Sontag in Greenwich Village: An Interview

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This interview with Susan Sontag originally appeared in the April/May 1979 edition of The London Magazine, an issue focused on painting. 

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The fact that Susan Sontag had cancer and a mastectomy as well as various follow-up operations and chemotherapy has been public fact in New York City for more than a year. She has given several interviews about her condition and the book it provoked, Illness as Metaphor. In an interview with the Soho News (a rising rival to the Village Voice) she said, ‘I have a highly developed sense of the mortality of things. And that has been sharpened by living with this disease for the last two years. But I think anyone who travels a lot – and I do – has a sense of how rapidly things are being destroyed, particularly in the last ten years. So there is a pathos in the experience of travelling. It is not only that if I go to Venice, I think maybe I will never see Venice again, but also I think that maybe Venice won’t be there to see.’

And first reactions to cancer? ‘Panic. Animal terror. I found myself doing things like sleeping with the light on for the first couple of months. You feel as if you are looking into a black hole.’ Yet despite a couple of later scares that the cancer might be spreading, her doctor announced cheerily not long ago, ‘Your actuarial prospects are sprucing up’.

I arrived in New York having already arranged the interview via Sontag’s publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They jealously guard her telephone number and address. Therefore, when I arrived at the brown-stone house in Greenwich Village I was to meet someone I had never spoken with before. This is unusual. In the past I’ve managed to organise at least a short telephone conversation to get a feeling for the manners and energy of my subject.

We shook hands and she directed me upstairs to a spacious studio and asked me to wait a moment. I could still hear the continuous dense throbbing of Manhattan traffic punctuated by blood-curdling screams of tyres and the brain-frying sound of police/ambulance sirens. If cars could go insane they would moan and squeal and shriek in the same cacophony of pulsating panic which typifies this traffic. ‘I have very steady nerves. I’m not one of those people who jumps every time a car skids around the corner’, Sontag told me later.

For me, the most impressive feature of her studio was a poster advertisement for: The Rapidissimo Olivetti Typewriter. Probably from the thirties. It was framed and stood about two metres high over the fireplace. In one direction a huge grey steam train surges into the centre of the picture. Click-clicketty-click and whistling. Also speeding to the centre of the picture from the opposite direction, and also on rails, is the Olivetti Rapidissimo which spills from its roller a flurry of typed sheets of ever diminishing size which are carried by the wind to the far side of the poster. Marvellous. I forgot to ask her how she acquired it.

We sat at the table. She lit a cigarette and I opened the chocolates I had brought. We chatted, getting the measure of each other. As I was about to switch on the tape recorder she said, ‘I haven’t got anything in particular I want to say. You can ask me anything you want.’ So I started by confessing I felt uneasy about the fact that several writers had chosen to ‘die in public’ by writing about cancer. Stewart Alsop of Newsweek was a good example. ‘It should only make one uneasy if it is bad writing. It is no different than writing about war or going through a divorce. You either do it well or badly.’ Sontag explained how she felt only ten per cent of her writing was autobiographical, but that during interviews about her cancer she had ‘discussed personal experiences in as much detail as anyone wanted to hear’, because she felt ‘it was my civil duty and it helped save lives… But I have a very acute sense of privacy. I’m not mainly a performer. My performance is to produce works that are given to the public.’

What is wrong with metaphors is not metaphors themselves, but that they stop people thinking by becoming stereotypes.

She had intimated at the beginning of the interview that she was reluctant to be interviewed. It is this reluctance, on behalf of a growing number of authors, which I feel more and more acutely myself, as interviewer. Isaac Bashiva Singer was quoted recently as saying, ‘If Tolstoy lived across the street I would not visit him. I would read his books.’ But publishers always tell authors that interviews help sales. So I asked Sontag how she coped with the demands of publicity as they encroach on privacy.

‘It is easy. I just answer the questions the way I want. I live in a modern world and I know that things are done. That there is this activity which surrounds books which is part of getting them better known or helping them to find their audience. I don’t feel violated or compromised by giving interviews.’ This certainly wasn’t quite the answer I expected. But anyway I could relax and stop feeling reluctant on her behalf. Now I had only my own reluctance to deal with. So:

How much is Illness as Metaphor a political response to the society which produces pollution and disease?

‘It is a political response to the metaphorical uses of disease which are invariably part of a reactionary ideology. The disease metaphors encourage fatalism. When people talk, for instance, about urban growth using cancer as a metaphor, which you can find in literature starting in the eighteenth century, it is counsel to despair. I think there is a kind of cheap pessimism around which is moralistic. But this moralism is just a thin surface and underneath is a kind of amoral despair which makes people behave very badly. I don’t think it is necessary that we should think of cultural situations in terms of decay. But generally this sort of language,’ the telephone had started to ring, ‘is much too crude. What is wrong with metaphors is not metaphors themselves, but that they stop people thinking by becoming stereotypes…’

It was the New York telephone company. ‘I’ve been on to them all week to install a cut-off switch so that I don’t get interrupted.’ (New York telephones cannot be unplugged. Some subscribers try leaving the phone off the hook but within an hour or so the telephone company sends an annoying high pitch tone down the line to encourage you to put the hand-set back in the cradle.) The company agreed to visit soon. She started again where she left off.

‘Of course, it you live in a highly polluted environment, you have the right to be angry about the diseases produced. But there are paranoid responses to this where people are so busy improving themselves and safeguarding themselves against poisons… changing their diet, brewers’ yeast in the morning and so on. But I don’t think the main thing is to save one’s self… But listen, I must say right away I’m not mainly interested in promoting ideas. I’m not mainly a polemicist. The main point for me is writing fiction – working out a more eloquent sensibility which is mine… I believe very much in the dialogue. It is made up of many voices and I want to be one of them.’

As a freelance intellectual?

‘Well, it doesn’t feel like that in my head. I think of myself as a writer whilst others think of me as an intellectual.’

And the university life she left behind? ‘I got tired of the academic world. I thought I would just repeat myself.’ My tape was running out. She kept talking. I mentioned that many of her interests paralleled those of John Berger. She said she was a great admirer of his. ‘But he pays such a high price for his isolation in France. If only I could persuade him to just come to Manhattan for a few months and see one journalist a week. He would do himself a great service. I really admire his work. I wish he would write more.’ The new tape was fitted.

How do you feel now about the essay ‘On Camp’ you wrote in 1964?

‘I stand by it. I have nothing more to say. What happened afterwards is really none of my business. I wrote it for a small literary magazine. I was astonished to discover that two weeks later it was an article in Time magazine. But I didn’t do it. I never co-operated with any of the digests or amplifications. Yet it got reprinted, discussed and digested and misquoted and I was represented as having written a manifesto or even having invented it, which wasn’t true at all… My idea about my work is to wait until something builds up, whether it is a story, an essay or a novel, until I know enough, and feel enough, and have enough imagination to get it down. Then I write it and go on to something else. For example, the essays “On Photography” have sold more than anything else I’ve ever written. So people sometimes ask me, “When are you going to do XYZ on photography?” I say, “I’m not going to do anything about photography. I’ve said it.”’

It has become boring?

‘Yes… but I’m never bored myself. Boredom is not my problem. I don’t believe it exists. I think it is really a mistake. I think what people mean is that they are depressed. I can’t understand it. I find a million things interesting. If there were two hundred hours in the day I still couldn’t find time to give attention to all the things which arouse myinterest. Now in the essay “On Camp” I thought boredom was a label which people put on things they don’t understand. It was involved in the general defence of experimental or avant-garde art. But now that has changed. Avant-garde has become institutionalised. It is official high culture. It is supported by museums and foundations. It doesn’t need defending the way it did ten or fifteen years ago. It has also exhibited its real limits. Dead ends. Just doing things for the sake of doing them. Always trying to take it a step further. Now we see there is only so much outrage that one can tolerate. Then you just turn off. The outrage just doesn’t seem to be provoking anymore.’

So isn’t that boredom?

‘No. It just means that you don’t think it is good. Let me put it this way. When I was much younger I thought the word experimental or avant-garde or formalist had more meaning than I think now. Now I’m interested in getting away from those labels. I think words like mainstream art, avant-garde, conventional, etc. are tactical words used to impose something on people.’

And you used them in the past because that was the nature of the battle.

‘Yes, the battle seemed to have been conceived in those terms. Now they seem very tired. Now I wouldn’t want to say anything is avant-garde. I don’t know what it means anymore.’

So that battle has been won?

‘Yes. But now that it has been won, the victory is not quite as sweet as one had imagined it… Today there is a general confusion about standards. There is a growth of nihilistic mentality. So it is therefore more important to just support the idea of seriousness. And say, perhaps, one has to take a step backwards.’

Old-fashioned seriousness?

‘Well, it seems old-fashioned. But it also (if I were going to use the word but I won’t) could be considered to be avant-garde in the sense that there is a lot of resistance to seriousness.’

There is really quite a close fit between avant-garde art and the values of the consumer society.

But you and your friends take each other seriously.

‘Of course. We have to, because we suffer. And despite all the nihilistic talk we still come up against experiences which make us cry. Life forces you to be serious. I did not realise ten years ago how conformist some of the works I supported were. I thought they offered more radical challenges to the society than I now see. There is really quite a close fit between avant-garde art and the values of the consumer society which needs more products, constant turn-over, diversity, outrage and so on. The bohemian or radical artists’ challenge of conventional bourgeois sensibility doesn’t work any more. The consumer society is so sophisticated and so complex that it has broken down the lines between high taste and mass taste, between the conventional sensibility and the subversive sensibility. And now these distinctions have broken down I don’t think it is the solution. The solution is still to find what is good in a swamp of stuff that is mediocre, trivial and false.’

I guess terrorism is the last form of expression that hasn’t been incorporated?

‘Probably. An Italian friend of mine was visiting yesterday afternoon, sitting right where you are now. He’s a college professor. He says that a large number of his students sympathise with the Red Brigades. And they talk about it not as politics but as some kind of futurist art form of constant provocation and outrage. Murder included… One of the things about punk is that they play with this kind of terrorist nihilism in their dress and lyrics. I still think it is only play despite the fact that sometimes people get killed because one musician is bombed out of his mind with drugs. But essentially it is fascist rhetoric taken over as theatre, so far only theatre…’ Sontag was running out of time so l asked for another interview and she agreed.

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Two days later at nine-thirty in the morning she looked sleepy. Someone sleeping on the studio sofa had to be moved into a bed downstairs, before we could begin. We sat at the same table and she lit another cigarette (Carlton low tar). ‘I really wish I could give it up. I’ve tried several times. But I never really made it to “non-smoker”. I’ve always been just a smoker who doesn’t smoke. When you see the old movies you can see what an avant-garde thing smoking used to be for women. Bette Davis smoking…’, and she did an imitation of sucking the delicate paper tube held high in the poised hand. ‘But I’m a victim’, she confessed. I offered to send her a book called How to Stop Smoking in Five Days. She accepted and agreed to return it in a month if she did not use it. She then settled back in her chair and I asked what, for her, was the meaning of this new seriousness she’d mentioned in the first interview.

‘One of the things which matters to me a lot – and it isn’t a new discovery – is caring about history, challenging the historical amnesia which is part of this whole society. If I want to understand something it seems that a serious way to understand it is in a historical way. It can be a word, an idea, a cultural phenomenon. I wouldn’t necessarily want to go back all the way. Maybe just a hundred years or so. That involves reading books. It involves realising that you don’t get all information in some radioactive way by listening to popular music, walking in the streets or watching television. You then discover that a lot of the ideas and problems that we think are part of human nature were in fact invented and explored during the time of the French Revolution and the birth of the Romantic Movement. Essentially we are still living these problems and ideas. And understanding this in some detail is for me a way of being serious. Because today there is a generation of people under thirty-five who think that all their ideas come from a decade ago. And they don’t. All those romantic oppositions of individual versus society, the head versus the heart, the need for liberation, the repressive nature of authority. They are the debates of the last two centuries. Read Proust, Dostoyevsky, Kafka. You can’t read them without having some sense of the evolution of things as well as the revolution… And if you are serious it is a way of saying that you are opposed to kidding around with life. To being detached or dissociated or, mostly, asleep… But I don’t go around thinking of myself as a serious person. It is just that the word itself can be used to point certain things out to people. It is a polemical word. A tactical word. It is not of any value of itself.’

So who are the real enemies of seriousness?

‘Indifference to information. Sloppiness in argument. Trivialiasation and vulgarisation. You see, the intellectual arts are falling into disuse. Except, of course, in science. Scientists can’t get away with what people in other areas allow themselves to get away with… Of course, there is a sense in which everything is always being challenged. All these things are always terribly precarious. They are always only the concern of a small minority of people. But we are in a state of radical or revolutionary crisis. There is a sense in which we are at the end of a moment, at the end of a civilisation. That’s something a lot of people say so I hesitate to repeat it because it becomes a cliché which one says very easily without realising or experiencing the full weight of it. But this is the end of a moment. A very long and a very complicated end. The cultural revolution is a fact, but not perhaps in the desirable sense. The traditional support of all kinds of activities and values has been so eroded that people don’t know the reasons why they do certain things, except because of the objective coercion. People describe themselves all the time as “being conditioned”. You would think that when people say, “I’ve been conditioned to believe XYZ”, that this would liberate them from their conditioning. But it doesn’t. They then go on to affirm those things which they say they are conditioned to believe.’

Writing is such an un-natural activity that one has to keep in practice, like sport, or playing a musical instrument.

As I changed tapes I noticed she had already smoked several cigarettes. Two stubbed out prematurely. And one broken in half. Now she was trying a new technique. She had balanced the ash tray on a chair behind her. Out of sight. When the ash got too long her eyes would go searching for the ashtray. She was hiding it from herself. I don’t usually smoke, but this once I asked for a cigarette, out of solidarity. Then we got the ashtray back on the table.

You mentioned in the first interview the thing that concerns you most is your fiction writing. Do you acknowledge the notion of style?

‘I’m not cultivating anything. I just try to stretch my imagination. I’m trying to make my voice, my cocktail of temperament, more eloquent, more powerful. It feels like I’m trying to make something good. Really good. Something that will seem important and necessary to other people. I want it to be something that I can admire.’

Do you ever write just for practice like an athlete goes jogging?

‘I wish I did. It would make writing much easier. I have an enormous problem getting started. I’m very undisciplined. When I work on something I work on it day and night and toward the end I’m in a state of, I don’t want to say hysteria, but of total absorption. I drive myself to my physical limits. I can work twenty-four hours at a stretch. And when I finish I stop cold. I take a trip or do something entirely different for a couple of weeks. Writing is such an un-natural activity that one has to keep in practice, like sport, or playing a musical instrument. I don’t do it. But if I did it would make it a lot easier.’

Who are the writers you admire?

‘Not many of my contemporaries. The Hungarian, George Konrad, who wrote The Caseworker and The City Builder. And there is, of course, John Berger for his novels A Painter in Our Time and G. Calvino, who is quite a bit older, but I find his writing absolutely marvellous – Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics. Then Sinyavski and Ballard, and that’s about it.’

When you have finished a piece do you show it to anyone before publication?

‘Usually only my son. But I really shouldn’t because it is probably a great burden for him. I just can’t resist the feeling that it exists first for one other person, before it goes to the editor.’

Lionel Trilling had the notion that books used in the classroom are diluted. How do you feel about your books being used in universities?

‘I think that all uses of books are a dilution. There is nothing wrong with that. It is part of their destiny. But this raises the question as to whether such things should be the proper subject of university study. Many universities now teach things which people would be better getting on their own. Universities have become cultural centres, in this country, abandoning, in part, traditional academic pursuits. Yet as long as there is a plurality of uses for books I suppose I can’t object. One can’t guarantee the purity of the work. All situations are impure.’

What about reviewers?

‘Most reviewers are extremely stupid whether they are flattering or unfavourable. I rarely learn anything from a review or an article written about me. On the contrary it is deeply embarrassing and seems very silly.’

Looking back on your fifteen years of writing do you feel satisfied with the way you have been treated by publishers, reviewers and readers? If you were to manage yourself again in the same market would you do it any differently?

‘You always use these words that come from a realm of discourse that is so alien to me. I don’t manage myself. I don’t think of myself as being in a market. These are the ways people are talked about in the world of media and of the consumer survey. That is a language which doesn’t do anything for me. I can describe my activities in a completely different way. I am lucky enough to have a publisher whom I respect. I’m very fond of him (Straus). He was the first publisher to whom I took my first book. He accepted it and gave me five hundred dollars. I have always been with him. I will go on being with him as long as we are both alive. I’m lucky, I don’t have an adversary relationship with my publisher. I know I could make more money with another publisher. But I prefer the non-adversary relationship. It suits my temperament. I’m not a good citizen of capitalism – temperamentally…’ The tape had finished. I felt accused. The point had struck home. I tried to explain that recently I had spent several days at the Frankfurt Book Fair and that the commercial elements of publishing were foremost in my mind. ‘Of course, there are things which have to be done. But I’m a writer. I’m not interested in money.’ Yes, yes, I had been vulgarising the writer’s role. I tried to redeem myself. ‘Maybe it is best if we stop here’, I said. She agreed with a nonchalant ‘If you wish’. I gathered myself together and thanked her for her time. She folded up and handed me the remains of the chocolate from the table. I had eaten my share and the rest was hers, I said. She returned it to the table. Chatting politely we moved to the door where she wished me bon voyage and said good bye.

By the time I had slumped into the back seat of a yellow cab and was hurtling up-town all those other questions I had planned to ask started flooding back. But I had chosen to end the interview prematurely. That was my decision. Was I really such a thin-skinned amateur? Hadn’t I over-reacted? How had she seen the ending? I really don’t know. What I do know, however, is that under slightly different circumstances I would have bitten my lip, taken up the challenge and got another half hour of Susan Sontag ‘on tape’. And under slightly different circumstances, I believe, Susan Sontag would have played along.

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Susan Sontag was an American writer, critic and public intellectual.

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