To what extent is it possible to be a great prose writer without being a great writer of fiction? Or, to put a similar question in a different way, can one’s achievements as cultural commentator and critic be enough to make one a writer in the specially valued sense of those one has written about? Don Paterson, in The Book of Shadows, is Manichaean on this score: “Well, critic: fair criticism. But at the end of the day, she did; you didn’t.”
The thing about Susan Sontag is that she both did and didn’t. As essayist and thinker her stature is assured. The authority, rigor, clarity, discernment, and range of her expository prose helped configure the cultural landscape of the last forty years. For almost the whole of that time Sontag had also been writing fiction, from the modish avant-gardism of Death Kit and I, etcetera to the later, substantial novels, The Volcano Lover and In America. As her son, David Rieff, points out in a moving foreword to this characteristically varied collection of essays and speeches, “she valued her work as a fiction writer more than anything else she did.” And it is here that a major discrepancy opens up, between how Sontag regarded herself and the way she is regarded—and will be remembered—by others.
Speaking personally, my love of her writing would be undiminished if she had never published a novel. (I remember thinking, when In America won the National Book Award, that the prize was thoroughly deserved—as long as one assumed that it was given for everything except the book in question.) “Literature,” she contends, “ is knowledge,” but dozens of writers, some with only a fraction of her intelligence and knowledge, have produced novels that are many times more impressive—to say nothing of enjoyable—than hers. This makes her case especially interesting. It is, I am tempted to say, what At the Same Time is predominantly, if tacitly, about. A quick diversion will enable us to see why and how.
J. M. Coetzee has just published Inner Workings, his latest installment of critical writings. As one would expect from a novelist of his abilities, these essays—the result of careful ladling between two closely related activities—are of a consistently high standard, but they are not the work on which Coetzee would stake his claim to greatness. As far as I am aware, no such collection is forthcoming from Lorrie Moore. Moore is one of those writers whose intelligence and perception find perfect expression in fiction. Little of her talent has spilled over into the realm of commentary. She feels perfectly at home with fiction. So there was a certain irony when Sontag cattily dismissed Moore’s work—especially the “famous story” about “the infant having cancer”—on the grounds that it was so trivial “you don’t respect yourself for finishing it.” As a writer of fiction, Sontag strikes one as having to proceed like Jackson Pollock in reverse, finding ways of coaxing spillage back into the confines of the pot. Thus the most extraordinary moment in a collection marked by unflinching intellectual honesty is also the most deluded. It comes during the Friedenspreis acceptance speech, when Sontag describes herself as “a storyteller.” To put the matter crassly, Sontag couldn’t tell a story to save her life. (Her reaction to learning about her first diagnosis of cancer was not to fictionalize the experience but to examine it analytically, in the benchmark essay Illness as Metaphor.) What she did manage, with The Volcano Lover, was to find a way—just—of turning her distinctive discursive habits into a mode of historicized fictional narration. As for In America, I respected myself so much for finishing it that I felt I deserved a prize myself.
The irony is that whereas for Sontag the essays were a compelling distraction from what she felt she should be doing, the commitment to fiction was, to many of her admirers, an interruption from her ongoing critical project. Her best writing recorded, with a trademark combination of precision and breadth, the experience of being a reader of—and looker at—other people’s works. Except it was not quite as simple as that.
Critics are always working the room. The way they do so changes over the course of a career. Young critics like to disparage and tear down. Later, when they write about the real heavyweights, it is not so much the subjects—Tolstoy, Proust, etc.—as their own ability to go toe-to-toe with greatness that comes under examination. Once this test has been passed, a reversal takes place when an unknown, underrated, or neglected figure is deemed worthy of the attention of a particularly respected critic. The mere fact that, in the current volume, Sontag considers the case of Victor Serge—at length, brilliantly—is a vicarious affirmation of his status.
But this kind of employment was not enough for Sontag, either as reader or as writer. For someone who valued literature so highly and, more importantly, who understood so well what it took to produce literature of lasting value, Paterson’s “she did, you didn’t” would have gnawed away like a constant reproach. So she had to believe that fiction was her real home—and had to have her right of residence recognized.
As At the Same Time repeatedly demonstrates, Sontag was both moralist and aesthete, democrat and elitist. Her political commitments were matched by her unyielding adherence to standards of excellence, to the belief—as she famously quipped—that “literature is not an equal opportunity employer.” She wanted to meet people on equal terms. It’s just that the people she most wanted to meet were right at the top of the cultural totem pole. And she couldn’t meet them on equal terms simply as a critic, so the fiction, the fiction that (to her) was more important than—and, at the same time, palpably inferior to—everything else she wrote had to be hauled (or, if you prefer, smuggled) up there too. How? By claiming that the magisterial pronouncements about literature were a side effect of having produced it. This had the additional side effect of giving her political and critical interventions even more weight because of the sacrifice or opportunity cost (foregoing the real business of writing fiction) of doing so. But it is of course these distractions (five years later her off-the-cuff 9/11 piece seems a profoundly considered reaction, not only to what happened but to what lay ahead) that constitute her real and enduring achievement.
2007