Like Zelig, Susan Sontag was where the action was. In the late 1950s, she was in Paris during the heyday of Godard and Truffaut. She was back in New York in the early 1960s, enthusing about Andy Warhol and John Cage. In the late 1960s, she travelled to Hanoi. In the 1970s, she took part in the famous debate about feminism with Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer in New York. In the Reagan years she denounced communism, and in the 1980s celebrity culture there she was on the cover of Vanity Fair. She wrote about Aids at the height of the epidemic in the US. And after the break-up of Yugoslavia, she was in Sarajevo, directing Waiting for Godot.
To her critics, she was merely a dedicated follower of fashion. Already in the early 1960s, the Spectator was sneering at "the beatnik Boadicea" for her trendy jargon. In the US, she was attacked by left and right for her changes of political position. Hilton Kramer called her the "pasionaria of style." In 1982, the big figures of the American left queued up to lambast her "communism is fascism" speech. "Again and again, over the years," said Marshall Berman, "she has said things that she must have known were off the wall."
It is hard to think of any leading intellectual figure who has been subjected to more scathing attacks. George P Elliott, in the TLS in 1978, tore into her book On Photography for its bizarre omissions, rash generalisations and trendy leftism. The same year, Denis Donoghue attacked her new book, Illness as Metaphor: "She does not produce any respectable evidence for these assertions." Reading these critical demolition jobs, reviews of what are probably her best known works, a quarter of a century on, it is hard to know how her reputation survived.
And yet despite the political posturing and the preposterous public statements ("the white race is the cancer of human history"), Sontag was one of the most original essayists and writers of her time. And as one might expect, her life was riddled with paradox. A classic New York Jewish intellectual, she was actually brought up in Arizona and the suburbs of Los Angeles, and spent much of her later life in Paris and Berlin. A cerebral intellectual, her best work was on the body. A lifelong feminist, there was much media speculation about her sexuality, but she wrote best about men. A literary essayist and novelist, with a personal library of around 15,000 books, she directed four films, was fascinated by photography and was one of the first intellectuals to embrace television. One of America's best known intellectuals for almost 40 years, she wrote on Bresson and Bergman, not Scorsese and Spielberg; on Canetti, not Bellow or Roth. Scornful of the worst of American culture, she did not have much time for the best. From a childhood visit to Thomas Mann in LA to a posthumously published essay on a Russian-Jewish novelist, her heart belonged to Europe. "I once asked my father's mother… where she came from. She said, 'Europe.' And so to this day, I don't know from what country my paternal grandparents came," she said.
Her great subject was illness and the body. Her father died of TB when she was five, and she had asthma as a child. From the beginning, she had first-hand knowledge of illness: "The night-side of life." Later, she survived two long bouts of cancer, first of the breast, then of the uterus. However, her writing on illness hardly drew on her own traumatic experiences. It is the best kind of cultural criticism: references to writers and thinkers from St Jerome to Kafka, clear writing free of the jargon that was sweeping literature departments at the time, and full of original insights. Her book Illness as Metaphor was more than a polemic against the way we mythologise illness. It opened up a fascinating subject: illness and how we write about it, from the romantics to The Magic Mountain.
Her best short story, "The Way We Live Now" (1986), was about Aids and was followed by AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988), a companion book to the earlier one on cancer and TB. Her only play, Alice in Bed (1993), was inspired by the experience of Alice James, the little-known invalid sister of Henry and William.
She is better known for her work on photography: On Photography (1977) itself, essays on individual photographers like Avedon and Mapplethorpe, an Omnibus documentary about photography and her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). The subject isn't really photography, or even a moral inquiry into voyeurism or a history of war photography, though both inform the book. Her real subject is how we look at pain and cruelty, from Christian iconography to television. Barely touched, this is one of the great subjects of our time.
Her first achievement was introducing the European avant garde of the late 1950s to America. In particular, two moments of European culture fascinated her. First, Paris, the world of le nouveau roman and la nouvelle vague, the writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, the films of Bresson and Godard, thinkers like Emil Cioran and Lévi-Strauss. This gave her the intellectual capital she lived on, back in New York, in the early 1960s. You can feel the euphoria in her first essays about the French avant garde: the liberation of a young woman away for the first time from 1950s America: "A refugee from my marriage" (to Philip Rieff).
Increasingly, though, her later writing moved east to central Europe: pre-war writers and thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin and Tsvetaeva, postwar artists like Sebald, Syberberg and Pina Bausch. Instead of euphoria, liberation and the avant garde, there are new preoccupations and a darker mood, a brooding sense of a tradition coming to an end. Her essay on Benjamin was called "The Last Intellectual."
Sontag was one of the key figures in that cultural explosion between the 1960s and the 1980s, which used the essay to explore every area of culture. Like Edward Said, John Berger, George Steiner and Roland Barthes, Sontag developed a new kind of cultural criticism that was at home in popular culture, in literary high culture and in the avant garde. She was a quintessential cosmopolitan. The first time I met her, she had flown into London and gone straight to look at old prints in shops near the British Museum. The next time I saw her was in Paris: she talked about Benjamin and his Arcades project. The last time I spoke to her she was in Sarajevo: expressing solidarity with a cosmopolitan city under attack.
Sontag made films, wrote stories and novels, and directed plays. But her best form was the essay: in Partisan Review, Salmagundi, the New Yorker, and above all the New York Review of Books. "There's this great tradition in my head," she told an interviewer, "people like Emerson, Leopardi, Chamfort, Valéry and Barthes… If I were to dare to describe my own aspiration, it would be as someone who continues in that tradition… It's a way of writing that breaks down the genres as we usually think of them: it's the tradition of the artist-thinker that unites writers as disparate as Wilde, Nietzsche, Benjamin and Adorno."
