Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  It is unlikely that readers who are motivated by prurience will be satisfied by the strangely scattered document that has resulted from Rieff’s editing. (The volume has a jittery, disjointed feel; it isn’t clear whether this is how the journals were written or if the published version of them was shaped to accord with Sontag’s trademark aphoristic style.) What’s fascinating and, in the end, extremely suggestive is that the journals reveal an adolescent and, later, a young woman in whom “ambition”—in this case, an overpowering yearning to be surrounded by and immersed in literature and culture—vastly outweighed, and seems ultimately to have overpowered, “sexuality.” That disproportion explains a great deal about the strange career, its achievements and its failures both, of a writer who, as her son wrenchingly writes, “was as uncomfortable with her body as she was serene about her mind.” Or for whom, as she herself puts it in the last entry of this journal, “intellectual wanting” was the equal of “sexual wanting.”

  The erotic element about which Rieff worries in his preface is, indeed, the least memorable part of Sontag’s private writings, at least in this first volume. There is, to be sure, a good deal of emoting, particularly in the early entries, which are dominated by the usual sorts of adolescent anxieties. “How easy it would be to convince myself of the plausibility of my parents’ life!” she writes in 1947, at the age of fourteen, already showing the impatience with the petit-bourgeois, assimilated Jewish-American background into which she was born, and at which she would never look back—the impatience that would later drive her to Berkeley, then to the University of Chicago, and then to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life. “I am in love with being in love!” she writes the next year, in one of the many girlish effusions about her already precocious erotic life that are sprinkled through the journals. (She understood that she was a lesbian very early on, and started having serious affairs as a teenager.)

  Much of the material about the diarist’s sentimental life constitutes a fairly typical Bildungsgeschichte, the record of a young person’s initiation into the mysteries of adulthood. The only real surprise here is that, intriguingly for a woman of her class, culture (provincial: she grew up in Arizona), and era (she was born in 1933), Sontag did not express a great deal of anguish about homosexuality itself. The pain that she records in these pages—the journals chronicle two major lesbian relationships—is the pain that comes with any love affair, but the insights are no more illuminating, finally, than the confidences to be found in any number of such documents, straight or gay. (“Lesson: not to surrender one’s heart when it’s not wanted.”) This is also true of the more explicit ruminations about sex itself, which are both infrequent and wholly conventional. “Fucking vs. being fucked. The deeper experience—more gone—is being fucked.”

  What you do want—what would, perhaps, be illuminating about Sontag’s hitherto hidden emotional life—you don’t get, at least in the text that has been published. There is almost no comment whatsoever on a notorious enigma of Sontag’s early biography—her engagement, at the age of sixteen, to the sociologist Philip Rieff after a ten-day acquaintance: a decision about which this journal’s near-total silence may, in the end, be more eloquent than words. As for the aftermath of that bizarre decision, there is much here about a bad marriage that, pace Tolstoy, seems to have been a lot like many other bad marriages, although Sontag can bring to her account of its collapse the same crisp intelligence that would make her criticism so satisfying. “Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor,” she wrote in 1956, after nine years with Rieff. “It is an institution committed to the dulling of feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.” She left Rieff in 1957.

  So the sex is not that good. That leaves ambition. That Sontag—the critic who emerged in the early 1960s as a Wildean champion of style wherever it could be found (camp, Godard, theater, “happenings,” science-fiction movies, pornography), even as she brandished a formidable familiarity with the classics of the canon—was completely omnivorous and always hungry for something new, you understood from the work itself. What the early journals reveal, and what ends up, curiously, being far more moving than the material about her emotional life, is the intensity and the scope of a remarkable intellectual ambition that was present from the start: the astonishing avidity for culture, for aesthetic stimulation, that more than anything mark Sontag as a writer and a public figure. (Members of a certain generation of writers can invariably recall the play, or opera, or ballet, or opening, or reading at which they first saw Sontag: she seemed to be everywhere.) At the age of fifteen she already had an unwavering conviction of what she wanted to do and where she needed to be: “I want to write—I want to live in an intellectual atmosphere.… I want to live in a cultural center.” And then, later: “I intend to do everything.”

  Much of Reborn—and, according to Rieff’s occasional interpolated commentaries, a great deal more of the original documents—consists simply of lists of “everything”: books that Sontag was determined to read, movies she had to see, poets and playwrights she had to know. An entry from 1948, when she was fifteen, looks like this:

  Gide

  Sherwood Anderson

  Ludwig Lewisohn

  Faulkner

  George Moore

  Dostoyevsky

  Huysmans

  Bourget

  Arsybashev

  Trumbo

  Galsworthy

  Meredith

  poems of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Tibullus, Heine, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire

  plays of Synge, O’Neill, Calderon, Shaw, Hellman

  In an italicized note to this passage, Rieff indicates that the list goes on for another five pages in the original.

  As the years pass and the journal continues, this particular passion, at least, never abates. What strikes you is how you encounter less and less the kind of emotions most people confide to their diaries: tenderness, vulnerability, and so on. One list that’s genuinely affecting, because it gives a rare glimpse of precisely that kind of awkward vulnerability, is the one that the young woman drew up before her first trip to Paris in 1957, which reveals how nervously the already deeply Francophile writer studied for her transatlantic debut:

  cafe crème—white coffee after dinner

  cafe au lait—breakfast coffee

  une fine (brandy) un Pernod (as many Pernods as colas in the US)

  It’s hard to avoid the impression that the outsized cultural avidity, the literary ambition to which these pages bear witness, seems eventually to have occluded the more tender feelings. Not the least of these was the maternal. It cannot have been easy for Rieff to come across lines such as “I hardly ever dream of David, and don’t think of him much. He has made few inroads on my fantasy-life.” Most editors aren’t called upon for, and don’t demonstrate, such probity.

  Indeed, there is a strange, sometimes even shocking froideur in evidence here about subjects that most of us find hot; it is startling to grasp the extent to which Sontag brought to her own life the chilly assessing gaze that made her such a brilliant critic, such an expert looker. In one passage toward the end of the book (she is in her late twenties) she muses that “sex as a cognitive act would be, practically, a helpful attitude for me to have, to keep my eyes open, my head up—where the point is not to show sexual excitement as long as you can. (No pelvic spasms, no hard breathing, no words, etc.)” “Practical” and “helpful” do not, for most of us, belong to the linguistic register that we bring to our understanding of a roll in the hay. And later on Sontag again returns to this wish “to make sex cognitive”—and “to correct the imbalance now.”

  It isn’t at all clear that the balancing act was a great success. If anything, the journals reveal a person for whom, however much she saw herself as a sensualist, the cognitive and the analytical invariably dominated the erotic and the affective. (“Emotionally, I wanted to stay,” Sontag wrote of her
decision to leave home and family in Los Angeles for Berkeley. “Intellectually, I wanted to leave.” She left.) The inevitable triumph of the head over the heart in these pages defies, I think, a description of his mother that Rieff gives in his preface: in speaking of Sontag’s extraordinary literary ambition, he compares her to Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré, the hero of Lost Illusions, the talented youth who comes from the provinces to find literary fame in Paris. Rieff goes on to conclude with a summary characterization of Sontag as a “nineteenth-century consciousness”—a judgment, you suspect, that Sontag, with her insatiable avidity for experience and her penchant for the Continental novel as model of the highest form of literary activity, would have welcomed.

  And yet when you survey her career with an eye as coolly dispassionate as the one she trained on so many objects, it becomes obvious that, temperamentally, she belonged to another century entirely. Her failure to understand just which century it was accounts for the sense you often get, taking the work as a whole, of aspirations that were at odds with her temperament and her talent; and it explains a great deal about both the strengths and the weaknesses of her work, and about the strange fascination that she exerted.

  If you looked closely enough, this uneasy, even riven quality was there from the start, in the breathtakingly authoritative critical pieces with which she made her reputation in the early 1960s. But as would often happen with this remarkable personality, the sheer force and stylishness of her utterances overwhelmed whatever doubts there might have been. The essays in Against Interpretation (1961) and in Styles of Radical Will (1966) may champion, famously, the need not for “a hermeneutics but an erotics of Art,” but what is so striking is that there is not anything very erotic about them; they are, in fact, all hermeneutics. In the criticism, as in the journals, the eros is all from the neck up.

  The heat, if anything, tended to be generated by the objects of Sontag’s interest, rather than by her investigation of them. The early forays into cultural criticism often derive their power precisely from the tension between the iciness of Sontag’s Olympian gaze and the unexpectedly funky, roiling, popular objects at which she levels it: porn, movies, sci-fi, camp. There was a deep pleasure, a thrill even, in seeing how she used a formidably broad and deep learning, and the traditional tools of formal literary analysis, to turn cultural sows’ ears into critical silk purses. In demonstrating the deeper cultural significance of phenomena that nobody else had thought to take seriously (“camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture … camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica”), she anticipated by a generation the belated adolescence of the American academy—all those Comp Lit and Cultural Studies dissertations, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, on Madonna and Boy George. This willingness to see the value in material disdained by “high” culture—something for which Pauline Kael would later become famous, after Sontag’s tastes ossified—was an important and satisfying part of Sontag’s rhetorical persona, and went a long way toward giving her the iconoclastic allure that would cling to her for the rest of her life, however conservative her tastes were to become.

  And yet this astoundingly gifted interpreter, so naturally skilled at peeling away trivial-seeming exteriors to reveal deeper cultural meanings—skilled, too, at teasing out the significance of surface features to which you might not have given much attention (“people run beautifully in Godard movies”)—fought mightily to affect an “aesthetic” disdain for content. Again and again, the essays themselves give the lie to her agenda of devaluing interpretation: even as she appears to swoon over “the untranslatable, sensuous immediacy” of, say, Last Year in Marienbad, you can’t help noticing that there is not a single sensuous surface that she does not try to translate into something abstract and rarefied, that is not subject to the flashing scalpel of her critical intellect. While this championing of form and especially “style” at the expense of content and “meaning” is hardly original—it’s reheated Wilde—what’s so striking in Sontag’s case is her furious insistence that it be true, her desperate need to believe the rhetorical claim that her own writing subverts.

  There is an odd quality of protesting too much to these gestures, to the booming opening salvos against contemporary intellectual culture’s “hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability,” and of interpretation as “the revenge of the intellect upon art.” As you make your way through these exercises in interpretative finesse, with their flourishes of epigrammatic bravura (“the greatest artists attain a sublime neutrality”), you wonder who is taking revenge on whom, exactly. Here again you feel the presence of an underlying conflict: Sontag the natural analyst against Sontag the struggling sensualist. You don’t doubt that she genuinely wished to experience works of art purely with the senses and the emotions; but the author of these celebrated essays is quite plainly the grown-up version of the young girl who, at fifteen, declared her preference for “virtuosity … technique, organization … the cruelly realistic comment (Huxley, Rochefoucauld), the mocking caricature.” Technique, virtuosity, raillery, cruelty even: all this, capped by the reference to Rochefoucauld, reminds you that, whatever her Balzacian yearnings, Sontag’s young tastes were far more in line with French classicism than with Romantic passion.

  Sontag’s career as a novelist is similarly marked by a strange misapprehension of her own gifts and nature. Everything that makes her an extraordinary critic—the extreme analytical self-consciousness, the way in which she can’t help but train the cool and assessing eye on every available object, the thirst for learning all the relevant and arcane details, the inability to resist any opportunity to interpret and to explain—makes her an inept novelist. There’s a jarring contrast between the thrilling vividness of her critical writing and the almost total inertness of her fiction. And yet she clung stubbornly to a view of herself as essentially a writer of novels and stories, from her claim in the preface to Against Interpretation that her critical essays were largely ancillary to her fiction, helping her to “radically change” her “conception of [her] task as a novelist,” to her pronouncement, in a speech she gave on accepting a prize in Germany in 2003, that “I am a storyteller.”

  Her fiction suggests otherwise, from the strained exercise in Francophilia that was The Benefactor in 1963, replete with the kind of archness and striving for effect that so often result when critics aspire to fiction (“he always spoke across the unbesiegeable moat of his own chastity”) to The Volcano Lover, in 1992, and In America, in 2000. In all of these the critic’s analytical and self-examining eye dominates, explaining too much, getting in the way. In both The Volcano Lover, a kind of intellectual recasting of That Hamilton Woman, and In America, a highly self-referential fictionalization of the career of the nineteenth-century Polish actress Helena Modjeska, Sontag herself, in the form of a disembodied narrator’s voice, hovers intrusively over the story that she claims to want to tell, commenting on the action, distracting your attention from the story by reminding us that this is a Susan Sontag production. “Appalled by the lethal upsurge of nationalist and tribal feelings in my own time,” the narrator of In America says, apropos of some ruminations about her Polish characters’ national history, “I’d spent a good part of three years in besieged Sarajevo.” There is no aesthetic reason, nothing in the form or the narrative, for the reader to have this information; Sontag just can’t get out of the way. You suspect that this arch carrying on was meant to be justified as a playful, even chicly postmodern device, but Sontag was too solemn and self-serious a writer to get away with such tricks, and the intrusions come off as merely pretentious.

  The Sontag that the author of the later fiction seems to think we want is not even Sontag the great critic: it’s just “Sontag,” the celebrated public figure. Already in The Volcano Lover, but particularly in the unbearably labored and self-conscious In America, the authorial interventions feel not only self-referential but also self-congratulatory. Even the true believers wh
o felt that In America deserved the acclaim it received must have stumbled over passages such as the following one, in which, as the novel opens, the hovering Sontag-narrator explains how she manages to understand the conversation of the Polish characters she mysteriously finds herself observing at the beginning of her tale:

  But I, with my command only of Romance languages (I dabble in German, know the names of twenty kinds of fish in Japanese, have soaked up a splash of Bosnian, and understand barely a word of the language of the country in which this room is to be found), I, as I’ve said, somehow did manage to understand most of what they were saying.

  The command “only” of Romance languages; the pompous advertisement for what we understand to be her sophisticated appreciation of sushi and sashimi—stuff like this, and there is a lot of it, makes you wish that Sontag had hoped more fervently for herself what, as the narrator of In America, she “hoped” for her protagonist: that “she hadn’t been made less of an artist by high-mindedness. Or by self-regard.”

  The great irony of her career is that her apparent conviction, derived from her early immersion in nineteenth-century European literature, that to be a significant literary figure you had to be a novelist, paradoxically blinded her to what already made her a significant literary figure. There’s a passage in Regarding the Pain of Others, a slender critical work published in 2003, in which, making a case about the special rhetorical quality of photography, she observes that “photographs [are] both objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality—a feat literature has long aspired to, but could never attain in this literal sense.” But of course literature does possess a genre that strives to be both objective and personal, an accurate record and a subjective testimony, a representation and an interpretation at the same time, and it’s the genre at which Sontag really excelled: criticism. That she could write such a passage—that it never occurred to her to think of her own métier when thinking about what literature could do—is more wrenching than anything she ever wrote in her fiction.