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The Volcano Lover: A Romance

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In The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag writes beautifully about people she eventually condemns. Not that they have done anything wrong, they are the privileged aristrocracy of the late 18th century. They are absorbed by love, art and by their professional duties. They live beautiful, active, somewhat intelligent lives. Page after page, we live and grow with them. But then there's the world around them. It appears in the form of the distant and then not so distant French Revolution, which swells in the background trying to break into a story that is fundamentally intimate and personal. Or is it really? As our heroes leisurely love, celebrate and keep busy, drawing us into their own self absorbtion, thousands get killed and butchered because they dreamt a better world. A real nuisance if you ask our characters. Lord Hamilton is in love with a volcano but completely bypasses,as we do, the much more relevant, violent and deadly force of the political upheaval. Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover is ultimately a beautiful story of people who don't care. How normal they are. How they fool us into thinking them deep and interesting. So much that by the end of the book, the realization comes as a shock. They were vain, reactionary, at best irrelevant like Emma. They missed the point. A wonderful tour de force.

Susan Sontag's THE VOLCANO LOVER (1992) is about Sir William Hamiliton, for decades British Embassador to the Court of Naples, his young wife Emma (who clearly was not of our class) and her lover, the Great Hero, Horatio Nelson. The three of them were bound together in a very odd relationship. The kind, elderly Hamilton had a brilliant aesthetic eye and was a connoisseur of beautiful antiquities. He assembled a great collection, much of which is now in the British Museum, including the sublime 1st century Roman cameo glass vessel, the PORTLAND VASE. THE VOLCANO LOVER is also about Vesuvius, a still active volcano which periodically puts on a show, and about passion, acquisitiveness, beauty, romance, corruption and lots more. The first three-quarters of this dense novel is rendered mostly in the present tense: the style is quite formal and slightly archaic: the voice is cool, uninflected, detached - but not unfeeling. For the attentive reader, the effect is hypnotic. Sontag is an admirably careful, spare writer. Her distinctive, emphatic rhythms are always evident, but never obtrusive.

I read this book three times and each time it seemed like a new novel. After my first read, I thought I'd read a love story, after the other two, I was captivated by history and technique. We learn at the beginning of the novel that the Queen of Naples is none other than the sister of the recently guillotined, Marie Antoinette. Both Austrian women were sent to foreign lands to reign as queens. The contempt of the people, actually displaced subversion toward their inept spouses, was mismanaged by both sisters. Both, failed to transcend the 'foreign' cloak. They had none of the scheming, political savy of their mother, Maria Theresa. The Royal Court of Napels is impossibly crude. We are introduced to the maloderous, strainings and grunts of the sovereign's daily bowel movements, to which Ambassador, Lord Hamilton, bestower of the title of the book, is honored by a position closest to the specially constructed raised,'throne.' The dull-witted, physicaly repulsive monarch, besides keeping his wife chronically pregnant, with offspring numbering in the teens, has one other passion, which he indulges with equal lust. That is his daily 'hunting' of hundreds of animals, which are dragged and thrown in the streets and there left to rot. A self-indulgent glutton; those many hungry subjects receive nothing from the daily slaughter.
Lord and Lady Hamilton are the sole intimates of the monarchs, despite her Ladyship's low origins, evening performances and love for spirits. In the glorious Naples, these two British subjects live in marked splendor surrounded by Hamilton's obsession with 'treasures' he unearths from his obsession with Vesuvious.
The love affair that is ignited when Nelson's fleet comes to rest in the bay is one of the great passions of history and the details are satisfying to romantic readers. The years pass and Emma grows fat and more frequently drunk. Nelson loses his sight in one eye and an arm, but continues to be victorious on the sea. Love is blind, the two are consumed with the perfection of the other. Lady Hamilton continues to sing and 'pose' but she is fat and bloated, her voice lost. The British hero does not follow orders, stays too long, and returns to transport his friends and the royal family when outbreaks of violence threaten their lives.
Human and volcanic, the lava flow of war and destruction, the end of a kind of civilization flows into the equally bloody sea. Vesuvious is the only lord, he issues warnings and humanity at play must reckon with their ultimate mortality. Love and civilizations die, and who among us are equally dormant, in our fear, in our passions? The Volcano Lover is an intensely vital and artistically flawless work. It is a cautionary and thereby completely modern tale of the fate of nations and individuals who fail to honor the Gods.

Much as I admire Sontag, and much as I would like to rate THE VOLCANO LOVER with five stars, second thoughts intervene. I would describe those reservations by recalling what was once said about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: namely, that it contains both his best and his worst efforts. One would second the observations of those reviewers who, in various ways, have suggested that this work embraces a real cornucopia of stylistic devices; yet in the end, and after more than one rereading, I find artifice sometimes taking precedence over art. In particular, the character of Effrosina Pumo seems drawn with strokes that fail to resolve, and leaves me wondering if she was intended to serve as caricature or archetype--perhaps as Sontag herself would question certain feminist efforts. Still, there is much to be savored in THE VOLCANO LOVER, and self-appointed rival Camille Paglia's dismissal of it as "pedestrian" strikes this reviewer as a spitefully inadvertent confession of envy--to say little of her quip being an egotistically summary and platitudinous facsimile of criticism.

If a bit sententious at times, Sontag's teeming insights into human nature, as inspired by her reflections on the many historical personnages woven into the plot, are admirably, almost frighteningly keen. Dialogue, when used, displays a virtuosically wide range of stylistic mastery. Perhaps this novel is a necessary step in the process of learning to integrate a large number of ideas and methods into a seamless and dramatically balanced whole, as Mozart is sometimes credited with accomplishing. (Interestingly, Mozart enters into both form and content of the plot, even if Sontag once reduced "much of Mozart" to "camp".) Perhaps we should look forward to Sontag's masterpiece, while thanking her for taking the artistic risks necessary to prepare for it.

For readers of Sontag's most celebrated essay collections it was obvious that the most intimate connection of her early writing life was with the ideas of the great European thinkers and film makers (Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Luc Godard). She was more political than the decidedly apolitical Roland Barthes but her essays were never part of a larger political project either perhaps because like Walter Benjamin she wanted to believe but perhaps never really did believe that art and politics really made much of an impression on each other. The only place art and politics did seem to come into contact was when one of those rare individuals who were interested in both tried to understand what the nature of that connection might be. And when one of those rare individuals did try to describe the connection between these two apparently disparate realms what resulted was a melancholy realization that when it came to politics/history art really did not count for much. Only in the essay form itself does it seem that art and politics are mutually dependent realms and that individuals (and not impersonal forces like class or national interest) shape history.

What I suspect Sontag is doing in The Volcano Lovers is trying to negotiate that connection between art and politics/history in a form other than the essay, but the result is not particularly riveting, or, for that matter, in any way engaging either as a piece of cultural history or as a piece of cultural criticism as each of the characters come across as either curiously self-involved (Goethe, Lord Nelson) or self-detached (Sir William Hamilton). In fact few characters in the history of literature have been as detached from the events of their own life as Sontag's main character, Sir William Hamilton. Self-detachment could potentially make for an interesting topic for a novel but Sontag just doesn't make it interesting enough and most readers, I suspect, will put this novel down before they get very far. What is most disappointing about this novel is that in her essays Sontag is particularly good at giving quick biographical sketches of her favorite thinkers in which she sums up the connection between the life and the body of work, but in this novel it becomes clear from very early on that not one of the characters in The Volcano Lovers are really capable of holding her attention in the way that Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes held her attention in the essays and so the novel just feels like an exercise, an endurance challenge. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the first half of the novel is really a long meditation on the nature of collecting and Sontag's sentences sound like essay sentences. Granted Sontag understands the collector's impulse better than anyone (with the possible exception of Benjamin) and while this kind of meditation can be very exciting in a 15 page essay, this kind of meditation just gets tedious in a 400+ page novel. Unless you are a self-detached and sexless collector yourself, Sir William Hamilton just isn't a character you will want to spend 400 pages thinking about. At the end of the novel, when the female characters are finally allowed to speak for themselves, it would seem that (at least one of them) shares this sentiment as well--Sir William Hamilton in their eyes is a tedious bore--but it takes a long, long, long time before she is allowed to say so. For some this payoff might be enough to forgive the tedium of the first half but for me it wasn't.

The tone of the novel is one of melancholy. And the ultimate revelation, if the tedious accumulation of data that The Volcano Lovers affords can be called a revelation, is that we are all pawns of history but that some of us see this more clearly than others. In Sontag's eyes Goethe and Lord Nelson come across as egotists who see themselves in larger than life terms and next to them we might be more inclined to sympathize with the relatively humble William Hamilton who accepts the relatively small and inconsequential role that history has assigned him. At one time he may have wished for a larger role in history but really its obvious that he's living a life that suits his temperament pefectly. The mystery of the novel for me is whether Sontag's intention in writing it was to demystify the great man theory of history (and art) or to demystify the novel itself. Most novels, or at least most exciting novels, show characters caught up in historical changes and the exictement is following the characters as they negotiate those changes within society and within themselves but here Sontag chooses as her focus a man who because of his elite status is relatively immune from social and psychological change and thus the drama and conflict that usually pervades a novel is for the most part simply absent. Without that drama/conflict of character and context the novel just feels like a spent force. Like Sir William Hamilton this novel is curiously barren. The only thing in the external world that catches Sir William's attention or excites him is the volcano itself which puts all human action into perspective and is thus perhaps a great source of solace for this man who has never assigned much meaning to anything that takes place in the human world or even to his own life. To such a detached person as Sir William no merely historical change can really make that much difference anyway, but the volcano fascinates because of its potential to wipe out everything once and for all. And a death wish is really what seems to be the prime motivator here.

In short this is a novel about a man who is disappointed in the world and aware of the futility of human passions and as a result cultivates only one pastime: collecting (which is not so much a way of assembling an alternative/ideal world, as Sontag states, but of treating this one as if it were already dead). Most likely Sontag is examining her own life while examining this character but if that is so one wishes this were a more sympathetic self-portrait.

Note: In her last published essay Sontag wrote about another pair of novels that took place around a volcano: Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth & Laxness' Under the Glacier. It seems Sontag was examining her own mortality as well as her own fascination with art (and whether art is just some kind of solace for the eternally solitary & melancholy reader/writer). This essay can be found in the Sunday, February 20th 2005 edition of the New York Times.

The first time I sat down to read The Volcano Lover, I closed the book and did not open it again for more than a year. Its opening did not grip me in the least. But luckily someone encouraged me to pick it up again, and I now rate it as one of my favorite reads. This novel has driven me to the Huntington Museum to observe the portrait of Emma Hamilton. The novel shows the truth of passion as it explores in depth those things that give our lives their meaning, and they are all--individuals, art, nature--that about which we feel an inexplicable fervor.

What a wonderful book, I had never read anything written by the author, so I decided to give it a try and was not disappointed. The first 20 pages I had my doubts as her style was a bit odd as some of the conversations of the characters are mingled with the prose, which on third person describes the surrounding circumstances. However the book takes a rhythm quite unique that takes into account the slow passage of time in Napoli during the XVIII century while simultaneously crafts the peculiarities of each one of the persons involved in the drama.

Eventhough the books lacks that intensity that sometimes bind the reader to the pages of a novel, you want to stay with it an keep on reading. Its like having a great conversation with someone together with a pleasant cup of coffee in a wonderful setting. You don't want to rush, while you pay attention to everything that is going on around you.

Besides for those who like to underline pages or makes comments on the side of them, the most likely event is that the book will end severely scratched.

If rather slow, The Volcano Lover is not really a hard read, and although I suspect that some of Ms. Sontag's higher flights are over my head, I did not find it particularly rewarding either. As an essayist she is no doubt better, but this novel is somewhat bloated and lacks focus (as well as quotation marks). I bought it principally because Sir William Hamilton (the Cavaliere) fascinates me, which was disappointing. Sontag never really completes his character convincingly, despite all the authorial digressions about the psychology of collection, and treats her half drawn sketch with more cold-heartedness than that unfortunate man merits. In the end, it turns out to be yet another exposition of the intrigue between Nelson and Emma Hamilton; Sir William gradually fades into the scenery.

As a history, The Volcano Lover is fanciful at best, despite the gruesome detail with which Sontag describes the White Terror of 1799. (Some might please to call it euphemistically "gritty") While it is evident that some research was involved- the numerous unsited quotations from actual letters of Hamilton, his wives, and Nelson which Sontag weaves into the text, quite artfully and to good effect- I am not convinced her attempt at anything like factuality went much deeper. The usual jabs are leveled at British conduct in the suppression of the Jacobin rebellion, driven home with scenes of great pathos and gore; Ferdinand and Caroline are conveniently caricatured in two dimensions (so much for the victors rewriting history); the officially sanctioned robbery practiced by the French military and bureacracy is not mentioned and the Neapolitan Jacobins are of course innocent as a fold of lambs.

That said, the writing style was interesting. Suprisingly, the absence of quotes around dialog was not as annoying after the first hundred pages as one might expect, and Sontag manages some elegant turns of phrase. On the other hand, some of her metaphors lack finesse. Modern expressions and anachronisms, which occur often enough to be irritating, and frequent unpredictable shifts in time make the story a little fractured. Minor characters fly in and out of the plot with distracting rapidity and the eschewing of almost everyone's proper name becomes irksome. Overall, I would not recommend The Volcano Lover unless one has a deep interest in either the subject or the author.

Sontag's novel focuses on one of the most famous love triangles in history: British diplomat Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and the most famous British naval officer of all-time, Horatio Nelson. The setting is Naples at the end of the 18th century, the volcano is Vesuvius and the volcano lover is Hamilton. He's a collector of art and antiquities who agrees to welcome his nephew's cast-off paramour, Emma, into his palatial home in part because she was once the muse of painter George Romney. A charming beauty, Emma has slept her way to affluence but only achieves a kind of respectability with her marriage to Hamilton and not long after finally loses her heart to Nelson during his visit to the court at Naples. The much-older Hamilton proceeds to collect Nelson, and from the triangle an odd trio is born. The story follows them through revolution and back to England,where despite the best efforts of Hamilton and Nelson Emma winds up back in the squalor and poverty she fought so desperately to escape. Although there's plenty of action and lovingly-invoked historical detail in this novel, Sontag is a literary writer, so some readers will find it too slow for their taste.

Hamilton was a collector, married for sixteen years to Catherine, childless. He lived in Naples. He had a reputation as a connoisseur and a man of learning. Hamilton was the British envoy. The Marquis de Sade was in Italy in 1776.

William Beckford arrived in Naples after a pet monkey was acquired by Hamilton. Beckford spoke to Catherine about THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER. They played the piano together.

Catherine was dying. Hamilton fretted he was being inconvenienced. At her death he realized he had deep feeling for her, (but collectors are misanthropic, detached).

He met Emma through his nephew Charles. He was fifty-six and she was twenty-three. Hamilton, Sontag refers to him as The Cavaliere, claimed the impossibility of describing Emma's beauty. He found she had natural authority.

The rest of the story is known, it is history. The telling of it by Sontag is adroit, light, and richly cultured.

The idea of the volcano is masterful. There is the notion of collecting objects and then collecting volcanic events, collecting emotion, passion, the stages of a dynamic system. There are visual effects and there is danger. Excitement is produced. The volcano is a metaphor.

The reader's imagination is engaged. Whereas Susan Sontag was by nature an essayist, not a novelist, her voice does come through in this splendid work.