Sontag’s nonfiction prizes ardor; her fiction is filled with aching irresolution. Photograph by Bruce Davidson / Magnum

Seriousness, for Susan Sontag, was a flashing machete to swing at the thriving vegetation of American philistinism. The philistinism sprang from our barbarism—and our barbarism had conquered the world. “Today’s America,” she wrote in 1966, “with Ronald Reagan the new daddy of California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing.” Intellectuals, doomed to tramp through an absurd century, were to inflict their seriousness on Governor Reagan and President Johnson—and on John Wayne, spareribs, and the whole shattered, voluptuous culture.

The point was to be serious about power and serious about pleasure: cherish literature, relish films, challenge domination, release yourself into the rapture of sexual need—but be thorough about it. “Seriousness is really a virtue for me,” Sontag wrote in her journal after a night at the Paris opera. She was twenty-four. Decades later, and months before she died, she mounted a stage in South Africa to declare that all writers should “love words, agonize over sentences,” “pay attention to the world,” and, crucially, “be serious.”

Only a figure of such impossible status would dare to glorify a mood. Here was a woman who had barged into the culture with valiant attempts at experimental fiction (largely unread) and experimental cinema (largely unseen) and yet whose blazing essays in Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books won her that rare combination of aesthetic and moral prestige. She was a youthful late modernist who, late in life, published two vast historical novels that turned to previous centuries for both their setting and their narrative blueprint; and a seer whose prophecies were promptly revised after every bashing encounter with mass callousness and political failure. The Vietnam War, Polish Solidarity, AIDS, the Bosnian genocide, and 9/11 drove her to revoke old opinions and brandish new ones with equal vigor. In retrospect, her positions are less striking than her pose—that bold faith in her power as an eminent, vigilant, properly public intellectual to chasten and to instruct.

Other writers had abandoned their post. So Sontag responded to a 1997 survey “about intellectuals and their role” with a kind of regal pique:

What the word intellectual means to me today is, first of all, conferences and roundtable discussions and symposia in magazines about the role of intellectuals in which well-known intellectuals have agreed to pronounce on the inadequacy, credulity, disgrace, treason, irrelevance, obsolescence, and imminent or already perfected disappearance of the caste to which, as their participation in these events testifies, they belong.

She held a contrary creed. “I go to war,” she said a decade after witnessing the siege of Sarajevo, “because I think it’s my duty to be in as much contact with reality as I can be, and war is a tremendous reality in our world.”

Behind the extravagant drama, though, was a shivering doubt. Her work rustles with the premonition that she was obsolete, that her splendor and style and ferocious brio had been demoted to a kind of sparkling irrelevance. The feeling flared up abruptly, both when she was thrilled by radical action and when she was aghast at public complacency.

“For Susan Sontag, the Illusions of the 60’s Have Been Dissipated”: this was the smiling headline for a profile of Sontag in the Times. The year was 1980, a hinge for her, and the article—by a twenty-five-year-old Michiko Kakutani—was occasioned by the release of “Under the Sign of Saturn,” Sontag’s fifth book of nonfiction. “Although she maintains that her current attitudes are not inconsistent with her former positions,” Kakutani wrote, “Miss Sontag’s views have undergone a considerable evolution over the last decade and a half.” The gruesome disappointment of the sixties’ militancy had sent shudders through the left-wing intelligentsia of which Sontag had once been a symbol.

So the Times piece presented a woman of dignified prudence, whose deviations are of the mature, domesticated kind. “The sensibility that resides in this particular town house is an eclectic one indeed,” Kakutani begins, as the piece swivels like a periscope to survey the gleaming appurtenances of the life of the mind: the eight-thousand-volume library, the idiosyncratic record collection, and the portraits of iconic writers who keep watch over Sontag’s desk like benevolent household gods—Woolf, Wilde, Proust.

And Simone Weil, the Marxist turned mystic who, during the Second World War, fled her native France and protested the humiliation of her countrymen by starving herself to death. In 1963, Sontag had begun an article on Weil, for the first issue of The New York Review of Books, with a thundering declaration: “The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois.” So, at that point, was Sontag. Weil was a specimen, for her, of a fascinating species: the raving writer, the flagellant writer, the writer impaled on ruthless principle. “No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom,” Sontag wrote. “Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it.”

To love seriousness was to quest for electrifying contact with spiritual and ideological extremes. The piece on Weil—a woman “excruciatingly identical with her ideas”—is a hymn to extremity. Extremity shone with the promise of transcendence, which is why Sontag strapped herself to the thrashing energies of the sixties. She was enshrined as an intellectual in revolt, unleashing her polemics on the repressive drabness of “our liberal bourgeois civilization.” Along the way, she learned, as she put it, “the speed at which a bulky essay in Partisan Review becomes a hot tip in Time.” The Weil essay, along with pieces on Alain Resnais, psychoanalysis, Camus, and Cesare Pavese, appeared in Sontag’s first essay collection, which in 1966 boomed cannon-like from the prow of the literary left: “Against Interpretation.”

It was crucial to be against: against fustiness, against the horror in Vietnam, against the leering excesses and calculated impoverishments of the global capitalist order. “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”—Sontag’s phrase from the book’s title essay—is now imprinted on the public imagination because it sent the ecstasies of the youth movement hurtling toward the arena of aesthetic taste.

“I wish I had a house like yours so I could do something nice with it.” Facebook

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“Styles of Radical Will,” Sontag’s best book, was published three years later, and contained an essay on Godard in which she gave full-throated expression to the spirit of revolution that had swept up the poor, the dark, the sensuous, and the young. “The great culture heroes of our time,” Sontag announced, again, “have shared two qualities: they have all been ascetics in some exemplary way, and also great destroyers.”