388
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
RADICAL STYLES
More than any other writer today, Susan Sontag has suf–
fered from bad criticism and good publicity.
If
she could be rescued
from all her culture-hungry interpreters, it might be possible to find
the writer who has been made into a symbol.
This
is
no longer easy
because a popular conception of her has been rigged before a natural
one could develop -like a premature legend. Ironically, those who
love her and those who hate her are equally responsible for the
popular image, for both of them have inflated the flashier, more
photogenic side of some of her subjects. The standard picture now
in circulation
is
that of the up-to-date radical, a stand-in for every–
thing advanced, extreme and outrageous, for artistic revolt, political
disaffection, perversity and that peculiar combination of moral res–
ponsibility and moral irresponsibility associated with revolutionary
movements - a fusion of Che and Genet. Middle-aged liberals are
shocked by her politics and her aesthetics, and loudmouthed moral
conserv.ationists have been accusing her of trying to undermine the
good old sexual establishment. On the other hand, a recent adulatory
review endowed her with the kind of subversive wisdom only a great
revolutionary prophet could have. And then there
is
the tintype of
the smart rebel promoted a few years ago by the fashionable maga–
zines and the commercial media with their cultural thermometers
looking for the hottest things going in intellectual life. Naturally,
they have struck gold in the Camp and the Hanoi pieces, and have
ignored the rest of her writing. No wonder Susan Sontag's reputa–
tion has gone up and down as the literary stock market fluctuates–
a celebrity one moment, a failure or a menace the next, and lately
all at the same time.
These distortions reached their peak several years ago, but the
effects still hang on. And Miss Sontag must also be having her
dif–
ficulties coping with these standardized interpretations which harden
into expectations. Who can keep up with his own legend? - parti–
cularly when it comes too early and
is
manufactured for the cultural
trade. Fortunately for
Miss
Sontag she possesses several qualities
which in some circumstances might be seen as shortcomings but
