On Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag, who died in December at age seventy-one, was a brave intellectual; but her bravery was not just intellectual. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death, a great many people all over the world, on the left and on the right, fell over themselves trying to explain that Rushdie must have done something truly unforgivable in his Satanic Verses, and that perhaps he was merely an opportunist, a man trying to sell books in the most sensationalist of ways-as Jimmy Carter managed to suggest. In that year, Susan happened to be the president of the American branch of PEN and, in that capacity, testified to the U.S. Senate. And it fell to Susan, not to any of the political leaders, to explain that Khomeini's fatwa against Rushdie had already threatened an American publisher with death, and that freedom of literature might well be a national interest of the United States.