The Diaries
In the preface to the first volume of his mother’s diaries, David Rieff admits he cannot say whether or not his mother wanted her diaries to be published. The first volume, Reborn, represents Rieff’s selection of entries from 1947 to 1963. He cannot know, he notes, what entries she would have published, if any. And she left no instructions about her diaries, her uncollected writings, her papers, and her unfinished work. But she sold her papers (manuscripts, notebooks, letters to and from her, and e-mails) to the University of California at Los Angeles with no restrictions, although the material that will make up the third volume of diaries has been held back until that volume is published and, presumably, until her authorized biographer, Benjamin Moser, completes his work. It seems reasonable to conclude, however, that since Sontag chose to preserve her papers in a university archive, she realized that someday the diaries and her other unpublished writing would be available on some basis to scholars and most likely to the public. Whether the UCLA archive represents all of Sontag’s literary estate is not clear, especially since an undetermined amount of material seems to have been removed from her e-mail folders before being sent to UCLA.1 Many of those folders are now empty. Rieff makes no mention of his mother destroying any of her papers. She expected to recover from her third cancer and did not realize she would die until the last few weeks of her life.
Rieff believes that his mother wrote her diaries for herself since she never published anything from them and never shared them with friends, although, as Rieff admits, friends were aware of her notebooks, which she kept among photographs and other private possessions. And yet Sontag’s own literary consciousness was first formed by her teenage reading of André Gide’s journals. And so it is difficult to believe that she did not, on some level, think of posterity in leaving behind a very intense and detailed record of her life. Rieff remembers his mother making only one cryptic reference to the diaries—a “single whispered sentence: ‘You know where the diaries are’” (ix). They constitute a conversation with herself, which is part of their great value, since she was able to express certain ideas and emotions that never appeared in her interviews and, in some cases, not even in the conversations she had with her son and her friends and lovers. If she left no instructions as to the disposal of her diaries or publication, it is perhaps because they were a part of her private self so long as she could breathe that one sentence.
The sheer volume of notebooks—close to a hundred, Rieff reports—makes it even more difficult to believe that she was not amassing what is virtually the alternative canonical version of her work, the version that did not get vetted, edited, or otherwise mediated through the formal process of publishing. That she did not tamper with her diaries or prepare them for publication does not, however, mean that they are necessarily more honest or reliable than her published work. And yet her reflections on herself, her sexuality, her family and friends, certainly shows sides of Sontag that would otherwise be occluded, if not erased from her biography. And these diaries, read beside her letters and e-mails, as well as the letters written to her, open up new ways of exploring the origins of her work. So far, however, no plans have been announced for a collection of letters from or to her.
Rieff presents himself as his mother’s reluctant editor, deciding to proceed with publication because of the existence of her archive. If he did not organize and publish the diaries, at some point someone else would, he notes. But that someone else could not have proceeded without Rieff’s permission, and although he claims not to have restricted anything important in his mother’s diaries, a conflict of interest remains. As valuable at the diaries are, they should also be used in the full knowledge that a family member has edited them—not exactly the sort of scholarly procedure that modern readers have come to expect in the handling of an author’s unpublished materials.
That Rieff has, however, acted in contravention of his mother’s own behavior during her lifetime is undeniable. As he admits, his mother was not a “self-revealing person…. She avoided to the extent she could, without denying it, her own homosexuality or any acknowledgment of her ambition” (ix). And yet why Rieff refers to one of Sontag’s lovers as “H,” rather than giving her full name is bizarre, since Harriet Sohmers agreed to be interviewed and her name was freely used in the 2000 publication of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon. Other names of real individuals are also omitted, although Rieff’s reasons for disguising some names and not others is not divulged.
Rieff is right to stress the almost Victorian earnestness of Sontag’s journal. He aptly compares her to Thomas Carlyle, the author of Heroes and Hero Worship, which could easily have been the title of one of Sontag’s books. Even so, Rieff is right to say that there is also something very American about Susan Sontag in her desire for rebirth and new beginnings, a desire that dominates her diaries. That the diaries are also a record of disappointed love, of the conflicting role of Eros in her life, “makes me sadder than I can possibly convey,” (xii) Rieff laments. It is important to know that, as he puts it, she was as “uncomfortable with her body as she was serene about her mind” (xii). She was always praising the sensual in art and yet found it so lacking in her own experience, although the list of her lovers in the diaries would seem to contradict her seemingly too-earnest evaluation of her love affairs. Perhaps the greatest irony in the diaries is that they are about the very ambitions Sontag was so loathe to acknowledge when questioned about them. In the end, Rieff seems to give himself and readers permission to read the diaries, since he concludes by emphasizing how much his mother loved to read diaries, “the more intimate the better” (xiv). So, he supposes, she might approve of what he has done. What he does not say is that the diaries also reflect (although not enough) how much Sontag reveled in gossip, in what was happening not only to those close to her but also to those she considered her rivals. Thus these diaries are, in a way, yet another bid to have the last word.
Dated November 23, 1947, Sontag’s first diary entry is a declaration of principles in the form of a list from a to h. She declared that she was no believer in a “personal god” (1) or in the immortality of the soul. She took an Emersonian position on being true to herself as the best form of honesty. She believed that human beings differ only in intelligence. She sounded like a utilitarian when she announced that the happiness of the individual should be the cause for action. It is wrong to take a human life, she stated, making no exceptions. Already, her politics were those of the socialist who believed in a strong central government in control of public utilities, banks, mines, and transportation. Such a government would support the arts, guarantee a minimum wage, provide for the disabled, the aged, and pregnant women regardless of their marital status.
The nascent Susan Sontag also emerges in her April 13, 1948, entry: “Ideas disturb the levelness of life” (1). The statement seems born out of her impatience with what she deemed southern California blandness and conformity but also represents a sensibility keen to argue her ideas, which she hoped would move the world to other, higher levels. But the adolescent Sontag feared she might give in to her mother, who wanted her to remain at home while attending college. Her mother’s sorrow made Sontag feel cruel, but at the same time she retreated to her room to play a Mozart opera and fortify her desire to be on her own. Such entries demonstrate how much willpower it took for Sontag to break from her family, and these early declarations also underscore what becomes a dominant theme in her work: the strength of the will, which Maryna Zaleska in In America, for example, dwells on as she embarks on reshaping her life by moving from Poland to the United States.
André Gide became Sontag’s indispensable guide, as she noted on September 10, 1948, after her first reading of his journals. She finished reading the book at 2:30 a.m. on the same day she had purchased it. She immediately decided that she must reread the volume more slowly a second time. She treated Gide as her liberator, but she also saw the book as a projection of herself, as if she had created it. On December 19, 1948, Sontag began the first of many reading lists that she would include in her diaries. On the list are several Gide titles, Sherwood Anderson’s Tar, and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, as well as titles by English and European writers such as George Moore and Dostoyevsky. Her leftist politics are apparent in her reading of Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun. She was already reading classics by Dante, Ariosto, Pushkin, and Rimbaud, and she included several dramatists such as O’Neill, Shaw, Calderón, and Hellman. David Rieff notes that this list is more than five pages long and has more than one hundred titles. Already Sontag was thinking of art not only in terms of its content but its form, noting that language is “not only an instrument but an end in itself” (7). She was drawn to music because of its purity of form and sensuality. The mindset of Against Interpretation is apparent in these incipient meditations on art.
In her December 25, 1948, entry, Sontag alluded to her “lesbian tendencies” (9). By April 6, 1949, she lamented her inability to make love to a man. She felt degraded when she kissed him. Tellingly, she exclaimed that she wanted to hide, a decision she would stick by until nearly the end of her life, when it then became impossible to deflect interest in her sexuality because it had become a part of her biography.
By the end of 1948, Sontag had established a tone for her diaries that would remain consistent even as she matured: an intense disappointment in herself that seemed to arise out of her high expectations and aspirations. She acknowledged a masochistic streak and a divided sensibility, wishing to stay in the comfort of home but realizing she must leave in order to grow intellectually. She said as much when she noted on February 11, 1949, her agreement to attend Berkeley. There she seemed no happier, and in a mood almost of resignation she identified university teaching as the only profession that appealed to her. David Rieff notes that she later added a one-word comment: “Jesus!” Yet the studious, graduate school–like quality of her desire to amass knowledge and collect it in lists and books and her encyclopedic references to authors and ideas suggest a mind that never quite transcended its academic roots. Indeed, her diaries reveal her as a kind of transitional figure occupying places in both higher education and in the world of artists and an intellectually engaged public.
However unsatisfying Sontag’s semester at Berkeley, it served the purpose of finally breaking forever the hold of home on her. She spent a weekend with her mother and realized that she was ready to leave this small world and that she would no longer be dependent on her mother for emotional sustenance. At several crucial moments in Sontag’s life—her Berkeley semester, her two years at the University of Chicago, her decision to study at Oxford, her move to New York—changes of location proved essential in the next stage of her development as a person and writer. The impact of these moves had its ultimate impact on her work in In America, where Maryna Zaleska cannot conceive of a new self unless she leaves her native Poland, and she cannot conceive of America as other than a stage on which to perform her new self. Similarly, Sontag’s reading of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, mentioned in a May 17, 1949, entry, would have its exhilarating denouement in the passages about the Cavaliere’s wife, Catherine, whose sedate life is suddenly disrupted but also fulfilled by her reading of the famous bildungsroman.
Sontag’s own coming of age occurred in San Francisco, where she toured the gay bars with Harriet Sohmers, a Berkeley student who initiated Sontag into a lesbian life. Sontag recorded how little she knew then by describing her admiration for a beautiful blond singer with a powerful voice. A smiling Harriet had to tell Susan that the singer was a man. In this part of the diaries Sontag described sex and making love with a directness absent from her fiction, let alone her essays. Sex was a difficult subject for her to handle in print, as her son David Rieff suggests, and her own experience, especially at first, was tentative, and she described herself in the act of making love as “stiff.” But the understanding she came to in the act of love she underlined: “I knew everything then, nor have I forgotten it now” (25). This avowal is part of what David Rieff identifies as almost thirty pages of Sontag’s account of her life in Berkeley, an entry begun on May 23, 1949. How much of this account Rieff left out is impossible to determine. But it is clear that Sontag was excited by overcoming what she called the “agonized dichotomy between the body and the mind that has had me on the rack for the past two years” (18). In fact, after her experience with Harriet, Sontag declared her desire to have many love affairs. In her published work, her interest in sex seemed displaced in essays on pornography and on the Marquis de Sade, in which she maintained a cool, reserved, intellectual discussion of the subject. But these essays also have deep roots in Sontag’s exploration of the language of sex and sexual identity. By August 3, 1949, she was compiling a list of gay slang, including words such as swish (effeminate) and chippie (a one-night stand with a woman), and contrasting heterosexual words and phrases such as box for vagina and get a piece of tail (a male having sexual intercourse with a woman). If Sontag was wary of being more open about her sexuality, she may have had in mind what she noted in her diary for August 5, 1949. Some friends had said: Date men. Otherwise it would be too late to reverse her preference for women.
Sontag’s comments on lectures at Berkeley sized up the faculty, with courses like The Age of Johnson stimulating her, and others that seemed merely competently presented but without much originality. Already she was concerned about “letting myself slide into the academic life” (6). Her tastes were already avant-garde, and she rejected the English Department’s stultifying publications such as “The Social Criticism of Fenimore Cooper” and “A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines and Newspapers of California (1859–1891).” Her disgust with the staid university world is set against the backdrop of Harriet’s announcing to her friends that she is going to “rescue” Susan.
Sontag appears in the diaries as, in her own estimation, a naïf, but also as a self-conscious student of her own youth, remarking wryly on August 26, 1949, that she was entering the “anarchist-aesthete phase of my youth” (44). She read I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism and Arthur Koestler’s anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon. But the issues of her sexuality continued to engage her. When she arrived for her first semester at the University of Chicago, she found in a bookstore on State Street copies of Wilhelm Stekel’s The Homosexual Neurosis and Bisexual Love. She noted Stekel’s belief that humans are naturally bisexual, although only the Greeks understood that to be the case.
Although she would not settle in New York until the end of the 1950s, Sontag was already making excursions to visit museums and attend plays, including Death of a Salesman and The Madwoman of Chaillot. She was an astute student of both staging and acting, and she was already trying to work out how art should be described. It gave pleasure but how could that be measured? At this point, she did not have an answer. Then, on November 11, 1949, she reported that she had been given a splendid job as a researcher for sociology instructor Philip Rieff. Now she would be able to concentrate “in one area with competent guidance” (54). How she moved from this excited but hardly passionate entry to marrying Rieff less than two weeks later remains a mystery in the diaries, except insofar as her writing to herself reveals a sensibility yearning for an overwhelming commitment to a life of ideas and of passion, and that no one, until Rieff, seemed in a position to provide stability and the guidance.
At the end of 1949, Sontag, back in California for the holidays, visited Thomas Mann, an event that she put a year earlier in her memoir, “Pilgrimage,” perhaps to obviate the need to deal with the connection to Rieff and also, apparently, to intensify her role, once again, as intellectual naïf bearding the master artist in his den. The diary account is more prosaic and lacks the sardonic retrospective tone of “Pilgrimage.” She quoted his comments on The Magic Mountain, which he meant, he said, as a “summa” (55) on the period leading up to World War I. The meeting was something of a disappointment because Mann’s remarks could not match the eloquence of his novel. It seems that this crucial meeting with a literary hero convinced Sontag that it was better to know the art than the artist. But Sontag also seems to have been fascinated with Mann’s comments on James Joyce and Proust, which may have been instigated by her. What Sontag thought of her encounter with Mann, then, is hard to say, except to note that she left with no particular insight, no epiphany, which thus left room for the anticlimactic ambiance of “Pilgrimage.” That she was looking for some kind of denouement, however risky, seems apparent in her cryptic entry for January 3, 1951, in which she announced her marriage to Rieff, fearful of her “will toward self-destructiveness” (62).2
Marriage did not change Sontag’s two-year trajectory at the University of Chicago, where she spent heady semesters in philosophy and literature courses, absorbing the ideas and manners of famed professors such as Elder Olson, R. S. Crane, Leo Strauss, and Kenneth Burke. And yet, as she noted in her entry for November 12, 1950, she remained a disciple of Jack London’s novel Martin Eden, the story of a writer who commits suicide (Sontag understood the oddness of her inspiration) but one that nonetheless expressed her attraction to the sheer energy of creativity.
Entries for the years 1950–1955 are sparse, and David Rieff cannot say whether the notebooks were lost or whether his mother wrote no more than he found. What she thought in those early years of her marriage, and how those early years shaped her intellectual outlook, can only be pieced together from her later writings, which, of course, are memories rendered into the fiction of I, etcetera and In America, which may well distort as much as they reveal about the true nature of her marriage. Of more concern to her in the extant entries was her son, David, whom she loved to observe, noting the child’s self-absorbed nature in entries for August 17, 1954, and September 4, 1956.
In late 1956, Sontag dwelt on marriage as a torment, a way of subduing feelings in a life of mutual dependency. Arguments that have no satisfactory conclusion bothered her, and she admitted that after the marriage’s first year, the urge to reconcile had atrophied into angry silences that gradually gave way to relations as usual. She later called this state “inertia” (84). Some of the silences and hostilities of marriage are evident in Duet for Cannibals, especially in that film’s evocation of the claustrophobic nature of marriage. In her diary, Sontag noted Rilke’s belief that marriage is sustainable only through continuing separations and returns. As Sontag would later say, Rieff remained at her side always, continuing conversations even when she went to the bathroom.
Throughout the end of 1956, conversations with David seemed to buoy her, and she enjoyed talking with him about the nature of God, of death, and of the new words he was learning to use, such as sarcophagus and esophagus (90). But as she noted on January 3, 1957: “the sense of not being free has never left me these six years” (96). She referred to the “leakage of talk” (87), apparently meaning nothing said was of any consequence.
On January 6, 1957, Sontag complained about her “flabby” (90) will. This would in her later writing about Cioran and others, and then in In America, become of paramount importance. Her notes on marriage contain more complaints about quarrels and her writer’s block. She had ideas for stories but nothing seemed to jell. Perhaps as part of priming her for writing, she set down notes about her childhood, somewhat in the manner of “Project for a Trip to China.” Brief glimpses of her life in New York, Tucson, and Miami are listed rather than developed, but the roots of her radicalism are evident in her mentioning a paper she did on the California robber barons for her favorite teacher, Mr. Shepro at North Hollywood High School. She referred to her father, his singing “She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when she comes” (112). She dreamed of the Lone Ranger coming to rescue her from high school and also listening to a speech by John Howard Lawson, a blacklisted screenwriter. She mentioned writing a book on Russia, an assignment for a high school class that she preserved and is now in her UCLA collection. She wept when Franklin Roosevelt died. She told her mother that she would rather not be Jewish—perhaps in reaction to certain insults and after being hit on the head with a rock, an event her sister recalls in the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag. Sontag mentioned being called a “kike” at her middle school in Tucson (125).
Sontag’s conflicted sexuality is alluded to in her brief mention of threatening to cut her breasts off because she did not want to be a girl when she grew up. She mentioned a journal she began in Tucson (evidently lost or destroyed) with an entry about a dead, rotting dog. These are just flashes of memory—like collecting Classic Comics when she was in the eighth grade. But the memories were apparently fitful and were of a piece with Sontag’s reluctance to revisit her childhood and adolescent years by constructing an extended narrative. Instead she was beset by the duties of marriage and childrearing. It was in this context that she exclaimed: “If only I get the fellowship to Oxford!” It would be her chance to escape the “feathered nest” (126). She seemed, to herself, inauthentic. She played Dorothea to Rieff’s Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar who spends a futile life compiling “A Key to All Mythologies.” The diary establishes that Sontag saw the parallel between her life and George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch decades before she put it in her novel In America. Like Dorothea, Sontag dreaded the loss of her personality. In her lists of do’s and don’ts she reminded herself to shower every other night and write her mother every other day. Was there a connection between the dutiful daughter and the wife who was struggling to maintain her mental and physical hygiene in a failing marriage?
On March 19, 1957, Sontag recorded that she had obtained her Oxford fellowship. Philip Rieff seemed devastated; ”an ejaculation of weeping” (137) was her terse description. She suffered from migraines and prepared to depart, never really having had a full conversation with her husband. As David Rieff notes (146), Sontag’s last day in Cambridge, where she had been studying philosophy and literature at Harvard while Rieff taught at Brandeis, was, in effect, the last day of her marriage. Seeing her off was her Harvard mentor, Jacob Taubes, whose influence on her early writing was significant, especially in her essay about Simone Weil, although Sontag’s published work avoids the theological issues she explored in her teaching at Columbia University under Taubes’s supervision. If Sontag had pursued an academic career, the philosophy of religion might well have been her specialization. Her course work at Harvard reveals deep engagement with the history of religion, and she excelled in anatomizing various belief systems; this work formed the deep background of her handling of Western culture in Against Interpretation.
Although Sontag studied at Oxford, neither its environs nor its curriculum seemed to absorb her. Instead, she went to Italy and then to France in November 1957, visiting churches and galleries and storing up perceptions that would later inform her writing about art in her essays. It is also clear from diary entries that her interests were shifting to bohemianism. Already, she was concerned with philistinism, a deliberate turning away, in her view, from any original or unconventional thinking about art. Rather than philosophers, she was reading Dostoyevsky and D. H. Lawrence. What she thought of her philosophy courses is unfortunately unavailable because David Rieff decided not to include her extensive notes on lectures in the book publication of her diaries.
Sontag reported that Saint-Germain-des-Pres was “not the same as Greenwich Village, exactly” (158), which was the beginning of her exposure not just to European thinkers and culture but to a mode of living and writing that she first read about in André Gide and that she associated with Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood, which had been the subject of her thesis at the University of Chicago. Slowly, Sontag was transforming herself from the philosopher to the artist, and from the academic to the public, independent intellectual. She had not cut her ties to academe, but she was already estranged from the regimen of higher education and moving toward what she called the “café routine” (158): writing, then meeting with fellow artists in as many as four cafés in one evening. This sampling of shifting cultural milieus became a habit she would pursue in New York City as well, influencing a writing style that was constantly inflected with allusions to various schools of thought, aesthetics, and ethics, as if these ideas were arranged on so many tables to be savored. The Susan Sontag essay that is, in effect, a menu of thought had its origins in her early exposure to Parisian intellectual life.
The first mention of camp occurs in an undated entry (probably made in December 1957). Sontag met Elliot Stein, a New Yorker who wrote for Opera, a London publication. His taste for movies like King Kong and many of his opinions and insights would eventually be assimilated in “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Sontag also met Beat poets and other writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. She resumed relations with Harriet Sohmers, who had seduced Sontag at Berkeley. Sontag now called her the “finest flower of American bohemia” (160). It was a conflicted relationship, with Sontag’s having to deal with her sexual longing and Sohmers with her sexual dissatisfactions, as Sontag put it in her diary entry for December 30, 1957. What seems at stake in Sontag’s copious diary entries about her relationship with Harriet is how sex becomes intertwined with power—that is, with who is in charge, who leads, and who ultimately determines what the love affair means. This tortured presentation of love is replicated in Sontag’s first film, Duet for Cannibals, and in Unguided Tour, starring Sontag’s lover Lucinda Childs.
During Sontag’s sojourn in Paris, she began to make extensive notes on films, collecting a range of references that would later be displayed in her essays. She called movies novels in motion (164). She also reflected on her journal keeping, noting that she was not merely recording what happened to her, or expressing her thought and emotions. Instead the journals are an act of self-invention. Sontag used the journals as a project, a construct. When she read Harriet’s journal, which confirmed Harriet’s dislike of Sontag, Sontag was hurt but also took the occasion to comment again on the purpose of diaries, which were precisely to be read “furtively” (161) by others. In short, more than self-invention is involved in these diaries. They are meant to be read, although Sontag at this point only wondered if Harriet would ever read Sontag’s diaries.
Sontag now saw her life in terms of her writing, whereas with Philip Rieff their long conversations seemed only an extension of their intense marriage, which did not get written down in diary form because it was not, in effect, part of Sontag’s self-creation. She felt imprisoned by the marriage and, in turn, her writing suffered—indeed was almost extinguished. However unhappy Sontag was with Sohmers, both sought a creative self—what both Hippolyte and Diddy dream of in The Benefactor and Death Kit.
Sontag’s attraction to extremist writers such as Simone Weil, Antonin Artaud, and Jean Genet is explicable in terms of her early struggles in Paris. She felt left out of the bohemian mix that Harriet Sohmers so easily absorbed. Sontag told herself that she was not egotistical enough. She was too timid, too sane, too prudent. She wanted to be more daring and even reckless, as Harriet had no trouble doing. All the same, this tension between Sontag’s cautious and wild sides shaped her identity as a writer. Her essays extol the bohemian, but they also tend to preserve an academic decorum. She was a great sampler of bohemianism, but she was not a regular, so to speak. And it was precisely her straddling different worlds that would make her so appealing as a writer about cultural trends (a word she would have despised) who denied that she was trendy. Her slightly removed stance as a narrator of what she saw, read, heard, and analyzed separated her from the phenomena she was nevertheless associated with.
In a fictionalized account of her marriage breakup that is included in her diary, Sontag rejected the “tense careerism of the academic world” (169) and sought the spontaneity and independence that she associated in her essays with the artist’s life. And that life consisted not of self-expression but of creating something new. When she considered why people create masks, she suggested in her own case that it was not because she was hiding her true self but rather that she was projecting an identity that is aspirational—what she wanted to become. This comment on herself is of a piece with her essays arguing that the artist’s work is not to be understood in autobiographical terms but that it is the form—or the mask, in a sense, the surface of the art—that has to be contemplated, not some hidden meaning to be excavated. So she counseled herself not to look for shapes and scenes in abstract painting but instead to appreciate their plasticity.
To be an artist, to be a person, for Sontag, was to have a sense of vocation—a point she made when criticizing Harriet for behaving like no more than a tourist of life. Sontag was equally hard on herself, pointing out that she had become complacent in the face of her adoring husband. As in her essays, which call for a fresh response to art, she called herself to attention, saying she wanted to “re-open my nerves” (202). She had to awaken herself from the self-enclosed dullness of a marriage that prevented her from engaging with others.
Part of Sontag’s reinvention of herself occurred when she moved from Paris to New York in early 1959. Although the city’s griminess appalled her, she also threw herself into this new scene with gusto, paraphrasing the poet William Blake: “Exuberance is beauty” (210). On a daily level, she was ground down by her scut work at Commentary magazine and by her inability to openly admit her homosexuality (the term she used). Her guilt over her sexuality inhibited her and made her feel vulnerable. This major theme in her life, the dread of being exposed, is carefully hidden in her work, and yet it fueled so much of her writing about topics like camp.
Although Sontag had forsaken an academic career, the prospect of teaching the history of religion at Columbia University in 1960 was preferable to her unsatisfying work at Commentary. She enjoyed lecturing about Kant, who spoke to her own sense of tension between “inclination + sense of duty,” which she enjoyed discussing with her students in “marvellous classes” (224). She had similar positive experiences at City College, but then in the spring semester at Sarah Lawrence College, where she was teaching philosophy, she began to show up late and unprepared for class, noting on February 29, 1960, that she could not seem to find a balance between “total enslavement to a responsibility and ostrich-like irresponsibility” (253), which again posed for her a Kantian dilemma.
Amid doubts about her own sensuality that broke through her intellectualizing, she again quoted Blake on life as “a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire” (228)—a phrase that brings to mind her call in Against Interpretation for an “erotics of art” to replace the “hermeneutics of art.” Even as Sontag was making up and breaking up with her lover, the Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornés, she was reading the novelist Stendhal and the philosopher Ortega y Gasset on the nature of love and also thinking about Emma Hamilton, who would become one of the main characters in The Volcano Lover. “What did this concealed woman have that these great men loved her” (238), Sontag wondered. These thoughts seem to arise out of her unsatisfying lovemaking with Fornés and Sontag’s own doubts about what her actual feelings were. This uncertainty would suffuse her treatment of conflicted erotic affairs in The Benefactor and Death Kit.
It is no wonder that Emma Hamilton, a woman who gave so much of herself to her lovers, should fascinate Sontag, who bewailed her fear of loving Harriet and of defying Philip. Her marriage, she implied, was the only way to deal with her two lovers. Neither relationship sufficed, however, and Sontag did not see herself “as free” (299). She took up almost as a chant the phrase “Do something” (314), which she repeated three times. She seems paralyzed in this early 1960s period as she created a character, Hippolyte, who “serenely claims to be responsible for his acts, but patently is more haunted than he admits” (315). The same could be said of Sontag, who appeared, in public, so sovereign and self-contained and yet in her diaries confessed to a fundamental indecisiveness.
In the second volume of Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964–1980, nothing changes—insofar as she remained, in David Rieff’s characterization, a perpetual student, forever reflecting on her education and making lists of words, books, and movies. However, the haughty Susan Sontag, so often written about in the memoirs of her friends, emerges. As Rieff also notes, his mother’s definition of fool was, “to say the least, ecumenical” (10). She became the teacher as much as the student, an extravagant admirer of great writers but also a diva insisting on her own prerogatives. Rieff does not say so, but part of Sontag’s assumption of arrogance grew out of her injunctions to herself in earlier diaries: she admired stars like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Ida Lupino—all ladies, she noted, with cruel tongues who used men badly. This was the mark of the high-class femme fatale, always a little aloof with her admirers. “Didn’t I despise Jacob [Taubes] for trying to be charming” (245), she noted in a diary entry in early 1960. And like a femme fatale in a forced confession, she wrote, “I have always betrayed people to each other” (242)—in this case because of her wanton gossiping about the sex lives of others. And perhaps most revealing of all is how she hardened herself with injunctions such as this: “Don’t be kind. Kindness is not a virtue. Bad for people you’re kind to. It’s to treat them as inferiors, etc.” (232) This disciplined ruthlessness became a defining feature, a measure of her own importance.
Of Sontag’s politics, Rieff, in some embarrassment, excuses his mother’s more fanciful comments about North Vietnam by emphasizing how appalled she was at the horrors of war. Russian dissident and exile Joseph Brodsky helped set Sontag straight on the subject of Communism, Soviet and otherwise, Rieff reports, as well as becoming her touchstone for how a great writer should think and behave. If Brodsky deepened her understanding of politics, he also encouraged her arrogance. They exercised their sense of superiority by belittling others.
And yet the opening diary entries for 1964 place Sontag in the same abject position she occupied when in love with Harriet Sohmers. This time the beloved was Maria Irene Fornés, whose very identity, Sontag declared, was predicated on her rejection of Sontag, who became the scapegoat for Fornés’s every disappointment. Fornés could absolve herself by attacking Sontag. And it was just as vital, Sontag insisted, for her to cling to Fornés. Why? Sontag never quite said. But it seems that both in her love life and in her literary affairs she felt the need of a figure whom she could portray as lording it over her. Certainly in Under the Sign of Saturn, Sontag performed a kind of obeisance to the difficult writers she considered her superiors.
David Rieff suggests that the diaries constitute a kind of novel around which Sontag shaped her life, turning what was almost surely a different story from Fornés’s point of view into a kind of master/slave scenario that attracted Sontag when she wrote about the pornography of the Marquis de Sade or in her own creation of Hippolyte, who sells his mistress, Frau Anders, into slavery. Only fragments of Fornés’s point of view figure in Sontag’s diary—for example, when Sontag reported on May 5, 1964, Fornés’s claims that Sontag had damaged Fornés’s ego (2). Who, then, was the master, who the slave? “Conceiving all relationships as between a master and a slave” (45), Sontag wrote in an entry for November 17, 1964, still insisting that it had been her role to play the slave in most relationships.
In 1964 Sontag made quite a study of Marlene Dietrich in the films of Josef von Sternberg. She liked the way the director “mounted” (26) the actress, making her a kind of complete object, a showpiece, much as the artist Joseph Cornell would later put Sontag in one of his famous boxes, emphasizing her as a diva. The high gloss of Dietrich’s films fascinated Sontag, who was preoccupied with style, with the manner of presentation that becomes, as well, the artist’s substance. The exotic nature of Dietrich’s performances appealed to a writer who noted her “ostentatious appetite” (27) and proclivity for unusual food, which she consumed with the same voracity she demonstrated for so many different kinds of art in Against Interpretation. It is no wonder, then, that she began to make notes about camp, which above all attends to style, to the mode of presentation. She was reading, as well, the French new novelists, and listening to avant-garde music—all of which dislocated traditional realism, harmony, plot, and character development.
Sontag rarely commented on the quality of what she was reading. As in Against Interpretation, her choices may have in themselves conferred a certain distinction on the works she discussed, but if they were worthy, she felt no need to criticize. Criticism, she stated quite emphatically in her diary, was for inferior work, which she rarely deigned to examine. She focused rather on painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and writers who advanced their work by saturating themselves in the history of their art. The camp sensibility, for example, is all about those who are aware of how works of art contribute to or upend the history out of which they arise. Sontag saw herself as a vehicle for that history more than as an artist engaging in self-expression. Camp, with its focus on style, charted the changes in art, and camp’s consciousness of style amounted to an understanding of the historicity of art. She wanted to see the artist’s life only in terms of his art and collected quotations that said as much—such as Austrian composer Anton von Webern’s assertion that “every life is a defense of a particular form” (54).
In 1965, while preparing to write her second novel, Death Kit, Sontag noted that William Burroughs in Naked Lunch switched from first- to third-person narration abruptly while also displaying his erudition in parentheses—techniques she also put to use in Diddy’s wavering consciousness of his own imminent death. Life. as she noted in a diary entry for November 1, 1964, is the world; death is what is inside the head (43).
During this mid-1960s period, Sontag continued to look for models to emulate—writers whose styles she admired, artists who had certain manners that appealed to her. The painter Jasper Johns, for example, became not only a romantic attachment but also the epitome of the person and the artist she wanted to become. She admired his disputatious disposition and emulated it in essays that invited counterarguments. Yet she also observed a “formidable reticence” (59) that seems to have influenced her writing about the silences in works by Beckett and others. In actor Joseph Chaikin she found another version of holding back, a restraint, Chaikin told her, that stimulated “something in himself to come out” (71).
Sontag considered several different novel plots, listing them without comment. A few center on the intense relationship between two women (one variation is about two incestuous sisters), a theme, of course, in her own life but also in her study of Bergman’s Persona. She contemplated re-creating characters such as Orpheus and Eurydice in dialogue but also science fiction plots and murder stories involving matricide and assassination. Other story ideas deal with a work of art, a discovered lost manuscript. She made one cryptic reference to a story based on Simone Weil’s religious experience and Sylvia Plath’s honest depiction of sex. The listing of so many narrative possibilities and allusions to Homer, Virgil, Herman Hesse, and Georges Bataille reveal an encyclopedic sensibility that suffuses so much of her nonfiction prose. The role of science fiction and fantasy predominated in these musings, which would eventually inform several of the stories in I, etcetera, a collection that plays with notions of identities. One day, Sontag supposed, the self could be rewired and reprogrammed.
Even as Sontag admired avant-garde artists such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Antonin Artaud, she continued to muse over her attraction to An American Tragedy (1925), Theodore Dreiser’s naturalistic novel that would seem the antithesis of the experimental, innovative fiction that she wished to write.3 Describing what was “good” about the novel, she noted how intelligently Dreiser treated his main character, Clyde Griffiths, who murders his lover. She also praised the novelist’s patient piling up of detail, reworked imaginatively in a way that also reflected the writer’s Tolstoy-like compassion. This devotion to Dreiser seems to have inspired her own desire to create a story about a murder of some kind, which she did in Death Kit, although she did not emulate Dreiser’s documentary focus—instead opting for a phantasmagorical, Poe-like narrative that allowed her to probe the subject of madness, a subject that often recurs in her mid-1960s diaries and that had already been explored in The Benefactor.
By the summer of 1965, Sontag had become acutely conscious of her public persona and of how she wanted to present herself. She decided to give no more interviews, she declared to her diary, until she could speak as forthrightly as Lillian Hellman did in her Paris Review interview. Indeed, Sontag did not sanction her own Paris Review interview until shortly before publication of her fourth novel, In America, since she regarded this particular publication as establishing the interview of record, the one that would be read as the author’s definitive statement.
Above all, Sontag wanted the work of art to reign supreme, to change people’s thinking, to be a solid object that would be as integrated as “consciousness is harnessed to flesh” (84), she wrote on May 22, 1965. She tried to embody this idea of the artwork in June 8, 1965, in notes about a novel concentrating on Thomas Faulk, a painter. Like Jasper Johns, Faulk is taciturn and short-tempered. He suffers the torments of a hypochondriac and takes injections for an unspecified malady. Like her earlier male protagonists, he seems to be going through a breakdown, although in another version she reversed herself, calling Faulk a “spiritual aristocrat,” who would have no breakdowns.
Sontag seems to have been, by her own account, in a state of creative paralysis because she could not work out any sort of balanced life with Fornés. Sontag’s moods fluctuated between longing and anger. Her son, David, served as her ballast, preventing her from giving way to suicidal thoughts. She explored her sadomasochistic tendencies with a New York City therapist, Diana Kemeny. Sontag’s friend, the film critic Noël Burch, pointed out her contempt for others’ weaknesses even as Sontag herself worried about her deference to anyone who seemed an authority. And yet, as she reported in a diary entry for August 28, 1965 (104), she had her own train of men she led on, including Burch and George Lichtheim (a Marxist historian).
Looking for new sources of inspiration, and perhaps experiences that would relieve her anxiety, she traveled to visit the writer Paul Bowles in Tangier, where Alfred Chester—at one time her close friend—was also visiting. The manic Chester, for all his delusions, had created the kind of fiction Sontag wished to emulate. She even took the title of a Chester novel, I, Etc., and appropriated it for her own purposes. She noted that he did not try to establish time sequences and did not rely on a main character but instead assembled an enviable array of personalities. She would do the same in her short story collection, I, etcetera.
Sontag does not seem to have seen the irony of her irritated dismissal of Chester, who had become quite paranoid. She accused him of always seeking an “oracle” (105), a quest that she had also undertaken, including the days she spent with Chester in Paris, when she was first breaking away from her marriage and attempting to establish herself as a writer. And she described herself as falling for bullies like Harriet, Irene, and Alfred—all of whom became, for a time, her masters. The very idea of mastery, of being a master, is one aspect of her work in Under the Sign of Saturn. But Sontag’s stay in Morocco was troubled because she could not accept what she called the “international homosexual style” (108), as exemplified by her host, Paul Bowles, and his wife, Jane. To Sontag it was a cruel, heartless, and obsessive circle, and also one without much sense of mission. In this drug-taking environment in which kif “melts the brain” (109), she would not be able to write. She compared the stupor and disorientation of these writers in Tangier to de Sade’s insane asylum in Paris. She did not explain why she had been drawn to this alien group, except that it reminded her of that first weekend with her first lover, Harriet, when as a college student at Berkeley she was introduced to the gay and lesbian bar scene in San Francisco.
The figure of the artist, Thomas Faulk, continued to concern Sontag, but the nature of his project, the art he was supposed to create, is never quite revealed in the diaries, and perhaps that is one reason why Sontag abandoned the novel. So much of what she wrote about Faulk is cryptic because his background and attitudes are never clarified in the same way in which Sontag explored the art of her actress, Maryna Zaleska, in In America. Faulk seemed, in other words, too much of an abstraction of the artist, and he lacked the substantiality of Sontag’s attachment to writers like Borges, who established the labyrinthine and ambiguous nature of human relations and the art that fails to resolve the world’s paradoxes but heightens an awareness of the gap between life and art, which was, in Sontag’s view, the artist’s true subject.
The indeterminate nature of art was a key concept for Sontag, who rejected the notion of art as self-expression, as the record of insights she attributed to herself. Her thought, she insisted in a diary entry for November 20, 1965, did not drive her writing—not even in her diaries. On the contrary, the writing generated the thought. The writing of one day might very well yield different thoughts from the day before (143). The person Susan Sontag was a “banality” (149), she claimed a week later, when considering what she had said to her psychiatrist. The person does not count, only the professional. She liked to remain undecided about ideas, keeping them open, as Jasper Johns did.
Sontag saw herself as in the service of ideas. Although her diary entry for January 4, 1966, acknowledges the high quality of her mind, she did not rank herself as a genius—not on the level of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Sartre. The greatest thinkers had been demonic, she argued, and she was just too conventional in comparison to them and not “mad enough” (168).
Sontag paralleled her search for master thinkers with a restless travel itinerary, which she documented, David Rieff reports, at the beginning of a notebook dated 1966–67. From June 3 to September 21, 1966, she journeyed to London, Paris, Prague, Venice, Antibes, and back and forth between these locations. Sometimes she took her son, David, along with her. He was both a comfort and a distraction. With him, she still felt lonely; with him, she also felt like another person. She could not be herself. So much of the diary, in fact, is about Sontag’s frustration with not being herself, or with not measuring up to the self she thought she could become. She wanted to convert her experience—her travels and her reading—into a novel that kept changing in form. Should it be epistolary, a diary, an annotated poem, an encyclopedia, a confession, a list, a manual, or a compendium of documents? All of these already constituted the very diary in which she was jotting down these possibilities.
Sontag thought about how the world turns itself into an aesthetic experience. She visited the catacombs in Paris, and it was there that she explored a tunnel that later became the tunnel of death in Death Kit, although her diary does not make the connection. It is characteristic of her to dwell on the artistic treatment of death by referring in the same sentence to horror films and to Mario Praz’s famous work of scholarship Romantic Agony, and also to reading Foucault on the subject of madness, which, in Foucault’s words, is the “absolute break with the work of art” (171). In Sontag’s first two novels, the self disintegrates as Hippolyte and Diddy dissolve into their stories, unable to accomplish the feat of individuality that marks the bildungsroman.
The artist-thinker who self-destructs was very much a part of Sontag’s thinking and her experience. Her best friend, Susan Taubes, committed suicide and became the subject of a Sontag story, “Debriefing,” and in Sontag’s diary entry for June 26, 1966, she noted without comment, in lines set out like a poem:
Sylvia Plath:
Poet—
Husband, father
Two children—
Suicide— (174)
Sontag experienced both the euphoria and the ennui of marriage, the struggle to establish herself as a writer, the haunting yearning for a father who had died when she was quite young, her own role as mother—all of which bound her to Plath, although suicide never seems to have had any appeal to Sontag except as the absolute way of defining a response to life. Sontag was, however, subject to depression and understood the state of mind that led to madness or suicide. On July 5, 1966, Sontag placed her fictional character, Thomas Faulk, just above the name “Sylvia Plath” (176) in quotation marks, as though Plath had become, like Faulk, a character in Sontag’s mind, Sontag’s language. The use of quotation marks is noteworthy because of the way Sontag employed them in Against Interpretation, where “Adolf Hitler,” for example, was treated as both a historical figure but also as Leni Riefenstahl’s invention. In other words, there was a real Adolf Hitler but also “Adolf Hitler.” Incipient, then, in Sontag’s thinking, was a way to take on history and yet still represent it as a fiction, a mode of imagination she would practice in both The Volcano Lover and In America.
Sontag’s diaries, full of cryptic jottings, lists, and random thoughts, seem like so many dead ends, fragments of selves and stories that never quite congeal. As with the poem-like evocation of Plath, the diary passages seem opaque plaques of thought that Sontag could not quite figure out. These passages also seem, given the peripatetic nature of her existence, thoughts caught on the fly, picked up and put down at a moment’s notice, reflecting the intermittent nature of Sontag’s cerebration.
In an entry composed on June 26, 1966, in Paris, Sontag considered a novel that would have a narrator questioning who he is, where he is, and to whom he is talking, while also wondering what would happen next. Would this be a work of science fiction? Sontag’s diary is not clear on this point, but her desire to create a work not limited by the conventions of realism, or by the ordinary limits of language, seems evident in her quotations from Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” and “To imagine a language means to imagine a life” (174). Rather than seeing fiction as a representation of a world already formed, she struggled to conceive of a novel that is itself the world as created by her narrator. But she had already attempted precisely such a novel in The Benefactor and Death Kit, and it would be decades before she would relinquish Wittgenstein in favor of the most traditional form of all: the historical novel, which she would try to revive by insisting that fiction could rewrite history.
Sontag’s diaries reveal her uncertainty about the medium she wanted to explore. Writing in Paris on July 28, 1966, she observed that documentary film (she would eventually make one, Promised Lands) had a special authority, like the photograph, because it seemed to be an “image of reality.” Theater, on the other hand, was a “representation rather than a presentation” (182). So how could theater seem as authentic as documentary film? And yet plays like The Brig and Marat/Sade (the subject of an essay in Against Interpretation) had a vitality and vision that superseded most documentaries, or so it seems since Sontag singled them out while mentioning no specific documentary film. Television, she recognized, was becoming all encompassing, making Vietnam the “first television war” (182). She contrasted Artaud’s idea of a theater that transforms consciousness with television’s overwhelming presentation of images that dilute awareness. The ability of images to attenuate thought, if not obliterate it, would become one of the main contentions of On Photography.
Television’s tendency to display undifferentiated images is treated as almost a personal affront in Sontag’s diaries. She quoted her friend the actor Joseph Chaikin as saying, “I look to be offended” (184). Any medium that did not discriminate, carefully select, and distinguish troubled her, although in later years, especially in Regarding the Pain of Others, she expressed doubt that the plethora of images seen in photographs and on television do necessarily dull the senses and judgment. She recognized, in other words, that her arguments were exaggerations, unproven and open to correction.
In this period (August 1966), Sontag settled in London to watch the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski and British director Peter Brook rehearse their actors. Grotowski seemed to be putting on the stage a drama of human behavior that she treated with irony in The Benefactor. Exactly what Sontag meant is not clear, but it seems she was attracted to Grotowski’s experimental handling of actors who take possession of the stage, eschewing props, and making the performing space a projection of their characters’ thoughts and feelings, much as the narrative space in Sontag’s first two novels is a world emanating from her narrators, not a world her narrators simply inhabit or respond to. Grotowski fascinated her because, while Sontag treated her ideas as literary conceits, he took his own ideas as literally true. Thus she described Ryszard Cieslak, Grotowski’s celebrated star, as appearing virtually without clothes on a platform with the other characters revolving around him emitting a fantastic energy. The centripetal effect of this theater movement is what seems to have aroused Sontag, perhaps because it was a concrete manifestation, an embodiment of her early fiction.
Peter Brook had to translate everything Grotowski said, so that, in Sontag’s words, it was like watching a French movie with subtitles. Everything the British actors learned about the Grotowski method was filtered through Brook’s voice and manner, which, she noted, only increased Brook’s authority. The Brook and Grotowski dynamic resembled the doubling of authority figures in Sontag’s two Swedish films, which present two sensibilities reflecting Sontag’s bifurcated biography straddled between the worlds of London and Paris, and Paris and New York.
Although Sontag had given up the idea of an academic career, her diary reveals that well into the 1960s she still contemplated completing her Ph.D. with a thesis about consciousness of self in contemporary French philosophy. Her reading of Sartre, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot, coupled with her observations of Grotowski, whose seeming inertness fascinated her (as though he exemplified the aesthetics of silence), perhaps suggested the possibility of writing an academic work. She made a list exploring the roles of language, silence, art, religion, and Eros in the development and manipulation of self-consciousness. Interspersed with such ideas is, again, the figure of Grotowski himself, a kind of black column, dressed in shiny black shoes, black socks, and sunglasses. He seems almost to be a character in a fiction taking shape in Sontag’s diary and conceivably part of the two novellas she projected, both of which would have a theatrical presentation.
Role-playing in the theater, by its very nature, appealed to Sontag’s notion of the self as a creation of consciousness. But in her diary her various roles seem discontinuous: woman, mother, lover, teacher. How did they consort with one another? Part of Sontag’s confusion seems to have derived from her fraught relationship with her mother, which the diary treats at great length, showing how as a very young child Sontag’s mother demanded so much emotional support from her daughter that the daughter felt superior to the mother and craved her mother’s dependence so that Sontag could “become strong” and “stronger than ‘the others’” (211). This dynamic of dependence led to what Sontag called her cannibalizing of others’ experiences for her own purposes and the search for a project worthy of her ambitions and her “cosmic, voyaging mind” (213), as she put it in the long diary entry for August 9, 1967. That mind set her apart from her surroundings as definitively as Hippolyte’s dreaming does in The Benefactor. What made the affair with Fornés so disturbing is that Fornés forced Sontag to look at herself—that is, to use her mind for more than observing the world outside herself. The failure of Sontag’s first two protagonists, Hippolyte and Diddy, to break out of their solipsism is a fate Sontag barely escaped herself, and with Fornés’s help, even though that help caused Sontag great pain. Sontag had scaled down herself to fit at least somewhat comfortably in the lives of her family and friends, but Fornés showed the tremendous cost to Sontag of creating an unexamined self. In a striking phrase, Sontag referred to the “desexualized pedagogic friendship” (213) she specialized in before the advent of Fornés. The safety of dispassionate relationships meant that Sontag had failed to develop a complete self. It is no wonder, then, that even an academic study of self-consciousness would have considerable appeal to her. Only recently and fitfully had she been able to break her usual cycle of building up a new friend and then seeing that friend’s flaws, followed by the evasive approach-avoidance brand of intimacy and withdrawal that is so characteristic of her characters in Duet for Cannibals, Brother Carl, and Unguided Tour.
Theater and film became so much a part of Sontag’s psyche that she referred to the film stills on her walls as her “friends” (216), showing her a more glamorous world to which she aspired. Sontag noted her obsession with lists, suggesting that they are her way of establishing value—but in a self-contained world, since none of these pictures or characters could speak to her. The lists and posters were her way of maintaining her world (217), much as the constant allusions to artists and works of art bind together books like Against Interpretation.
In several diary entries in late 1967, Sontag accused herself of bad faith, of not really giving herself to Fornés as Sontag had promised to do. These passages shift away from a concern with the aesthetic view of life (as represented in The Benefactor) to the ethical view of Death Kit, as Sontag herself noted. Diddy is, in effect, forced to acknowledge the world outside himself—or at the very least to question the world inside himself—as Sontag repeatedly did with herself in her diaries. But how to move beyond the aesthetic/ethical dualism continued to perplex her.
Sontag’s involvement in political causes, especially in protests against the Vietnam War, seemed to contribute to her retreat from novel writing. Although she continued to write short, experimental pieces of fiction, she devoted most of her writing not only to nonfiction but to political commentary. Her diaries, according to David Rieff, include reports on her trip to Hanoi that he chose not to publish because they contained factual reports and “historical notations” (237) as well as lists of Vietnamese words. Except for a few representative examples of this reportorial material, he includes only one analytical entry about her trip, which, he implies, is more critical than what she published in Trip to Hanoi.
In an undated entry (Rieff estimates it was written on May 5 or 6, 1968, in Hanoi), Sontag expressed her frustration with the language barrier that made it hard not to speak in the simplest phrases through a translator. She felt infantilized, bundled along like a child in a carefully selected tour of certain sites. Even worse, she found herself behaving like an A student, eager to perform well for her hosts. She noted their rigid, formulaic hospitality, and at the start it looked as though learning anything of consequence was hopeless. The Vietnamese seemed to have no idea of how to treat her, or how she might react to their treatment of her. Yet she knew it was not what she had come to learn that was important but rather that her trip was a “piece of political theatre” (239). This aspect of her trip is never mentioned in Trip to Hanoi, which is perhaps one reason why David Rieff finds her published comments on North Vietnam so embarrassing. She never quite reckoned, in print, with the political ramifications of her trip. She was simply following the Vietnamese script, she noted in her diary, and yet she was untroubled by this and even said that this is how it “should be.” As she explained, she was part of a “corporate identity”: “friends of the Vietnamese struggle” (239). And so the trip was the group’s reward, their treat for their support and encouragement for the North Vietnamese cause. It was the propaganda value of the visit that counted, she realized. So the group was not required to do anything specific in terms of supporting the North or asking questions during this trip.
Sontag bridled at hearing the constant refrain that the North Vietnamese understood that the American people were their friends. They North Vietnamese knew nothing about America if they believed what they said, she noted, although what she thought of America is not stated. Her published work reflects considerable disdain for Americans and American history. The Vietnamese she met seemed without psychological complexity—a point that is made in Trip to Hanoi, which explores her uncomfortable realization that North Vietnamese culture had no place for someone like her, who thought like her, who questioned her own motivations. The Vietnamese were puzzled by her questions because they did not share her cross-cultural sensibility. As in Trip to Hanoi, she extolled the Cuban Revolution, finding in it a sensibility closer to her own and more relevant to the concerns of a sophisticated American like herself. North Vietnam was not a society where she felt free to talk about herself, to deal with personal concerns; instead, everyone seemed blanketed with a discreet and bland courteousness.
Especially distressing is Sontag’s discovery—one that is not explored in Trip to Hanoi—that North Vietnam was a hierarchical society in which everyone knew their place. She much preferred the “populist manners” (242) of the Cuban revolution. She learned that government people got special privileges, and she was dismayed at how everyone seemed to think that to have this kind of elite was proper in a Communist country. She quoted a fellow writer, Andrew Kopkind, as wondering if the North Vietnamese had egos.
David Rieff includes some of Andrew Kopkind’s comments about Sontag’s activities in North Vietnam, presumably because Sontag herself did not write about how she described American culture to the Vietnamese. She evidently spoke at some length. Kopkind did report on Sontag’s attacking Mark Sommer, an American journalist who praised the North Vietnamese for holding on to their humanity during the American bombing of their country. Sontag and Kopkind found Sommer’s comments condescending. Kopkind also mentioned that Sontag went to visit American prisoners of war, but how she felt about them is not disclosed, and it is a subject not dealt with in Trip to Hanoi. Kopkind only remarked that Sontag gave the prisoners news about political changes in the United States.
By August 1968 Sontag was in Stockholm at work on the first of her two films made in Sweden. Her diary entry on August 7 is a long reflection on her emerging femininity, her discovery that she liked bright, colorful clothes and flowers, and this reveling in beautiful objects was such a change from the black, grey, and brown world of her marriage. The sources of her interest in camp and the emerging aesthetic that informs Against Interpretation are evident in passages about her involvement with the male homosexual world that had liberated her and made it more possible for her to be “more genuinely a woman” (254). These exuberant thoughts seemed to prepare for her expressed hope that one day someone who loved her would read her diaries and feel closer to her. In one of the few passages that deals directly with the purpose of the diaries, Sontag stated that the writing is for herself and that she felt edified by simply writing down her thoughts.
Curiously, Sontag’s notebooks say nothing at all about filming in Sweden but are rather a record of her reading Chekhov, Melville, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Conrad, Agatha Christie, Artaud, and Adorno, as well as of her reflections on revolutionaries such as Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg—in response, perhaps, to the student revolt in France in 1968. From 1968 to 1970 she wrote very little in her diaries as she moved between Paris and New York, involved with a new lover, the Italian aristocrat Carlotta del Pezzo, a recovering drug addict whom Sontag had to treat warily because of Carlotta’s fear that she would become dependent on Sontag. As in Sontag’s first two novels, love was bound up with power, with concerns about who was the dominant figure in an affair. Sontag told herself that she needed to be strong but also permissive, an object of desire but not one that overwhelmed the beloved—a dynamic she explored in her essay “The Pornographic Imagination,” included in Styles of Radical Will.
Women’s issues and women’s liberation began to filter into the diaries in the early 1970s, although Sontag’s engagement with feminism as a political movement is fitful and quickly subsumed into her worries over her affair with Carlotta del Pezzo, an increasingly problematic relationship, according to Sontag, because Carlotta could not see herself as the author of her own existence. But the main problem, Sontag noted, is that she saw life as a series of “projects.” Indeed, this is the key to her attitude toward herself and her writing: Both were in progress, which meant that Sontag felt incomplete, dissatisfied, and anxious about the outcome of her activities. In a long passage dated February 17, 1970, Sontag explored the nature of women in a way absent in her other writing. In her published work, her comments on feminism and Women’s Liberation are usually expressions of solidarity, whereas in her diary she dwelt more on how women have represented the “Southern” (279) values of softness, amiability, and a mentality less concerned with ideas and more spontaneous and emotional than men. The exercise of the will is regarded as a masculine attribute, she suggested, and that made it difficult for Carlotta to assert herself.
Sontag’s comments on her filmmaking began to inform the diaries in mid-1970. On July 16. 1970, for example, she noted that Brother Carl dealt with the nature of love, sadism, and masochism—all of which had pervaded her diary accounts of her love affairs with Harriet Sohmers, Maria Irene Fornés, and Carlotta del Pezzo. In fact, her writing the script for Brother Carl occurred as Sontag began to mourn the end of her affair with Carlotta. The movie, like the earlier Duet for Cannibals, is in part about love that is lost and cannot be repaired.
The early 1970s are an interregnum for Sontag, who had trouble writing an essay on women’s liberation while working out why her love affairs had failed, mulling over an invitation to visit China, and the story that would become “Project for a Trip to China.” Notes for essays on travel, death, revolution, film, and false starts on novels and films are strewn across entries for several days in the early 1970s. As David Rieff reports, Sontag’s trip to China yielded very little material—only desultory notes in her diaries. Reflecting on both civil rights and women’s liberation, Sontag declared herself a “pure integrationist” in a January 7, 1973, entry, affirming her opposition to “sex-specific standards” (353). The stories she found she could write, like “Debriefing” and “Baby,” were autobiographical. And she attributed this new vein in her work to her essay on Paul Goodman, which put her in touch with her American voice.
One of the most revealing diary entries was written on December 23, 1973, probing her bifurcated sensibility—part Flaubert, part Simone Weil, Sontag noted. Of the former she identified with his ambition, egotism, arrogance, sensuality, and dishonesty; and of the latter she cited ambition and egotism as well, but also an asceticism and quest for purity and honesty. These contradictions, Sontag believed, are at the heart of her paradoxical behavior. She was reading a biography of Weil and was dismayed at what she learned about the writer, especially Weil’s denial of her sexuality and femininity, but Sontag’s own puritanism (a term she often used in the diary in relation to herself) matched Weil’s own desire for a life unencumbered by the body, an immaculate state that both Weil and Sontag associated with wisdom. This fascinating passage seems to explain why Sontag was so chary of dealing with herself in her nonfiction work—why, when she wrote about camp and AIDS, for example, she made no references to her own homosexuality.
By the mid-1970s Sontag was rethinking positions taken in Against Interpretation. She was looking for a new vocabulary. The culture had changed, and perhaps she had to engage in an argument with herself to refresh her views. No longer did it seem necessary to speak of liberation, especially since what seemed groundbreaking in the 1960s had since been absorbed into the mainstream. The New Left, she concluded, had not really created an alternative culture, and this recognition signals her reevaluation of the left, which seemed to be fighting old battles. Her entry for May 16, 1975, marks the beginning of an evolution in her politics that would become evident in her Town Hall speech calling Communism “Fascism with a human face.”
Surrounded by a faithful, select circle of friends, and comforted by her new liaison with the French actress and producer Nicole Stéphane, Sontag reflected on her attraction to “custodial relationships” (384). In this case, Stéphane became the one to take care of Sontag as Sontag believed she had taken care of her mother, who made Sontag almost into a sibling and confidant. Out of the renewal of her life in Paris and New York and a continuing interest in film, Sontag found a way to refashion the ideas of Against Interpretation by attacking Leni Riefenstahl, whose work she had defended as art, even if its propaganda was fascist. On July 19, 1975, she came to the conclusion that there “really is a ‘fascist aesthetics’” (388). It was not possible to speak simply of the form of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. The politics governed or at least coexisted with the film’s form. This entry asks over and over again what it means to employ aesthetic judgment alone without some kind of moral standard.
Sontag’s diary is curiously silent about the breast cancer diagnosis that gave her very little chance of surviving the disease. The truncated nature of her entries is perhaps an indication of her exhaustion in the summer of 1976 during a period of intensive chemotherapy. She mentioned her fear once. Although in earlier entries she referred to her constant thoughts about death, such thoughts do not make an appearance as a response to her surgery and other medical treatments. One of the few comments on cancer comes from an intern at Sloan-Kettering who noted that the disease “doesn’t knock at your door first.” It is, Sontag added, “insidious,” a “secret invasion” (408).
Even as she was recovering from cancer treatment, Sontag was reading Walter Benjamin and formulating the arguments about photography that would be yet another way for her to revisit the form/content nexus of Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will. And she was thinking of titles for what would ultimately become Illness as Metaphor. As Nicole Stéphane gradually faded from Sontag’s life, the Russian writer and emigrant to America Joseph Brodsky took her place. He becomes in the diaries a kind of touchstone for Sontag’s own opinions and observations. They argued as well, but Brodsky appears in the diaries almost as Sontag’s other voice.
Sontag’s growing interest in dance—she seems to have considered it superior to other arts in America—appears in her entry for February 25, 1979. Twyla Tharp’s choreography, Sontag asserted, reconciled her to “being an American” (481). Full of ideas for stories and also a book she was planning to write about her visits to Japan, Sontag was seemingly energized by the imminent publication of her stories in I, etcetera. The death of Roland Barthes, which she announced in her diary on March 26, 1980, was a momentous event for her, since he was as important as Brodsky in sharing a kind of fellowship of ideas, but she seemed undisturbed and even measured about his passing, noting that while he became a “real writer,” he could not “purge himself of his ideas” (503)—a statement that appears to reflect her own desire to abandon nonfiction prose for fiction. She was trying to make a transition that Barthes, by implication, was not able to achieve.
Although she was nearly a decade away from writing The Volcano Lover, her May 9, 1980, entry dwells on the pathos of the intellectual and the collector, two of the major themes of her novel. And here the diaries break off, to be resumed only when David Rieff publishes the third and final volume.