[In the following review, Postlewaite maintains that In America is not only a superbly written historical novel, but that Sontag's characterization of protagonist Maryna provides insight into Sontag's mind and personality.]

In 1992, critics were surprised and readers delighted when Susan Sontag, formidable essayist of the au courant, published The Volcano Lover, a romantic historical fiction set in late eighteenth-century Naples. And now she's done it again: a nineteenth-century tale based on the true story of Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska, who emigrated to a farming commune in Anaheim, California, in 1876 and subsequently became a darling of the American stage.

Sontagians have made much of this writer's later-life new beginnings, her protean self-reinvention (qualities she shares with the heroine of her latest fiction). But Susan Sontag's avant-garde postmodernism and her old-guard historicism, her fierce intellectualism and her equally fiery romanticism, were there all along, inverted images of one another—photograph and negative, to use a metaphor from an art form which continues to fascinate her.

If Sontag was a prophet, she's always been a historian, too. Re-read today, her famous 1964 essay “On ‘Camp’” from Against Interpretation offers an uncanny prevision of the retro-crazed, sensibility-in-cheek way we live now. Sontag got famous writing about “The Way We Live Now” (her short story by that title was recently chosen for The Best American Short Stories of the Century); but it's worth noting she borrowed that title from a classic novel by Anthony Trollope. Even as she denominated “the canon of Camp,” from Cuban pop singers to old Flash Gordon comics, she was reminding us of the “pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.” George Eliot's Middlemarch made it onto Sontag's “high culture” list back in 1964, and it pops up again in Chapter Zero of In America, wherein our narrator (manifestly Susan Sontag herself) engages in some “alert eavesdropping” on her heroine-to be: “If I thought of Maryna as a character in a novel, I would have liked her to have something of Dorothea Brooke (I remember when I first read Middlemarch. I had just turned eighteen, and a third of the way through the book burst into tears because I realized not only that I was Dorothea, but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon).” No doubt we are to read this as a reference to Sontag's youthful marriage to academician Phillip Rieff.

Poor old Henry James (glimpsed at a dinner-party walk-on in In America as a “fattish, wordy, manifestly brilliant man”) was relegated to the corridors of Camp back in 1964 for his “quality of excruciation.” Nonetheless, James' eyewitness description of George Eliot came to mind as I read In America: “Her manner is extremely good though rather too intense and her speech, in the way of accent and syntax peculiarly agreeable. Altogether, she has a larger circumference than any woman I have ever seen.”¹ He could be describing Susan Sontag.

In America, fourteen Polish emigrés pose for a group photograph by Mrs. Eliza Withington, Photographic Artist extraordinaire (“Secure the shadow 'ere the substance fade,” her card reads). At their center, poised on the brink of the modern age and “the far edge of … the American sublime,” stands the charismatic actress Maryna Zalezowska, who has left behind stardom at Warsaw's Imperial Theater to join a utopian commune at the western border of the national experiment. “Picture-taking transported everyone into the future,” Sontag writes of her little band of European adventurers, “when their more youthful selves would be only a memory. The photograph was evidence … that they were really here, pursuing their valiant new life; to themselves, one day, it would be a relic of that life at its hard, rude beginning or, should their venture not succeed … of what they had attempted.”

Photographs and historical novels, literary snapshots of the past, have something in common. “To take a photograph,” Sontag wrote in 1977 in On Photography, “is to participate in … mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.” But a photograph is also a treasured “relic,” a testimony to the human spirit, that which those who came before us valiantly attempted.

Shortly after Mrs. Withington freezes that moment, the commune disbands: some return to Poland, others seek their fortunes in America. “Time's relentless melt” haunts the pages of In America. Our heroine, fashioning yet another “new self,” returns triumphantly to the stage, touring the western states under a new name, “Marina Zaleska.” That's the novel's fairy-tale plot in a nutshell: idealistic agrarian isolata reinvents herself as imperial, media-darling diva.

But “with this story you feel you can tell many stories,” the narrator of Chapter Zero tells her readers. This wonder-full, unapologetically overreaching and unabashedly exuberant novel tells us stories about (among other things): the idea of “America”; the actor's art; the Old World versus the New; the earnest sensibilities of the nineteenth century and the self-conscious sensibilities of intellectuals in every century; the birth of the modern; self-transformation; history, memory and mutability; and—above all—the splendid prerogatives of diva-dom.

“Authority, idiosyncrasy, velvetiness—these are what make a star. And an unforgettable voice.” Not since George Eliot's Princess Halm-Eberstein, the Jewish birth-mother of Daniel Deronda, has there been a more fascinating, egomaniacal nineteenth-century fictional actress than Maryna Zalezowska. “This woman's nature was one in which all feeling … immediately became a matter of conscious representation: experience immediately passed into drama, and she acted her own emotions,” Eliot wrote of her histrionic heroine—words which perfectly describe Maryna. But in 1876, George Eliot was profoundly (or at least publicly) ambivalent about a woman who placed her art above motherhood and religion: “I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel—or say they feel, for being thought unlike others,” the Princess tells her long-lost son—just before revealing her fatal illness.

No such guilt or retributive health problems for Sontag's Polish stage-princess, “vibrant,” “fluent” and “agile”—whose story also happens to begin in 1876, the same year as Deronda's. “I need ordeals, challenges, mystery. I need to feel not at home. That's what makes me strong,” Maryna freely confesses. Maryna has a young son, Piotr, with no father in sight, but motherhood doesn't cramp her style. She also has the three men in her life every woman needs: a (rich) husband, a (romantic) lover and a (wise) friend. Wealthy husband Bogdan, estranged from his aristocratic Polish family, is latently homosexual, openly adoring of Maryna's every flamboyant move and calmly accepting of lovers and absences (“Bogdan brought support; Bogdan brought harmony”). Ryszard, novelist and Don Juan, follows Maryna to America and gets his reward (“quick bruising kisses”) after the star takes eleven curtain calls on her triumphant American opening night (“I can give you my heart, Ryszard. But I can't give you my life”). To complete the triumvirate, there's Henryk, an urbane doctor straight out of a Chekhov play, who remains in Poland to give Maryna an outlet for epistolary musings.

This isn't the first time Susan Sontag has placed a divine diva center stage in a historical novel. Emma Hamilton, heroine of The Volcano Lover, notoriously unfaithful wife of the British Ambassador to Naples and paramour of British naval hero Horatio Nelson, was famous in her day for her striking “living statues” of famous historical/mythological figures. “Once she was in possession of the subject, came the challenging part—finding the … moment that represents meaning, that sums up the essence of a character, a story, an emotion. It was the same hard choice painters [and novelists, too, I would add] were supposed to make.” Like Maryna, Emma isn't just an artist, she's a star. Although Emma's life ends in poverty and decrepitude, she comes back from her grave at the end of The Volcano Lover to address us directly: “there was some magic about me. … I had [something] that was more inclusive [than talent, intelligence, and beauty], that compelled attention, like a ring of light.”

Sontag has said repeatedly that she'll never write her memoirs. They'd be a bestseller, of course: from being buddies with Mike Nichols at the University of Chicago in the 1950s to dodging bombs in Sarajevo in the 1990s, Sontag has, like her fictional heroines, toured widely. But to read In America is to know more than you could ever have hoped to learn about Susan Sontag: to tour not her life, but her brain. “We're always talking about ourselves when we talk of anything else,” Maryna tells her husband.

The cover of In America presents a vintage photograph of an elaborately-coiffured nineteenth-century woman—her back, startlingly, to the camera. In what direction is this faceless woman gazing: backwards, or forwards? “Like many writers,” Sontag writes of her novel's novelist, “Ryszard did not really believe in the present, but only in the past and in the future.” Like the photograph, the novel is, paradoxically, a memento mori that lives on. “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending,” writes George Eliot in Middlemarch's “Finale.” And the final line of In America? “We have a long tour ahead of us.”

Notes

1. Henry James, letter to his father, 10 May 1869; quoted in Gordon Haight, George Eliot (Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 417.