The Voice Over

Since the age of twelve, Sontag considered it her duty to keep a journal. The first published entry is from November 1947, when she was almost fourteen, and it is a kind of declaration of independence: the author denies the existence of a personal god (lowercase), sweeps aside the idea of an afterlife, and affirms that the most desirable thing in the world is to stay true to oneself—what she calls Honesty (capitalized). At age seventy, she still subscribed to the same credo, with minor changes and additions; it is no less astounding that her authorial voice managed to preserve that faithfulness to the self, not once breaking or changing. Its intonation of deep conviction, its natural authority (if not authoritarianism) remain unchanged no matter what happens to Sontag; the special character of her writing turns out to be not something acquired through experience but a gift bestowed to her upon birth, a feature of her timbre or diction. The things she says always have a special weight to them; they are pronounced with emphasis—which is why her way of thinking and speaking can easily be described as having pathos. The author of these journals is, as they say, quite full of herself. And yet she can neither change herself (the themes, motifs, field lines of the early entries don’t lose their appeal over time but evolve to include new arguments and interpretations), nor make peace with her own imperfection. The fraternal, comradely respect that Sontag has for her intellect, which had to be nourished, developed, trained, massaged—and the pity, mixed with disdain, with which she regards her own mortal self, her biographical self, would govern her life until its very end. Or at least until 1980, which is where the corpus of journals published so far by David Rieff ends.

Volume one, volume two. Her childhood, her years in school, her first lesbian experience, which is a revelation for Sontag (“Everything begins from now—I am reborn”¹¹). The early, unhappy marriage (“The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies”¹²), early motherhood, the divorce. Her new life as an independent intellectual—a designation she carried with honor, rejecting any other kind of work. The first books (“At the very end, I couldn’t even stop to light my own cigarettes. I had David stand by and light them for me while I kept typing”—her son was ten at the time¹³). The initial, rising fame, the years of her might—packed to the brim with projects, ideas and the possibility of new projects and ideas. (The notebooks are full of lists, pages upon pages of books to read, movies to see, foreign or unknown words, quotations and references, explanations for herself, childhood memories, all in neat columns.) The love stories, which, one after the other, split or dwindled into nothingness. The attempts at prose. The attempts at not writing essays. The political activism, which involved repeatedly refining and revising her stance. Cancer and her victory over it, which seemed absolute at the time. Her relationship with Joseph Brodsky (“Story about a poet (Joseph!) so much less, morally, than his work”¹⁴), which was so important to her that she spoke to him in her deathbed delirium. More and more lists of books, movies, ideas, observations.

The demands that Sontag placed on herself all those years, her worship of her idols and her pursuit of new heights to conquer, the high-brow dramaticism of her existence, seemed to imply some kind of hidden wound, a sting of the flesh or the mind—that which, in fact, distinguishes heroes from gods. But to many onlookers, Sontag was also a goddess, impetuous, merciless, almost impossible to comprehend.

That’s how they saw her (noting her height and figure, the flowing scarves, the tall boots), and that’s how they wrote about her: “Susan is … beyond being a lesbian. I know I’m probably saying something very politically incorrect, but, except for the fact that she has affairs with women, she doesn’t really fit into that category. […] I look upon her as, I don’t know, as Venus with Hera, some great goddess that is on Mount Olympus and beyond sexuality, beyond category.”¹⁵ Once you take this approach, the height, the seriousness, the assertive tone, the legendary humorlessness no longer count as merits or flaws—they are a mere footnote to the main text. Sontag comes from a place where they never heard the news about the death of irony, because irony never made an appearance there in the first place. Hence her fierce sensitivity to the appeals of the fascist aesthetic, hence the draw of camp, hence the attraction and resentment toward the avant-garde.