SUSAN SONTAG: Stand Aside, Sisyphus

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Politically Sontag describes herself as a social democrat. But in the 1960s, amid the revulsion aroused by the Viet Nam War, she traveled to Havana and Hanoi and wrote about both places sympathetically, though not without misgivings. Read today, the mismatch in those essays between her complex inquiries and the nostrums of Communism is palpable. Her lingering reputation as a leftist, however, explains the fire storm she set off with a brief speech six years ago at a New York City forum to voice support for Poland's Solidarity labor union. Though the session had been organized by a coalition of left-wing activists, she delivered a biting denunciation of the Soviet system and called to task those who had not acknowledged sooner that "Communism is fascism with a human face."

Newspapers around the world dissected the event for weeks afterward. The left attacked her as a pawn of the right and the right as a latecomer to anti- Communism. Sontag was stunned by the response, especially the assumption that her rejection of Communism was a recent development or that it signaled a sharp move rightward on her part. As early as 1971, she points out, she was protesting Cuba's imprisonment of writers like the poet Heberto Padilla, now a friend living in the U.S. She also insists that her views are not the result of the close friendships she has formed with writers in exile from Communism, including Czeslaw Milosz of Poland and Joseph Brodsky of the Soviet Union, both Nobel laureates. But their situation is never far from her thoughts. Her first novel in nearly a quarter-century, which she has almost completed and calls The Western Half, is about Polish and Soviet emigres in Paris, New York and Midwestern academe.

Sontag's earlier novels have met a mixed reception, and not just in Bull Durham. Though she builds an absorbing puzzle in The Benefactor (1963), in parts of Death Kit (1967) the scientific instrument of her prose is never quite equal to a musical instrument of the imagination. But in her more recent short stories, many of them collected in I, etcetera (1978), she triumphs, neatly drawing thought into the shapes of feeling. At the end of the story Debriefing, about the psychic perils of city life, she even makes what could be a gently funny summation of her own doggedness:

"Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don't have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up -- up, up. And . . . down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I'm on my feet again. See, I'm starting to roll it up again. Don't try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock."

For decades, Sontag has been resolving to devote all her time to fiction -- and failing. "Essay writing is part of an addiction that I'm trying to kick. My last essay is like my last cigarette." She quit smoking two years ago, but there's still one more essay she plans to turn out, this one about intellectuals and Communism, taking as its point of departure the disillusioning trip that the writer Andre Gide made to the Soviet Union in 1936. And then there's a short book on Japan. And then . . . Well, at least the tube won't be distracting her. The houseguest has departed, and the men have come to retrieve the rented TV. "I did watch a bit of it," she admits. "But I couldn't watch much. The thing about television is, it goes too slow."