DIARIES: BRIAN DILLONreviews Reborn: Early diaries 1947-1964by Susan Sontag, Hamish Hamilton, 318pp. £16.99
BY THE time of her death at the age of 71, in 2004, Susan Sontag had long ceased to be an interesting or relevant critic. This is a hard thing to have to admit, because her essays of the mid-1960s - on Godard, Sartre and Camus, on the nouveau romanand the camp sensibility - are among the most essential documents in the post-war critical response to avant-garde art and thought. A decade later, Illness as Metaphorand On Photographycanvassed, with elegant authority, ideas then being broached in more daunting terms by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, respectively. For a time, her writing thrilled and instructed by its amplitude and precision, while her public image lent a glamour to criticism that is scarcely thinkable today.
But Sontag eventually became the kind of critic - Harold Bloom is the worst of this type - who writes inflated encomia to Literature or Culture per se, and loses sight of fine distinctions in a fog of genera regarding genius, civilisation and (inevitably) modern barbarism.
Barthes, whom she greatly admired, developed a mature voice that was seductively less certain than his former, systematic, self. Sontag, by contrast, wrote with greater authoritativeness as she got older, thus with less authority. Her late essays, published as At the Same Timein 2007, are full of such ludicrously broad-brush claims as "everybody in our debauched culture invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom". It's evidence of how low Sontag had sunk that she could not spot who was doing the simplifying, or indeed the despising, in that sentence.
If the publication of Sontag's private diaries achieves anything, then, it must be to remind us that her early brilliance was a matter as much of the risks she took - in terms of her tastes, her arguments, her polemical alignments - as of the oracular force and erudition of her essays. (Sontag's great talent, at her best, was for expressing the eruptive, disorienting styles of modern art and literature in prose that was never less than level-headed.) This first volume, edited and introduced by her son, David Rieff, takes its author from precocious adolescence in 1947 to the cusp of mainstream literary success in 1964: the book ends a couple of years before the publication of her first essay collection, Against Interpretation. The diaries reveal a writer, and a woman, struggling precisely with the problem of her own authority: professionally and personally, Sontag was unsure just how sure of herself she ought to sound.
This is less of a problem at the outset of the book: she believes, as she writes confidently at the age of 14, in individual freedom, no God and a centralised state with social security. She makes lists (as she did all her life) of useful words: noctambulous, effete, perfervid. She determines to become learned in certain subjects: "Abelard, marine biology, especially jellyfish, Baron Bunsen, Spinoza, Job." She gushes critical judgments: "immersing myself in Gide again - what clarity and precision!" Very quickly, however, self-consciousness ups the intellectual and emotional ante. She finds "very narrow" her tendency to be impressed by literary style alone; desperate to leave home, she nonetheless knows "how easy it would be to convince myself of the plausibility of my parents' lives!"
This unease about her own intellectual ambitions and capacity for experience continues as she discovers sex, which is bound up throughout the diaries with her urge to be a writer. At 15, she confides to her journal: "I feel that I have lesbian tendencies." At 16 she has her first affair with a woman, and declares herself reborn: " . . . everything begins from now." A good deal of Rebornis devoted to Sontag's relationship with a woman, "H", whom David Rieff does not identify. (This is a curious editorial decision, but one I'll respect here: five minutes with Wikipedia will solve the mystery for those who care.) Transplanted to Paris while Sontag was still married to the academic Philip Rieff, the couple disintegrated. Sontag found herself "so blind and love-sick and gut-torn I could barely stand". She cannot seem to stand up for herself: " . . . though I admire ruthlessness, I cannot wholly despise my own weakness."
WHAT LINKS HER erotic and writing lives at this point is Sontag's abiding uncertainty about whether or not to become an egotist. (It says something about the force and the limits of her personality that this was for her primarily a choice.) On the one hand, she surprises herself by becoming weak and passive in her relations with H; on the other, she frankly despises (a favourite word) the passivity of her husband. A similar ambivalence besets what she later called, in Against Interpretation(1966), the erotics of writing. "The orgasm focuses. I lust to write . . . To write is to spend oneself, to gamble oneself." But the writer, she also notes, "is in love with himself". To write is either a jealous hoarding and canny investment of the self, or its squandering in language and experience - Sontag remained a great critic (and, one assumes, an unhappy woman) so long as she did not choose one or the other.
None of this should suggest that Rebornis an entirely rarefied volume. Sontag, according to Rieff, loved writers' diaries: the more gossipy the better. Her own, beyond the expected lists of films seen and books to be read, is full of curious (if not exactly salacious) details about her life. Not the least of these is her habit of writing herself lists of improving activities. She tells herself to appear less interesting so as to save her best thoughts for her writing, to smile less and not seem so eager to please. Time and again, she reminds herself to bathe every day, wash her hair (every 10 days) and not to go to bed fully dressed.
If the diary, as she noted in her teens, is the literary form in which one invents oneself, it seems that in more ways than one Sontag's mature persona was won at the cost of her messier self.
Brian Dillon's memoir, In the Dark Room(Penguin) was published in 2005.He is UK editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture based in New York. His Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Liveswill be published this year