Susan Sontag

For years I have admired the work of Susan Sontag. But I have done so from a distance for the breadth of her erudition is so far beyond me as to be virtually unapproachable. Nevertheless, I was eager to read Volume 1 of her journals, recently published under the title Reborn. They cover the period of her life between 1947-1963, beginning with her adolescence, college experiences, marriage, years abroad in Paris and Oxford, as well as the birth of her son, David Rieff, who has taken on the task of editing the material.

She began writing them as a teenager, a precocious one at least in terms of literature. Her reading appetite was voracious. Soon it became clear that was also true of her sex life. She was a great believer in making lists and the journals abound with them, including one in the beginning which I have condensed slightly:

I believe:
(a) that there is no personal god or life after death
(b) that the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e. Honesty
(c) that the only difference between human beings is intelligence.
(d) That the only criterion of an action is its ultimate effect on making the individual happy or unhappy
(e) That is wrong to deprive any man of life
(h) I believe, furthermore, that an ideal state…should be a strong centralized one with government control of public utilities, banks, mines…

There are countless list of books in Reborn that she has read or would like to read. Here is a partial list of the first:

The Counterfeiters—Gide
Tar—Sherwood Anderson
The Island Within—Ludwig Lewishon
Sanctuary—William Faulkner
Diary of a Writer—Dostoyevsky
Johnny Got His Gun—Dalton Trumbo
The Forsyte Saga—Galsworthy
The Egoist—George Meredith

Sontag was devoted to the cinema. Rieff notes that one of the notebooks from 1961 is simply a list of films seen. He writes: “On no occasion is there a break of more than four days between films seen; most often [she] notes having seen at least one, and not infrequently, two or three films per day.” That was surely the golden era of the cinema, for today we live in an time when we are lucky if we can find one decent film to see during the week.

Perhaps the best way to convey the intensity and range of Sontag’s life during this period is to quote directly some of her entries:

On Journaling: In the journal I do not just express myself more open than I could do to any person; I create myself.

On Needs: All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship.

On Music: Music is the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts—it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure—and the most sensual.

On Marriage: Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong mutual dependencies.

On Writing: Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose….I write to define myself—an act of self-creation—part of the process of becoming—In dialogue with myself, with writers I admire living and dead, with ideal readers…

In the introduction to Reborn Reiff wonders whether he should have published his mother’s journals since she never made her wishes known to him. To be sure the journals are frank, intimate, cranky, often little more than sexual bookkeeping and emotional quarreling. Yet simultaneously they depict a life that is dedicated to the arts and literature that, as Rieff notes are matters of life and death for his mother and “where seriousness is the greatest good.” Like a fine film, you are fortunate if you encounter a single such person every now and then.

Susan Sontag

Illness colors everything, especially a serious one. Life seems bleak, there is little that is worth doing, eating is a chore, as is everything else. I suspect that is the reaction of many who are struck with a debilitating disease or injury, although we do hear about an almost equal number who never abandon life, even when it is virtually impossible for them to live it.

Susan Sontag was one of those individuals. Like others so struck, they command our admiration. Of course, there is much else about Susan Sontag to admire, including her recently published and widely reviewed first volume of her journal, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963.

David Rieff, Sontag's son, has written about her mother's lengthy battle with cancer in Swimming in a Sea of Death. It was a tough book to read as Rieff describes in detail Sontag's three horrible bouts of cancer that one by one descended upon her body and ravished it.

But she never gave up hope that she would be cured by one of the new techniques for treating cancer, each one grimmer than the next. She studied the medical literature, traveled the world to visit doctors and hospitals that specialized in their application, sure in the knowledge that she would be cured.

Her last bout did her in and Rieff struggles with the question throughout his account of whether or not to tell her that there was no cure for it (myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). Here are the some of the passages I made note of in the book.


“I curse death.” I cannot help it. Elias Canetti

She loved living and, if anything, both her appetite for experience and her hopes for what she would accomplish as a writer had only increased as she grew older. If I had to choose one word to describe her way of being in the world it would be "avidity." There was nothing she did not want to see or do or try to know.

…she writes that she is an eternal student and speculates whether, in the end, that is what she is best at.

…irrational human wish to ascribe meaning when no meaning is really on offer.

“The statistics only get you so far. There are always people on the tail end of the curve.” Jerome Groopman.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Real commitment for her was always radical.

Above all, information needed to be collected. Information meant control, did it not?

Her apartment became a kind of research unit (it had always been more office and library than home)…

…brochure is written in the language of hope, but in fact offers almost none to anyone reading it with care.

But the gap here between language and reality is simply too great

Thomas Mann once wrote that a writer is someone for whom writing is harder that it is for anyone else.

You did not give in to cancer, you fought it, and if you fought hard enough and, above all, intelligently enough, there was a chance that you could win.

…but deferring completely to another person is, if anything, an even more impossible project. For such deference would render one without personality—without the very qualities, in other words, upon which one's relations with the other person are grounded.

…for my mother information had become synonymous with hope: the more you knew, the better your chances of cheating death once more.

Looking back, I wonder if there is any silence worse than the silence of the sick room.

…love was no consolation to her as she fought so desperately for her life.

From a political and, increasingly, an ecological standpoint as well, she had no great hope that the world would get any better and, at the very least, the strong intuition that it would probably get a great deal worse.

…to understand an illusion is not to rid yourself of it…

And if so many people die of cancer today, doctors say that this is at least in part because we are not dying of other diseases when we are younger.

“…as long as one's thoughts are spoken and written down, they'll form another life, they won't perish with the flesh.” Bei Dao