Bookplanet: on Susan Sontag the essayist

On Sontag: Essayist as Metaphor and Muse -- by HOLLAND COTTER

HOW to honor the memory of a multifarious figure like Susan Sontag? The Metropolitan Museum’s solution — a small, grave, beautiful photography show — is an apt one, though some people will grumble that Sontag had tributes enough in her time, and doesn’t need, or deserve, any more.

The same people were saying not-nice things about this writer long before her death in 2004 at 71, about how she was a prima donna and a holier-than-thou moral scold, a limousine liberal turned cultural conservative; a snob; an opportunist; a serial self-contradicter.

I read her first collection of essays, “Against Interpretation,” the year it came out, in 1966, when I was in high school in rural New England. For me it was like an alarm clock that wouldn’t shut off. I was familiar with only a few of the subjects she was writing about. But I instantly wanted to know everything about all of them, and about everything else she was interested in.

I loved her voice, and I could tell that she loved it too: propulsive, exhortatory, accusatory. Like William Hazlitt she opened each essay with a challenging bang — take that! — then plunged on, names and ideas exploding like fireworks around her. The tone was confident to the point of show-offy, but that was O.K. because there was so much behind it. She was speaking from ardor as much as from ego.

Her style was nothing at all like that of other young New York writers I was reading at the time; it had no connection with a belletristic fashion — still current — for smooth, witty, elegaic prose that sashays from one urbane thing to another. Years later, in one book, “Where the Stress Falls,” Sontag dropped into that mode. Otherwise she did not sashay. She strode, power-walked, fell on her bum, pushed on. I wanted to go where she went. So I devoured Camus, then Jean Genet, even Simone Weil, whom I’d never heard of. I sneaked into the city to see films by Bresson, Godard, Resnais, and emerged ecstatic with bafflement.

The essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” which was already famous, I could barely take in, it was so heady and dangerous. But I did take it in, because soon I was listening to Mozart, Yma Sumac and the Supremes all in one afternoon. I won’t go so far as to say my adult intellectual life began at this point, but I changed from being a modern person to being a contemporary person.

The pictures in the Met’s show, “On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag,” brought me back to those days. Napoleon Sarony’s 1882 portrait of Oscar Wilde did. Wilde was the Virgil to Sontag’s “camp” Dante, and she actually resembled Wilde a bit with her candid features, chic clothes and boyish demeanor.

“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art,” Wilde wrote (and Sontag quoted). He would have loved her in Peter Hujar’s gorgeous 1975 portrait, lying on a bed, looking spent and entranced. And he would have approved — “Oh, yes” — when she put a streak of white in her long dark hair and became one of the Sights of New York, visible on the street from blocks away.

Of the film directors she championed, Bresson was my favorite. I can’t help but see his mute fatalism, brutal and tender, in a 19th-century photograph by Horatio Ross of a stag lying dead in a cart. Limp and forlorn, it looks like Jesus brought down from the cross, then abandoned, no mother, no Magdalene, no beloved disciple to mourn him.

And everywhere in the show is the America that Sontag woke me up to. It’s there in 1960’s photo-booth self-portraits of Andy Warhol . It’s there in Diane Arbus’s 1967 “Boy With Straw Hat, Button, and Flag in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C.”; the nerd in tweeds looks like half the kids I went to school with.

And it’s there in Walt Cisco’s picture of John and Jacqueline Kennedy beaming at the crowds from their Dallas motorcade in what must have been minutes, even seconds, before the shots were fired.

It’s important to remember that Sontag didn’t think of such pictures as tabloid throwaways. For her they were culture, maybe art. In her second book of essays, “On Photography” (1977), she grappled with the ethical mechanics of picture taking. And the conclusions she drew about photography as a larcenous, predatory, conscience-deadening medium have been hugely influential.

This is the Sontag book the show focuses on, to the degree that it has a single focus. The curator, Mia Fineman, a senior research associate at the museum who occasionally writes about art for The New York Times, seems to be after something else. She accompanies the 40 pictures, all from the museum’s collection, with Sontag quotations, placed high on the walls, and leaves the play of images and words allusive rather than illustrative, free to generate mood as much as meaning, as Sontag would have wished.

At the same time links to the book are specific. Several photographers Sontag cited are here: Arbus, E. J. Bellocq, Robert Capa and August Sander. So is Leni Riefenstahl , concerning whom she did a much-noted critical about-face. In 1965 Sontag argued that the stylistic brilliance of Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films lifted them beyond censure; she later revised that view.

Sontag herself was photographed repeatedly. In the 1980’s she sat for a portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe and wrote, rather pompously, on the experience. The Mapplethorpe in the show, however, is a portrait of someone else, the singer and poet Patti Smith. Ms. Smith is, I suspect, the kind of celebrity that Sontag a little bit wanted to be, not an intellectual pundit but a demimonde pop star, her words backed up by electric guitar.

Mapplethorpe was wired into that demimonde. And he was one of Sontag’s many gay acquaintances who died of AIDS. Hujar was another. So was the American artist Paul Thek, to whom she had dedicated “Against Interpretation.”

Sontag understood sickness from the inside. In the 1970’s she survived cancer and wrote a fiercely demythologizing book about it, “Illness as Metaphor.” A decade later she followed that with another, “AIDS and Its Metaphors,” an analytical indictment of social stigmatization through disease.

She dedicated that book too to Thek, who died the year it appeared. He was an old and influential friend. Like her he was bisexual. But, tormented by his appetites, he kept clear of gay politics. She seems not to have been tormented, but she also kept clear.

To certain observers her discretion on the subject seemed perverse, even dishonorable, considering how forthright she was on other political topics, and how unafraid of antagonism. In 1968 she went to Hanoi and wrote admiringly of the society she found there; then in the 1980’s she declared Communism a form of fascism. In the intervening years the world had changed and she had changed.

In the 1990’s she traveled repeatedly to Sarajevo, in part to bring the plight of an embattled Bosnia to the world’s attention. Her last book, 2003’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” reflects that commitment in a complicated rethinking, even reversal, of her earlier ideas on photography, which she now considered from a humanitarian perspective. Even in a media-saturated age, pictures could move us, wake us up, stir us to action.

Action was Sontag’s thing. It is the essence of her best essays, with their magnetic drive. They are exhilarating performances. Young people in particular will long be drawn to them. “It’s the beginning mind I embrace,” she wrote. Like the classic enthusiast she was, she saw herself as a beginner, a learner, an ambitious amateur. I bet the advice she gave to students at Vassar College a few years ago she gave herself every day:

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

Eagerness — for doing, for knowing, for connecting to her energy — was exactly what Sontag made me feel when I first read her decades ago. It is a kinetic emotion, and I still feel it when I read her now.