One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn't ask to be liked. Other postwar American writers who cut the same sort of public figure pleaded with you to love their outsized faults, embrace their dumb enthusiasms, and cast in your lot with theirs through recounted divorces, nervous breakdowns, lusts. Sontag's persona was not personal. It was superior. Sontag made you acknowledge that she was more intelligent than you. That cost little enough. She then compelled you to admit that she felt more than you did. Her inner life was richer, even if she didn't fully disclose it. She responded to art more vividly and completely. Not only her sense, but her sensibility, was grander.

LRB 12 February 2009 | PDF Download