SUSAN SONTAG.(The Talk of the Town)(biography)(Biography)

From 2002, an essay by Susan Sontag on photography and war

Susan Sontag, who wrote for this magazine on and off for more than thirty years, died last Tuesday, to everyone's surprise, for though she had been in treatment for cancer intermittently since the nineteen-seventies, she never got it into her head--or, therefore, into anyone else's--that this disease might kill her. Such an idea was a violation of her deepest need, the need to live, and to have the experiences that the world might give her. Once, writing of her childhood, and the family's barbecues, she said, "I ate and ate. . . . I was always hungry." Hungry she remained. She read everything, and she wrote everything: novels, stories, plays, essays on literature, film, politics. She made movies. She gave speeches. She went to North Vietnam, Cuba, and Bosnia and sent back reports. There was almost nothing she felt she couldn't do, nothing she wasn't planning to do, very soon.

When I began interviewing her, in 1999, for a profile in this magazine, she had just undergone a new, very aggressive series of cancer treatments, which left her with nerve damage. She was living on painkillers; she had to look at her feet as she walked. But never mind that, she said cheerfully. She had embarked on a whole new life. Before, she had been an essayist. Now she was a novelist. In fact, she had written two novels at the beginning of her career, in the sixties. She didn't like them much, so she became a critic, indeed, the most famous and influential young critic of the sixties and seventies, a central figure in the aesthetic bouleversement of that period: the absorption of pop culture into high culture, the abandonment of classical form for modernist fracture, the enthronement of the shattered consciousness in place of realism and morals and beginning-middle-and-end. But by 1999, as far as she was concerned, that was all over with. She was writing novels, with realism and morals, beginnings, middles, and ends. She had already produced one such book in 1992, "The Volcano Lover," about Lord Nelson's fabled affair with a married woman, Emma Hamilton. It had been a best-seller. Now she had just finished an even more ambitious historical novel, "In America," and she was starting another novel, about modern Japan.

It's ...