Waiting for the Barbarians (54 page)

The passage is wholly typical. Apart from the characteristic tension between the mind (“Intellectually, I know why”) and the heart, and a certain awkwardness reflected in the stiffness and the circuitousness of the language (“I do wonder if I haven’t repressed something there”), the statement represents yet another triumph of that ferocious intellect at the expense of the realm of feelings. Note the reflexively disdainful dismissal of any possibility that she might have spoken publicly about issues relating to homosexuality as a merely sentimental gesture, a treacly project of “giving comfort.”

But as we know, Sontag certainly wasn’t above giving comfort to groups that she saw as oppressed, and didn’t disdain making large and dramatic public gestures meant to validate the rights, and the humanity, of certain minorities. About the citizens of Bosnia, that province of Mitteleuropa that became one of her intellectual homelands, about Europe and its political outrages, Sontag never ceased to speak, with her usual crispness and a smart, outraged passion. All this was deeply admirable. But finally there was something familiar about the way in which she championed the foreign over the domestic, the idealized identity rather than the core identity.
Intellectually I wanted to go
. As we know, she went; and to be sure, there is a kind of touching grandeur to the famous
folie
of her producing
Waiting for Godot
in Sarajevo under siege, which, whatever else it may have achieved, certainly gave comfort.

My point is not to correct Sontag politically; nor do I want to
denigrate the significant positive effects of her political arguments and activities. Everyone, after all, is self-interpreting and self-inventing—writers and artists more than most. Sontag was a true cosmopolitan, and that is an achievement not only of morality but also of imagination. But cosmopolitanism, too, is a set of choices, and Sontag’s choices in the realm of politics strikingly resemble her choices in the realm of literature and culture. At a certain point you have to ask why there was this unquenchable need to comfort, this limitless sympathy, for Bosnians but not for lesbians.

In the end, it was Sontag herself who gave us the most useful metaphor for understanding her. The key is to be found in
The Volcano Lover
, a work whose ambivalent seesawing between two crucial centuries, between two irreconcilable worldviews, tells us more than anything else she wrote about the uneasy divisions in Sontag herself.

The novel is an unusual take on a famous story: the love affair between Emma Hamilton and Admiral Nelson. It is told primarily through the eyes of Emma’s cuckolded husband, Sir William Hamilton, the great collector of classical antiquities who, as British envoy to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in Naples, had the pick of the splendid works that emerged from the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum; these helped to create the great craving for all things classical (and neoclassical) that marked the end of the eighteenth century. A good deal of the book is devoted to brilliant ruminations on the nature and the psychology of collecting, a passion apparently shared by the Sontag-like narrator who, like the narrator of
In America
, hovers obtrusively over the opening of the novel. “I’m seeing,” this disembodied voice says, during a visit to what seems to be a flea market,

As we know, a taste for “checking on what’s in the world,” to say nothing of aesthetic rescue missions, constituted a significant part of Sontag’s critical project. Hamilton’s own characterization of the point of his activities—“To surround oneself with enchanting and stimulating objects, a superfluity of objects, to ensure that the sense will never be unoccupied, nor the faculty of imagination left unexercised”—reminds you even more strongly of the author, with her frenetic desire to be aesthetically stimulated, occupied, exercised. The sense of a strong identification is palpable. Not surprisingly, this novel was the closest to a real literary success that her fiction ever achieved.

The metaphor of the collector is the perfect one for Sontag. Her impressive sympathy for Hamilton, with his great hunger for inanimate objects, explains so much about her—the unbelievable avidity, the impossibility of satiety, the need to possess it all, to know “everything.” And it provides, too, another explanation for her incessant promotion, toward the end of her career, of “greatness”: like all good collectors, she wanted you to know how precious her objects were, how much they were worth. Small wonder that some of her most intense aesthetic enthusiasms were inspired by collectors: William Hamilton; Walter Benjamin, in his library and in the arcades; Godard. She wrote feelingly about the latter’s “hypertrophy of appetite for culture (though often more avid for cultural debris than for museum-consecrated achievements); they proceed by voraciously scavenging
in culture, proclaiming that nothing is alien to their art.” It would be hard to think of a better description of Sontag herself.

As it proceeds,
The Volcano Lover
moves away from the eighteenth century, from the cool acquisitive gaze of the Enlightenment, to the grand passions of the Romantic century that followed. (The book’s coy subtitle is “A Romance.”) In the novel, headlong passions are represented by two narrative threads, one “personal” and one “political,” that become intertwined. The first is the adulterous love of Nelson and Emma (who abandons, you might say, the love of the old for the love of the new—the elderly Hamilton for the war hero Nelson); the second is an ongoing series of references to the violent revolutions with which the eighteenth century ended—in particular, the brief republican revolution in Naples in 1799, which resulted in the short-lived overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy. Nelson, on orders from London, gave the royalist regime military support, as Hamilton gave diplomatic support. (Emma, for her part, was the bosom friend of the queen, Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette.) With Nelson’s aid, the republic was soon overthrown and the repressive monarchy was reestablished.

But if the novel moves you, it is—as sometimes occurs in Sontag’s writing—because of something that happens between the lines. Everything about Hamilton, about the collector, is wonderful: the evocation of what it is like to live a life given to intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, the rich sense that Sontag gives of what it’s like to “discover what is beautiful and to share that with others,” an activity that Hamilton passionately defends as “also a worthy employment for a life.” And yet against all narrative and logical expectation, Sontag ends by wrenching the novel (and the reader’s sympathy) away from Hamilton, who, we perceive, will not be the hero. That role, it turns out, is given to a person who comes late on the scene: another historical figure, Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, a Neapolitan aristocrat
and poet who sided with the republican rebels and was executed by the restored Bourbons as the exhausted century ended, in August 1799. The book ends with her musings at the moment of her death—reflections that comprise a stunning rejection of the character, and indeed the values, that Sontag has so feelingly evoked throughout the book. “Did he ever have an original thought,” Pimentel furiously wonders about Hamilton,

And the novel’s last lines make a final overt allusion to Sontag herself, one that suggests that she saw her political engagement as an expression of this “romantic” side:

Anyone who has considered Sontag’s career will find that “damn them all” profoundly affecting; it expresses, yet again, her desire to forsake who she was in favor of a romantic dream.
The Volcano Lover
makes it clear that Sontag’s sensibility was the eighteenth-century
one that she so successfully evoked in the character of Hamilton, whom she ends by damning. And yet this aesthete and accumulator of experience nonetheless yearned all her life—because she was so taught by the kind of novels that she ingested but could not, in the end, ever write—to inhabit the century to which her son touchingly assigns her: the nineteenth, with its grand passions and its Romantic energies. Emotionally, she thought she was the one; intellectually, she was the other. This confusion helps to account for so much about her life and her work: the strange analytical coldness about normal human passions (that desire to make sex “cognitive”) and the remarkably hot passion for the stimulation of books, theater, films; the initial embrace of the importance of the daringly new, the avant-garde, the louche and outré, followed by the retreat into the conventional (the historical novel!), the canonical, the established, the “great”; the wobbly relationship between the criticism, which was her calling, and the fiction, which was not.

This lifelong struggle to find a place between these various poles—extremities nicely summed up, in
The Volcano Lover
, during an amusing encounter between Hamilton and Goethe, as “beauty” and “transformation”—gives Sontag a certain novelistic allure of her own. But here again the character whom she calls to mind is a decidedly pre-Romantic figure. In one of the shortest literary essays that she ever wrote, Sontag ruminated on a favorite novel, and her description of its hero suggests a strong affinity between the critic and the character:

Thanks to her son’s nervous but rewarding decision, Sontag herself has finally achieved a kind of resolution. For she has made the translation that, you sometimes feel, she had always yearned for and so long awaited. Now others must do the interpreting; she herself, beyond compromise and corruption, no madder than most and more noble, too, has become the text. Infinitely interpretable, she has at last ended up on the inside of a book.

—
The New Republic
, April 15, 2009

DANIEL MENDELSOHN’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in
The New York Review of Books
and
The New Yorker
. His books include a memoir,
The Elusive Embrace
, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; the international best seller
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
; an acclaimed translation of the works of C. P. Cavafy; and a previous collection of essays,
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken
. He teaches at Bard College.