2.
But Sontag was exactly this—an author interested in the complex and the boring (“We should not expect art to entertain or divert any more. At least, not high art”4), and had been since birth, with no intention of changing course. In her diaries from her youth, she complains about wasting a Sunday night with her stepfather: a driving lesson, an evening at the movies (which she “pretended to enjoy”). Her morning routine is full of more serious things (“seriousness” is another one of her important words): The Magic Mountain and recordings of Mozart’s Don Giovanni; no more compromises, she promises herself.5 Here we see a marvelous blending of a pronounced focus on culture (where “culture” and “Europe” are synonymous) and a less distinct shape, which organizes Sontag’s life goals, one that’s both a close relative of the American dream—a religion of achievement and victory—and quite far from it. “I had the company of the immortal dead—the ‘great people’ (the Nobel Prize winners) of whom I would some day be one. My ambition: not to be the best among them, but only to be one of them, to be in the company of peers and comrades.”6
The nostalgia for heroes, for the familiar dead, the dream of a textual immortality, of glory—it touches us because it makes us think of a time that has been recently and hopelessly lost, an old world bound by the borders of a great era. The scale that seems native to Sontag, the yardstick by which she measures herself, are those of the nineteenth century, with its great ideas and even greater expectations. The novelty and advantage of her position is that she is an anachronism; the way she carries herself (and her self) belongs to a different time. Sontag imposes on herself the obligation of nothing other than greatness (one of her later articles, on W. G. Sebald, begins by asking whether literary greatness is still possible in the present day7—and in a way her fifty years of authorial practice amount to variously orchestrated attempts to answer this question for herself). The tasks she sets for herself often seem neither literary nor feasible. “To be noble-minded. To be profound. Never to be ‘nice.’” “Remember: this could be my one chance, and the last, to be a first-rate writer” (written when she was past forty). “Well, what’s wrong with projects of self-reformation?” “I smile too much,” “I lack dignity,” “I don’t try hard enough.”8
And also:
Proust didn’t know he was writing the greatest novel ever written. (Neither did his contemporaries, even the most admiring, like Rivière.) And it wouldn’t have done him any good if he had. But he did want to write something great.
I want to write something great.9
3.
The daily journals from her youth and adulthood are where Susan Sontag’s life project comes to its long-awaited, startling conclusion. We are now presented with texts that are still fresh, that haven’t yet reached a broader readership: the first volume of the diaries, Reborn, was just translated into Russian, and the second, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, was just published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. And it feels like a long-running Spiderman comic book or the crusade to find the Holy Grail has finally ended in victory—now, in real time, before our very eyes, on the TV screen that Sontag loathed so much. This corpus of diaries and notebooks (the third volume has not been published yet) spans decades, and I believe it may be the most significant thing she ever wrote; it truly resembles “something great,” even though Sontag, who considered herself above all a writer of novels and stories, probably had something different in mind. “Every interesting aesthetic tendency now is a species of radicalism. The question each artist must ask is: What is my radicalism, the one dictated by my gifts and temperament?”10 she writes elsewhere.
Since the age of twelve, Sontag considered it her duty to keep a journal. The first published entry is from November 1947, when she was almost fourteen, and it is a kind of declaration of independence: the author denies the existence of a personal god (lowercase), sweeps aside the idea of an afterlife, and affirms that the most desirable thing in the world is to stay true to oneself—what she calls Honesty (capitalized). At age seventy, she still subscribed to the same credo, with minor changes and additions; it is no less astounding that her authorial voice managed to preserve that faithfulness to the self, not once breaking or changing. Its intonation of deep conviction, its natural authority (if not authoritarianism) remain unchanged no matter what happens to Sontag; the special character of her writing turns out to be not something acquired through experience but a gift bestowed to her upon birth, a feature of her timbre or diction. The things she says always have a special weight to them; they are pronounced with emphasis—which is why her way of thinking and speaking can easily be described as having pathos. The author of these journals is, as they say, quite full of herself. And yet she can neither change herself (the themes, motifs, field lines of the early entries don’t lose their appeal over time but evolve to include new arguments and interpretations), nor make peace with her own imperfection. The fraternal, comradely respect that Sontag has for her intellect, which had to be nourished, developed, trained, massaged—and the pity, mixed with disdain, with which she regards her own mortal self, her biographical self, would govern her life until its very end. Or at least until 1980, which is where the corpus of journals published so far by David Rieff ends.
Volume one, volume two. Her childhood, her years in school, her first lesbian experience, which is a revelation for Sontag (“Everything begins from now—I am reborn”11). The early, unhappy marriage (“The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies”12), early motherhood, the divorce. Her new life as an independent intellectual—a designation she carried with honor, rejecting any other kind of work. The first books (“At the very end, I couldn’t even stop to light my own cigarettes. I had David stand by and light them for me while I kept typing”—her son was ten at the time13). The initial, rising fame, the years of her might—packed to the brim with projects, ideas and the possibility of new projects and ideas. (The notebooks are full of lists, pages upon pages of books to read, movies to see, foreign or unknown words, quotations and references, explanations for herself, childhood memories, all in neat columns.) The love stories, which, one after the other, split or dwindled into nothingness. The attempts at prose. The attempts at not writing essays. The political activism, which involved repeatedly refining and revising her stance. Cancer and her victory over it, which seemed absolute at the time. Her relationship with Joseph Brodsky (“Story about a poet (Joseph!) so much less, morally, than his work”14), which was so important to her that she spoke to him in her deathbed delirium. More and more lists of books, movies, ideas, observations.