I met Susan Sontag once at Colosseum Books just off Columbus Circle at 57th Street. Now, sadly, both are gone. I recognized her voice first as we both stood surveying the new trade paperbacks at the front of the store. She was talking to someone else next to her when I glanced up and saw the full face with its trademark white plume sweeping over her forehead headed, along with her otherwise coal-black hair, for her shoulder. We exchanged only a few words, something about a book on the rack. She was very pleasant as I remember. Neither of us acknowledged her celebrity--which is how most New Yorkers do it.
It was a New York moment of the sort only residents can appreciate. Walking, or dining, or standing in line for a movie New Yorkers frequently rub shoulders with celebrities. The thrill never goes away, if my twenty-odd years experience there counts. But neither does one forget. Dustin Hoffman, Rex Harrison, William Hurt, Peter Jennings, Bette Midler, Richard Nixon, ...my list of celebrities could go on and on.
Susan Sontag, for me, was most outstanding for her journalism. I've only read On Photography and Illness as Metaphor, it was long ago and I can only remember being favorably impressed at the time. We also shared interest in filmmaking, especially French films.
I admired her politics too, especially her willingness to stand up for ideas that were decidedly unpopular. Here's what she had to say about the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must
seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow
one of the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an
occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some
actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the
torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') -- but
whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by
individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of
Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies
prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry
them out makes such acts likely. ...
...So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the
photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American
custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be
separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the
perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German
soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities
they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the
executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly
rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the
Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what
these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black
victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show
Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or
woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were
souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly
justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.
Regarding the Torture of Others
