The New Yorker:

“I thought I was a student. I thought I was a teacher. And then I discovered that I liked to tell stories and make people cry,” Susan Sontag said. She was born on February 27, 1933.

By Joan Acocella 

Susan Sontag did two big things last year. She finished a novel, “In America,” which is being published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this week, and she underwent treatment for cancer. On a recent evening I said to her, “This is now your second novel in eight years, but it wasn’t novels you were known for—it was essays. Don’t you miss the essay form?” She answered something like “Essays! Pooh! Forget essays! That was the past. From now on, I’m writing fiction. I have a whole new life. It’s going to be terrific.” And she began charting for me her happy future. This was a person who that same morning, as she told me, had been scanned in every inch of her body for cancer. (Her recent episode was not the first. She had breast cancer in the late seventies.) Furthermore, as a result of chemotherapy—specifically, a drug called cisplatin, with a platinum base—she has heavy-metal poisoning. For months last year, she was in terrible pain—she lived on morphine derivatives, meanwhile trying to finish the book—and couldn’t walk without help. Now she can walk, but her balance is still uncertain. “I don’t know where my feet are unless I look at them,” she told me. She has physical therapy for three hours every day.

Also on her daily schedule, however, are piano lessons. At the age of sixty-seven, she has started studying piano. Sontag has huge reserves of hope. Or maybe hope is the wrong word—too psychological. The quality seems physical. In “Pilgrimage,” an autobiographical piece she wrote in 1987, she describes the patio barbecues of her childhood: “I ate and ate. . . . I was always hungry.” When, as a young graduate student, she was trying to figure out what she would do for a living, she decided to become a writer because, as she later told Edward Hirsch for the Paris Review, “What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.” A quality she repeatedly praises in the subjects of her essays is avidity: Jean-Luc Godard’s need to cram into his films everything passing through his brain; Elias Canetti’s deciding when he was sixteen that he would learn “everything,” and pretty much succeeding; Walter Benjamin’s endless book collecting. She, too, is a collector, both of subjects—she has written on literature, film, opera, drama, dance, painting, photography, politics, illness—and within subjects. Reading her “Illness as Metaphor,” a book only eighty-seven pages long, I started keeping a list of the sources she brought to bear on her argument. After Choderlos de Laclos, Schopenhauer, Kant, Rousseau, Blake, Lermontov, Sartre, Camus, Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, Baudelaire (a note he wrote for an unfinished book), Frank Lloyd Wright, Gramsci, Marinetti, Osip Mandelstam, Plato, Artaud, Machiavelli, Edmund Burke, Trotsky, Solzhenitsyn, Hitler, Neal Ascherson, John Adams, John Dean, St. Jerome, Novalis, Alice James, Henry James, Wilhelm Reich, Kafka, Wycliffe, Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas Mann, Ingmar Bergman, Thomas Wolfe, Friedrich von Schlegel, Oliver Goldsmith, Saint-Saëns, the Goncourt brothers, Victor Hugo, Boccaccio, Homer, Sophocles, and various science-fiction movies, I stopped. When an interviewer commented that she must have done a lot of research for that book, she answered that she had done no research. She’d read a lot in her life, she said, and “I remember what I read.” More than anything else, Sontag is hungry.

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