‘Communist systems are anti-human’

Press, 30 June 1982, Page 14

‘Communist systems are anti-human’

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS talks to Susan Sontag, Left-wing writer and film-maker who has recently taken New York intellectuals by surprise. “Is she still a believer?” they are asking. Mr Hitchens writes for the Nation.

Last year I was at a partyin New York when somebodygripped my arm and hissed: "See that?" What I saw was Aruthur Schlesinger chatting desultorily with Alger Hiss. I said I could see it. My fellow-guest was transfixed. “Do you realise." he demanded'. "that this is the first time they have spoken in over 20 years?" I was new in town then, but I've learned since where some of the mines and black holes of the cocktail circuit are to be found. Most of them are to do with the history of communism and the exact moments (1939. 1956. 1968. 1981) when some glamorous adherent decided to "break." Lillian Hellman versus Mary McCarthy is a biggish one.

Anything to do with the other McCarthy is good for a life-long feud.- especially .if you know anybody who testified in the trial of the Hollywood Ten. Were the Rosenbergs guilty? What about the academics who justified Vietnam?

The quarrels are sometimes brief but often prolonged, and their particles drift down to form the basic silt and sediment. The fact that they' often revolve around showbiz types or fashionable intellectuals doesn’t make them trivial,

as some would prefer to think. Saul Bellow once inquired . why it was that so many intellectuals were so reluctant to abandon their illusions about the October revolution. If he knew enough to ask. he probably ' knew the answer. The question recurred with amazing force among NewYork intellectuals this spring. Poland had already set everybody by the ears, with the Jaruzelski coup puncturing the last of the optimists, when a meeting was organised to defend Solidarity. Hardly a single radical "face" was absent from the platform, which included Gore Vidal. Kurt Vonnegut, and E. L. Doctorow. The city's literary and political salons were ■ empty for the evening. In atmosphere, right down to the faulty film-projector, the overcrow’ded podium, and the bearded chairman, it was clearly an evening of the Left. ‘ All the speakers varied their attacks on the Polish regime with loud criticism of the Reagan foreign policy in El Salvador. Gore Vidal went so far as to say that America, too, was an occupied country — "occupied by the.military-indus-trial complex.’’ '

So that when Susan Sontag got up to speak we were entitled to expect more of the same.

For nearly two decades she had been in the forefront of the progressive" movements.

As a novelist, she was experimental (“The Benefactor"). As a film-maker, she was innovative ("Duet for Cannibals"). As an essayist she was held to be adventurous (“Against Interpretation").

Politically and artistically her contacts had been with the Parisian Left Bank. It seemed natural that she should go to North Vietnam

She has embellished sc many platforms of the Great and the Good that it seemed certain that she would stick to the sarne mixture of denunciation as before. We could not have been more wrong. She expressed her impatience with the way that radicals and leftists phrased their attacks on communism.

She called for self-critic-ism about the Stalinist past and gave a mea culpa of her own. When she first read Czesaw Milosz in the 19505, she said, she hadn't credited his account of life under communism and had dismissed it as cold war propaganda. •

She had since discovered that, if anything, he had been understating the case. Then she said this: "Imagine, if you will, someone, who read only ‘Reader's Digest’ between 1950 and 1970, and someone who in the same period read only ‘The Nation’ or the ‘New Statesman.' Which reader would

in 1968 at' the height of the American bombing and write a passionate account of her experience ("Trip to Hanoi"), have been better informed about the realities of communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?" The cat and the pigeons were speedily . entangled. Susan Sontag just had time to add that communism tr«s fascism — “fascism with a human face" — before the

howling began. It has hardly stopped since. The meeting took place in February, but in June the journals’and reviews are still buzzing. “Harper’s” magazine ran a long and learned comparison between the "Reader's Digest” coverage of communism and that of "The Nation.” Neither came out of it awfully well (the "Reader's Digest" had insisted that the MoscowPeking split was a ploy to lull the West, and "The

Nation" had been sceptical about emigres from Eastern Europe." The “New Republic." absurdly. published an article suggesting that, deep down. Susan Sontag was still a Communist. William Buckley's "National Review." which would be soft on communism if communism tens fascism, pointedly referred to her as "SS" throughout its witty coverage of the affair. Several papers reprinted the whole speech, with symposia of critics and commentators. It's been fun. Which is odd. Because, as Susan Sontag is the first to admit, there's nothing exactly nett’ in her analysis. In one contribution to the argument. Diana Trilling commented loftily that Susan Sontag was merely repeating what she had been saying for vears.

"1 welcome Miss Sontag into her new, difficult life as an anti-communist." An irritated Sontag retorted: "Thanks but no thanks." I went round to see Susan Sontag in her town house on the lower East Side. "Booklined" would about describe the place, which she shares with her son. and a Polish writer, a member of Solidarity who was caught abroad by the Warsaw coup, and is now living the part of the man who came to dinner.-:

"This kind of public burning has wrecked my entire spring." she told me. "but I'm glad I did it."

We discussed the reasons behind the public row. "Well, I suppose it's a chance to call a referendum on me — ■ like Aristides the Just!"

I asked if she thought there was any sexual ingredient in the' brouhaha: it seems to be the Vanessa Redgraves and the Jane Fondas who get people really angry.

At first she pretended tc he surprised by this thought but then shouted from the kitchen as she poured .me a drink. "Look you're quite right about that, and Tobeing Pollyanna-ish not saying so." Politically she still counts herself a socialist, but het many visits to Eastern Europe in the 1970 s only confirmed a fear that she had developed during that defiant visit to Hanoi during the American bombing. The system rectllp is worse than anybody thinks It really is ant'i-hurhan. And Western governments, quite as much as Western radicals are either cynical or naive about it.

Everybody involved in a public controversy claims tc be encouraged by their mailbag. But she seemed genuinely uplifted by the letters she had been getting from Eastern Europeans.

"Actually." she says, "I think I did make one new contribution to the debate. 1 pointed out that the future of communist society is probably in the hands of the army. Not even of the party — but the armed forces. That's given them something to think about."

I know in my guts that years from now- there will be a social event where I fall out with somebody over the seriousness of Susan Sontag. Copyright — London “Observer” Service.