SOURCE: "Eruptions," in New Republic, Vol. 207, Nos. 11-12, September 7-14, 1992, pp. 46-9.

Sir William Hamilton, the principal character of Susan Sontag's new novel [The Volcano Lover], was what the eighteenth century called a virtuoso, a cultivated aristocrat with an amateur interest in art and science. As British ambassador to the court of Naples from 1764 to 1800, he became what passed for a vulcanologist, making more than twenty ascents of Vesuvius, and collected antiquities, especially Greek vases. His enduring fame, however, is as one of history's most notorious cuckolds.

Hamilton's second wife, Emma, of the humblest origins, was celebrated first as the great beauty of her day, then for her "Attitudes" tableaux, in which she posed in the roles of the heroines of classical myth. ("People are mad about her wonderful expression," Horace Walpole observed, "which I do not conceive, so few antique statues having any expression at all, nor being designed to have it.") But finally, and most lastingly, she was celebrated as Lord Nelson's mistress. Nor was Nelson the only spectacular visitor to Naples: Goethe passed through, and described his encounter with Emma in his Italian Journey, and a more exotic bird of passage was William Beckford, soon to be notorious for Vathek, a lurid tale of Oriental cruelty and sensuality, and later for creating a fabulous palace at Fonthill in Wiltshire, with a gothic tower nearly 300 feet high. It is quite a cast; and it is something of an achievement for Sontag to have made these people so dull.

The Volcano Lover is being launched with more than the usual fanfare of promotional trumpets, but the din cannot disguise that it is a big disappointment. What went wrong? A part of the answer, perhaps, is that Sontag seems to have had no clear notion of what sort of book this was to be. Maybe the idea was to produce a "baggy monster," to borrow Henry James's description of the Victorian novel, a treasure house sparkling with precious and fascinating objects. In a recent interview Sontag is quoted as saying that "it's a historical novel, but it's written from a modern point of view and it's a book that speaks in many voices…. The point is, I don't want just to write only a historical novel, but I do want it to be historical." Of course, many voices can make a rich and harmonious polyphony—or they can be babel. The fluctuation of tone in The Volcano Lover usually suggests not depth or complexity, but uncertainty and a lack of control. Perhaps the problem originated in Sontag's feeling that it would not be good enough to write only a historical novel. In any event, for most of the time her novel is more historical in its way than most historical novels. We are given a great deal of factual information. The tone is almost professional. What Sontag says of Hamilton could be applied to herself: "He wanted to make sure that their amusement was as saturated with knowledge as his own. Wherever he was, the Cavaliere was prone to cast himself in the role of guide or mentor."

Sometimes the little lectures are absurdly prosy:

Then as now an ascent had several stages. The road, in our own century turned into a motorway, did not exist then. But there was already a trail on which one came about two-thirds of the way, as far as the natural trough between the central cone and Mount Somma.

And at moments the lecturer turns into the schoolmarm, with a priggish shaking of the head over Hamilton's political incorrectness, and a superiority too easily won. When Madame Vigée-Lebrun paints Emma, "Probably, he [Hamilton] did not give any thought to the fact that this would be the first portrait of her by one of the few professional painters who was a woman." Tsk, tsk.

Often the book reads more like a chronicle or a biography than a novel, and in fact Sontag has a considerable talent for descriptive narrative. Scenes such as the arrival of Nelson or the riot of the mob in the Neapolitan counter-revolution are excellently done. But there is no consistency of style or approach. Odd bits of the author's own stream of consciousness intrude for no discernable reason, and the characters reflect sometimes in an eighteenth-century manner, sometimes in a modern one. Thus, when Hamilton visits a fortuneteller, we have a naturalistic scene of Italian low life, when suddenly the fortuneteller is given magical powers and foresees tarmac, the disappearance of horse-drawn traffic, mass tourism, the century of the common man, and "even the American professor will be interested in me."

It is a serious weakness that Sontag shows little ability, with one minor but welcome exception, for creating character. She has one or two sporadic ideas about Hamilton—that he is an aristocratic cold fish, that he is an obsessive collector—but these are not developed or made to fit together into a coherent picture. And so there is a hole at the heart of the novel. Until a page from the end Hamilton is never named, but referred to as "the Cavaliere," even when we are seeing him through the eyes of his wife or his family. Emma, we are told, "was not born to that kind of snobbery which prides itself on an indirect expression," and it is a pity that Sontag could not learn from her. The tiresome mannerism of periphrasis, one of the many affectations with which the book is littered, is symptomatic: Sontag seems less interested in her characters than in striking attitudes toward them.

Emma must be a problem for a novelist, because her quality seems to be irrecoverable. One gets little sense of her beauty or her charm from the vapid portraits of her. Sontag depicts her as a sort of hearty barmaid, and perhaps that will do, more or less. But again there is infirmity of purpose. Sontag blunders in quoting from Emma's authentic letters. "Oh Charles on that day you always smiled on me & staid at home & was kind to me & now I am so far away…. But I will not no I will not rage. If I was with you I wood murder you and myself boath." Suddenly Emma has become touchingly alive—and how painfully we feel the contrast when Sontag returns to the flatness of her own invention: "It is impossible to describe how much I miss you, Charles, wrote the girl. Impossible to describe how angry I am."

If Emma's magnetism is lost to us, the problem with Nelson is the reverse: we know too much about him. His fierce suppression of the revolution in Naples may well have been the darkest episode in his career. You may, if you choose, be repelled by him, but he undeniably had what now we call charisma and was then described simply as the Nelson touch. Not since Alexander the Great was there a commander in whom iron will was so bound up with the romance of personality; and on top of that, he was the greatest naval genius in history. What will not do, then, is to depict this astonishing figure as a pathetic little man, which is how Sontag depicts him. When Nelson enters Naples in triumph, the best that she can imagine is him wishing that his wife and father were there to see him. We may not know how it felt to be Nelson, but it surely cannot have been that. And she comments repeatedly on the grotesqueness of the lovemaking between Nelson and Emma, a small man with one arm and a large woman running to fat. This is merely vulgar, a failure of human understanding.

Great novelists can elevate the everyday—Austen can make a scene between a dull young man and a straight-laced young woman seem endlessly absorbing—but Sontag does the reverse. Given extraordinary people, she makes them commonplace. Goethe meets Lady Hamilton, and all he can manage is cocktail-party conversation. With Beckford, however, Sontag does better, inventing a platonic tendresse between him and Hamilton's first wife. This amitié amoureuse between a middle-aged woman and an insecure young homosexual is conventional enough, and it hardly does justice to a character of bizarre flamboyance, but at least it has some life to it.

A good deal of Sontag's prose is bad in a creative writing way. Consider this sentence, about Beckford's arrival in Naples: "A restless, abbreviated version of the Grand Tour (he left England only two months earlier) had brought him to its southernmost station with record speed, casting him on the shore of the Cavaliere's hospitality just in time for the hot wind, one of the great winds of southern Europe (mistral, Föhn, sirocco, tramontana) that are used, like the days leading up to menstruation, to explain restlessness, neurasthenia, emotional fragility: a collective PMS that comes on seasonally."

Or consider the ship Colossus "plodding nervily" across the Mediterranean. What motion is less like a ship's than plodding? And "nervily" is pseudopicturesque and means nothing. The ship is then seen "clinging to the western ledge of Europe," a poor description of a passage up the flatlands of the French Atlantic coast, before running into "a merciless, protean storm." The first of these adjectives is lazily sentimental, the second shows that Sontag may not know what "protean" means. Throughout the book, with a grim sense of the inevitable, we discover that Vesuvius is to be loaded with a mass of labored symbolism—molten passions seething beneath the apparently hard surface, that sort of thing—and the less said of this the better. And there is plenty of cultural self-advertisement, too. Sontag lets us know that she knows about Heian Japan, say, or about opera—though any reader who can pick up the allusions does not need to be taken through the plot of Don Giovanni or—for seven pages!—of Tosca. (Scarpia is also introduced into the narrative of the novel itself, appearing as a fee-fi-fo-fum sadist who makes Puccini's own figure seem understated.)

Above all, the book is thick with authorial comment and portentous aphorism. At its worst, this is tastelessly facetious. Thus, on Pompeii and Herculaneum: "Like a more recent double urbanicide, one murdered city is much more famous worldwide than the other. (As one wag put it, Nagasaki had a bad press agent.)" Or there is word play so feeble that one marvels at the lack of self-criticism: "The sleep of reason engenders mothers." (No, it does not make much better sense in context.) More often banality is endlessly elaborated as though it were a dazzling new perception. So the obvious thought that when you are haggling you should not seem too keen is spun out into a whole slack paragraph:

That tremor when you spot it. But you don't say anything. You don't want to make the present owner aware of its value to you; you don't want to drive the price up, or make him decide not to sell at all. So you keep cool, you examine something else, you move on or you go out, saying you'll be back. You perform a whole theater of being a little interested, but not immoderately; intrigued, yes, even tempted; but not seduced, bewitched. Not ready to pay even more than is being asked, because you must have it.

And so on and on.

Too often the Great Thoughts are simply wrong or silly. The collector's strategy, we are informed, "is one of passionate self-effacement. Don't look at me, says the collector. I'm nothing. Look at what I have. Isn't it, aren't they, beautiful." One has only to think of Getty or Thyssen or what S.N. Behrman called Duveen's "brisk trade in immortality" to see that this is nonsense. The lover, says Sontag, is the opposite of the collector: "The lover's relation to objects annihilates all but the world of the lovers. This world. My world. My beauty, my glory, my fame." Again, this is deficient in emotional truth. Love has sometimes been called an égoïsme à deux, but Sontag makes it into an égoïsme tout court. Is being in love really a self-congratulatory narcissism of this kind?

Sontag's understanding of grief and bereavement is similarly skewed. Suppose, she says, that someone you love has died on the other side of the world. The fact that this person may have been dead for some months "makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal—which is why we can bear to take in so much of it." Think about it: your beloved is dead, far away; therefore you feel that death is mocked, not final. What person of decent feeling has ever reacted like that? In such passages especially, Sontag is much too busy being smart.

The last part of the novel turns in a new direction. Sontag abandons naturalism, and four women in succession address us from beyond the grave. This is a fully self-conscious scheme to shift the book into a different mode; and the offering of a new perspective, in a way involved, in a way detached, is attractive, though it might have been more successful if the preceding naturalistic tone had been maintained more steadily. In one instance the late shift works especially well. The second of these women is a character who has played little part in the story so far, Emma's mother, Mrs. Cadogan. She is Sontag's most successful creation. Sontag brings vividly to life the garrulous old lady, disillusioned but warmhearted; with a rough peasant wisdom. Mrs. Cadogan is an unpretending character, and for once Sontag can forget to be pretentious. Yet even here she lacks consistency of purpose: Emma's mother is made to use the rural eighteenth-century vernacular (a good piece of impersonation), but when Emma herself returns to the stage as the third of these voices from the dead, she speaks in the tone of a twentieth-century sensibility.

The last of these women is Eleonora Pimentel, poet and journalist, who was hanged for her part in the Neapolitan revolution. There are lots of executions and tortures in The Volcano Lover, too many, and rashly Sontag lets Eleonora offer us one more of these, telling us what it is like to be hanged in public: "Then it was my turn—and, yes, it was exactly as I had imagined it." Oh, like that, was it? This means, of course, only that Sontag has not been able to imagine it. Near the end, moreover, Eleonora turns to some pious feminist sentiments: "Sometimes I had to forget that I was a woman to accomplish the best of which I was capable. Or I would lie to myself about how complicated it is to be a woman. Thus do all women, including the author of this book." The idea that this revolutionary heroine, dying horribly for the sake of liberty, should spend some of her last words to us on the hardship of being Susan Sontag provides the book, in its final paragraph, with its most ripely comic moment.

Great novelists may be intolerable in their private lives, but in their work they show a certain reticence. Tolstoy was a raging egoist, but in his fiction he deferred to the autonomy of his creations. Sontag may be the soul of modesty in herself, but her literary persona is much too self-important. Her characters are squeezed out to make room for her own insistent voice. The novelist needs to know where he or she is, what ground he or she is standing upon, but this Sontag does not quite know. A failure of imaginative engagement with her story is suggested, for example, by the frequent slippage of tenses. One small example (italics added): "Catherine does not think he will ever become devout (and he did not)." Such things jar in the reading, not because they feel grammatically odd, but because the writer does not seem to have her feet planted firmly in either of her centuries.

It is interesting to compare The Volcano Lover with the triumph a few years ago of A.S. Byatt's Possession—both books have the subtitle "A Romance" and both measure a past era, in Byatt's case the Victorian age, against the values of today—and to wonder why the one novel should succeed so much better than the other. One answer is that Byatt plunges exuberantly into her chosen period with love and admiration, while Sontag rises superior to hers. Byatt is ready to learn; Sontag sets out to teach. She has Eleonora Pimentel conclude that the Hamiltons were worthless people, greatly pleased with themselves but devoid of originality, generosity, or convictions. "They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all." These are the last words of the book. Perhaps we should not assume that Eleonora's sweeping contempt is the author's own, but it does seem uncomfortably close. To be sure, a satirist may write a novel about worthless people (though it should not be necessary to explain that they are worthless), but Sontag has not written a satire.

Sontag reveals her attitude of lordly insouciance, in fact, right at the beginning of her book. There is more heavy symbolism. She depicts herself as lingering at the edge of a flea market, condescending to the vulgar populace ("Sloppy crowds. Vulpine, larking.") and wondering whether she will bother to enter:

Why enter? Only to play. A game of recognitions. To know that, and to know how much it was, how much it ought to be, how much it will be. But perhaps not to bid, haggle, not to acquire. Just to look. Just to wander. I'm feeling lighthearted. I don't have anything in mind.

Nothing in mind—well, maybe not nothing, but the admission seems still too true.