When she was good

THERE were many different sides to Susan Sontag. There was the razor-sharp intellectual who made her name with the works “Against Interpretation”, “Illness as a Metaphor” and “On Photography”. There was the novelist, whose dense, melancholy, historical novels never got the attention she aspired to. She was also an ardent and outspoken campaigner for the citizens of Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia. For a time, she was even a theatre director there, putting on Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in a building with no electricity, which was mainly waiting to be bombed. She was a documentary film-maker, briefly a philosophy lecturer and a frequently published critic of American foreign policy.
 
Since her death in 2004, Susan Sontag's multitudes have been selectively remembered. Often criticised for being too serious, her more playful ideas—which found a home in essays such as “Notes on ‘Camp’”—have been overlooked. She has been fondly remembered in essays and memoirs, including Sigrid Nunez’s “Sempre Susan” (reviewed by The Economist here). But these days when her name returns to the literary headlines it is often for the wrong reasons—such as the public spats between her son, David Rieff, and Annie Liebovitz, a photographer and Sontag’s lover in the final years of her life. Her momentarily rash remarks after 9/11 did not endear her to many Americans who were feeling raw after the attacks, and have tended to overshadow discussions of her work. 
 
But with the recent publication of the second volume of her diaries, another side of Sontag comes in to view. Covering 1964-1980, “As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh” traces the years in which she started to write properly, when she was living in Paris and New York and visited North Korea, and when she began her life-long battle with breast cancer. 
 
The Sontag that appears here is, at times, very different from the strident academic who polarises public opinion. She is anxious, self-deprecating and frequently heartbroken. She reprimands herself, “Buy records, read, do some work. I’ve been very lazy”, or suddenly wonders, aged 32, “Have I done all the living I’m going to do?” She complains of being photographed, and worries that “I smile too much” or that “I’m unattractive, unloveable.” During a series of torturous love affairs—with Irene, Carlotta, and Nicole—she writes both to console herself and in the knowledge that some of these lovers will snoop into her diary to see what she’s written. (“Does she get a kick out of my groveling in the last two years?”) As in the earlier volume of diaries, “Reborn”, in which Sontag wrote reminders to herself to wash, this collection brings a more fragile, neurotic side into view.
 
And yet there is still much of the academic who did not suffer fools—or “Modernist-nihilist-wise-guy-bullshit”—gladly. Her lengthy analyses of her relationships are broken up with quotations from Wittgenstein, or counterpoised by reported conversations with Jasper Johns and Joseph Brodsky (both also briefly lovers of hers, but less complicated ones). With a certain breathlessness, she approaches her work and her private life with the same intensity which makes her declare “I want the encounter with a person or a work of art to change everything.” 
 
She writes dozens of obsessive lists—on rhyming cockney slang, her body type, the German romantics, places to see, “novels about erotic obsession”, “qualities that turn me on”, Czech movies, “things I like / dislike” and, when in North Korea, on “anti-personnel weapons”—each a reminder of her voraciously catholic interests. She works, or reads theNew York Times (“my lover”), until 3am, and when she feels alone, writes in her diary: “I can’t talk to myself, but I can write to myself.” As she undergoes cancer treatment, she writes just as often, if not more. She declares, with only a slight tremor, “I want to be one of the survivors.”
 
Over the course of the diary, a picture of a complicated, brilliant person emerges. A little like her criticism, her diary entries combine her interests with bright, aphoristic turns of phrase. But unlike her work, these entries—especially as they are edited slightly sloppily by Mr Rieff—tell only half the story. They are often cut off, ellipses evocatively suggesting what else she might have written. 
 
In a way, this is appropriate. In 1967 Sontag wrote “Works of art have a certain pathos—poignancy.” She went on to try and explain this pathos: “Their veiled, mysterious, partly (and forever) inaccessible aspect? The fact that no one would (could?) ever do that again?” At a time when discussions of Sontag tend to revolve around her private life, or a miscalibrated political statement, these diaries are a reminder of the value of the work that made her great, and also mysterious—“partly (and forever)” escaping from view.