- I don't know.

It's something more intimate, something more intimate than fiction and more mysterious.

I mean, I can write in bed or on the bed, I mean under the covers, but on the bed, if I'm writing fiction, I would never write an essay on the bed.

I mean, the essay is for the living room, so to speak.

I mean, it essay is a, you know, more a public part of me.

It's the good citizen or the teacher or the, well, I don't know what, the preacher.

(gentle music) - Hello, I'm George Plimpton, and this is Writer's Workshop where our guest today is a writer who works in many different forms.

She writes novels and short stories, and also essays and screenplays and criticism.

She takes them all quite seriously because she thinks that writers have a great responsibility as guardians of the language.

Her name is Susan Sontag, and she's been taking herself seriously as a writer and a guardian since she was 10 years old and started her first literary magazine.

She describes her work in terms of innocence and determination.

Two qualities she feels are very important for beginning writers.

You see, when Susan Sontag started sending her work out, she got as many rejection slips as anyone else, but it never occurred to her that she should do anything but take a fresh envelope and send it out again and again.

And we're gonna hear about this determination and persistence as she talks with William Price Fox and the students on today's session, a Writer's Workshop, - The writer's the guardian of the language.

The writer is working in the language in that that's the medium.

I make lists of words for instance.

And I have, you know, I wake up in the middle of the night and I think contentious, ah, contentious.

I forgot about contentious.

And I will, I will turn on the light and write this word down because I forgot that that word exists and it's a wonderful word.

And there the English is so rich.

Well, there are a lot of other ways you could say what you might say if you use the word contentious, I mean, the usual word that comes to people's mind is argumentative.

But then something I remember, oh, there's contentious and contentious and argumentative really are very, very similar if you look them up in the dictionary.

But I think what writing is about is deciding whether it's contentious or argumentative, whether it's fast or rapid, that's really the what it's about.

And it comes out of those decisions, which as I say, are very intuitive and very sensuous and very magical.

And you, and you, you, you build this thing out of language and the language, this piece of language, its rhythms, its diction, it's structure, it's punctuation, generates more.

And of course there is material in it.

I don't mean to say that that it's completely abstract, but I think the guiding thing is actually the language itself in the most concrete sense.

I'm very interested in punctuation.

I'm always looking for ideal punctuation.

It's tremendously important where you put that comma, or if you put it there at all.

- What process did you go through when you first get published?

- Well, when I was a child, I had, I guess I was 10.

I started my own newspaper, which I reproduced by a very primitive process.

One that's still used in many parts of the world, which have dictatorships, which is most parts of the world.

It was, it's called a Hector graph.

I don't know if anybody even knows what that is, but it's the cheapest, very primitive, cheapest method of reproducing anything.

You get a stencil, you need a tray and you need gelatin.

And you've just put the stencil face down on the gelatin and it takes the print, the ink.

You just have to type something up on this stencil with this certain ink.

And it takes the ink.

And then you can put about 20 pieces of paper onto the gelatin, and it reproduces the stencil.

It doesn't go for much more than 20, 20 copies, I guess.

As I say, it's the simplest and cheapest method in the world.

It's wonderful to use in closets and in countries where it's difficult to print what you want, which I don't have a freedom of expression or publication.

And when I was about 10 years old, I started to make a sort of literary magazine of my own, which I wrote.

And then I would sell to get my bicycle and sell to all the neighbors for 5 cents a piece.

And people would take pity on me and buy this thing.

And then when I was, by the time I was at 15 or 16, I started sending things out to magazines.

And it almost all came back, of course, but I had a few things accepted even then, small literary magazines.

And that just kept on going like that.

It was just, I knew the magazines existed 'cause I was a magazine reader and just started sending it out.

And a book, which had an enormous, made an enormous impression on me.

And I think it's a very sad book.

And I, when I think back on it now, I wonder how such a book could have given me such an up feeling about the vocation of a writer.

'Cause it ends with the writer committing suicide.

But I got only the positive side of it was Martin Eden by Jack London.

I dunno if any of you ever read that book, but it's a autobiographical novel that Jack London wrote about how he became a writer.

And he describes himself very poor, living in a furnished room in Oakland, California.

This utterly unknown person without any connections.

He'd been a sailor and he would get himself a great stack of envelopes.

And he, and we would write the dresses of every magazine and paper in the country.

And then he would just send everything out.

And then every day there would be this great mailing.

And every day there would be this great returning because you had to enclose a stamp self address envelope.

And then the things would go out the next morning, whatever came back, would go out the next morning to another magazine or newspaper.

And I read that book when I was about 13, and I thought, "Oh, that's how you do it."

You just send it out and it comes back and you send it right out the next day.

And you have to have that kind of naive, obsessed enthusiasm.

Because I know when I told this story to friends of mine, particularly younger friends who were writing, and they tell me that they sent something out and it came right back.

And I just say, well, send it out again.

Just send it out again there some, some other place.

And they usually say, well, it's very discouraging, I guess it isn't very good.

And I'll put it aside and I'll write something out and I always say, what something else?

And I always say, well, send it out again.

But you have to be, you have to be willing to be rejected.

Of course.

You have to have a certain, how can I say, innocent relationship to your work.

You say, "Well, maybe it isn't very good, but I'm learning.

And we'll see if anybody likes it.

And I'll go on."

- How did you get the benefactor published then?

- Well, that was also very, very innocent.

I got, I was living in New York already, and I took a, I went to bookstores and I looked for the first time really consciously at the publisher, the name of the publisher on the spine of the book.

And I made a list of 10 publishers whose books I liked.

That is to say, these were the publishers who were publishing a number of writers whom I admired.

And I thought I would like to be published by them.

And I had my list of 10, and I was going to take it to each publisher.

I thought, well, maybe the ninth, by the time I get to the ninth, it'll get accepted.

'Cause the wonderful thing about writing is that everybody can turn you down, but if the 19th or 20th person or magazine or publisher takes you, then it's published.

So I got on the subway and I took my manuscript down in a box in the, that the springs typing paper used to come in boxes in the old days.

Now it's just wrapped in paper.

And I left it at the, the switchboard operator's desk with a note for the fiction editor.

I was very naive.

I didn't know there was more than one in most publishing houses.

And two weeks later, I got a call to come down there and they gave me a contract.

So it actually, my first book was taken by the very first publisher whom I submitted it to.

And I'm still some nine books later with that publisher.

So I've had a very fortunate experience because it's a wonderful publisher.

And because I prefer to stay with the same publisher.

I perhaps could have a better deal with some other publisher, but I feel very loyal to them.

And I like not being in an adversary relationship to the publisher, which most writers are.

- You didn't then work at an outside job and try to balance, say, a nine to five with trying to write in the evenings then?

- Oh, sure.

No, that's exactly what I was doing.

I was then a college teacher.

Of course, I have no money other than what I earned.

So of course I was working, I was teaching.

And I, but then after the benefactor came out, I quit.

I resigned my teaching position, which was in New York at Columbia University.

And I decided I wanted to become a full-time writer because the benefactor was, could have been written in a much shorter time, but in fact it took me about two and a half years, which isn't such a long time, except that I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

And it would've been much more pleasurable and maybe even better if I'd been able to just sit day after day and do it.

But in fact, I was doing it not even in the evenings because I was preparing my classes and reading papers.

And I was a lowly instructor with a very heavy teaching load.

I was doing it on the weekends and then the vacations and summers over two and a half years.

But I, my heroic models were writers who were, who did nothing but write.

So I fool, no rather foolishly, but I thought that was necessary.

I resigned from my teaching job, the year after the book came out.

And since then, I have sort of scraped along.

I don't basically make a living for my writing.

I do have to supplement it with some other things, like some occasional lecturing or reading or whatever.

Such as what brings me to South Carolina.

- Do you attempt to write every day?

- Yes.

Yes.

I think a writer must write every day the way a dancer must be at the bar every day.

And a musician must have the instrument in his or her hands, or an athlete must, must stay informed.

- Do you succeed in writing every day?

- No, I don't.

Well, no, there's no day that I don't write something.

- Since you write several different types of things, essays, screenplays, fiction, does your process change?

Can you just sit down and and work on all three things at once or do you just separate your time?

- No, I'm only working on one thing at a time.

And the actual process of working is rather different.

When I write fiction, I write in long hand.

And when I write essays, I write in a typewriter.

And this from this, I conclude that.

Well, I think it's something different.

It's more fiction is more intimate.

The typewriter is there and the writing of fiction is here.

And I really have to see it in an essay.

I would get very impatient to see my scroll on a, my work on mostly on legal size, yellow paper, those long pads.

And I feel that that's the, I don't know, it's something more intimate, something more intimate than fiction and more mysterious.

I mean, I can write in bed or on the bed under the covers, but on the bed, if I'm writing fiction, I would never write an essay on the bed.

The essay is for the living room, so to speak.

I mean, it essay is a, you know, more a public part of me.

It's the good citizen or the teacher or the, well, I don't know what the preacher, I mean I have those aspects, I suppose rather strongly.

And the fiction is something connected with more, with dream and fear and longing and anxiety and well, a very sensuous relationship to language.

And I don't, even though some of my, some, but not most of my fiction is autobiographical, some autobiographical source.

I don't really think it's about me.

I don't really think it's my voice.

It's a voice which comes to inhabit me in which I feel I'm taking down.

- How did you make the transition to film director?

- Well, it's, I, I, it's so just something else I like very much to do.

I don't like to, I don't like to just stay in the room and write.

And there is something else I think I do well, which is direct.

So I have directed some films and I've started directing in the theater.

But it's another activity.

It's not really a transition.

It's simply another activity that is to say it's comparable perhaps to the situation in which I would be both a writer and a teacher, let's say.

So I also direct when I get the chance, and I like very much.

'Cause it gets me out of the room, away from the typewriter, away from the legal size pads of yellow paper and puts me in con in a very intense and interesting contact with other people.

And I like doing that very much.

But it is really another activity.

- You've directed films in Europe, primarily not in America.

Yeah.

Do you feel that what you wanna say is better said with the European in film industry?

- Well, it's just easier because it's less bloated there.

The budgets are lower.

The crews are smaller.

The production situation is less elaborate.

I mean, it's completely professional, of course.

I mean the Europeans have made, I mean, for the most part better films than the Americans.

But they have, I think a more normal scale of work.

And they also have a less narrowly commercial idea of who a director is.

So it is possible for people to move in and out of directing in the theater and opera and film in Europe.

I've worked there because I could work there because it was easier than try trying to deal with a sort of a mega buck in entertainment industry of the United States.

There's just more room, the situation in Europe is a more human scale and more diversified.

Not that they don't have a lot of commercial junk too, but there are more different parts to the activity there.

I of course, would prefer to work here for the obvious reason.

I'd rather work in my own language.

But the reason that I worked there, as I say, it was a more human scale of work with more independence for the director, less pressures to compromise with films for instance, it's normal that you have the right of final cut, that you can edit your work.

It's not normal here.

- In writing for films, do you find that the visual media gives you something more or something different than the page can offer you?

Is that why you diversify and break, say from writing pros into writing screenplays, - But it isn't the writing screenplays that interests me.

I mean, I wrote screenplays for myself to direct.

What interests me is directing rather than writing screenplays.

I would never write screenplays for another director.

And if I could find a, somebody with a script, a screenplay that I would love to direct, I would be delighted.

So it's not as a writer that I'm interested in film and theater.

It's as a director, but it's absolutely true.

It is different.

And it is the visual thing that interests me most.

And you can do things with the image or the stage space, of course, that have a whole other character from anything that you can do with language.

So it is what is not language in working in the theater and film that interests me.

Yes, the visual, the sensual, the kinetic.

- Well, you said that writing is not fun.

It's something else, but it's not fun.

Would you tell us a little more about what something else is for you?

- Oh, well, I think it is a holy vocation.

(interviewer laughs) I think, yes.

I mean I feel it's a sacred calling.

I use the word sacred and of course in a secular sense.

But I think it is something noble and something that one pledges oneself to as something very, very, very difficult, very arduous, very, very noble, very important.

The writer is, the writer deals with the language.

And the language is the instrument of thought, the instrument of sensibility for the whole culture, for the whole society.

The writer keeps the language alive, either adds to the language or contributes to its deterioration.

The writer is concerned with questions of conscience.

I don't say that all writers do this consciously or obviously they all make all make a positive contribution insofar as they do do it.

But they're all engaged in this activity.

And I think if you're not making things better, you're making things worse.

- Would you share with us your process when you were writing illness as a metaphor?

- Well, that one was, that, that's an essay that was relatively easy to write.

I never find anything very easy to write.

But there are a few things in my life that have been as easy to write as that, because that was based on, was in, I'm based, that's not the wrong word, inspired by perhaps or occasioned by a very profound personal experience, which I had, which is that five years ago I got cancer.

And I spent quite a bit of time the first year or two when I was very ill in hospitals.

And I met a lot of people who had cancer.

And I talked with a lot of doctors, and I had a lot of doctors and, and finally found good treatment, and was fortunate in that.

And I became very angry at the way, particularly cancer patients were penalized by a mythology that surrounds that disease.

And I wasn't angry on my own behalf because I was lucky to be surrounded by loving friends and to find competent doctors and get treatment, good treatment.

But I knew, I know that, that most, this is not the situation of most people.

And so I got interested really because I was so angry on behalf of the other people.

And because I saw such horrible things, I saw people dying because they didn't have proper treatment because they were too afraid or intimidated by the mediocre medical establishment.

They were ostracized and isolated from family and friends and in their workplaces.

It's quite horrible.

And so I wanted to write this, to help people, to give them a track a set of arguments and evidence that would help to liberate them from the myths concerning disease.

And I had this idea very, very soon.

It was only a couple weeks after I got sick and I was in the hospital and I realized that these myths about cancer, these fantasies, these grotesque fantasies, really had an exact parallel in the fantasies about tuberculosis in the 19th and early 20th century.

And it's very easy for people to say, "Oh yes."

They used to believe all those crazy things about tuberculosis because all those fantasies have been exploded, have been demystified.

People don't believe them anymore.

And if I could show that it was the same process and the same kind of fantasies, I thought I could give people some distance, some freedom from the ones that they were afflicted by now about cancer, which are very difficult for people to be free of because the disease is still mysterious to people.

So this was a kind of polemic, and I wrote it with, with great glee, with great enthusiasm.

I thought, I'm doing this good thing, I'm even though I'm probably going to die.

'Cause I did, I mean, my doctors originally did tell me I was going to die because that's another thing that they do, that they make you feel that it's a death sentence.

And it's not, I mean, at least half the people who have cancer could be cured according with the present of treatment that's available.

And much better treatment will be available soon.

So I felt that I was doing this good thing.

And if you feel you are doing something good for other people, that that's very strengthening, especially at a moment when you feel very, very weak, which I did.

So that writing of it helped me a lot.

'Cause I felt that at least something good would come of this disaster.

And I did indeed, I have indeed learned since that small book came out three years ago, that it has saved lives.

'Cause many, many people have written me and contacted me and said that it changed that their attitudes, if they were themselves ill or if they had people close to them, relatives or family of relatives or friends had cancer, that just changed their whole attitude and made them freer and more able to seek good medical treatment.

So that's the kind of of essay writing, of course, that's where you were born by, you know, an ethical, that's the easiest to do in a way because you feel good, you feel you're doing something for other people.

And I've had some, some writing like that where I really felt, well, I was bringing the news to people that was useful to them.

And then it's easy or relatively easy.

- Will you tell us what project or projects you're working on now?

- I'm working on another novel, a very ambitious novel.

I want them mainly to work on fiction now for a while.

- We have to have one more question.

One more Leslie?

- Yeah.

Oh, you wanna do it?

- Yeah.

Oh, I've been very appreciative of your sharing the woman's point of view in your fiction and speaking, speaking out to that, could you just address yourself more to that, what you think the influences on literature and fiction as a whole with the whole new women's consciousness and all that's come about?

- Well, I'm very, I'm a feminist and it's very, the cause of women, women is a question of justice for me.

And it's, what interests me are the bread and butter issues of job discrimination, unequal pay for the same work, all the obstacles which inhibit women from using their minds and going after real achievement.

The way that women internalize the role of the playing second in any situation, being the assistant, being the helper, being the well being, being second.

And so I, this is what concerns me.

And I think as a woman, as a citizen, as a writer, I care very much about adding my voice to those voices.

But I don't feel that I want to use my writing mainly for that purpose.

In that sense I'm not a femi, I'm a feminist and a writer, but I'm not a feminist writer.

I'm a militant feminist, but I'm not a feminist militant.

My feminist activities are as a citizen where perhaps I use the fact that I write as a way of getting my ideas across rather than let's say speaking or I might write something and publish it if I'm asked to do that.

But the main activity that I have as a writer, I have as a writer and not as a woman writer.

I don't consider myself a woman writer in, I'm not that kind of feminist.

And I don't wanna be in the, I don't think women artists of any kind or women professionals of any kind, whether they're politicians or surgeons or airline pilots, or orchestra conductors or bankers or engineers or artists or writers should allow themselves to be convinced that they have some distinctive feminine contribution to make, or that their work is in some way different or should be different because they're women.

Yet at the same time, I know it's important for women to stand together as women, citizens of this society to press for redress of these wrongs.

So as I say, I have to define the way in which I care about these things.

I mean, I care as a total person, but I don't feel that my writing is that is attached primarily to this ethical cause, which is very important, ethical cause for me.

My writing is attached to this mysterious noble enterprise called literature, which has no sex.

- This is George Plimpton thanking you for participating in our writer's workshop.

Please join us again next time.

(gentle music) (beep)