Book review: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963, by Susan Sontag

Published on Sunday 15 February 2009 20:56

Hamish Hamilton, 336pp, £16.99 Review by Richard Eder

IF, DAVID Rieff writes in the introduction to this book, his mother Susan Sontag was still alive, she would never have allowed this book to be published. She might well, he says, have burned the journals and notebooks of the title – and he'd have understood if she had because they contain "much that I would have preferred not to know and not to have others know".

In many ways these scrappy entries justify Rieff's doubts – not because the material is raw, with its accounts of lesbian sex and feelings of wretchedness, but because the writing is.

Sontag seldom gives us any hint here of the great cultural critic she would later become. Her writing wasn't spontaneous; her intellectual ferocity was dressed and belted before it was allowed out. Here everything is in a dawn disarray. Only very rarely does it manage the prickly splinter of insight we associate with her work.

More serious, perhaps, these bits of diary mostly lack what can give value even to the most private and personal examples of the form: inner vision of an outside world. Virtually the only outside we get here, even in Sontag's accounts of her marriage and two extended affairs, is in the way it affects her feelings. We are not looking through her eyes, we are looking at her eyes, mainly inflamed.

Take her marriage at 17 to Philip Rieff, an academic for whom she did research. There is virtually nothing about him, or about their life together until it falls apart. Instead there are epigrams about the universal oppressiveness of marriage: "It is an institution committed to the dulling of feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition."

This set of notebooks (two later volumes are planned) begins in 1947, when she was 14, and runs through 1963, well before the writing that would make her justly famous. They are raggedly kept; some years are skipped or missing, others get no more than a couple of pages.

They are in no way a systematic record, and rarely do they give us much idea of what she was about at any particular time. Rieff provides very few nuts and bolts, perhaps reflecting his tentative attitude towards the whole project. This contributes to the feeling that we are getting, at best, not herself and others but emotions about herself and others.

What is most heavily touched on in these early 15 years is Sontag's exploration of her sexuality. She is briefly ecstatic with her initiation into lesbian sex and the prospect of limitless, commitment-free affairs. No messy love stuff: thus, the "reborn" of the title. Then despair sets in: a long sadomasochistic subjugation to a woman in Paris, identified only as H, and a subsequent relationship with the playwright Maria Irene Fornes (stormy, though less chilling), help Sontag to decide that, on the contrary, sex without love is worthless.

Restless discovery and change: just what a private notebook is for. But these published miseries, endlessly described and feeding interminable doubts about her self-worth, are more than anyone but a psychoanalyst could want to know.

At one point Sontag writes: "I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it." There is something of this in the journals: self-absorption and self-absence at the same time.

She still could come up with great phrases – Kafka's writing, she wrote, induced a "shiver and grinding blue ache in your teeth" – but this portrait of an intellectual remains maddeningly incomplete.