Leakage

Some scattered thoughts after finishing, or rather, tearing through Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963. Like others, I was transfixed.

There’s something about how Sontag thinks of the mind that I found kind of haunting: “I must not do all those things so that I will not know these horrible moments when my mind seems a tangible thing.” That’s her in 1948, age 15, in the midst of some fairly standard teenage angst about contemplating the solar system and its “innumerable galaxies spanned by countless light years” and “infinities of space.” But this idea of the mind as object continues through the years, twisting at times into an anxiety about talking, which she calls leakage: “The leakage of talk. My mind is dribbling out through my mouth.” Later she will declare, “Problem of the emotions is essentially one of drainage.” “Drainage by means of shouting? telling people off?” The interior life and its plumbing surface again and again.

And I was taken with the many character studies. Here’s Anais Nin: “her speech is over-precise—she shines and polishes each syllable with the very tip of her tongue and teeth—one feels that if one were to touch her, she would crumble into silver dust.” Critic Mike Harrington is “a curd-faced bloke.”

I was struck, too, by the sudden and frequent stabs of self-consciousness and doubt: “I acted pretty inanely myself—my sardonic-intellectual snob pose.” Also, I feel affinity for anyone who relies so heavily on em-dashes.

And then there’s the question of being a writer. In 1959, she writes, “The only kind of writer [I] could be is the kind who exposes himself…” I’m fascinated by that “I” that the editor, her son, David Rieff, had to insert in the sentence and the “himself” that Sontag slides into. That particular reflexive pronoun is not so remarkable, I suppose, for 1959, but I paused at it just the same.

Twelve years later, recorded in the documentary Town Bloody Hall about a panel on Women’s Liberation, an extremely toothsome Sontag remonstrates Diana Trilling for allowing Norman Mailer to refer to her as a “lady critic.” Sontag says something along the lines of finding the phrase demeaning. I’m quoting from my spotty memory here: “It just bothers me. I mean why not a ‘woman critic’?” It’s only when shouts come from the voluble crowd that she thinks to rephrase the question: “or why not a ‘critic’?” (In Darryl Pinkney’s essay, “The Books of Lists,” in this week’s New Yorker, he recalls that, “She once berated me when I said that I didn’t mind being called an African-American writer as opposed to a writer who was African-American.”) It’s not so much that I’m trying to chronicle the shifts in what might be called “identity politics,” but that I’m compelled by the seemingly bold act of a woman simply projecting herself into the authority of “the writer” (male) and simultaneously effacing that same self—while thinking of the whole project as an exercise in self-exposure. It seems like a complicated sequence of ballet steps or maybe a room of mirrors.

And the question of Sontag’s sexuality (“Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable”) certainly kept my attention, along with the juicy passages about the women who do her wrong, the sex that is good, and the sex that is bad. And this: “Sex is not a project (unlike writing a book, making a career, raising a child)…. It is not an accumulation.” Which, in turn, makes me think of Sybille Bedford’s excellent line on such matters: “Sex is not a noun like coffee.”

Throughout the whole thing David Rieff’s clear-eyed and tender introduction stayed with me. He is very direct about his own ambivalence about publishing his mother’s journals: “One of the principal dilemmas of all this has been that, at least in her later life, my mother was not in any way a self-revealing person.” (Was she, in the end, the kind of writer who did not expose himself?) There is, too, the strange and somewhat uncomfortable circle that emerges when the outside reader thinks about the son reading the mother’s entries about the son:

I hardly ever dream of David, and don’t think of him much. He has made few inroads on my fantasy-life. When I am with him I adore him completely and without ambivalence. When I go away, as long as I know he’s well taken-care-of, he dwindles very quickly. Of all the people I have loved, he’s least of all a mental object of love, most intensely real.

But what really stayed with me from Rieff’s preface was an echo. He writes:

When my mother was very young, she took a trip to Greece. There she saw a performance of Medea in an amphitheater in southern Peloponnesus. The experience moved her profoundly because as Medea is about to kill her children, a number of people in the audience started yelling, “No, don’t do it, Medea!” “These people had no sense of seeing a work of art,” she told me many times. “It was all real.”

These diaries are real, too. And reading them, I have very much the anxiety that I am responding as those Greek spectators in the mid-1950s did. I want to shout, “Don’t do it” or else “Don’t be so hard on yourself” or “Don’t think so well of yourself” or “Watch out for her, she doesn’t love you.” But of course I am too late: the play has already been performed and its protagonist gone, as are most though not all of the other characters as well.

Watch out for her, she doesn’t love you. That’s not the echo I keep hearing, but I liked Rieff’s warning so much, I wanted to repeat it. No, the echo I keep hearing is that of another child as spectator, Delmore Schwartz’s narrator in “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” who, through his tears, watches the motion picture of his parents’ courtship unspooling before him:

…and it was then that I stood up in the theatre and shouted: Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you.

For more on the Sontag’s journals see Craig Seligman’s “Sapphic Signals” in Bookforum and Deborah Eisenberg’s “Becoming Susan Sontag” in the New York Review of Books.