“I thought I was a student. I thought I was a teacher. And then I discovered that I liked to tell stories and make people cry,” Susan Sontag said. She was born on this day in 1933.
“David grew up on coats,” she says—the coats on the bed at parties. “I met Claes Oldenburg a couple of weeks after I came to New York. I started going to ‘happenings,’ and to these crazy movies that Jonas Mekas was putting on, and to Off Off Broadway plays, with all this Artaud. Artaud certainly came as a surprise to me! I learned to dance. I was practically thirty, and I learned to dance, and I became a dancing fool.” New York wasn’t all.
And then there was politics. Like most young intellectuals in the sixties, Sontag was a leftist. She had no illusions about the Soviet Union, but she nourished hopes for the Communist regimes of Cuba and North Vietnam. She visited both countries and wrote about them with some reservation but considerable admiration.
Hopeful and energetic as always, she dug her way out. She moved from utopianism to more modest commitments—Bosnia, human rights—and from a relativism that could forgive Communist regimes their little transitional problems to an absolutism requiring that all societies honor certain basic freedoms. She does not apologize for her change of heart.
To call for an “erotics of art” did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to, then, as “popular” culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its burden of seriousness, of depth. When I denounced . . . certain kinds of facile moralism, it was in the name of a more alert, less complacent seriousness. What I didn’t understand . . .
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