The chief appeal of the private journals of Susan Sontag is to those who are interested in the lives of writers
By BETH KISSILEFFSusan Sontag521(photo credit: Reuters)
I recently sent an article I’d written to two good friends. They wrote back, “Looks like some good notes that can be shaped into an article” and “Um, have you proofed this yet?” I had sent the wrong file and was embarrassed to have people I respect see the disheveled mess of my notes.Thus, this reviewer feels a bit ashamed and voyeuristic about delving into the private journals of a writer who worked famously hard to shape her prose and ideas into exquisite sentences, which garnered her many accolades. We are, after all, reading raw, even random writings, which Sontag would not have necessarily wanted to be made widely available. Of the life as chronicled in these journals, Sontag’s son and editor David Rieff writes that they are “true to herself, that is to her life as she lived it,” although reading them shows many sorrows and “it was not the life I would have wished for her.”The many works Sontag did publish will continue to be read for many years to come, especially her criticism, particularly “Notes on Camp,” “Illness as Metaphor” and “On Photography.” Her fiction too is of lasting interest. Sontag won a National Book Award in 2000 for her novel “In America,” and her short stories, particularly “The Way We Live Now,” published in The New Yorker in 1986, continue to be widely read and studied.So why read these journals then, the second of a projected three volumes? (The first, covering the period 1947 to 1963, was published five years ago.) Their chief appeal is to those, such as myself, who are interested in the lives of writers. I want to know how these undigested and sketchy pieces of thought could make their way to become appetizing morsels that any reader is eager to consume. How did she become the persona celebrated in her New York Times obituary as “undoubtedly the only writer of her generation to win major literary prizes… and to appear in films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol; to be the subject of rapturous profiles in Rolling Stone and People magazines; and to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad.”However the editor, her son David Rieff, does not offer much assistance to readers, not even an index. It would have been helpful to have a chronology in the back, listing pieces she was working on at the time these entries were made, so that readers could have a sense of what public record the private thoughts were aiming toward. Although there is a listing of books she has read and movies she has seen, information about how and where she quoted and referenced them in her work would have been of interest. A reader is left unsure who all the cast of characters referred to in her life are, though there are some full names given where Sontag used initials, and having little idea of where these entries fit in the larger structure of her life.Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in 1933; her name was changed to her stepfather’s when her mother remarried after her father’s untimely death of tuberculosis when she was five. The evidence in this journal is that she seems to have always felt connected with her identity as a Jew. She directed the 1974 documentary film “Promised Lands” about the ongoing Arab/Israeli conflict, filmed in the final days and aftermath of the Yom Kippur War.Though the journals cover the time period in which the movie was made, there is only a half page devoted to her time in Israel. And some of this limited space is taken up by her meeting with the Hebrew University scholar of Kabbala Gershom Scholem, who “paled” at the mention of Jacob Taubes, her professor at Harvard. In 2001, she was the recipient of the Jerusalem Prize and said at the time that she would not use the occasion to make political remarks. She thought “that there should be a Palestinian state, that the settlements in the territories should be disbanded,” and these views found their way into her documentary.However, she did not see that as a reason not to go to Jerusalem to accept the honor, as some people suggested to her.Her journals evince a similar attitude to Jews and Judaism, viewed through a critical filter, yet tempered by love and pride. In speaking of “home analysis” with friends, she says she prefers this to her analyst in some ways because she “can analyze the cultural [Jewish, American, psychoanalytic, etc.] forms of my consciousness, not just their sources in my individual psychobiography.”Her amusing take on those in the Soviet Union who marry Jews in order to be able to leave the country: “In the Soviet Union Jews are a means of transport.” Judaism is seen as central to her struggles when she writes that “misogyny (sexism), anti-Semitism and antiintellectualism” are the three evils against which she struggles.On reading her journals, we learn that the first thing she published, in the Partisan Review, in summer 1962 was on the novel “The Slave” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. And that in a list of things she likes and dislikes, Jews and “asking questions” fall in the like column along with urinating, green apples, office furniture, the color blue and eucalyptus trees. There are many parts of these journals worth skimming.It is hard to read and learn such personal things about her as “my career is my life as something external to myself + so I report it to others. What is inside is my grief. If I expect as little as possible, I won’t be hurt.”Or when she writes of feeling “unlovable.”On the other hand, it is fascinating to know that she felt she was “not a genius,” that her mind was not “really first-rate” but was comforted by her ability to “go on pushing my sensibility further + further honing my mind.Becoming more unique, eccentric.” And we are saddened to note that she has “given up on human satisfactions (except for David)?” For those looking for interesting tidbits and literary gossip, Sontag’s journals are wonderful. Of Saul Bellow, she wrote, “who has not, for all his talents, craft, intelligence, produced a great body of work.” Can it be forgiven that this was a year before Bellow won the Nobel Prize? We also learn that another Nobel laureate, writer Elias Canetti, had an affair with British novelist Iris Murdoch. Her listing of the 50 best films is also within these covers, as well as her ideal anthology of short stories and essays, all worth knowing.But the enduring reason to read Sontag is to learn of the importance of “imagination: having many voices in one’s head. The freedom for that.” The chance to engage with a unique mind who was never afraid to challenge received wisdom and think carefully about it is always of value. Sontag said of her work, “All my work says, be serious, be passionate, wake up.” Any reader interested in being thus awakened will find much of interest here.
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