selenak

wychwood told me yesterday evening, Susan Sontag is dead. It's one of these deaths that make you sad but, as with Katherine Hepburn's passing, leave a sense that here was a woman who lived the life she had wanted to live, had succeeded in her chosen profession and had made a difference. No, I didn't agree with each statement/attitude/point of view, but I always found Sontag worth reading, and no matter whether I agreed or disagreed, I admired that - a very rare thing among public figures of any calibre - she had the courage to change her point of view if she felt she had been wrong. (One of the more famous instances being communism, which she turned against in the very early 80s, 1982 I think, long before the wall fell.) She was not a dogmatist closing herself off from challenges, new ideas and other perspectives.

Reading obituaries of a writer always feels vaguely dissatisfying, because inevitably they are a collection of the most famous soundbites, and Oscar Wilde aside, writers need to be read in context, not in aphorisms. Speaking of context, the headlines of the various obituaries probably tell you something about the paper in question. For the Washington Post, she was a "fearless writer", for the Guardian the "Dark Lady of American Literature" (and who is Shakespeare then, I wonder), and for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, "America's conscience". (Which made for the handy, if a tad obvious "America's conscience is dead".) A title she probably would have rejected. I saw her only once in person, when she received the "Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels" last year. Her acceptance speech then was far calmer and relaxed than the person the obituaries conjure up would have made. It was methological and with a dry sense of irony directed as much at herself and her German audience as it was at her American home. There also was a deep, deep concern (no kidding). The last thing of Sontag's I've read was an article on Abu Ghraib. As was to be expected by the author of On Photography, her analysis went far beyond "Rumsfeld sucks" and covered pornography, historical precedents (those lynch party photos from the American South rather than Vietnam, which as she pointed out was a different situation), and general human power mechanisms, as well as the automatic distancing process setting in when looking at pictures. Months later, her analysis is still fascinating to read, and sadly more relevant than ever.

Apparently, a lot of people who met her found her intimidating and I guess I would have, too, if I had had the chance to talk to her back in Frankfurt. But her articles never intimidated me; they made me think. Her play Alice in Bed got me interested in Henry, Alice and William James. Her novel The Volcano Lover was a great take in that scandalous triangle of the Regency, Sir William Hamilton, Emma, Lady Hamilton, and Nelson, and I only got into nitpicking mode once. (Her image of Goethe is clearly influenced by Thomas Mann's depiction in Lotte in Weimar, but Thomas Mann had a tendency to confuse Goethe with himself, and at any rate during his two Italian years Goethe was at his most informal and relaxed, not in Olympian mode.) I must read her other novel, In America now, and am looking forward to it. But then there will be no more writings of hers to enjoy. I'm going to miss them.