The Second Volume of Susan Sontag’s Diaries
When she was 13, Susan Sontag "made a rule": "No daydreaming." The habit of idle reflection, to most writers part of the job, seemed to her not so much a waste of time as a threat to stability: "Being intelligent isn't, for me, like doing something 'better,' " she confided to her journal in 1973. "It's the only way I exist. If I'm not [being] intelligent, I hover near being catatonic."
Illustration by Grafilu
Susan Sontag
AS CONSCIOUSNESS IS HARNESSED TO FLESH
Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
By Susan Sontag
Edited by David Rieff
523 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $ 30.
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Times Topic: Susan Sontag
The reader of "As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh" might wish to strike out "catatonic" and insert "self-absorbed" or "self-lacerating" or "self-pitying" — malign spirits in danger of possessing Sontag whenever she paused from thinking. "I'm being wasted by self-pity and self-contempt," she wrote on her 38th birthday (Jan. 16, 1971), the pithiest voicing of a frequently repeated sentiment. Just occasionally, she wanders close to distraction — not yielding to daydream, exactly, but failing to focus on the matter at hand:
"I couldn't react to Joe [Chaikin's] news today — that he would shortly have a very dangerous heart operation followed by six months' convalescence. I couldn't feel, I couldn't concentrate — even while he was talking. . . . I started to feel anxious, depressed, restless. But not about him. About me: Where was I? Why couldn't I lay hands on my feelings?"
"As Consciousness" is the second of three projected volumes of Sontag's diaries, edited by her son, David Rieff. The first, "Reborn" (2008), began in 1947, when she was 14, and ended in 1963, the year of publication of her debut novel, "The Benefactor." By the time she opened a new notebook in May 1964, she was developing into a writer adept at both fact and fiction. What distinguishes Sontag from other two-handers, like Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, is her worship of intellectualism as a goal in itself. The essays of her first nonfiction book, "Against Interpretation" (1966), are anything but "against": they are smothered by the impulse to catch and classify not only her ideas but those of others. The book is a testament to an implausibly wide range of reading, some of it, like the essays on Camus and Nathalie Sarraute, worth revisiting; but with a good deal of creaky opinion too. "All thought, as Sartre knows, universalizes." Does it? Does he? Change it to "All thought, as Sartre knows, particularizes," and it makes just as much sense. In the same year as her essay "Sartre's 'Saint Genet' " was written, 1963, the 30-year-old confided to her diary: "Loving is the highest mode of valuing, preferring. But it's not a state of being." The preferred state of being was "being intelligent." Low moods color the pages of "As Consciousness," and perhaps the lowest was when she suspected she was "becoming just as stupid as everybody else." In August 1968, having neglected her journal for some time, she awoke with a "mini-thought," which offered fleeting pleasure. "So I spoke out loud, rather self-consciously: 'Well, what do you know. An idea!' . . . And the sound of my voice in this room with nobody but me here profoundly depressed me."
Part of the despair derived from the absence of a female friend. There is a great deal here about conflicts with lovers, mostly though not exclusively female, much of it couched in Sontag's signature style of self-analysis: "Diana [Kemeny] — no neg[ative] transference; doesn't permit anger, tears; my accomplice; tell me something in detail." Time after time, love lets her down. The most poignant feature of these diaries is the evidence they contain of the diarist trying to feel, but forced to confess to an inability to do so. Love was fickle; only ideas offered constancy (or seemed to: Sontag was famous for her recantations, as well as for her certainties).
James Campbell is an editor at The Times Literary Supplement. His books include a biography of James Baldwin, “Talking at the Gates,†and a collection of essays, “Syncopations.â€
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