“[The] success of women writers has been empowering women, has given them a sense of possibility.”
—grace paley, Village Voice reading
“Kate Millett is the true groundbreaker and not Simone de Beauvoir. Perhaps this is so for subjective reasons, but Millett wrote things I had been thinking for a long time, and when her first writings appeared, I remember feeling a great sense of relief! Enfin!”*
This note from Mavis Gallant, received on the morning of a Millett reading at the Village Voice,** brings together two significant feminist theorists of the twentieth century who sought to revolutionize the lives of women in both public and private spheres. In The Second Sex (1949) Beauvoir had demonstrated their subordinate condition as a second-class gender; twenty years later, in Sexual Politics (1970), Millett decried the enduring male culture inherited from centuries of patriarchal societies that perpetuated the image of women as sexual objects.
These seminal works called for the emergence of a new consciousness that appeared in the 1970s with the creation of departments of women’s studies and the huge success of writing workshops and book clubs—all of them circles of reflection that helped female authors diversify and broaden the scope of their writing. In the next two decades, their literature experienced an unprecedented boom, addressing as it did a more varied and larger readership. If their life stories were still a source of inspiration, their literary expression gained in vision and universal significance, now starting to capture the imagination of people of both genders.
Among the great number of unparalleled women authors who read at the Village Voice, we will highlight the voices of four whose critical biography, fiction, poetry, and essays have left an indelible mark on American and other literatures.
Hazel Rowley
“I write to discover: I wanted to understand how this relationship worked.”
—rowley, Village Voice reading, January 12, 2006.
British-born Australian and naturalized American writer Hazel Rowley is the author of four notable biographies, three of them about singular women and one the edifying life story of the African American writer Richard Wright,1 whose 1946 exile to Paris was made possible by Sartre and Beauvoir. As a feminist early on in her life, the subject of Hazel Rowley’s third biography, Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, was Beauvoir herself, known worldwide as the author of The Second Sex and taken on as a role model by so many women, now revealed in a unique and unexpected light.2
Our author had been a reader of Beauvoir’s works since her youth and an admirer of this independent female figure. Intrigued by Beauvoir’s unconditional dedication to Sartre, never eclipsed by any of her various other love affairs, not even her longest and most passionate one with Nelson Algren, Rowley made up her mind to choose this feminist icon as the subject of her doctorate dissertation, even managing with some difficulty to secure a private appointment with Beauvoir in Paris.
The interview took place in 1976 in the latter’s studio, but Rowley’s high expectations quickly dissipated as she told us that “Beauvoir was evasive in her replies about the ‘pact’ binding her for life to Sartre, and her very automatic pistol-like answers betrayed her irritation.” She sensed that Beauvoir was a woman who was “attached to her own myth . . . polishing up her image, not really telling much and even holding onto certain truths.”3
Seventeen years later, in 1993, after the death of both Sartre and Beauvoir, out of the blue, a scandal broke out with the publication of Mémoires d’une jeune fille dérangée4 (a satirical pun on Beauvoir’s title of her youthful memoir) by Bianca Bienenfeld-Lamblin, a former philosophy student of Beauvoir’s. According to her, this teacher had abused her professorial authority by seducing her students and then passing them on to Sartre. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to say that Rowley’s intuition of malaise during her studio visit had not been a simple impression.
Beauvoir’s unfailing attachment to her lifelong partner was far more complex than she had made it appear in her journals and autobiographical fiction. Hazel Rowley was now finding it nearly impossible to consider her life and publications as separate from Sartre’s role in them. In fact, she was the first feminist biographer to try to really understand how this unique couple “worked.” She presented her insightful portrait of their relationship at the Village Voice on January 12, 2006.
Tall, slender, and elegant in a dark gray tailored suit, Hazel, “Azelle la Gazelle” for her French friends, opened her talk with the word “passion” which, she felt, “best expressed the driving force of Beauvoir and Sartre’s lives. It was not the kind of passion that bonded Abelard and Héloïse, but an intellectual passion, a passion for a life lived in ideas. Indeed, the title Tête-à-Tête conveyed the idea of a relationship that had more to do with their heads than with their bodies.” She stressed the complexity of Beauvoir herself who, in 1947, two years before the publication of The Second Sex, had written an essay on “The Ethics of Ambiguity,”5 which she dedicated to Bianca, the lover she had given to Sartre, himself the author of the following epigraph to the second volume of The Second Sex: “Half victim, half accomplice, like everyone.”6
Rowley reminded us that “truly, they were clear about their ambivalence and claimed it as part of their philosophy, yet certain mores that were easily accepted in France in the 1950s were no longer in the 1990s.” When Lamblin’s revelations came out “it was not as much the crude details that caused scandal as the duplicity and the deception of the couple, much greater than anyone had imagined. Everyone had been conned, the women for whom Beauvoir had been an inspiration and Sartre’s former girlfriends, who could now read in the archived letters the unpleasant things that Sartre and Beauvoir had said behind their backs.”
The biography was received in the United States to critical acclaim, and Hazel was eager to see it published in France where, she was convinced, it belonged more than anywhere else. At the time of our bookstore launch, its French translation was being finalized, but publication was postponed to October 2006 when it immediately faced widespread outrage.
The saga of this short-lived translation provides some insight into the Parisian intelligentsia of the time, all-powerful but not without its own prejudices. Attacked from all sides, Hazel explained that “one priority of the biographer is to understand their characters with their complexities, their history, psychic particularities, and emotions.”7 She was an adventurous biographer,8 as she described herself, the kind of biographer who will “press her nose on the windowpane to see inside,”9 ever curious and eager to probe her characters’ interiorities.
Yet her explanations did not appease the outcry, and she was disconcerted by the review in Le Monde that dismissed “la Britannique installée à New York,”10 implying that as a foreigner she had no business meddling in uniquely French matters. Even more unsettling was the attitude of Claude Lanzmann, the internationally known author of the documentary film Shoah, Beauvoir’s former lover, and Sartre’s close collaborator at the review Les Temps Modernes, who had granted Hazel several interviews.11 He was furious about her reference to an affair that had turned sour between his sister, the actress Évelyne Rey, and Sartre, a seventy-year-old story that had already been cited in one memoir and written about in the press.12 Lanzmann threatened Rowley’s French publisher with a lawsuit if the book was not immediately withdrawn.
Hazel Rowley at the Village Voice, summer 2005, Village Voice archive.
Under pressure, Rowley’s publisher spelled out to her the French laws on privacy and the public domain: “No matter if the material has already appeared in seventeen different books, the notion of ‘public domain’ doesn’t exist in France.” So, after a short life on bookstore tables, all copies of Tête-à-Tête were recalled and pulped. No one raised a voice of protest in France, not even a single female writer. In 2008, an expurgated second edition was reprinted, but booksellers did not reorder it, and so the French translation vanished completely.
Even more scandalous to Rowley was her “right of reply” denied by the two major French dailies, Le Monde and Le Figaro. She expressed her indignation in an article, “Censorship in France,”13 reminding her detractors that Sartre and Beauvoir had made it clear that “they would like the public to know the truth about their personal lives.” To further strengthen her position, she pointed out that “neither of them destroyed any of their private correspondence and journals even when it did not make them look good.” Had not Sartre himself written, “So much the better if this means I will be . . . transparent to posterity?”14
If she showed the flaws of her characters, Hazel also stressed their dedication to work, to worthy causes, and enduring friendships. Answering a woman in the audience who wondered if the couple’s “pact of love” had profited both partners equally, she paused for a while, then affirmed that she “sincerely believed that Beauvoir had gained more from the relationship than Sartre.” Her answer caused a stir, given the revelations heard that evening, but after a pause, she went on, “it was Sartre who had stimulated Beauvoir, pushed her to go into the world, have lovers, and adventures. . . . ‘Dare to put yourself in your writing; screw up your courage and take risks,’ he had told her.”
Hazel’s conclusion was taken as encouragement by author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was sitting in the first row that evening. Born in Somalia, Hirsi Ali is an international political activist who has dedicated her life to supporting the rights of Muslim women throughout the world and, as a result, has become the target of death threats.15 Accompanied by six bodyguards who, the day before, had checked out the nooks and crannies of our bookshop, she was in the process of writing her autobiography and had looked forward to hearing Hazel speak about Beauvoir.
Likewise, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier attended the reading. Socially and politically active women in the circle of Democrats Abroad, they had recently taken on the daunting task of a new and complete English translation of Le deuxième sexe.16 Four years later, they would launch their work at the Village Voice on January 14, 2010, extending the influence of Beauvoir’s feminist ideas in the US, as well as the English-speaking world.
I might add that while she was engaged in her research work in Paris, Hazel had become a personal friend and constant supporter of our Village Voice bookstore, which she described in an elaborate and wonderful article published in Australia and in the US.17
On March 1, 2011, the eve of her Australian book tour to promote her new and highly praised biography on the exceptional marriage of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt,18 the news of her sudden death came as an enormous shock, plunging us all, her friends in Paris and many other places in the world, into grief and dismay.
Two months later, a number of us gathered for a tribute to Hazel at the Village Voice, her “home away from home” during her Paris years. Still stunned and sorrowed, we decided to share our fond memories of her. Coming first, Jake Lamar’s moving anecdote was a reminder of the ups and downs of her career as a biographer.19 He reminisced about the first time he met Hazel by chance after one of our bookstore readings, everyone mingling and chatting with a glass of wine in their hands. Jake told us he suddenly realized that the person he was talking with was none other than the author of Richard Wright’s biography that he had favorably reviewed for the Washington Post. With the usual bio elements and photo missing in his review copy, he had always assumed that “this person was a male Jamaican, and this male Jamaican turned out to be white, a woman, and an Australian.” Enjoying this confusion of genres, Hazel had then concluded, “It’s the best compliment I’ve ever got.”
Another of her Paris friends, Virginia Larner, closed the evening by describing our friend as a woman of the world: “Hazel had lived in London, Australia, Cambridge (Mass), Paris, and New York. . . . At times it made me wonder where home was and what it was for her.” Reflecting on the remark of Adam Gopnik’s wife that their family “had had a beautiful existence in Paris but one missing a full life,” Virginia insisted that “Hazel had fought to the end to keep both registers alive and vibrantly so . . . always happiest living with others.”
The following year, on the first anniversary of Hazel’s passing, her sister Della flew all the way from Australia to New York with close friends of hers to attend a tribute to Hazel at the Roosevelt House/Hunter College on February 9, 2012. The day before, in the biting cold, a few of us had gathered at the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial in Riverside Park, not far from where Hazel had lived and where I had spent a few days with her in June 2010.
Sitting on the wooden bench with the memorial plaque Della had dedicated to her, we looked at the pensive figure of Eleanor while revisiting in our minds the warm and vivid portrait Hazel had drawn of this revered figure in her recent biography. Then, in loving memory of her sister, Della scattered a handful of her ashes at the foot of the statue in the park where Hazel had loved to walk.
Two days later, Sarah Gaddis, a friend since her Paris stay in the 1980s, welcomed me at her home in the Lower Hudson Valley. She had discreetly left on my bed a box of letters her father, William Gaddis, had sent his mother from abroad when he was a young writer already working on his monumental novel The Recognitions. Back in 1999, Sarah had invited me to attend the memorial tribute to her father at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. Sharing this intimate correspondence with me before the letters were to be published beautifully reflected our mutual trust and friendship. Sarah had given me the room at the top of the house where she usually worked, a cozy place infused with the concentration of her own writing.
It was nightfall. I stood at the window watching the snow dancing in the light of the street lamps, reminiscing about Hazel but also about Sarah’s father, with the last words of James Joyce’s “The Dead” filling my thoughts: “His soul swooned slowly, as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”20
Grace Paley
“She will listen. It’s her work.
She will be the listener in the story of the stories.” —grace paley21
Grace Paley gave three readings at the Village Voice, the last one on March 28, 1999, for the launch of Just as I Thought,22 a semi-
autobiographical collection of essays, reports, and talks. She was introduced by Noëlle Batt, professor of contemporary American literature and author of an essay on Paley.23 In the photo taken that day, Grace Paley looks like the French writer Colette with her mane of tousled, curly white hair framing an open, jovial face. A mother, a friend, and an anti-nuclear and anti-war activist, she had made her opinions heard in public stands and in writings that defended civil and women’s rights. Famous for her sharp wit and humor, hers was truly a unique voice among us.
Paley opened the reading with “The Man in the Sky Is the Killer,” her account of her 1972 visit to Vietnam as a member of the Peace Movement on a mission to escort three liberated POWs back home. The title of this piece was the name given by the North Vietnamese to the US jet fliers bombing their country where, Paley quipped, “they had no business to be.” Asked about his war experience, one of the three soldiers ingenuously replied: “Gosh! Grace, I have to admit it, I really loved bombing.” Whereas at home the POWs were hailed by politicians and newsmen “as though they had been kidnapped from a farm in Iowa or out of a canoe paddling in the waters of Minnesota.” [laughter] As for their wives, they waited for their husbands, refusing to acknowledge the reality of the deadly havoc they had caused with “Oh, Mrs. Paley, villages and people! My husband wouldn’t do that.”
Paley followed with a seventeen-minute memoir, “Six Days: Some Rememberings”—her unforgettable six days in prison that she revived with much humor and tenderness for her inmate sisters. Arrested for sitting down in the middle of the street to slow down a military parade, Paley was taken to the Women’s Detention Center in the middle of Greenwich Village, her own neighborhood. Tears running down her face, she caught the attention of the other women already inside.
“Hey, you, white girl,” a Black woman called out, “you’ve never been arrested before?”
Putting her arms around Paley’s shoulder, she said, “It ain’t so hard . . . I’ve got thirty years. What’s your time, sugar?”
“I’ve got six days.”
“You’ve got six days? What the fuck for? You’ve got six days for sitting in front of a horse? Those cops are getting crazier, meaner and stupider. We’ll get you out of here.” [laughter]
A woman in the audience asked her if she considered this piece to be fiction or nonfiction. Paley: “The border is thin between the two, and I don’t particularly like borders.” [laughter]
Grace Paley, March 28, 1999. © Noëlle Batt
Q: “What is your take on America these days?”
Paley: “It’s a hard question. We’re all very anxious.24 Many of us, like me, hope for less war, less racism. Yet struggles that happened in the past are still there. Let’s take the fight against racism that started with the civil rights movement. If things seem worse now, it’s because racism has become a lot clearer: it is the great curse of the United States, like anti-Semitism is the great curse of Europe, but women-hating is the great curse of the whole world. [laughter] Really, all around the world, it has been how to keep women down. . . . It may look to many people that it is all about oil, but it’s more like making and maintaining a patriarchal state.”
Q: “You said in one of your interviews that writing for you came from life. Could you elaborate on this?”
Paley: “The sound of the story comes first. My lesson came from the poet Auden. I attended his class. I admired him a lot. I was shy, but I gave him some poems to read. He pointed to a couple of words and asked me, ‘Grace, is it the way you talk?’ I immediately realized that I had been writing Jewish all along, and I suddenly understood the richness of my background, a community of Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, with Yiddish talk all around. I really learned from poetry to write stories.”
Q: “After a whole life in Greenwich Village, how does it feel to live in Vermont?”
Paley: “I don’t feel a stranger, but I miss New York. I met Isaac Babel’s wife who lived in France with their daughter. Babel would come to visit them in Paris, but always would return to Moscow. Why? I asked her, until 1935, the year of Stalin’s Great Purges, he could have stayed in Paris. ‘He used to tell me,’ she said, ‘that Paris was good for strolling, but Moscow was good for work.’ The way I feel is that New York is good for strolling, and it’s also good for work.” [laughter]
Adrienne Rich
The author of a significant body of poetry and essays, both awarded prestigious prizes, Adrienne Rich graciously agreed to make a stopover in Paris on her way back home from England where she had been presented with a new award. She was to read from her latest collection The School among the Ruins25 and the event, organized by our mutual friend Steven Barclay, had been set for July 18, 2006. It turned out to be the hottest day of that summer’s heat wave. With people massing at the door, we left it open, rendering our antiquated air-conditioning system pretty useless. Suffering from the high temperatures, but also from a bout of arthritis, with some difficulty Adrienne made her way through the dense crowd gathered outside and inside the bookshop, helped by her partner, the writer Michelle Cliff. Though tired from the flight the day before, she displayed a big smile and even began to look somewhat sprightly.
Adrienne Rich, July 18, 2006. Village Voice archival video.
Sitting poised at the microphone with a sparkle in her eyes, Rich gazed around her, acknowledging friends in the room, among them the poet Marilyn Hacker who had written about her poetry. In the packed audience were American writers living in Paris, as well as her Norton publisher from London and her French, Italian, and Spanish translators. Likewise, there was also a number of women from the States who remembered Rich as the feminist advocate and activist whose writings, poetry performances, and clear public stances on gender issues had made a difference in their lives.
Ellen Hinsey,* a young and talented American poet living in Paris, introduced Adrienne Rich. Like Rich fifty years beforehand, Ellen had been awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1996 for Cities of Memory,26 her first volume of poetry. She immediately began by stressing the impact of Rich’s writings on several generations of women, including her own, describing her poems as “those seemingly simple things which had changed their lives.” “I’m sure,” Hinsey went on, “that everyone in this room has their own version of them. Adrienne’s poems were read, passed on, discussed, carried in notebooks and wallets, returning even in dreams. . . . The driving force of her poetry and essays is her desire to reach the other, to be in dialogue with the other.”27
Rich opened her reading with the poem “The Art of Translation,”28 a dialogue between the author and the translator. In this way she greeted her three translators in the room,29 insisting that “her life would be unthinkable without poetry translation.” She too had put works from different languages and cultures into English and knew the difficulties, the obstacles, and the duplicity inherent in this demanding art.
In her poem “The Art of Translation,” she intimates that such dangers betray the original language, its ideas, and its internal rhythms. Here the translator is likened to a would-be smuggler at “passport control,” unable to prove that the translated poem is not “contraband,” or its words subversive messages. “If translation is a dangerous art,” Rich ventured, “it’s nonetheless an indispensable one with a crucial social responsibility.” “However,” she added, “translating a poem is also to create a new poem.”30
Though a writer of numerous essays, Rich stands out as the poet who asserts that “what I know, I know through poetry.”31 Beyond knowledge, this literary genre is the path to the advent of “the dream of a common language” between men and women. For her, since the very existence of patriarchal societies, language had developed according to the male view of the world, fashioned by his will to dominate through power.
In her poem “Fox” she shows how male vision and language have deprived women of the “recognition” of their own “history” and with it, their own vision of the world and the language to represent it. Only through a radical change may the “dream of a common language” become reality. “Change” is another key word in Rich’s poetry and essays and the very precondition for the birth of “the yet-to-be human child” and “the-yet-to-be woman,” as shown in the final act of the vixen in “Fox.” She is the one who, by giving life, incarnates hope for the new being to come.
Rich dated each one of her poetical works, placing them “in a historical continuity,” she said, thus charting her personal involvement in their composition. She concluded the reading with the title poem from The School among the Ruins, depicting a classroom of children in a city which has just been bombed.
Dated 2001, the poem hints at crucial events in recent American history taking place within a crossfire of American foreign wars, both past and present. Still, beyond the larger scope of deadly world catastrophes, in this “school among the ruins,” the teacher urges her children to pay attention to the stray cat that has taken refuge in their still standing classroom: “Don’t let your faces turn to stone / Don’t stop asking me why / Let’s pay attention to our cat she needs us.”32
A few weeks after the reelection of George W. Bush, Adrienne sent me a postcard dated November 29, 2004, conveying the atmosphere of the country at that particular moment and her own sadness: “It is a time when one would gladly think oneself outside the US, or the grotesque profile of what calls itself culture here & now. Yet there is something else, partly invisible, partly confused perhaps—the end of illusions, of adolescent egotism—but it is coming at a huge price for the vulnerable of the world. One writes, one reads, one speaks, one remembers dreams that were not illusions and tries to re-imagine them.”33
Susan Sontag
“What is a writer but a mental traveler?”
—sontag, Village Voice reading, March 28, 2002.
Susan Sontag had lived in Paris in the 1960s and returned to the city regularly. During my Washington, DC, days in the seventies, I had discovered her essays on French and other European writers and artists, deepening my understanding of the earlier decade’s protest culture within my own country. On the other hand, her essays on the United States—“Notes on Camp” (1964), “What’s Happening in America” (1966), and “Trip to Hanoi” (1969)—gave me clues to decipher the country I was now living in, helping me discern the perpetually shifting contours of its political and cultural trends.
I can honestly say that this writer’s intelligence, her vast culture, her overarching approach to the world, all expressed in a style that was unpretentious, direct, and yet elegant, simply carried me away.
In Paris, told by French booksellers close to the Village Voice that Sontag was a regular of their bookstores, I asked them to put in a word for us, but their reply was, “It’s no use. Sontag does not come to Paris to buy American books; she can find them around her corner in New York.”
Then, one day she pushed open the door of our shop. It was a late afternoon during the Christmas holidays. The writer was wearing dark, loose pants, a black flyer jacket, and walking boots. The following times, she never arrived alone, rather always with one friend or another, dashing straight away to our section on Central and Eastern European literatures in English. I learned that when she was just a teenager, Sontag’s veneration for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was so strong that it had led a friend of hers to set up a seemingly implausible meeting with the great writer exiled in Los Angeles. Never forgetting that enchanted moment, all her life she remained attentive to the literatures from that part of the world.
Her famous essays “On Photography,”34 “Illness as Metaphor,”35 “AIDS and Its Metaphors,”36 and “Regarding the Pain of Others”37 stand as crucial testimonies of our time by a major American voice whose observations and reflections have opened our eyes and minds and sharpened our discernment.
Then, in the 1990s, the preeminent essayist revealed she was an equally brilliant storyteller with two powerful novels, The Volcano Lover38 and In America,39 each featuring an inspiring and memorable female character: Emma in the first novel and Marina in the second.
One day, as she was browsing in the bookstore, Sontag approached me, saying: “Odile, I would love to give a reading at the bookshop.” I was thrilled. I had been too shy to ask her and here we were, setting up the date—March 28, 2002—for the launch of her new book, Where the Stress Falls.40 It was a collection of essays laying out her aesthetic credo in literature and reflection on what it takes “to be a great writer” who also acts as a kind of societal conscience.
On that March evening, Sontag arrived with her French publishers, Christian and Dominique Bourgois, followed by her sister, Judith Rosenblatt, and Chantal Thomas, a renowned French novelist and essayist who was to introduce her. Our author apologized for being a few minutes late as she had “recklessly” accepted a friend’s invitation to go and visit the Vézelay Abbey in Burgundy, a site already familiar to her, but, she added with an apologetic smile, “I’ve only got three days in Paris and I had to do it.”
Our bookstore was packed upstairs, downstairs, and there was a crowd standing on the stairs in between.41 She opened her talk by confiding that “the fact of this evening was a confluence of affinities and affections: this bookshop an eccentric place, and the discovery of Chantal Thomas42 who interviewed me for France-Culture. It was stupendous. I realized we had so many authors in common, starting with Thomas Bernhard and Roland Barthes.”
Thomas: “In these essays collected in Where the Stress Falls, you explore a new space with writers and artists from many different horizons, and most of them are displaced: they are writers, travelers, and wanderers. This book communicates your ardor for travel, reading, and writing. How do you conciliate all three?”
Sontag: “The first travel book I read, and certainly one of the most important books of my young life, was Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton43 describing the wonders he visited all over the world, including the Great Wall of China, where my father and mother lived at the time. His adventures fired up my imagination. I was seven years old and, in my child’s mind, to be a traveler, to be a writer, started off as the same thing. Both travel and writing meant to embrace the world.”
Thomas: “‘Travel is to embrace the world,’ you say, but do you write when you travel? Elizabeth Bishop in your epigraph wonders, ‘Should we have stayed home?’44 What about you?”
Sontag: “I don’t write when I travel, but I like very much to be a foreigner. I don’t think that travel involves detachment; on the contrary, it is a higher, passionate form of intensified experience. In many ways, it is also simply living in a big city. I grew up in the Southwest of the US and went to New York when I was twenty-six. New York is foreign to me.”
Thomas: “How does this experience of being a foreigner translate into your writing?”
Sontag: “Migrants, wanderers, travelers are themes of my fiction. Actually, as a fiction writer,45 I wanted to encompass a great deal more reality, but did not know how to do it, did not have the inner freedom to do it. It was not that I did not have ideas, but there is a difference between what’s going on in your head and what’s going onto paper.”
Thomas: “What about your essays?”
Sontag: “I drifted into writing essays, the seduction of certain kinds of debates that were going on, getting much attention from the beginning. But I went back to fiction: screenplays, plays, play directing. Fiction was what I wanted; essays are monophonic while fiction is polyphonic. I’m still trying to keep the muzzle on the essayist dog in the basement. But suddenly, in the 1980s, the gates swung open. I don’t know why. I began taking in much more reality and liberating my gift as a storyteller.”
Thomas: “Your two major novels, The Volcano Lover and In America, are works of a storyteller?”
Sontag: “Yes, in these two novels I discovered that I was a storyteller. I was proud of the act of making a story: how you invent a story, a character, names, relationships, future events. The writer is God, and, hence, the master of the destiny of his characters. It is in the process of writing fiction that I came to some kind of unified relationship with myself as a writer. I felt that I was taking care of the person who wrote this book.”
Thomas: “Marina, the protagonist in your novel In America—is she your self-portrait? So many details seem to indicate it, like her origins, her ardor . . .”
Sontag: “No, not at all. Marina is not me. My family came a hundred and thirty years ago, too far back. I do not look in that direction. I have no family apart from David, my son, and my sister who is here tonight. As much Europeanized as I may be, I’m ready to let the past go. In ‘Singleness,’ one of the essays in this book, I address this question of the author and their double. My books are not me. They are not a portrait of me, but the work comes from me. It took almost thirty years to write a book I really liked, The Volcano Lover. There is an even deeper reason why my books are not me: my life. I’ve always felt it like a becoming. And still do. Once the books are finished, they liberate me to do, to be, to feel, and aspire to something else.”
Thomas: “Sartre writes against someone or something; by contrast, each one of your essays is a tribute to a writer or to an artist, a form of love.”
Sontag: “That’s absolutely true. I once wrote an attack, and it was an accident. It was my piece on Leni Riefenstahl. Not because of her association with Hitler or fascism, but I discovered doing my research on her that she was even more infamous than I thought . . . all those lies. The question I ask myself when I am writing on something: ‘Is this worth doing?’ I have to go beyond my subject. I have to have a larger point. The larger point here was not to discuss the work of Riefenstahl per se, but to explore the idea of fascism as an aesthetic point of view. Benjamin speaks of ‘le fascisme esthétisant’ (the creation of a fascist aesthetics). In every one of my essays, I try to highlight a theme, a body of work, a style, and I do so out of enthusiasm and admiration. I don’t know if I could have a main character I could not like or identify with. It’s not that I am not able to deal in my fiction with the horrors of the world, but the main character could not be an executioner. I don’t think that my creative process works that way. I write to share.”
Someone in the audience asked, “What does it mean to you to be an intellectual today?”
Sontag: “When the word ‘intellectual’ is pronounced, I substitute it with ‘writer’ because that’s what it is, and myself, I react not as a writer, but as a citizen, as any citizen reacts to public things. However, if I do not have firsthand access to the event in order for me to form my own opinion, I do not talk. I prefer silence.”
“Silence? But you always spoke and took public stands on the major events of the past years, didn’t you?” someone interjected.
Sontag: “I did not speak about what was happening in Yugoslavia until I had been there, and I did go to have information firsthand, be a witness and ask people how they felt.46 9/11 was a terrible crime, but after my piece in The New Yorker,47 I was to be drawn and quartered, stripped of my citizenship. The New Republic went as far as putting me in the same bag as Hussein with ‘What they have in common: they both wish the destruction of America.’ The atmosphere of conformity is drastic. I’ve never been attacked so much in my whole life even during the anti-war movement of which I was one of the founders. As for Iraq, I’m appalled and horrified because I have from a sure source that all is imminent, decided. I have it from authority. Everything is in the works . . . only logistical details are being worked out.”
Q: “What do you feel when you write?”
Sontag: “Good question. To write feels as if I were rowing my frail boat to the very big ocean, and that ocean is made up of words, language, fragments of words. It’s a great adventure, a great challenge. Writing is a tremendous journey in which you get lost. Yes, lost. Sailing his frail Chinese junk, Halliburton had disappeared in the Pacific Ocean. Writing fiction was no different from a risky sea-faring journey; it was the great and challenging adventure of the mental traveler.”
On November 3, 2008, David Rieff was at the Village Voice to read from Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir,48 his sober recollections of the last months of his mother’s life.
Three years earlier, on January 17, 2005, at her burial at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, as one of her friends was quoting Emma in The Volcano Lover, it was the voice of Susan Sontag we heard: “I will not allow that I was moved by justice rather than love, for justice is also a form of love.”