Susan Sontag attending a writers' conference in 1966. Photograph: Bob Peterson/Getty
Images
29 December 1958, Paris
Harriet [Sohmers, author and artist's model]. Finest flower of American bohemia.
New York. Jewish. Family apartments in the 70's and 80's. Middle-class business
(not professional) father. Communist aunts. Own history of CP flirtation. Negro
maid. New York high school, NYU, experimental artsy-craftsy college, San Francisco,
flat in Greenwich Village. Early sexual experience, including Negroes. Homosexuality.
Writes short stories. Bisexual promiscuity. Paris. Lives with a painter. Father
moves to Miami. Trips back to America. Expatriate-type night employment. Writing
peters out.
30 December
My relationship to Harriet baffles me. I want it to be unpremeditated, unreflective
- but the shadow of her expectations about what an "affair" consists
in upsets my poise, makes me fumble. She with her romantic dissatisfactions,
I with my romantic needs and longing ... One unexpected gift: that she is beautiful.
I had remembered her as definitely not beautiful, rather gross and unattractive.
She's anything but that. And physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly,
important to me.
Article continues31 December
On Keeping a Journal. Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle
for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and
illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I
could to any person; I create myself.
The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally
and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my
actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.
There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a
person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does
not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves
is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow
than actions. I am thinking now of what I read today in H's journal about me
- that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concludes by her saying
that she really doesn't like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune.
God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated. We rarely do know
what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us) . . . Do I feel
guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main
(social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively
by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been
cruelly honest only in the journal. Will H ever read this?
...
Writing. It's corrupting to write with the intent to moralise, to elevate people's
moral standards.
Nothing prevents me from being a writer except laziness. A good writer.
Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want
to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say.
Yet why not that too? With a little ego-building - such as the fait accompli
this journal provides - I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have
something to say, that should be said.
My "I" is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists,
even to the point of fatuity. Sane men, critics, correct them - but their sanity
is parasitic on the creative fatuity of genius.
2 January, 7.30am
Poor little ego, how did you feel today? Not very well, I fear - rather bruised,
sore, traumatised. Hot waves of shame, and all that. I never had any illusion
that she was in love with me, but I did assume she liked me.
...
Tonight (last night!) at Paul's place I reely wuz speeking French. For owers
'n owers, with him and his very sweet parents. What great fun!!
19 February
Yesterday (late afternoon) I went to my first Paris cocktail party, at Jean
Wahl's - in the disgusting company of Allan Bloom. Wahl [a philosopher] very
much lived up to my expectations - a tiny slim birdlike old man with lank white
hair and wide thin mouth, rather beautiful, but terribly distrait and unkempt.
Baggy black suit with three large holes in the rear end through which you could
see his (white) underwear, + he'd just come from a late afternoon lecture -
on Claudel - at the Sorbonne. Has a tall handsome Tunisian wife (with a round
face and tightly-drawn-back black hair) half his age, about 35-40 I'd guess,
+ three or four quite young children. Also there was a man who looked like
Jean-Paul Sartre, only uglier, with a limp, and was Jean-Paul Sartre; and lots
of other people whose names meant nothing to me. I talked to Wahl + de Santillana
+ (unavoidably) to Bloom. The apartment, it's in the rue Peletier, is fantastic
- all the walls are drawn + sketched + painted on by the children and by artist
friends - there is dark carved North African furniture, ten thousand books,
heavy tablecloths, flowers, paintings, toys, fruit - a rather beautiful disorder,
I thought.
28 Feb
Heard Simone de Beauvoir talk on "the novel, is it still possible?" last
night at the Sorbonne. She is lean and tense and blackhaired and very goodlooking
for her age, but her voice is unpleasant, something about the high pitch +
the nervous speed with which she talks. In the late afternoon read Carson McCullers's "Reflections
in a Golden Eye". Slick, really economical and "written", but
I don't go for motivation by apathy, catatonia, animal empathy ... (In a novel,
I mean!)
Early 1959, New York City
The ugliness of New York. But I do like it here. In NY sensuality completely
turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful
river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt ... Nothing except
eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
...
March 12, 4:15pm
I am in bad shape. I write it out here; I write slowly and I look at my handwriting
which looks OK. Two vodka martinis. My head feels heavy. Smoking is bitter.
October
I'm not pious, but co-pious.
Nov 19
The coming of the orgasm has changed my life. I am liberated, but that's not
the way to say it. More important: it has narrowed me, it has closed off possibilities,
it has made the alternatives clear and sharp. I am no longer unlimited, ie
nothing.
Sexuality is the paradigm. Before, my sexuality was horizontal, an infinite
line capable of being infinitely subdivided. Now it is vertical; it is up and
over, or nothing.
...
The orgasm focuses. I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation
but, more, the birth of my ego. I cannot write until I find my ego. The only
kind of writer I could be is the kind who exposes himself ... To write is to
spend oneself, to gamble oneself. But up to now I have not even liked the sound
of my own name. To write, I must love my name. The writer is in love with himself
... and makes his books out of that meeting and that violence.
Nov 20 (3am)
I have never been as demanding of anyone as I am of [the Cuban-American playwright
Maria] I[rene Fornes]. I am jealous of everyone she sees, I hurt every minute
she goes away from me. But not when I leave her, and know that she is here.
My love wants to incorporate her totally, to eat her. My love is selfish.
...
Tonight she went from work to meet Inez at the San Remo. Ann Morrissett [journalist
and playwright] was there. After, the Cedar Bar. She came home at 12:00; I
was asleep ... She came to bed, told me about the conversations of the evening,
at 2:00 asked that the light be put out, went to sleep. I was paralysed, mute,
swollen with tears. I smoked, she slept.
...
Dec 24
My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity
as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.
It doesn't justify my homosexuality. But it would give me - I feel - a license.
I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer.
...
Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable.
Dec 28
Till now I have felt that the only persons I could know in depth, or really
love, were duplicates or versions of my own wretched self. (My intellectual
and sexual feelings have always been incestuous.) Now I know + love someone
who is not like me - eg not a Jew, not a New York-type intellectual - without
any failure of intimacy. I am always conscious of I's foreignness, of the absence
of a shared background - and I experience this as a great release.
1960
Cogito ergo est
Feb
How many times have I told people that Pearl Kazin [editor] was a major girlfriend
of Dylan Thomas? That Norman Mailer has orgies? That [FO] Matthiessen was queer?
All public knowledge to be sure, but who the hell am I to go advertising other
people's sexual habits.
How many times have I reviled myself for that, which is only a little less
offensive than my habit of name-dropping (how many times did I talk about Allen
Ginsberg last year while I was on Commentary?) and my habit of criticising
people if other people invite it ... I have always betrayed people to each
other. No wonder I've been so high-minded and scrupulous about how I use the
word "friend"!
Saturday:
awake at 7
Museum at 10:30
I. arrives at 1
coffee + lunch in Museum
3:00 "Trouble in Paradise"
4:30-5:15 coffee with I; talk
she comes with me in the cab to 118th St.
pick up David [Rieff, Sontag's seven-year-old son]
drop I at 79th St - she is going to Alfred [Chester, author and literary critic]
I feed D + put him to bed
A calls to urge me to come to the party
I read the Listener - call Jack, Harriet - leave at 9:30
cab to 14th St - I buy tickets for [film director Kenneth] Anger film and Pirandello
party - I leave - Times Sq
Bardot movie - home at 4
Sunday:
awake at 7:00 - rage
call A at 9:00
Jack picks us up at 9:15
breakfast at Rumpelmayer's
walk in Central Park
Hotel Pierre with Jack + Ann + 2 friends (Jack and Harriet)
cab to Alfred's
lunch with I + A, at Bocce place
matinee off - I and I go to the Commons
our talk
we return to Alfred's at 6:45
I calls Ann - we all go down, I to Ann's, A + David + I to Frank's Pizza.
we pick I up at 8 on Hudson St - go to films at Carnegie Hall Playhouse
10:30 - cab home, put D to bed - I wants to eat - sex - no talk - sleep
...
March 8 (noon)
There is no stasis. To stand still is to fall away from the truth; the inner
life dims and flickers, starts to go out, as soon as one tries to hold fast.
It's like trying to make this breath serve for the next one, or making today's
dinner do the work of next Wednesday's as well ... Truth rides the arrow of
time.
August 8
Monday Morning
I must help I to write. And if I write, too, it will stop this uselessness
of just sitting and staring at her and begging her to love me again.
...
It hurts then to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that
at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
August 14
I SHOULDN'T TRY TO MAKE LOVE
WHEN I AM TIRED.
I SHOULD ALWAYS KNOW WHEN I AM
TIRED. BUT I DON'T.
I LIE TO MYSELF. I DON'T KNOW
MY TRUE FEELINGS.
(Still?!)
12/3/61
Becoming aware of the "dead places" of feeling - Talking without
feeling anything. (This is very different from my old self-revulsion at talking
without knowing anything.)
...
9 Dec 1961
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living
now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.
Sept 3, 1962
I am sitting on the grass by the river. David is play[ing] ball with a Puerto
Rican boy and man.
Alone, alone, alone. A ventriloquist's dummy without a ventriloquist. I have
brain-fatigue and heart-ache. Where is peace, the centre?
There are seven different kinds of grasses where I am lying. Dandelions, squirrels,
little yellow flowers.
...
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
Hippolyte says, blessed is the mind with something to occupy it other than
its own dissatisfactions.
I dreamed of Nat[han] Glazer last night. He came to borrow a black dress of
mine, a very beautiful dress, for his girlfriend to wear at a party. I tried
to help him find it. He lay on a single bed + I sat beside him and stroked
his face. His skin was white except for patches of black moss-like beard on
his face. I asked him how his face got so white, + told him he should get into
the sun. I wanted him to love me but he didn't.
Sept 12, 1962
Premature pliability, agreeableness
so that the underlying stubbornness is never touched
accounts for 80% of my notorious flirtatiousness, seductiveness
10/16/62
Sentimentality. The inertia of the emotions. They are not light, buoyant. -
I am sentimental. I cling to my emotional states. Or do they cling to me?
[On a loose scrap of paper, probably from 1964]
I will be all right by 7:00 am this morning.
...
M [Mildred Jacobsen, Sontag's mother] didn't answer when I was a child. The
worst punishment - and the ultimate frustration. She was always "off" -
even when she wasn't angry. (The drinking a symptom of this.) But I kept trying.
Now, the same with I. Even more agonising because for four years she did answer.
So I know she can.
...
My faults:
- to censor [sic] others for my own vices*
- to make my friendships into love affairs
- to ask that love include (and exclude) all
* but, perhaps this becomes most hectic and obvious - reaches a climax, when
the thing in myself is deteriorating, giving way, collapsing- like: my indignation
at Susan [Taubes]'s and Eva [Kollisch]'s physical squeamishness
NB: my ostentatious appetite - real need - to eat exotic and "disgusting" foods
= a need to state my denial of squeamishness. A counter-statement.
...
July 4, Bled [Yugoslavia]
In every important modern American writer you feel a struggle with the language
- it's your enemy, doesn't naturally work for you. (Completely different in
England, where the language is taken for granted.) You have to subdue it, reinvent
it.
July 16, Paris
I haven't learned to mobilise rage - (I perform militant actions, without militant
feeling)
Nov 8
Through 2/3 of Greta Garbo's "Private Potato Patch" I wanted to be
Garbo (I studied her; I wanted to assimilate her, learn her gestures, feel
as she felt) - then, toward the end, I started to want her, to think of her
sexually, to want to possess her. Longing succeeded admiration - as the end
of my seeing her drew near. The sequence of my homosexuality?
In NY, little or no "community" but a great sense of "scene".
...
Nov 24
Lillian [Hellman] identified with Becky Sharp - always wanted to be a bitch,
to bait people.
I never got past admiring and envying her for being able to throw the dictionary
back at the drippy schoolmistress. All that manipulative stuff with men was
beyond me.
...
[Not dated, late 1965]
The unpleasantness of the feedback - other people's reactions to my work, admiring
or adverse. I don't want to react to that. I'm critical enough (+ I know better
what's wrong).
I like to feel dumb. That's how I know there's more in the world than me.
my intellectual formation:
a) Knopf +M[odern] L[ibrary]
b) P[artisan] R[eview] (Trilling, Rahv, Fiedler, Chase)
c) University of Chicago
P & A via Schwab-Mckeon
Burke
d) Central European "sociology"
The German Jewish refugee intellectuals Strauss, Arendt, Scholem, Marcuse,
Gourevitch, [Jacob] Taubes, etc. (Marx, Freud, Spengler, Nietzsche, Weber,Dilthey,
Simmel, Mannheim, Adorno et etc.)
e) Harvard Wittgenstein
f) the French - Artaud, Barthes, Cioran, Sartre
g) more history of religion
h) I - mailer, anti-intellectualism
i) Art, art-history
Jasper [Johns]
[John] Cage
[William S] Burroughs
end result: Franco-Jewish Cageian?
Jan 4, 1966
The situation in painting is tight: like science. Everyone conscious of "problem",
what needs to be worked on. Each artist by his recent work issuing "white
papers" on this or that problem, + the critics judging whether their chosen
problems are interesting or trivial ... While in literature, everything is
so loose textured. One could make a parachute jump blindfolded - anywhere you
land, if you push it hard enough, you're bound to find interesting unexplored
valuable terrain. All the options are lying about, barely used.
...
Jasper is good for me. (But only for a while.) He makes it feel natural + good
+ right to be crazy. And mute. To question everything. Because he is crazy.
...
[Not dated, late winter 1966]
NYC with its intelligentsia, its liberal consensus, is in relationship to the
rest of USA like Vatican in the midst of Italy, a tiny private state with immense
power + wealth, but separate
...
June 1
One of my strongest and most fully employed emotions: contempt. Contempt for
others, contempt for myself.
...
I'm impatient (' contemptuous) of people who don't know how to protect themselves,
stand up for themselves.
My mind = King Kong. Aggressive, tears people to pieces. I keep it locked up
most of the time - and bite my nails.
June 27, Paris
When the provos stage "happenings" at night in the streets of Amsterdam,
there is a risk. They provoke the police, they "say" something, they
try to make something happen. (More liberty, etc.)
Happenings in NY are not only apolitical. They risk nothing. They are witty
exercises in irrationality - entirely safe.
...
If only my novel could have the speed - and the range, the relevance - that
Godard's last two films have. The ulcer of Vietnam, the sound of guns going
off -
Aug 6, London
Peter Brook: very intense, high-pitched, pale blue eyes - balding - wears black
turtleneck sweaters - warm generous handshake - fleshy, meaty face
Studied with Jane Heap (famous Little Review lady from 20's) living at end
of her life in Hampstead; a pupil of Gurdjieff; her Sunday afternoons
brain-picker
...
Aug 9
I've got the Novel ... I think! Thanks to Brook + Grotowski, the final pieces
have fallen into place.
Oct 8
Jap [Jasper Johns]; of a young painter's work he saw this afternoon. "The
paintings are very beautiful. But that's all."
Jap's authority, his elegance. He is never flustered, apologetic, guilty, ashamed.
Perfect certitude. So, if he picks his nose or eats in the Automat, he's being
elegant.
...
[Not dated, late 1966]
Joe [Chaikin] asks me tonight how I feel when I discover, say, three-fours
through something I'm writing that it is mediocre, inferior. I reply that I
feel good and plow on to the end. I'm discharging the mediocre in myself. (My
excremental image of my writing.) It's there. I want to get rid of it. I can't
negate it by an act of will. (Or can I?) I can only allow it its voice, get
it "out". Then I can do something else. At least, I know I won't
need to do that again.
Feb 22, 1967, 3am
I'm finishing the "[Story of] O" review which has turned into a 35-page
essay. It's OK. Still, I don't believe a word I'm saying.
April 6
In Calif, a stranger is a [potential] friend until he proves otherwise; in
NY, a stranger is an enemy until he proves otherwise. One uses up a lot of
energy in NY by that hypothesis.
...
The ideal life: doing only things which are indispensable.
Two ways to be - a saint or a thief.
My image of myself since age 3 or 4 - the genius-schmuck. I allow one to pay
off the other. Develop relationships to satisfy principally one or the other.
...
Sartre (cf "Les Mots") the only other person I know of who had this "certainty" of
genius. Living already a posthumous life, even as a childhood. (The childhood
of a famous man.) A kind of suicide - with the "work" of genius you
know you'll do when adult your tombstone. The most glorious tombstone possible.
Sartre was very ugly - and knew it. So he didn't have to develop "the
schmuck" to pay off the others for being "the genius". Nature
had taken care of the problem for him. He didn't have to invent a cause of
failure or rejection by others. As I did, by making myself 'stupid' in personal
relations. (For "stupid", also read "blind".)
©
The estate of Susan Sontag 2006.
Appreciations
Lucasta Miller on Susan Sontag
Ed Vulliamy remembers Susan Sontag
Related stories
19.01.2002: The Guardian profile by Gary Younge
13.01.2002: Robert McCrum reviews Where the Stress Falls
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