Susan Sontag - The Volcano Lover

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First published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1992
Published in Penguin Classics 2009

Copyright Susan Sontag, 1992

My Cavaliere is Sir William Hamiltons double, a fictional character on whose behalf I have taken what liberties suited his nature, as I have with other historical persons given their proper names. I wish to acknowledge the stimulation given by and information gleaned from the many historical studies and biographies as well as from memoirs and letters of the period.

I am grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), which brought me to Berlin in 1989, when I began The Volcano Lover, and again in 1990; to Robert Walsh and Peter Perrone; and, most of all, to Karla Eoff.

The images reproduced in this book are, with one exception, taken from plates in Sir William Hamiltons Campi Phlegraei, Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies. 2 Vols. Naples, 1776. Supplement, 1779. The artist was Pietro Fabris. The image on p. 359 is the dedication plate in the first volume of Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of Hon. Wm. Hamilton by DHancarville (Pierre Franois Hugues). 4 vols, Naples, 17667.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-141-97652-5

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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, and Regarding the Pain of Others, which are published by Penguin. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for her body of work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.

FOR DAVID

beloved son, comrade

DORABELLA (aside): Nel petto un Vesuvio davere mi par.

Cos fan tutte, Act II

It is the entrance to a flea market. No charge. Admittance free. Sloppy crowds. Vulpine, larking. Why enter? What do you expect to see? Im seeing. Im checking on whats in the world. Whats left. Whats discarded. Whats no longer cherished. What had to be sacrificed. What someone thought might interest someone else. But its rubbish. If there, here, its already been sifted through. But there may be something valuable, there. Not valuable, exactly. But something I would want. Want to rescue. Something that speaks to me. To my longings. Speaks to, speaks of. Ah

Why enter? Have you that much spare time? Youll look. Youll stray. Youll lose track of the time. You think you have enough time. It always takes more time than you think. Then youll be late. Youll be annoyed with yourself. Youll want to stay. Youll be tempted. Youll be repelled. The things are grimy. Some are broken. Badly patched or not at all. They will tell me of passions, fancies I dont need to know about. Need. Ah, no. None of this do I need. Some I will caress with my eye. Some I must pick up, fondle. While being watched, expertly, by their seller. I am not a thief. Most likely, I am not a buyer.

Why enter? Only to play. A game of recognitions. To know what, 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. Im feeling lighthearted. I dont have anything in mind.

Why enter? There are many places like this one. A field, a square, a hooded street, an armory, a parking lot, a pier. This could be anywhere, though it happens to be here. It will be full of everywhere. But I would be entering it here. In my jeans and silk blouse and tennis shoes: Manhattan, spring of 1992. A degraded experience of pure possibility. This one with his postcards of movie stars, that one with her tray of Navajo rings, this one with the rack of World War II bomber jackets, that one with the knives. His model cars, her cut-glass dishes, his rattan chairs, her top hats, his Roman coins, and there a gem, a treasure. It could happen, I could see it, I might want it. I might buy it as a gift, yes, for someone else. At the least, I would have learned that it existed, and turned up here.

Why enter? Is there already enough? I could find out its not here. Whatever it is, often I am not sure, I could put it back down on the table. Desire leads me. I tell myself what I want to hear. Yes, theres enough.

I go in.

It is the end of a picture auction. London, autumn of 1772. The picture in its bulging gold-leaf frame stands against the wall near the front of the huge room, a Venus Disarming Cupid thought to be by Correggio on which its owner had placed such high hopesunsold. Thought wrongly to be by Correggio. The room gradually clears. A tall, sharp-faced man of forty-two (he was a tall man for that time) comes forward slowly, followed at a respectful distance by a man half his age bearing a marked family resemblance. Both are thin, with pale skin and cold patrician expressions.