The misery of an intellectual

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.