Rieff’s notes are helpful but sparing, and he does not much go into his criteria for including or excluding material. It would appear, if only from the lack of moorings, that what we read was not meant for other eyes—at least, as Rieff says, in its current form. But now and again Sontag seems to sense someone peeking over her shoulder. Perhaps it’s herself. Certainly the entries concerning the event of her marriage are so tightly sealed that one would think the author hardly wanted herself to learn of it. On November 21, 1949, she writes:
Excellently staged performance of Don Giovanni last night (City Center.) Today, a wonderful opportunity was offered me—to do some research work for a soc[iology] instructor named Philip Rieff, who is working on, among other things, a reader in the sociology of politics + religion. At last the chance to really involve myself in one area with competent guidance.
The following entry is on December 2:
Last night, or was it early this (Sat.) morning?—I am engaged to Philip Rieff. [ Next to this entry, in the margin, SS notes: Jennie Tourel Das Marienleben.]
The next we hear of Rieff is Sontag’s entry of January 3, which appears in the diary section of 1950, but was, according to her son, written a full year later:
I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.
And that’s all we hear about it for a long time. But by now we have learned about the release and joy that her exuberant sexual experiments with other girls have brought her, and of her intermittent, triumphant embrace of sensual pleasure. In fact, the word “reborn”—which appears on May 31, 1949, “Everything begins from now—I am reborn,” and again on the inside cover of the notebook that runs from May 7, 1949, until that date, “I AM REBORN IN THE TIME RETOLD IN THIS NOTEBOOK”—seems to refer not only generally to the flowering autonomy and self-awareness of the teenage author, but, more specifically, to the flowering of her sexual expression and self-awareness as well.
We have also learned, however, of her attempts to demonstrate to herself that her homosexual yearnings are inessential ones, and of the difficulty of her struggles to reconcile herself in one way or another with her sexuality. So we recognize that the marriage has been undertaken with the rashness of panic, and the despairing finality, the very brevity of the entry, is like the somber tolling of a bell.
What she does write about in the interval between her engagement and her marriage—and this with detailed gusto—is her visit with two school friends to Thomas Mann. God, as she refers to him, obligingly speaks to his young worshipers at some length about his work and about the work of other writers. Sontag records a meticulous-seeming account of his remarks, and Rieff provides this note: ” Above the page setting down the last of these comments by Mann, SS writes: ‘The author’s comments betray his book with their banality.’”
In an entry of a few years later—January 19, 1953—Sontag recounts idly opening a volume of Kafka stories while she waits for Philip in a bookstore and reading a page of “The Metamorphosis”:
It was like a physical blow, the absoluteness of his prose, pure actuality nothing forced or obscure. How I admire him above all other writers! Beside him, Joyce is so stupid, Gide so—yes—sweet, Mann so hollow + bombastic. Only Proust is as interesting—almost. But Kafka has that magic of actuality in even the most dislocated phrase that no other modern has, a kind of shiver + grinding blue ache in your teeth.
Incisive, and splendidly persuasive. And twenty is a far cry from fifteen; it’s inevitable that Sontag will have refined her childish enthusiasms. Still, one can’t suppress a twinge of pity for poor sweet old Gide, mundane Proust, and stupid Joyce—to say nothing of hollow, bombastic God. Was it really necessary that he be sacrificed in order that Kafka might live and prosper in the blaze of her admiration? It’s shattering to imagine what she might have said had she thought to mention that friend of her youth, Hilaire Belloc!
School had the advantage of getting her away from the home she found so oppressively tiresome, and also certainly would have provided the most efficient access to the broad array of intellectual matter she aspired to absorb. But amassing information for its own sake seemed contemptible to Sontag, or pitiable, and like so many young people who hope to lead the life of the mind, she despised what she considered to be the airlessness and rigidity of academic life. And scholarly legitimacy is conferred by the opinions of earlier and, presumably, more powerful thinkers—which can present a dilemma for the person who wishes her writings to be vital and unorthodox as well as impeccably solid. Unhappily, Sontag’s uneasy relationship to academia appears to have corresponded to her feelings about her sexuality.
Here are some fragments about Al, a Berkeley schoolmate of Sontag’s, from an entry of late May 1949. At the time, Sontag was in disarray over a girl named Irene Lyons—who was, interestingly enough, the lover of a girl named H., who soon became Sontag’s first lover.
Al himself, and my relationship to him, really personify all my longing to retreat to the intellect, all my fears and inhibitions concerning life. He is twenty-two, ex–merchant marine…extremely handsome in the classic sense…. He wants to write, but doesn’t dare to because he’s afraid it would be very bad—and it probably would…. On a recent date he confessed to me that he hadn’t eaten all day just to discipline himself. He has, I think, a very capable mind—one of the finest intellects I’ve yet come in contact with—Although it’s absurd to imagine him a virgin, yet I’m sure he is normally wholly continent, and feels tremendously guilty about his rare lapses into sin….
We discussed everything from Bach cantatas to Mann’s Faustus to pragmatism to hyperbolic functions to the Cal Labor School to Einstein’s theory of curved space…. We both talked brilliantly, and everything seemed very clear to me because, at that moment, I had rejected more than I ever had: the totality of wandering and laziness and sun and sex and food and sleep and music…. I felt very confident that my decision to teach was right, that nothing really mattered except acceptable and mentally-digested experiences….
I could win out yet against life—against my own passionateness….
This would be heartrending coming from anyone, but from the coauthor of Gide’s journals and future author of “Notes on Camp” it is exponentially so.
In fact, Sontag was interested in experience, which spills over the confines of most academic categories. And it seems reasonable to say that her real, though not explicitly stated, objective—and eventual achievement—was to develop the ability to synthesize many sorts of information, in order to make the meaningful imaginative leap. But the objects of her zealous contemplation naturally also served as whetstones to sharpen her critical faculties, and she would sometimes measure against one another, brutishly, not only literary giants but also, apparently, friends, elevating and lowering them in her estimation at one another’s expense, and, like the Queen of Hearts, send heads rolling. Sontag was not one to find anything funny either about her ringing pronouncements or about their equally ringing repeal, or to question in any way her self-issued mandate for laying down the law, or indeed whether the law need always be laid down.
And of course, ranking is an adjunct of criticism in any field of art or thought. But for Sontag it seems to have been less an intellectual stance than it was part of a constellation of burdensome characteristics, deeply rooted in her personality—though hardly exclusive to her—which she comes to identify and, for a while at least, to refer to as X. Here are bits about X from entries throughout February 1960 (“I.” is Irene Maria Fornes, Sontag’s lover at the time):
I. thinks “X” is the reason I can’t talk to two people at a time (but always focus on one) and also why I block other people out—even casual intruders like waiters—when I am with someone….
So with each person I betray everyone else. Then after I feel guilty, my accounts are messed up again….
I didn’t feel X toward Philip. Because I was satisfying his demands as well as I could, because I wasn’t discussing him with anyone else, because he was #1.
“X” is when you feel yourself an object, not a subject. When you want to please and impress people, either by saying what they want to hear, or by shocking them, or by boasting + name-dropping, or by being very cool.
America a very X-y country….
The tendency to be indiscreet—either about oneself or about others (the two often go together, as in me)—is a classic symptom of X….
How many times have I told people that Pearl Kazin was a major girlfriend of Dylan Thomas? That Norman Mailer has orgies? That [F.O.] Matthiessen was queer? All public knowledge, to be sure, but who the hell am I to go advertising other people’s sexual habits?
How many times have I reviled myself for that, which is only a little less offensive than my habit of name-dropping…. And my habit of criticizing people if other people invite it….
I have always betrayed people to each other. No wonder I’ve been so high-minded and scrupulous about how I use the word “friend”!…
The source of X is: I don’t know my own feelings….
…So I look to other people (the other person) to tell me. Then the other person tells me what he or she would like my feelings to be….
…That’s why I’m so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be. Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal directly?…
All the things that I despise in myself are X: being a moral coward, being a liar, being indiscreet about myself + others, being a phony, being passive.
“Think of Blake,” she exhorts herself in September 1961; “He didn’t smile for others.” And “No matter what I have said,” she writes in January 1960, “my life, my actions say that I have not loved the truth, that I have not wanted the truth.”
Of course, many people who are fastidiously devoted to honesty and courage are people to whom those qualities don’t necessarily come easily. And Sontag is to be very much respected, in my view, for confronting in herself some of the very characteristics to which she had the greatest aversion.
She was under a great deal of pressure to do so, as her erotic and emotional life was, during the later years of this volume, chasteningly unsatisfactory: both I. and I.’s predecessor H., with whom Sontag continued an affair in Paris, seemed to find it unavoidable (in Sontag’s account, anyhow) to heap humiliations upon her in the form of repeated withdrawal of affection and approval, rebukes concerning her character and her lack of psychological acuity, and criticisms of her lovemaking. Still, pressure alone will not make us take an exacting look at ourselves—courage is indispensable to the effort.
Just as we see her courage in these passages, we see the lack of it in her entries about her sorrowful marriage, whose difficulties she blames—backing herself up with a goon squad of geniuses that included Tillich and Rilke—on the institution itself, rather than on the predictable consequence of her self-deception. Though perhaps it wasn’t entirely self-deception; on February 20, 1958, she writes, about H.:
The torment of lying, sleepless, beside the body one uniquely desires, and not being able to break through, to command desire in return…. Awful awful feeling of ‘déja été,’ for I did desire Philip tremendously during the first year.
Sontag berates herself in these years not only for her falseness and her moral cowardice, but for obtuseness, sexual inadequacies, compulsive seductiveness, failure to live as she believes she ought to be living, boasting, and failure to bathe with sufficient frequency. What a contrast the private woman in her mid-twenties, plagued by uncertainties and shame, presents to the other Susan Sontags—the girl we first meet in the pages of her journal, the author of the published work, and the public personality, all of whom are serenely, enviably decisive, utterly secure in their swift and severe—and blithely disjunctive—judgments, glitteringly charming, irrepressibly curious, bracingly diligent, fearlessly provocative, and immensely appetitive, to use a word which shows up now and again in her work, lustrous with her approval.
While she’d been busy ministering to the intellect she was more or less wholly pleased with, her character had gone largely unobserved. The obstructions it had been placing in her path were by now evident and highly inconvenient, and she was helpless to dislodge them. But no matter how accurate her grim tally of her faults may have been, it is a fact that the “real”—as distinguished from self-portrayed—person demonstrated inarguable honesty and moral as well as physical courage in her visit to Hanoi during the Vietnam War and her famous residency in Sarajevo during the siege. It has probably been said, cynically, that such ventures kept her in the limelight and that she believed herself, narcissistically, to be invulnerable—but it would be ridiculous to discount the difficulty and even danger she put herself in, and the very real unpopularity in many prominent circles of her convictions at those and other times.
No doubt everyone is an amalgam of inassimilable and contradictory tendencies, but in Sontag—who used more cubic area of her being than most people—the conflicts were perhaps enacted with unusual vigor, and perhaps the paradoxes are unusually conspicuous. Moreover, a journal is under no obligation to be consistent either in its form or purposes. We cannot know what it is that a journal actually reflects, generally or at any given moment—how transient or deep the author’s impulse, how exact, how distorted…what function the enterprise is serving. Obviously a journal mirrors no one but its author, but a mirror reflects largely what we instruct it to.
Here, from December 31, 1957, is what Sontag herself says on the subject:
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.
The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.
There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions. I am thinking now of what I read today…in H.’s journal about me—that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concludes by her saying that she really doesn’t like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune. God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated. We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us)…. Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal. Will H. ever read this?
We will see in the two ensuing volumes whether there will be any alteration of the profound unhappiness Sontag describes—whether she manages to surmount it or at least to expand other, countervailing, areas of emotional experience. We know from her writing and her public persona that elements of X endure throughout her life, but perhaps she manages to turn them to more benign effect, privately, than she does in the years recorded here.
“Pain” is a word that Rieff uses in his introduction, and it is the right one—there is so much pain here! And the dream of disclosure and revenge that is pain’s index. We have been dared to read. Sontag did not destroy her journals nor did she restrict them. The wound feels fresh, though the author—still amply capable of inflicting pain, herself—is beyond comfort.
