by Susan Sontag
A BOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHS; a book about women; a very American project: generous, ardent, inventive, open-ended. It’s for us to decide what to make of these pictures. After all, a photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?
[1999]
THERE AND HERE
Homage to Halliburton
BEFORE THERE WAS travel—in my life, at least—there were travel books. Books that told you the world was very large but quite encompassable. Full of destinations.
The first travel books I read, and surely among the most important books of my life, were by Richard Halliburton. I was seven, and the year was 1940, when I read his Book of Marvels. Halliburton, the handsome, genteel American youth, born in Brownsville, Tennessee, who had devised for himself a life of being forever young and on the move, was my first vision of what I thought had to be the most privileged of lives, that of a writer: a life of endless curiosity and energy and countless enthusiasms. To be a traveler, to be a writer—in my child mind they started off as the same thing.
To be sure, there was a good deal in that child mind that prepared me to fall in love with the idea of insatiable travel. My parents had lived abroad most of my first six years—my father had a fur business in northern China—while my sister and I remained in the care of relatives in the States. As far back as I can remember, I was already conducting a potent dream-life of travel to exotic places. But my parents’ unimaginable existence on the opposite side of the globe had inspired a too precise, hopeless set of travel longings. Halliburton’s books informed me that the world contained many wonderful things. Not just the Great Wall of China.
Yes, he had walked on the Great Wall, and he’d also climbed the Matterhorn and Etna and Popocatepetl and Fujiyama and Olympus; he’d visited the Grand Canyon and the Golden Gate Bridge (in 1938, when the book was published, the bridge counted as the newest of the world’s marvels); he’d rowed into the Blue Grotto and swum the length of the Panama Canal; he’d made it to Carcassonne and Baalbek and Petra and Lhasa and Chartres and Delphi and the Alhambra and Timbuktu and the Taj Mahal and Pompeii and Victoria Falls and the Bay of Rio and Chichén Itzá and the Blue Mosque in Isfahan and Angkor Wat and, and, and … Halliburton called them “marvels,” and wasn’t this my introduction to the notion of “the masterpiece”? The point was: the faraway world was full of amazing sites and edifices, and I, too, might one day see and learn the stories attached to them. Looking back now, I realize that Book of Marvels was a prime awakener of my own ardor and appetite.
The year before I read Book of Marvels, Halliburton had ventured a trip under sail in that quintessentially Chinese vessel, a junk, from Hong Kong to San Francisco, and had vanished somewhere mid-Pacific without a trace. He was thirty-nine years old. Did I know he had died when I was reading his book? Probably not. But then, I’d not entirely taken in the death of my own thirty-three-year-old father in Tientsin, which I learned about in 1939, several months after my mother returned from China for good.
And a sad end couldn’t taint the lessons of pluck and avidity I drew from reading Halliburton. Those books—from The Royal Road to Romance , his first, published in 1925, to Book of Marvels, his last; I eventually read them all—described for me an idea of pure happiness. And of successful volition. You have something in mind. You imagine it. You prepare for it. You voyage toward it. Then you see it. And there is no disappointment; indeed, it may be even more captivating than you imagined.
Halliburton’s books convey in the most candid and ingenuous—which is to say, unfashionable—way the “romance” of travel. Enthusiasm for travel may not be expressed so giddily today, but I’m sure that the seeking out of what is strange or beautiful, or both, remains just as pleasurable and addictive. It has certainly proved so for me. And because of the impact of those books read when I was so young, my more enviable sightings throughout grownup life, mostly by-products of opportunity or obligation rather than pilgrimages undertaken, continue to bear Halliburton’s imprint. When I finally did walk on the Great Wall, and was rowed into the Blue Grotto, and was shat on by monkeys in the Taj Mahal, and wandered in the ruins of Angkor Wat, and wangled permission to spend a night in a sleeping bag on the rosy rocks of Petra, and surreptitiously climbed the Great Pyramid at Giza before daybreak, I thought: I’ve done it. They were on his list. Truth is, although San Francisco is anything but an unusual destination for me, I never drive across the Golden Gate Bridge without recalling where it figures in Halliburton’s book. Even a place I’ve assumed isn’t very interesting and haven’t visited, Andorra, remains on my interior map because he went there. And when Machu Picchu or Palmyra or Lhasa or Fujiyama comes to mind, I think, I haven’t done that. Yet.
The cult of youth that animates Halliburton’s books could hardly have meant something to a seven year-old. But it is the association of travel with youth, beautiful youth, that seems most dated now. As an undergraduate at Princeton just after World War I, he succumbed to the spell of The Picture of Dorian Gray; and throughout his brief life his beau idéal remained Rupert Brooke, whose biography he hoped one day to write. Even more remote than these references is Halliburton’s assumption that he is bringing news to his readers, that what will entice and seduce are his words—not the photographs in the books, most no better than snapshots: the author standing in front of the Taj Mahal, and so forth. Today, when lust for travel is awakened primarily through images, still and moving, we expect the sights, many of them all too familiar, to speak for themselves. Indeed, we’ve seen the famous sights unrolling in color long before we actually travel to see them.
Halliburton’s travel narratives are stocked with people: guides, facilitators, scam artists, and other locals. The busy world that he encounters fills his mind. Today it is possible to travel solo, without traveling, to vacancy itself. The distraught heroine of Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist logs on to her computer at odd hours to watch a livestreaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road outside Kotka, Finland, where a webcam is always trained on asphalt. “It emptied her mind and made her feel the deep silence of other places.”
To me, travel is filling the mind. But that means, by launching me beyond the self, it also empties my mind: I find it almost impossible to write when I am traveling. To write I have to stay put. Real travel competes with mental traveling. (What is a writer but a mental traveler?) When I recall now how much Halliburton’s books meant to me at the beginning of my reading life, I see how the notion of “traveler” infiltrated, perfumed, abetted my nascent dream of becoming a writer. When I acknowledge to myself that I’m interested in everything, what am I saying but that I want to travel everywhere. Like Richard Halliburton.
[2001]
Singleness
WHO’S YOUR FAVORITE WRITER? an interviewer asked me many years ago.—Just one?—Uh-huh.—Then it’s easy. Shakespeare, of course.—Oh, I would never have thought you’d say Shakespeare!—For heaven’s sake, why?—Well, you’ve never written anything about Shakespeare.
Oh.
So I’m supposed to be what I write? No more? No less? But every writer knows this isn’t so.
I write what I can: that is, what’s given to me and what seems worth writing, by me. I care passionately about many things that don’t get into my fiction and essays. They don’t because what’s in my head seems to me to lack originality (I never thought I had anything compelling to say about Shakespeare), or because I haven’t yet found the necessary inner freedom to write about them. My books aren’t me—all of me. And in some ways I am less than them. The better ones are more intelligent, more talented, than I am; anyway, different. The “I” who writes is a transformation—a specializing and upgrading, according to certain literary goals and loyalties—of the “I” who lives. It feels true only in a trivial sense to say I make my books. What I really feel is that they are made, through me, by literature; and I’m their (literature’s) servant.
The me through whom the books make their way has other yearnings too, other duties. For instance: as me, I
believe in right action. But, for the writer, it’s far more complicated. Literature is not about doing the right thing—though it is about expressiveness (language) at a noble level and wisdom (inclusiveness, empathy, truthfulness, moral seriousness). And my books are not a means of discovering or expressing who I am, either; I’ve never fancied the ideology of writing as therapy or self-expression.
There is a deeper reason why the books are not me. My life has always felt like a becoming, and still does. But the books are finished. They liberate me to do, be, feel, aspire to something else—I’m a fierce learner. I’ve moved on. Sometimes I feel I’m in flight from the books, and the twaddle they generate. Sometimes the momentum is more pleasurable. I enjoy beginning again. The beginner’s mind is best.
It’s the beginner’s mind I embrace and permit myself now, when I’m very far from being a beginning writer. When I began publishing thirty years ago, I entertained a simpler version of the figment that there were two people around here: I and a writer of the same name. Admiration—no, veneration—for a host of books had brought me to my vocation, on my knees. So, naturally, I was scared that I wasn’t talented enough, worthy enough. How then did I find the courage to launch my frail vessel into literature’s wide waters? Through a sense of two-ness that expressed, and enforced, my awareness of the gap between my own gifts and the standards I wished to honor in my work.
In fact, I never called what I did “my” work but “the” work. By extension, there was that one, the one who had dared to become a writer. And I, the one with the standards, who happily made sacrifices to keep her going, though I didn’t think all that much of what she wrote.
Going on as a writer didn’t allay this dissatisfaction, not for a very long time; it only upped the ante. (And I think I was right to be dissatisfied.) In my “Sontag and I” game, the disavowals were for real. Oppressed by as well as reluctantly proud of this lengthening mini-shelf of work signed by Susan Sontag, pained to distinguish myself (I was a seeker) from her (she had merely found), I flinched at everything written about her, the praise as much as the pans. My one perennial form of self-flattery: I know better than anyone what she is about, and nobody is as severe a judge of her work as I am myself.
Every writer—after a certain point, when one’s labors have resulted in a body of work—experiences himself or herself as both Dr. Frankenstein and the monster. For while harboring a secret sharer is probably not often the fantasy of a beginning writer, the conceit is bound to appeal to a writer who has gone on. And on. A persona now: enduring, and trying to ignore, the nibblings of alienation from the earlier work which time, and more work, are bound to worsen. It also playfully affirms the dismaying disparity between the inside (the ecstasy and arduousness of writing) and the outside (that congeries of misunderstandings and stereotypes that make up one’s reputation or fame). I’m not that image (in the minds of other people), it declares. And, with more poignancy: don’t punish me for being what you call successful. I’ve got this onerous charge, this work-obsessed, ambitious writer who bears the same name as I do. I’m just me, accompanying, administering, tending to that one, so she can get some work done.
Then, more specifically, this doubling of the self puts a winsome sheen on the abandonment of self required to make literature, which invariably incurs the stigma of selfishness in “real” life. To write, as Kafka said, you can never be alone enough. But the people you love tend not to appreciate your need to be solitary, to turn your back on them. You have to fend off the others to get your work done. And to appease them—that issue is especially keen if the writer is a woman. Don’t be mad, or jealous. I can’t help it. You see, she writes.
Yeats said one must choose between the life and the work. No. And yes. One result of lavishing a good part of your one and only life on your books is that you come to feel that, as a person, you are faking it. I remember my merriment when, many years ago, I first came across Borges’s elegy to himself, the most delicate account ever given of a writer’s unease about the reconciling of life and work. Writers’ pathos. Writers’ humility. (I envied him the slyness of his humility.)
Rereading it now, I still grin. But I’m not so prone to make use of that balm to writers’ self-consciousness which Borges’s fable so charmingly evokes.
Far from needing the consolation of a certain ironic distance from myself (the earlier distance wasn’t ironic at all), I’ve slowly evolved in the opposite direction and at last come to feel that the writer is me: not my double, or familiar, or shadow playmate, or creation. (It’s because I got to that point—it took almost thirty years—that I was finally able to write a book I really like: The Volcano Lover.) Now I think there’s no escaping the burden of singleness. There’s a difference between me and my books. But there’s only one person here. That is scarier. Lonelier. Liberating.
[1995]
Writing As Reading
READING NOVELS SEEMS to me such a normal activity, while writing them is such an odd thing to do—at least so I think until I remind myself how firmly the two are related. (No armored generalities here. Just a few remarks.)
First, because to write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading. You write in order to read what you’ve written, and see if it’s OK and, since of course it never is, to rewrite it—once, twice, as many times as it takes to get it to be something you can bear to reread. You are your own first, maybe severest, reader. “To write is to sit in judgment on oneself,” Ibsen inscribed on the flyleaf of one of his books. Hard to imagine writing without rereading.
But is what you’ve written straight off never all right? Yes, sure: sometimes even better than all right. And that only suggests, to this writer at any rate, that with a closer look, or voicing aloud—that is, another reading—it might be better still. I’m not saying that the novelist has to fret and sweat to produce something good. “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure,” said Dr. Johnson, and the maxim seems as remote from contemporary taste as its author. Surely, much that is written without effort gives a great deal of pleasure. No, the question is not the judgment of readers—who may well prefer a writer’s more spontaneous, less elaborated work—but a sentiment of writers, those professionals of dissatisfaction. You think, If I can get it to this point the first go-around, without too much struggle, couldn’t it be better still?
And though this, the rewriting—and the rereading—sounds like effort, it is actually the most pleasurable part of writing. Sometimes the only pleasurable part. Setting out to write, if you have the idea of “literature” in your head, is formidable, intimidating. A plunge in an icy lake. Then comes the warm part, when you already have something to work with, upgrade, edit.
Let’s say it’s a mess. But you have a chance to fix it. You try to be clearer. Or deeper. Or more eloquent. Or more eccentric. You try to be true to a world. You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative. You want to winch yourself up from yourself. You want to winch the book out of your balky mind. As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head. You try to liberate it. You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be—what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be. You read the sentences over and over. Is this the book I’m writing? Is this all?
Or let’s say it’s going well, for it does go well, some of the time (if it didn’t, you’d go crazy). There you are, and even if you are the slowest of scribes and the worst of touch typists, a trail of words is being laid down, and you want to keep going. Then you reread it. Perhaps you don’t dare be satisfied, but at the same time you like what you’ve written. You find yourself taking pleasure—a reader’s pleasure—in what’s there on the page.
Writing is, finally, a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To find your own characteristic way of narrating and insisting; that is, to find your own inner freedom. To be strict w
ithout being too self-excoriating. Not stopping too often to reread. Allowing yourself, when you dare think it’s going well (or not too badly), simply to keep rowing along. No waiting for inspiration’s shove.
Of course, blind writers can never reread what they dictate. Perhaps this matters less for poets, who often do most of their writing in their head before setting down anything on paper. (Poets live by the ear much more than prose writers do.) And being unable to see doesn’t mean that one can’t make revisions. Don’t we imagine that Milton’s daughters, at the end of each day of the dictation of Paradise Lost, read it all back to their father and then took down his corrections? But prose writers—who work in a lumberyard of words—can’t hold it all in their heads. They need to see what they’ve written. Even the most forthcoming, prolific writers must feel this. (Hence, Sartre announced, when he went blind, that his writing days were over.) Think of portly, venerable Henry James pacing up and down in a room in Lamb House composing The Golden Bowl aloud to a secretary. Leaving aside the difficulty of imagining how James’s late prose could have been dictated at all, much less to the racket made by a Remington typewriter circa 1900, don’t we assume that James reread what had been typed, and was lavish with his corrections?
When I became, again, a cancer patient two years ago and had to break off work on the nearly finished In America, a friend in Los Angeles, knowing my despair and fear that now I’d never finish it, offered to come to New York and stay with me to take down my dictation of the rest of the novel. True, the first eight chapters were done (that is, rewritten and reread many times) and I’d begun the next-to-last chapter, with the arc of the last two chapters clearly in view. And yet I had to refuse his touching, generous offer. It wasn’t just that I was probably too befuddled by drastic chemotherapy and morphine to remember what I was planning to write. I had to be able to see what I wrote, not just hear it. I had to be able to reread.
