A fighter to the end

Susan Sontag, who died in December, was a great writer who used her towering intellect to rail against injustice, writes Belinda McKeon

The mammoth library is alone now. When the New York-born author and activist Susan Sontag died on December 28th, having lost a long battle with cancer - the second such battle of her 71 years - the footage carried by evening news programmes showed her writing in her Manhattan apartment.

Around her, some of her 20,000 books, arranged by language and chronology, testimony to the self-described "addiction" to literature which fuelled a passionate and brilliant career. The image caught the tension in which Sontag, most renowned for her literary essays (including the influential 'Against Interpretation' from 1966) and non-fiction, but author also of four novels, four films and several plays, lived her days: between a necessary silence and solitude on the one hand, and, on the other, a constant and vociferous presence in the public eye. She epitomised the notion of the intellectuelle engagée, showing that no barrier existed between the world of books and that of social and political reality.

If, during her lonely teenage years in Arizona and California, the library served as a refuge from the hard facts of life - her father's death when she was five, her mother's alcoholism, the stepfather she resented - yet it soon became the place in which she confronted such facts, and much more far-reaching incarnations of them, with vigour and determination.

And with no small spirit of provocation. Early in her career, in 'Trip to Hanoi', a 1968 essay written in opposition to the Vietnam war, Sontag declared the white race "the cancer of human history". She later withdrew the comment - not for its political sentiment, but for its use of cancer as a metaphor. Such use became her target in her 1978 book Illness as Metaphor, written out of her own experience of breast cancer and of the hopeless prognosis given to her by her doctors - which she resisted by availing of an experimental treatment for the disease in Paris. The book castigated not just the medical field for perpetuating the myth of cancer's inexorable fatality, but the cultural and political discourse which drew on that myth to express ideas of decay. Like that of her later (1989) book on the metaphorical use of AIDS, the argument leaned towards unwarranted optimism; still, by endorsing active resistance to the apparently inevitable, the first book saved lives.

Artistically and politically, Sontag's relation to those around her - and her notion of what was "around" her stretched across continents - was often driven by an impulse, if not to save, then to speak out. From introducing European writers such as Roland Barthes, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz and many others to American readers, to nurturing young authors and gaining wider audiences for lesser-known works, to leading protests in the literary community against the fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini, Sontag fought for the literature she believed in. She spoke out against those she perceived as political tyrants; after the Vietnam war, she declared the US to be "a doomed country . . . founded on a genocide", while in 1982 she publicly - and unfashionably - denounced martial law in Poland as "fascism with a human face". By the 1990s, her ire fell onto the intellectual and political left for its failure to encourage intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda.

It must be allowed that Sontag, as much as anyone, enjoyed a blast of her own rhetoric. Reigning as New York's favourite intellectual for over four decades, a status helped by her beauty, her love of the social scene, and by her companionship with the photographer Annie Leibowitz (having been married for seven years in her youth, Sontag later came out as bisexual, but never publicly clarified the nature of her relationship with Leibowitz), she had plenty of opportunity to do so; not many intellectuals have the distinction of appearing in films by Warhol and Woody Allen, or of being profiled everywhere from Rolling Stone to the New Yorker. Still, it could never be said that Sontag was all talk. She saw the horror perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic not from the safety of Manhattan's West Side, but from the bombed-out centre of Sarajevo; in 1993, she went there to investigate the siege for herself, intending to stay a fortnight, but ended up living in the city for the best part of three years. She helped to organise the Bosnian civil resistance, working in hospitals, running a nursery school, teaching and directing - by candlelight - in a basement theatre school, and reopening the National Theatre with a production of Waiting for Godot. There, she is remembered; two days after her death, the city's mayor announced that a street would be named for her. She is remembered less fondly, however, by the many Americans who were outraged by her remarks in the wake of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. These attacks were not "cowardly", she said, not attacks on "civilisation" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world", she argued, but on "the world's self-proclaimed superpower", as a consequence of US foreign policy.

Sontag received death threats in the wake of her comments; but to one who had already beaten one cancer and had recently been diagnosed with another, who had survived bombardment in the Balkans and a serious car crash on her return from there, they barely traced a ripple. Her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) was a richly textured reflection on the representation and perception of warfare and suffering that revealed itself as typically prescient a year later, when the Abu Ghraib photographs emerged, prompting Sontag to write her last, searing essay, 'Regarding the Torture of Others'. A pioneer in the understanding of photography (her 1977 book, On Photography, remains a seminal text), Sontag saw the medium as a lens for modernity, for understanding of the world itself; that her last works revealed that medium - and hence, that world - at its most powerful, its most insidious, is somehow apt. Faced with images of vast suffering, she wrote, we have a responsibility to keep looking, and to ask why. "Was it inevitable?" demanded Sontag. "Is there some state of affairs accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?"

That she died while the images of a catastrophe that demanded answers to just such questions poured in from the continent where she began her searing campaign against injustice is not just a great irony; it brings the first illustration of the void she has left behind. Already, her take on the world is sorely missed.