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October 3, 2008
The Sontag journals
Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be ending 2008 with a major literary event — the publication of the first of three volumes of journals and notebooks by the late great Susan Sontag.
The essayist, novelist and filmmaker died four years ago, after three battles with cancer.
Her incredible wide-ranging interests included photography, European literature, movies and history, all of which she wrote about with peerless insight and style.
I’ve been reading an uncorrected proof of volume one of the journals — “Reborn,” covering the years 1947 to 1963 — over the past few days and have been appreciative of the way the notes take us into the earliest stages of Sontag’s life and career as a thinker.
The first two lines in the book, written on Nov. 23, 1947 are very strong:
“I believe:
(a) That there is no personal god or life after death.”
Sontag may be gone in a physical sense, but her “life” as a writer will continue with indelible books such as “On Photography” and “Illness as Metaphor.”
“Reborn” starts with a remarkable introductory essay by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, who has edited the three books despite some personal reservations about the project.
“I have always thought that one of the stupidest things the living say about the dead is the phrase ‘so-and-so would have wanted it this way’ At best it is guesswork; most often it is hubris, no matter how well intended. You simply cannot know,” Rieff begins.
“Reborn” is “not the book she would have produced” Rieff says of his mother: “— and that assumes she would have decided to publish these diaries in the first place.”
Rieff says he wishes he did not have to become involved with the project, but that Sontag died without leaving any instructions as to what should be done with her papers. Before her death, Sontag did sell her papers to the University of California at Los Angeles library, without any restictions on access to her papers.
“I soon came to feel that the decision had been made for me,” Rieff writes of deciding to edit the three volumes. ““Either I would organize them or someone else would. It seemed better to go forward.”
Few editors have ever been as honest about their work as Rieff is in the introduction: “My misgivings remain. To say that these diaries are self-revelatory is a drastic understatement...One of the principal dilemmas in all this has been that, at least in her later life, my mother was not in any way a self-revealing person. In particular, she avoided to the extent she could, without denying it, any discussion of her own homosexuality or any acknowledgment of her own ambition. So my decision certainly violates her privacy. There is no other way of describing it fairly.”
I think Rieff is a bit too hard on himself. The entries in volume one are very frank about Sontag’s early confusion over her sexuality, but she never delves into this side of her life in a salacious manner.
In her “public” writing, Sontag seemed willing to analyze and question almost any facet of life — she was pilloried for writing one of the very few challenging essays to appear in the immediate wake of 9/11.
The journal writing seems of a piece with Sontag’s other ruthlessly direct work — I doubt that she would have passed the material along to UCLA if she felt it went beyond the bounds of her own character and morality as a writer.
Who knows, perhaps Sontag decided to preserve the material so that she could write about sexuality in a more direct manner if she had been given another few years of life.
Posted by Joe on October 3, 2008 1:44 PM
