Appreciation: Susan Sontag 1933-2004

'The world has lost a truly brilliant mind - and I have lost a precious friend'

Ed Vulliamy
The Observer
Sunday January 2, 2005

It is daunting to try to find words with which to lament the parting of someone whose command of language was as absolute as that of Susan Sontag. Words such as 'aesthete', 'essayist' and 'thinker' (her own least favourite) get in the way. Susan Sontag preferred simply the description of 'writer'.

With Susan's death last Tuesday, America and the world lost one of the most brilliant minds and sharpest pairs of eyes of her generation. I, like the many others who were lucky and honoured enough to know her, lost someone extremely precious.

Susan Sontag mattered - she mattered very much. The obituaries have already charted her remarkable output over four decades and that is not my purpose here; except to try to pay tribute to what that output meant, and how important it was.

In a world of moral fluidity and caprice, Susan Sontag's challenge was to be morally serious and morally radical. In an age of spin, political double-speak, whimsy and dumbing-down, Susan's was one of the loudest contrapuntal voices of quality, of clarity, of insatiable curiosity and of erudition.

While she bore a torch for seriousness and culture, Susan was anything but lofty - quite the reverse. Her writing was above all accessible to all and everyone; she had a devilish sense of humour and keen eyes for the libidinous and vernacular. Her range of stimuli (and thereby her ability to stimulate others) was extraordinary. She once said that a writer 'should be interested in everything', and she was.

Susan Sontag combined, in her own way, intimacy with detachment, the personal and the political; to combine the best of enlightenment with that of romanticism. She showed that reason could be passionate and that passion could be charged with reason. It is remarkable that the same writer could have produced the sharp, crystalline analysis of her essays in 'Against Interpretation' and 'Where the Stress Falls' and then the great romance novels The Volcano Lover and In America .

She would suffer neither fools nor foolishness, bigots nor bigotry, tyrants nor tyranny of any kind. She was a feminist and a dissident in the noblest sense, true to her Polish-Jewish ancestry and the rich tradition of radicalism in America. Her last book was in its way - for all its coolness - the most passionate of all, Regarding the Pain of Others - reflections on the representation of war.

Susan and I bonded first over our experiences of war in Bosnia. While the chattering classes of Europe and America were largely left stupefied by the worst carnage to blight Europe since the Third Reich, Susan was on her way to Sarajevo. Not to report or observe but to contribute to the spirit of a European capital under siege by barbarians. She reopened the national theatre with her production of Waiting for Godot for which the city cherished her. We met in New York but often talked of the impact of war on our lives.

Outings with Susan were high points of my life in New York and in that I was certainly not alone - all this is but my very small fraction of her life. Whenever music by Shostakovich was played we went along. She was immersed in the composer's work and the no-man's-land he inhabited between the Soviet regime and his own conscience and artistry. It made sense for her to love Shostakovich: Susan was also a civic artist - a communicator; a private, even enigmatic person who nonetheless wanted to be widely and clearly understood.

If we met during day time it was usually for a picnic of takeaway mezze in her apartment among her astonishing collection of books and prints by Piranesi. More often, though, an evening would conclude at a Russian place called the Samovar in the theatre district. There, they served vodka flavoured with pepper, garlic and many other things and Susan particularly liked Friday nights when a heel-kicking dancer would perform, reminding her of Grushenka in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov .
And there, into the early hours Susan would discuss music just heard, or some book or film, as her discourse wound its inimitable way... or else she might demand some update on personal life while remaining imporous about her own Susan's urge to communicate was not born of self-promotion for it propelled her far beyond her writing. Among the least appreciated aspects of her work was the discovery and nurturing of other writers, of books which she thought deserving of a wider audience. Here is a story typical of Susan Sontag.

Some years ago she was browsing in Charing Cross Road and chanced upon a remaindered novel by the Russian writer Leonid Tsypkin called Summer in Baden Baden, going for 50p. She found the work to be 'a masterpiece of modern literature' and secured its prominent republication in New York with an introduction by herself. Along the way she met and befriended the late Tsypkin's son, Mikhail, teaching at a military college in California. Grateful for the recognition Susan had won for his father, he came to visit her in New York and we convened for dinner - at Samovar of course.

One of the striking things about Susan Sontag was how deeply beloved she was. She commanded affection and loyalty among interconnecting circles of friends of all ages and nationalities. And she was beloved by her public too - she was forever touring Europe and America to speak to her readers and could find hours to respond to emails from strangers about her and others' books or ideas.

Perhaps her closest bond with her readers were for her two essays now coupled into a single edition, 'Illness as Metaphor' and 'Aids and its Metaphors', both of which have become staple manuals of comfort and confidence for those who have cancer or HIV. The irony that such gifts to the sick could come from someone who died as she did, aged 71, is almost too bitter to ponder.
She was planning another book on illness right up until her death. She devoured life, culture and the world; she used her solitude but loved company, invariably of those younger than herself.

Last May I returned to New York to see Susan just before she left for Seattle and the bone-marrow transplant which she was determined to risk but which ultimately failed her. Although sick, she had - typically and indefatigably - just completed her last major essay entitled 'The Photos Are Us' about the scandal of torture in Abu Ghraib prison. We went for dinner with friends and discussed her article - the j'accuse against the belligerence of American culture and the debacle in Iraq. Susan talked about an emergent form of American imperium which alarmed and appalled her - and also about her disease and her plans to conquer it. Within 48 hours she was on her way to hospital.

When someone really precious to us dies, there is that temptation to turn the happiest of memories into sad ones, recalled through the filters of death and loss. With Susan, one has - out of duty to her - to fight such an urge. She gave so much to so many people; she touched so many lives that one must insist, as I expect she would, on cherishing her influence beyond mourning.

So Susan Sontag lives on in three ways: first and foremost in the person of her son, David Rieff, and his own scalpel-edged wit, wisdom and writing. Second, in the memories she leaves for those lucky enough to have known her or heard her speak, and third in one of the most impressive and important bodies of work by anyone in modern America or Europe.

Susan Sontag reminds me of the majestic heroine of that Bob Dylan song which begins: 'She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back.'