Carl Van Vechten—a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and author better known now for his photographs—once wrote in an essay in his 1919 essay collection, In the Garret, that: 

“The notebooks of an artist always make interesting reading. These ideas, incidents and descriptions, these jottings down against the treachery of memory, which some day may fall into their proper places, often exhibit, when published, a more spontaneous grace than finished work.”     

The notebooks of Susan Sontag can be both enlightening and maddening. Having read this book (consisting of entries made from 1947 to 1963), one can see that Susan Sontag was a mass of contradictions. But most lives are made up based around little contradictions. These notebooks are the early chronicles of one of America’s most famous writers—the journey from self-conscious teenager to cultural critic and provocative essayist. But I must warn those who are curious about Sontag’s inner life—it’s not a journey for the weak of heart. Some may be put off by the differences in her persona (the occasionally cold and detached person she was in public versus her secret insecurities and judgmental self-consciousness.)    

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

*    *    * 

Susan Sontag was a writer, provocateur, intellectual, activist, filmmaker and an obsessive list-maker. The diary holds list upon list: books to buy, books to read, films seen, films to see, plays to see and records to listen to. Judging from the selections (mind you, just selections) from the multitude of lists which David Rieff has let come into print, I wonder if he might someday release a spin-off volume—The Sontag Lists. I’m sure there’s plenty of material left.     

“There are so many books and plays and stories I have to read—Here are just a few:    

The Counterfeiters by Gide    

The Immoralist— Gide    

Lafcadio’s Adventures— Gide   

Corydon— Gide    

Tar—Sherwood Anderson     

The Island Within—Ludwig Leisohn    

Sanctuary—William Faulkner    

Esther Waters—George Moore    

Diary of a Writer—Dostoyevsky

Against the Grain—Huysmans    

The Disciple—Paul Borurget    

Sanin—Mikhail Artsybashev    

Johnny Got His Gun—Dalton Trumbo    

The Forsyte Saga—Galsworthy    

The Egoist—George Meredith    

Diana of the Crossways— Meredith    

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel— Meredith

poems of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Tibullus, Heine, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire     

plays of Synge, O’Neill, Calderon, Shaw, Hellman…” 

Rieff notes in an annotation that the list continues for another five pages, listing over one hundred titles. It is a daunting list—an absurd homework assignment, if you will—especially when you consider that Sontag was fourteen at the time.     

A year later, at fifteen, Sontag would graduate from North Hollywood High School; soon after she would go to Berkley. She would then transfer to the University of Chicago—then the stomping ground for many important 20^th century writers, musicians and intellectuals: Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, Philip Glass, Paul Goodman, Norman Maclean, Philip Roth, Studs Terkel, Philip Rieff and Seymour Hersh.    

It is at the University of Chicago that Sontag would meet Philip Rieff, author of Freud: Mind of the Moralist. She married him after a courtship which lasted less than two weeks.    

Sontag’s journals and diaries document the rise and fall of her love affair with Rieff, as well as the many men and women she had affairs with before, during and after their marriage. One woman by the name of “H.” appears several times in the journals. She is Sontag’s first love. Sontag writes of her on-again/off-again relationship with H. as both tender (“The first time H. kissed me, I was still stiff… we talked some more… H. and I [finally] fell asleep on a narrow cot in the back of the Tin Angel”) and torturous (“The fantastic brutal insult of her love-making Thursday night—total estrangement yesterday… Did I know what was wrong?”, “I couldn’t rid myself of the awareness of her unhappiness…” and “Me to H.: ‘It’s rather that you’re bored with yourself. You can’t build your life around emotional and sexual tourism. You need a vocation…’”)    

Sontag seems to have had trouble handling her personal relationships. She had her flaws, but she (almost) always chose lovers that were more flawed than she was. Of course, Sontag had a predisposition towards perfectionism—not just towards herself, but towards everyone. The only person that she does not seem to be angry about is her son, the editor of these journals. 

*    *    * 

What happens when an author dies?    

I don’t mean the person themselves, I mean what happens to their work—their unpublished work, things they may never have intended for us to see. Since Sylvia Plath’s suicide, we have seen (by my count) at least four collections of her work which were collected, edited and published under the watchful eye of her husband, Ted Hughes. Would she have chosen to include her verse-drama Three Women in any of her collections, had she lived? Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian literary giant of the 20^th Century (along with Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Akhmatova) died leaving his The Original of Laura, a novel, unfinished. On his deathbed, he asked his wife to burn the manuscript. She died before she could decide whether or not to comply with his wishes. His son, Dmitri, has since spent much of the last thirty years deciding what to do with the book (he has finally decided it will be published in the fall of this year).    

When Sontag was dying, Rieff attempted to find out what was to become of her diaries. Should he publish them or sell them? Should he destroy them? Rieff explains the problem in his preface: 

“By the time she fell ill for the last time, in the spring of 2004, there were close to a hundred such notebooks. And others turned up as her last assistant, Anne Jump, and her closest friend, Paolo Dilonardo, and I were sorting through her effects in the year after her death. I had only the vaguest idea of what was in them. The sole conversation I ever had with my mother about them was when she first fell ill and had not yet rekindled her own belief that she would survive her blood cancer as she had the two previous cancers she had suffered from in her lifetime. And it consisted of a single, whispered sentence: ‘You know where the dairies are.’ She said nothing about what she wanted me to do with them.” 

Rieff later wrote a memoir of his mother’s final illness, Swimming in a Sea of Death, which—though it does not provide much new information on Susan Sontag’s personal life or her final illness—is a class-A exercise in masochism. Rieff pours over her illness time and time again. I could pull numerous examples from the text of the book that would suggest that he is still not over his mother’s death, despite what he has said in interviews. However, I believe the words written in the preface by Anne Jump and Paolo Dilonardo to Sontag’s last collection of essays—At the Same Time—proves that Sontag herself did not intend to die, thus making her death more shocking to those around her. They remark that, when she died, she was either working on or planning, “…a third, more autobiographical book on illness, a novel set in Japan, and a collection of stories, she intended to publish a new collection of essays, ‘my last one,’ as she used to say, before returning to fiction.”    

Sontag’s diaries, as well as the book written by her son and the numerous articles published about her since her death, have an odd way of blending the past with the present. Sontag herself would do this in her work. One example sticks out clearly in my mind: I remember after the death of Leni Riefenstahl—the controversial documentarian whose films Victory of Faith, Triumph of the Will and Olympia are both hailed as masterpieces of cinematographic invention (“years ahead of the times” is the phrase I keep hearing) and decried as Nazi propaganda—almost every even-handed obituary I could find (and even the not-so even-handed) mentioned Susan Sontag’s essay/critique “Fascinating Fascism” (collected in Under the Sign of Saturn). In this essay which touches on some of Riefenstahl’s work as a photographer in the post-WWII era, Sontag claims that the photographs (which helped raise awareness as to the plight of the Nuba’s) only reinforce the theory that Riefenstahl still believed in the Nazi ideal. In short, she states that she believes a person cannot change. What they did in the past, whether it be infidelity or propaganda, makes them who they are now.    

In other cases, particularly in her novels In America and The Volcano Lover, Sontag uses the idea of bringing the past into the present (and vice-versa) as the jumping-off point—as if Sontag believed everything that happened “now” had its roots in “then”, which is true. A writer cannot escape his or her past. Sontag’s journals (among others) prove this. 

*    *    * 

Susan Sontag was the kind of person who would, I imagine, look back on her teenage years reading Proust and be upset with the time she wasted going to see John Wayne movies with her father—a very small percentage of her time, if the journals are believed. She was a constant self-critic. These diaries have lists of self-resolutions from the typical (be more serious) to the ones that border on overkill (smile less).    

And yet I know many people (including myself) who would wish to have had her intelligence, her glamour, her wit and dedication to furthering the knowledge of literature. I would have killed to be able to read Gide and Faulkner when I was fourteen—and actually know what they were talking about. I would have loved to have gone to class with Saul Bellow or Allen Bloom. And yet, Sontag looks back on her (then) recent past with mostly self-loathing and anger for the things she didn’t do, the books she didn’t read because she was too busy helping Philip Rieff research for Freud: Mind of the Moralist or the films she missed seeing because her love-affairs got in the way.    

As I’ve said before, in the end, Sontag’s journals are not for the weak of heart. Cruel characterizations mix with unique art and literary theories (the beginnings of Against Interpretation spring up from these diaries). Loving descriptions of her son are mixed with curses and damnations for his father or one of Sontag’s ex-lovers.

This book is a collection of high and low points, at once dull and then incredibly interesting.    

The book is a life.