A little message from the recuperation…and Susan Sontag.

And so, while shopping for ingredients to make chicken soup for some Covid-afflicted folks, I slipped on something in the supermarket which resulted in a very badly fractured shoulder and what is becoming a quite long and difficult recovery. Not being able yet to return to my work has been gloomy. Today, though, I received one of those Google alerts about an interview I did with Susan Sontag in Edinburgh in 2003.

I always felt in two minds about the meeting with Sontag. I had prepared extensively, as usual, an interview on her latest book, the one the Edinburgh International Book Festival had asked me to cover. Horror of horrors though, a moment before the lights went down, Sontag said she didn’t want to talk about that book, but wanted to read from another book, a novel, a book I had not read.

All my literary journalism had been based on research and diligence, and here I was being thrown to the lions. And to make things worse, Sontag decided to dispute the way I had introduced her to the audience.

I had put the event out of my mind and had not returned to the transcript till today. And blow me down, if it isn’t quite an interesting conversation, despite my fears. I remain unconvinced by her “That's a wonderful question” and “Are you telepathic? This is really amazing. That's exactly right.” and “ You’re great!” and now that she has been dead for nearly twenty years I can reveal that after the interview she whispered to me that she thought it had gone well, and that she would be available that evening if I would like to take her out to dinner.

I had had enough of Susan Sontag by that time, so I declined the offer, and never wanted to speak to her again.

But here below is a transcript of the conversation that I had always regarded as one of the most embarrassing of my career. And it’s really quite good, but maybe that’s the pain medication talking?

Transcript:

Hello, welcome to Books & Writing, Ramona Koval with you ... and to begin this year we mark the death, on December 28th 2004, at the age of 71, of writer, activist and one of the leading intellectuals of her time, Susan Sontag.

She was one of America's best known and respected essayists, who was able to refer to a range of sources from philosophers to poets, from literary theoreticians to popular culture.
Her books, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; a play, Alice in Bed; and six works of non-fiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography and Illness as Metaphor. In 1982, Farrar, Strous and Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.

Her last book was another look at photography - this time the photography of war and was called Regarding The Pain Of Others. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other magazines. Her much anthologised story 'The Way We Live Now' (1987) was chosen for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties and, more recently, in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.

With her black hair and a white streak and her imposing height she was unmistakable as an intellectual celebrity. But she worked hard for causes she believed in, serving as President of the American chapter of the PEN organisation of writers and helping to lead the protests in the literary community when the Ayatollah Khomeini called for the death of Salman Rushdie on the publication of his Satanic Verses.

She campaigned for human rights and in 1993 she staged a production of Waiting For Godot in Sarajevo, a city that was then under siege. When she died the Mayor of Sarajevo announced that the city will name a street after her, and the city's youth theatre will mount a plaque for her on its wall.

The conversation you are about to hear was recorded in Edinburgh at the International Book Festival in August 2003. I introduced her as a respected 'public intellectual', whose remarkable work has ranged in subject matter from film, photography, pornography, the meaning of camp, to illness and memory, to time and lava, the French revolution and nineteenth century America. But as you'll hear, Susan Sontag took issue with my description of her ...

Susan Sontag: I'm very happy to be here. It's a thrilling event, this festival. I'm going to start, after thanking Ramona Koval for her gracious introduction, by quarreling with it. I would never, even if offered a large sum of money, use the word 'public' intellectual to describe myself. Though it is a word very often used, since unfortunately, it was invented-not so long ago actually, what would you say, maybe five years, ten years, something like that? Intellectual, yes. But public intellectual, I think-well maybe it's a contradiction in terms. I don't call myself an intellectual. I don't call myself a critic. I don't think I would ever call myself a public intellectual for the reason that I think it's at best redundant and at worst suggests something rather vulgar.

Ramona Koval: It wasn't meant to be vulgar. It was meant to be...

Susan Sontag: No, no, let me quarrel. It's a word-I'm quarreling not with you, obviously, I'm quarreling with the culture, which is one of the things I like to do. I just had the pleasure only a few minutes ago of being in the audience in this tent and listening to Merlin Holland-Oscar Wilde's grandson-quoting his grandfather, who is one of the great figures in my mental life. And Oscar Wilde said that an artist doesn't have views. People have views, and one has views on occasion, but as an artist, one doesn't have views or opinions; or at any rate they're not part of what makes an artist.

And I just am here to tell you that my much-vaunted essay production, because I wouldn't say I was anything other than (besides being a fiction writer and a playwright) an essayist, is for me very much literally what the word 'essay' means. You know what the word means in French, it means a trial, or attempt. It doesn't mean anything definitive, it's kind of 'exploration'. And I have written a lot of essays and they have gotten a lot of attention, and I find myself nailed to views which I feel I'm constantly escaping or trying to improve.

So for me the essay project, and this has been a very important part of my life, is a secondary one. I don't disavow it. It takes up far too much time, actually, because I find writing essays much harder than writing fiction so I must be some kind of awful masochist to have spent so much time writing these essays; whereas fiction is my first love and something that comes to me, I think, much more naturally.

And the wonderful thing about fiction, of course, is that you don't have to have views. In fact the whole point is that-I think it was Tom Stoppard who was asked why he had become a playwright and he said, 'Well, because I can contradict myself. I can put some things that I think some of the time in the mouth of one character and things that I also think, which are quite contradictory, in the mouth of another character.'

And I would submit that that's not simply true of playwrights, although it's very obvious because a play is principally dialogue; but it's true of fiction in general-prose narrative, unless it's a monologue-and even when it is a monologue. Even in such great monologues; narrators like Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett, I think you can find embedded very deep contradictions.

So with that, if you don't mind, slight amendment, here is a little bit from my last novel, my fourth novel, called In America. One of the remarks about In America that I most treasure came from an unfavourable review in The New York Times. The book was criticised because I didn't have any new ideas about America in the book. It was one of the criticisms. And I thought, well there goes that goddamn essayist reputation getting in my way. My feeling about having new ideas about America-this is a novel called In America-is first of all I don't have any 'new' ideas, absolutely new ideas about America in the book, and secondly and more interestingly, I don't think there are any new ideas about America. I think everything that can be said about America has been said. Quite contradictory things, of course. And the various characters in my novel have very contradictory views of the country to which they emigrate.

It's a novel about emigration, it's about a group of people from Poland who come to America in the late nineteenth century. The principal person is a great actress who has abandoned her career in Poland. She's a great figure in Polish theatre. The time is the 1870s, Poland is of course an occupied country, it's not an independent country; it's under triple occupation: Russia, Prussia and Austria. This great theatre figure and her entourage: her husband, a child from a former relationship, a group of friends; come to America. Her idea is to give up her theatre career and to live an idealistic life. In effect, what she has in mind is to found a commune. And they journey all the way from Poland and end up in a tiny village called Anaheim-since known for other things-in California, not far from Los Angeles. At this point, 1876, Anaheim has 2,000 people, Los Angeles has 10,000 people. They have their commune, various things happen. The commune doesn't work out. Most everyone goes back to Poland, the actress goes back on stage and becomes, Polish accent and all, for a while the most famous actress in America.

It's based on a real person. There was such a Polish actress who did go to Southern California. She lasted about two months on this little farm they bought. I changed just about everything, but the skeleton of the story is based on a real person.

The novel is told in a mixture of voices. What I wanted to write, just as with the previous novel, The Volcano Lover, I started with the idea I wanted to write a novel about a collector. I started this one with the idea I wanted to write a theatre novel. And it's conceived of in a mixture of first-person and third-person voices.

But the whole book is framed by two monologues. There's what I think of as a kind of comic monologue introducing the novel, where there's a sort of alter ego voice: somebody like me but not me, who speaks about encountering these characters as a kind of time traveler going back to Poland in 1876, landing at a party, overhearing people talking about doing something which other people disapprove of and-that's the actress and her friends we're talking about-well, she's talking about going to America and dragging them with her. Then there's the whole narrative middle part-although I shouldn't say middle part-nine-tenths, seven-eighths of the book which is told in a mixture of letters, diary entries, monologues, third person narration, story-telling, stories within stories.

And then it ends with a-I thought of it as, in a way, the comic monologue and the tragic monologue at the end-a monologue by someone who has only figured very marginally in the story up to now. It's a great, American, tragic actor, Edwin Booth, who is the older brother of-well, he's a member of a great theatrical dynasty and several of his siblings were also actors including a younger brother named John Wilkes Booth who assassinated Lincoln, who was himself a well-known actor. But Edwin Booth was the great star.

And when Marina-my character, my Polish actress-embarks on her career as an actress of course her great ambition is to play opposite Booth. That would be the culmination of her career. And eventually she does. And I'm going to read you the first part of the last chapter of In America, which is the monologue. Volcano Lover also ends with monologues, but monologues of a very different kind.

This is Booth talking. It's late at night, it's New York City; they have performed in The Merchant of Venice. They're on tour together. They've performed in The Merchant of Venice and Booth was Shylock and Marina was Portia. Booth has invited his colleague, his touring partner, back to his digs, back to where he lives in a couple of rooms in a club. Actually a house which he had donated, which had become a theatre club but he kept a couple of rooms as an apartment in this building-which still exists in New York City on Nineteenth Street in Manhattan.

He's very drunk. He was an alcoholic and he's extremely drunk. The only thing I have to tell you, the background for the monologue, is this was a time-by now it's 1880s-of maximum bardolatry. About half of all theatrical performances in the United States were Shakespeare. Probably more than half. And there were approximately three thousand theatres in the United States. Even small towns, villages-towns of a thousand people, fifteen hundred people-would have a theatre and this theatre would be serviced by touring companies. And more than half of all performances were Shakespeare. So the whole country knew Shakespeare. If you went to the theatre-and remember there were lots of other forms of entertainment that were not possible-Shakespeare was genuinely popular in these decades in the second half of the nineteenth century.

I don't mean that Shakespeare hasn't been and still isn't popular and extremely well-known in the United States, but this was the apogee and the summit of the time in which Shakespeare was performed. It wasn't, of course, the whole thirty-seven plays; it was maybe about fourteen of the thirty-seven plays that were done over and over again, including some of the obvious ones you would imagine and some others that are much less performed today like Cymbeline. But Booth, of course, was the great Shakespeare tragedian and Marina, my Polish actress, had done a great deal of Shakespeare by this time too.

The rest of what was put on was mostly farce; light comedies, very often French, sentimental tear-jerkers and vaudeville. So there was an enormous gap between the Shakespeare and everything else. Okay, this is the first part of the final chapter, the Booth monologue from In America. Oh, one last detail: the father, who's very important in the first part of the story, Booth's father was a great actor and he was insane.

[reading...}

Ramona Koval: You read really wonderfully and you obviously enjoy reading, too.

Susan Sontag: I love it. Few things I love as much, actually. I love reading other people's work as much or more than I love reading my own. Which is to say that in another life I might have been an actor. And I have had some acting experience. I won't say that that's not true. But mostly my experience in the theatre has been as a director. And I've actually spent much more of my life among actors and theatre people and movie people than I have among writers. I think they're much more fun to be with.

So this novel comes out of a deep place, comes out of a lifelong fascination with the theatre and dramatic forms and a lot of knowledge of actors as people. When I think of writing a novel I think first of a main character. And the main character has to be a kind of person that I can identify with or feel that I have some real, deep inside knowledge of.

I'll give you a counter-example. I'm intensely interested, for what it's worth, in politics and follow politics and various political situations very closely. But I can't imagine that I would ever have someone in politics as an important character in a novel, because I don't feel I know how those people work from the inside. That's the difference between having ideas about what people do and really knowing the psychology from the inside. It's not that I never met a politician or a person in public office; I have. But I haven't known a lot. And I haven't spent lots and lots of time with them and I have with actors.

When the novel came out, several people said, 'Oh, that's so-and-so,' and mentioned a famous actor whom I happen to know and felt that I had drawn a portrait of somebody in particular, but in fact it's a synthesis of a number of actors I know, this character.

I have to feel I'm writing from a deep place, not just telling a story, although the most important thing is the story, obviously.

Ramona Koval: Given what you said before about the essay and your hierarchy of things close to your heart and your love of the novel; you wrote two novels: The Benefactor in 1963 and Death Kit in 1967; and then almost thirty years later published Volcano Lover and then probably about nine or so years later, In America. What made you stop, and what made you start again?

Susan Sontag: Well, I didn't completely give up fiction form. In the period that I didn't publish novels I published stories and I made some films. But basically I lost my nerve. I thought the first two novels are pretty good-in fact some people think better of them than I do-so I might be wrong, by the way. I don't believe that a writer necessarily has the correct-what a writer says about his or her work is necessarily the real truth. I'm one of those writers who tends to be big on self-deprecation and self-criticism. Other writers are very big on self-praise and vanity. I think everything has to be adjusted. I get a lot of strength out of criticising myself and minimising what I do and saying, 'Oh well that's nonsense but now I'm just doing something I really like.'

Anyway, that being said, because I've often been criticised for my self-criticism-people say it's a very charming habit but you're not doing yourself any good by doing it. I don't think the first two novels were what I really wanted to do, even though I guess they are good and some people think they're very good. And so I stopped, because I thought I can probably write essays that I really think are as good as essays can be. But I'm not in a position yet to write fiction that I think is as good as what I want it to be. In other words-and this may sound very immodest but it's also very modest-I want to be a writer I can admire. Since I have very high standards, then of course I often fall short of this situation and I didn't know how to get out of the box. I felt that my early fiction-and some very great fiction, by the way, has this characteristic-I felt it was too much inside one head. And I wanted to write fiction that took in a world, that created a world. And I didn't know how to do it.

And so I fooled around and I wrote things. I started two novels and went quite a way and gave them up, because I didn't think they were good enough. And then when I started The Volcano Lover I suddenly thought, 'Oh, I'm on the right track,' and since then I'm mainly writing fiction, actually. I'm working on another novel. But of course there are things that I want to talk about, like the book that just came out now, which is a book about war and about sympathy. Some people think it's a book about photography but I think it's a book about war, called Regarding the Pain of Others, that's just come out. And sometimes there are things that seem so important that one would be, I don't know, defective in one's duty (I'm very big on duty, I'm afraid) if one thought one had something to say and didn't say it.

But to me, that writing is really in the nature of obligation, like this recent essay that I just published now on war and our capacity to sympathise with sufferings that are far away, of people we don't know.

Mostly I feel the importance of the big form. To put it in a very, very simple way, there's no bigger form than a long prose narrative. And if you have 'ideas', well you can put them in the mouths of your characters, as many of the great novels-think of Middlemarch, think of Vanity Fair, think of Balzac, think of Thomas Mann, think of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Proust. Some of the greatest novels have been very encyclopaedic and included things which could be called 'essayistic elements,' so this is a huge form, the novel's a big ship.

And above all, for me, it's multi-voiced, and I had to be sure that I knew what to do with different voices. And I think I only found that out-I've been publishing, you mentioned the date...my first book is a novel and it's forty years ago. So it's a little strange to think after you've been publishing books for forty years that you are maybe in the early, middle stages of your writing life; but I do feel that I'm actually a rather slow developer and I've kind of just 'got it' in the last ten or fifteen years, going on from there.

Ramona Koval: Sarajevo of course has been a major part of your life since 1993. You went during the siege, you lived and worked there doing theatre projects and school projects and running a nursery and working in a hospital and directing theatre and radio as well, under very difficult conditions. Do you think that these very dramatic times will make fiction for you?

Susan Sontag: That's a wonderful question. Yes. Definitely. But that's part of being slow. It's wonderful that you asked me that, because I ask myself how come I haven't been able to do it. I spent the better part of three years in Sarajevo, '93 to '95. And now it's ten years since I started going there. I still go back every year, in fact I just came back from another couple of weeks there. I try to go back and visit friends and bring people things, because although the fighting's stopped and the killing's stopped, it's still very difficult there.

And I haven't yet been able to find the form for writing about it but I do, absolutely, I do want to and I think it's the novel after this one. So that will then be a very long gestation period, but it's the only way I know how to work.

Ramona Koval: You've come from the late eighteenth century and then the late nineteenth century...

Susan Sontag: Are you telepathic? This is really amazing. That's exactly right. I mentioned before about having had a kind of breakthrough moment. When I started to do something I thought, Oh my God, this is good. For me to say it's good, believe me, I'm my own most severe critic. And that's when I had the nerve to set a novel in the past. And it was the late eighteenth century and that was The Volcano Lover. And then I thought, 'Wow! This is amazing.' I just found an inner freedom, setting a story in the past, which I didn't have.

Ramona Koval: Why?

Susan Sontag: I don't know. But I'll just follow up with what you have so amazingly intuited. So then I thought, well, I can't wait too long to catch up. Life is long, but it's not that long. So I'd better make the next one in the late nineteenth century and that's this novel that I read, that takes place in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. And then the one I've started now-well I thought I should go straight to the end of the twentieth century, but I got stage fright. And this one takes place in the nineteen twenties. But at least I'm catching up.

And then the next one, I guess the next one I will feel absolutely compelled to set a novel in a place of war. Because war has been a big part of my life and a huge part of my imagination.

Now, why I felt freer? I don't know. I think the present's very inhibiting in a way.

Ramona Koval: What's inhibiting about it?

Susan Sontag: Well...gosh, this is going to sound awfully stupid. I'm sure it is stupid. I find people now are very cynical-and I don't have a cynical molecule in my body. I found, for instance, that the subject of romantic love interests me very much. Interest: it's the wrong word. I'm drawn to this as a subject. And I think, I just felt-for instance there is a great romantic love in The Volcano Lover, and I just felt freer to do it by putting it in the late eighteenth century than I would in the late twentieth century. I don't know why. It felt freer-felt more expressive.

You know writing, at least for me, it's like giving yourself permission. It's a set of moves, inward moves, where you give yourself permission. The reason everybody isn't a writer is that you don't give yourself permission. That's why people don't sing, why people don't dance. Everyone can dance, everyone can sing, and actually everyone can write something this authentic and powerful and sincere. You may not be able to write about everything, but everybody has something in them that could find language. And powerful and expressive language. We know this when we try to teach children poetry, for instance, in the right way. Children can be wonderful poets. But why do we allow ourselves, and under what circumstances do we allow ourselves to be expressive?

So I feel in some way my whole writing life is maybe not hiding so much but maybe allowing more of the things that really are me in real life that I don't let in to my books because I'm too shy or embarrassed or whatever. I think a serious person has to have masks. And I'm not talking about absolute transparency here. And a wonderful thing is, an artist of any kind is, of course, constructing masks, multiple masks.

But I'm moving towards a place where I can be more expressive, and I've discovered a greater variety of masks. In a way, you see, the essays are both easier and harder in that respect. An essay is a single voice. It's my essay voice, it's not my real voice. I'm not really like that person but I stand by what that person says, at least serially. But it's a single voice working out some ideas or observations or perceptions or whatever. It in some sense is my voice, even if it's a mask, it's my mask. Whereas in fiction it's a thrown voice and you're telling stories.

And most of what I tell and what I describe, it's not me. I put something of myself in it but I also put something of other people as well. It's that thing about finding your inner freedom, I think, and that's a very long process.

Of course what happens with most writers-and now I am going to brag-is that most writers do their best work in their first twenty years or so of writing. Of course there are great exceptions like Dostoevsky, for instance, who just got better and better and better and wrote probably the greatest novel ever written at the end of his life. But on the whole, painters and musicians do their better work later in their creative lives. And on the whole, novelists and poets do their better work in let's say the first third or first half. Many exceptions, but I'd say-would you agree? That's by and large the case.

What happens with writers is they start repeating themselves, and they have less experience, they stay home all the time. They just get bogged down in their private lives and then if they travel they're just usually going to literary festivals or conferences or giving readings or lectures or whatever at universities. That's not going to give you a very broad sample of human existence. They tend not to take risks. They don't get into trouble, they don't do dangerous things, they're not really open. They become settled. And it's normal, because writing is a particularly sedentary, weird occupation where you have to be alone most of the time, sitting-well there are a few writers like Nabokov who seemed to write at a lectern. How the hell he did that, I have no idea-but it's usually just sitting. Sitting, sitting, sitting; day in and day out, week in week out, month in month out. Then you take the family to the seaside for a holiday and there you are, you haven't got much experience. You've had basically all your experience the first thirty, thirty-five years of your life.

Ramona Koval: What about imagination?

Susan Sontag: I'm interested in the world. I'm really interested in the world. I'm really not very interested in myself. And I think one of the reasons I love being a writer is that it's a magnificent place from which to pay attention to the world. And I want to be in touch with the greatest amount of reality possible. And I do think I have very George Elliot-ish or Matthew Arnold-ish ideas about the function of literature. I really think literature is supposed to enlarge your sympathy and make you deeper or wiser. And I think it should tell the truth, and I think it should embody a certain wisdom. And I don't think imagination is enough. I really don't. I think, to tell the truth, you need, to quote the epigraph I used for the new book, a line from Tennyson, 'The Idols of the King', I think you need that 'dirty nurse' experience. And I think the fact that the life of a writer tends to be just a desk-life for most people. Very understandably, because that's the only way you get anything done.

I've been publishing for forty years. I haven't published a lot of books. There Are other writers who are exactly my age-American writers, give or take a year or so-who have published three times as many books as I have. And why haven't I published more books? Because I'm racked with self-doubt and because I'm undisciplined and because I like to travel and when I travel I can't write, because I'm just soaking things up. I become completely just a receptive person. And I like to have adventures. I like to go out and play, I like to go to the movies, I like to do all those things that all those people with the forty, fifty, sixty books-and there are such people, here in England and Scotland and the United States and elsewhere-well they don't go out much. And I just want to go out. I want to go out, but going out might be really going out. It might be going to Rwanda.

Ramona Koval: That's out. Right out.

Susan Sontag: Yeah, that's out. That's really out. That's not going to Venice.

Ramona Koval: But you know, the way you talk about writing fiction, it sounds like it's a very joyous thing for you, that it's not that hard for you. Is it hard? Is it a struggle?

Susan Sontag: No. It's fun. That's why-I'm just the most awful Calvinist, actually. I have the biggest superego going. In fact I actually had a problem getting back to fiction. You talked about that long hiatus where I didn't succeed in publishing any very long fiction project, though I did a lot of stories and was working on two novels that I gave up.

But I had a feeling that novel writing represented pleasure and essay writing represented something that was good for public discourse, like throwing something out there that would be good for people. I felt I had some understanding of things, particularly about illness. I had a very big illness experience in the late seventies. I was diagnosed as having stage four terminal cancer. And I not only had to come to terms with the likelihood-I only considered it a likelihood, not a certainty, and I was proved to be right-that I was going to die, but I entered the illness world. And I perceived certain things which I felt that I ought to share because they would be useful to other people.

If I were to believe my doctors that was going to be the last book I would ever write, but things like that have come up at times where I have felt perhaps that's presumptuous on my part that there was something that I should say, never mind that it wasn't really what I wanted to write, but it would be good for other people. And I think in fact that first book, Illness as Metaphor, I know has saved lots of people's lives. I know it because I've had the testimony and it's a book that's used in medical schools and nursing schools-and hundreds and hundreds of people have written me that because they read the book they changed their doctor. I mean as simple as that. They got a better doctor. And they got proper treatment. All sorts of good things happened, so it really was useful.

Ramona Koval: So you think a novel's never saved somebody's life?

Susan Sontag: You're great. Yeah, I guess...Isn't that interesting. I'm just always fighting my own puritanism. Isn't that interesting? You see, that's very interesting, because I get a lot of praise, including for the novels. I got this big prize that's the equivalent of a Booker here for this last book in the United States. And it's so interesting what you said, because I feel very much made out of certain novels that I've read.

I mentioned Dostoevsky before. I think I'd be a different person if I hadn't read Dostoevsky. I feel that certain novels, as well as some music and art and performance that I've seen, have just entered into my substance. Not even into my bloodstream. Something like into my metabolism. Into my very being-that I've been deepened. My sympathies have been deepened and extended by literature. And I would hope that if my books-at least a couple of them or one of them or whatever, however it works out when it's all done-could be that, that would be wonderful. Because it's soul food. It doesn't literally have to save your life the way a book that gives you good advice about how to deal with an emergency situation. Something that feeds our souls is surely essential.

But I have a hard time-you see I think, Ramona, what it is, is really a very exalted, very idealistic idea of literature. That's where I'm coming from. Because of my own experiences. Because of what literature has meant to me. So when I write something, I ask myself this question, this really big question, which is, is this book necessary? Not can I do it, or will it get published, or will it make me money, or all those things; I don't ask those questions. I say, is this book necessary? Is this something that really should be written? It's all those 'oughts', you see. I don't think most people feel them. But I think they keep me up to a certain standard, so I don't want to sacrifice my ethical torment, even though it's incredibly old fashioned and hard to explain to people without sounding rather foolish.

Ramona Koval: I don't think you sound foolish at all. We've run out of time, Susan Sontag. But she's going to go and sign her books around the corner. You can talk to her. You can debate the idea of what a public intellectual is. [laughter] Because in Australian, which is a different language to American or English; it's a great compliment.

Susan Sontag: Wait-let's go one minute more. I don't say that it isn't meant as a compliment. I just mean that I don't feel comfortable with the phrase. I don't mean that I think it's negative. I think it's odd. I just think it's an odd idea.

Ramona Koval: Because some intellectuals don't engage in public life.

Susan Sontag: I like to be called a writer. And if it was good enough for Voltaire and Zola, two famous public intellectuals, then-you see writers in the past have been shooting their mouths off for centuries. The real task you see is not to say things you don't know a whole lot about. That's the hard part.