Remembering Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was that unimaginable thing, a celebrity literarycritic. Most readers of the New York Review probably would havebeen able to recognize her on the street, as they would not, say,George Steiner. An icon of braininess, she even developed, likeEinstein, a trademark hairdo: an imperious white stripe, reminiscentof Indira Gandhi, as though she were declaring a cultural Emergency.Most readers probably know a few bits about her life, as theydo not of any other critic: the girl Susan Rosenblatt -- Sontagwas her stepfather -- in her junior high class in Arizona, withKant, not a comic book, hidden behind her textbook. Her teenagedmarriage to Philip Rieff that was her entry into highbrow society.("My greatest dream was to grow up and come to New York and writefor Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people.") Her trip toHanoi in 1968. The mini-skirted babe in the frumpy Upper WestSide crowd and her years as the only woman on the panel. The front-pagenews in 1982 when, after years of supporting various Marxist revolutions,she declared that communism was "fascism with a human face." Hermonths in Sarajevo in 1993, as the bombs fell, bravely or foolishlyattempting to put on a production of Waiting for Godot. Her strugglewith cancer. Her long relationship with the glamour photographerAnnie Leibovitz. We even know -- from Leibovitz's grotesque "APhotographer's Life" exhibition and book -- what Sontag lookedlike in the last days of her life and after her death.