Reborn: Susan Sontag, Early Diaries, 1947-1964, edited by David Rieff
Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, by David Rieff
Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, was one of the late- 20th century’s famous public intellectuals. A stupendously well-read novelist, essayist and critic, strikingly good looking with her white badger-lock, she was engagé, pronouncing on many subjects, from Chinese dissidents to the meaning of disease.
She appeared unassailably self-confident, so it is sad, but a bit of a relief, to learn from this first volume of her journal, begun when she was 14, that Sontag was precocious but also deeply depressed. I can’t recall reading a more melancholy book. She was wracked with negative certainties about herself as a thinker, writer, adult, and, her son, David Rieff, says, ‘even for eros’.
She began keeping her journals when she was 12. They were for herself alone, and Rieff, also a prolific author, who read all 100 volumes after her death, feels guilty that he is intruding into his mother’s privacy. But he observes that because the journals lie in a university collection in California, if he didn’t publish them now someone else would.
The published journal begins in 1947. The next year, when she is 15, Sontag lists most of the anxieties that would torment her entire life: saying the wrong thing, rehearsing what to say the next day, hatred of her family, and (her own) lying. Can she hurt her mother more, she wonders, ‘How can I help me, make me cruel?’ Years later, she writes that ‘I wasn’t my mother’s child — I was her subject (subject, companion, friend, consort), I sacrificed my childhood — my honesty — to please her’. Sontag’s agony and rage at being the cheated child endure to the end of this journal.
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