As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Preface
1964
5/5/46
8/5/64
8/6/64
8/8/64
8/18/64 London
8/19/64
8/20/64
8/22/64 Paris
8/23/64
8/24/64
8/28/64
8/29/64
8/30/64
9/3/64
9/8/64
9/10/64
9/23/64 New York
10/3/64
11/1/64
11/4/64
11/17/64
11/22/64
12/3/64
12/6/64
12/19/64
1965
PLOTS & SITUATIONS
1/5/65
1/16/65 Minneapolis [SS’s thirty-second birthday]
Contempt
1/25/65
2/17/65
3/26/65
4/20/65
5/20/65 Edisto Beach [SS was visiting Jasper Johns at his house in South Carolina]
5/20/65—South Carolina—
5/22/65 Edisto Beach
5/24/65
6/5/65 Paris
6/8/65 7 a.m.
7/16/65 Paris
7/22/65
8/1/65 Paris
8/19/65 Corse [Corsica]
8/22/65
8/24/65
8/25/65
8/27/65 Avignon
8/28/65 Marseilles
8/29/65 Tangier
9/5/65 Tangier, Tetouan
9/6/65 Tangier
9/7/65 Tangier
9/16/65 Paris
9/9/65 Tangier
9/17/65 Paris
9/17/65 (on plane to NY)
9/22/65 NY
10/4/65
10/13/65
10/15/65
10/17/65
10/18/65
10/21/65
11/7/65
11/8/65
11/12/65
11/13/65
11/14/65
11/16/65
11/20/65
11/21/65
11/24/65
11/25/65
1943–46 (Tucson + summer of ’45 in LA)
11/26/65
11/29/65
12/3/65
12/5/65 [SS’s friend the film critic] Elliott [Stein’s] birthday
12/12/65
12/15/65
12/17/65
12/19/65
12/21/65
12/22/65
12/25/65
12/28/65
1966
1/3/66
1/4/66
1/8/66
1966
6/26/66 Paris
7/5/66
7/6/66
7/8/66 Karlovy Vary
7/17/66
7/23/66 Prague
7/28/66 Paris
8/4/66 London
8/5/66 London
8/6/66 London
8/7/66 London
8/8/66 London
8/10/66 London
8/23/66
8/26/66
9/2/66
9/10/66 Venice
1967
4/11/67
4/18/67
8/3/67 Fort de France [Martinique]
8/6/67 Fort de France
8/9/67
8/10/67
8/12/67
9/18/67 New York
11/17/67
1968
5/7/68
5/10/68
5/12/68
5/13/68 Morning
8/7/68 Stockholm
9/19/68 Stockholm
1969
1970
2/4/70 Paris
2/10/70 New York
2/12/70
2/15/70
2/17/70
2/18/70
2/20/70
2/21/70
2/22/70
2/22/70
2/23/70
3/2/70
3/5/70
3/7/70
3/10/70
4/26/70
5/25/70
6/22/70 Naples
7/8/70 Naples
7/9/70
7/11/70
7/16/70
7/26/70
10/3/70
10/15/70
10/17/70
10/19/70
11/19/70 Stockholm
11/30/70
12/18/70 Paris
1971
1/16/71 [SS’s thirty-eighth birthday]
2/2/71
4/11/71 New York
4/21/71
4/24/71
4/27/71
1972
3/10/72
3/13/72
5/10/72 Cannes/Cap d’Antibes
6/21/72
7/5/72 Paris
7/20/72
7/21/72
7/28/72
9/3/72 NYC
9/16/72
10/15/72 Paris
10/20/72
10/21/72
10/28/72
11/6/72 Paris
11/7/72
11/16/72
1973
1/6/73
1/7/73
3/15/73
3/21/73
6/20/73 Haramont
6/27/73 Paris
7/31/73 Paris
8/14/73 Paris
8/20/73
9/3/73
9/14/73
10/15/73
12/9/73 London
12/10/73
12/16/73 Milan
12/23/73 Haramont
1974
1/20/74 Paris
2/6/74
2/9/74
7/25/74 Panarea [Italy]
1975
3/15/75 Haramont
3/17/75
5/16/75 NYC
5/20/75
5/21/75
5/22/75
5/25/75
6/7/75
6/12/75
6/30/75 [Paris]
7/19/75 Paris
7/22/75
8/7/75 Paris
8/8/75
9/4/75 NC
1976
2/18/76
2/22/76
6/1/76
6/14/76 Paris
6/19/76 New York
8/15/76
8/30/76
9/3/76 Paris
11/5/76
11/12/76
12/8/76
12/12/76
1977
2/9/77
2/20/77
2/21/77
2/22/77
2/23/77
2/25/77
3/6/77
4/19/77
7/12/77
7/19/77
7/20/77
8/4/77
8/11/77
8/21/77
9/8/77
9/17/77
9/20/77
9/26/77
10/11/77
11/23/77 Houston
12/4/77 Venice [SS had come to attend the Venice Biennale]
12/5/77
12/6/77
12/7/77
12/8/77
1713
12/9/77
12/10/77
12/12/77
1978
1/17/78 NYC
1/21/78
3/1/78 [or 3/9/78—the date is unclear in the notebook]
3/16/78
3/24/78
5/10/78
5/14/78 Madrid
5/20/78 Paris
5/23/78
5/24/78 Venice
5/25/78
5/27/78 Venice
6/21/78 NYC
7/2/78
7/8/78 Paris
7/17/78 Paris
7/21/78
7/25/78 London
8/7/78 Paris
8/11/78 Paris
8/12/78
8/13/78
8/20/78 NYC
11/1/78
11/17/78
11/21/78
12/5/78
12/27/78 Venice
1979
1/1/79 Asolo
1/5/79 Paris
1/13/79 Paris
1/14/79 London
1/15/79 London
1/27/79 Rome
2/1/79
2/8/79
2/11/79
2/13/79
2/18/79
2/20/79
2/25/79
3/10/79 Navarro [in California]
4/13/79 (plane from LA to Tokyo)
6/1/79
6/14/79 Paris
7/19/79 New York
7/22/79
7/25/79
11/2/79 NYC
11/28/79
12/4/79
12/14/79
12/15/79
1980
1/24/80
2/3/80
2/14/80
2/28/80
3/10/80
3/15/80
3/26/80
3/27/80
3/28/80
3/29/80
3/30/80
4/3/80
4/7/80
4/12/80
4/25/80
4/26/80
4/29/80
4/30/80
5/2/80
5/6/80
5/9/80
5/18/80
5/20/80 Casimierez [Kazimierz, a district in Kraków]
6/29/80 Paris
7/23/80
7/30/80
ALSO BY SUSAN SONTAG
Copyright Page
Preface
In the first years of the 1990s, my mother toyed desultorily with the idea of writing an autobiography. Since she was someone who had always preferred to write as little as possible about herself directly, this surprised me. “To write mainly about myself,” she once told an interviewer in The Boston Review, “seems to me a rather indirect route to what I want to write about … I have never been convinced that my tastes, my fortunes and misfortunes have any particularly exemplary character.”
My mother said this in 1975, when she was still in the midst of undergoing a cruelly severe regimen of chemotherapy that the doctors hoped would, but, as at least one of them told me at the time, did not really expect to, grant her a long remission, let alone cure, the metastatic, stage-4 breast cancer she had been diagnosed with the previous year (this was still the era when the family members of ill people were told more than the patients themselves). Characteristically, once she was able to write again, she chose to write the series of essays for The New York Review of Books that would later be published in book form as On Photography. Not only is she all but wholly absent in any autobiographical sense from that work, she barely appears even in Illness as Metaphor, a book she would certainly never have written had it not been for her experience of the stigmatization that came with cancer in those days and, while it has lessened, still exists today, usually in the form of self-stigmatization.
I can think of only four occasions when she was straightforwardly autobiographical as a writer. The first is her short story “Project for a Trip to China,” published in 1973 on the eve of her first visit there. In large measure, the piece is a meditation on her own childhood and on her father, a businessman who spent most of his woefully short adult life in China, and who died there when my mother (who never accompanied her parents to the British concession in what is now called Tianjin, instead being looked after in New York and New Jersey by relatives and her nanny) was four. The second is the short story “Unguided Tour,” published in The New Yorker in 1977. The third is “Pilgrimage,” published in 1987, also in The New Yorker. It is a memoir of a visit she’d paid as an adolescent in Los Angeles in 1947 to Thomas Mann, then living in exile in Pacific Palisades. But “Pilgrimage” is first and foremost an exercise in admiration for the writer my mother had then admired above all others; characteristically, the self-portrait comes in a distant second. It was an encounter, as she wrote, of “an embarrassed, fervid, literature-intoxicated child and a god in exile.” Lastly, there are the autobiographical passages at the end of my mother’s third novel, The Volcano Lover, published in 1992, where she speaks directly, and in a way she never did either in her published work or even in interviews, about being a woman, and a few glancing childhood reminiscences in her last novel, In America, published in 2000.
“My life is my capital, the capital of my imagination,” she told that same Boston Review interviewer, adding that she liked to “colonize” it. It was a curious, and uncharacteristic, turn of phrase for my mother, who was profoundly uninterested in money, and whom I can never remember ever using a financial metaphor in private conversation. And yet it also seems to me an entirely accurate description of her way of being a writer. It was also why I was so surprised that she would even consider writing an autobiography, which, for her, to continue the capitalist analogies, would have been not to live off the fruits, the proceeds of one’s capital, but rather to dip into it—the height of unreason, be the capital in question money or material for novels, stories, and essays.
In the end, nothing came of the idea. My mother wrote The Volcano Lover, and, in doing so, felt she had made the return to being a novelist that had been her ambition even when she was writing her best essays. The success of the book gave her a confidence she herself conceded she had lacked since her second novel, Death Kit, had been published in 1967 to very mixed reviews that had bitterly disappointed her. And after The Volcano Lover came my mother’s long engagement with Bosnia and with besieged Sarajevo—eventually an all-consuming passion for her. After that, she returned to fiction, with no further mention, as far as I am aware, anyway, of a memoir.
In my more extravagant moments, I sometimes think that my mother’s journals, of which this is the second of three volumes, are not just the autobiography she never got around to writing (had she done so, I imagine something highly literary and episodic, a cousin to John Updike’s Self-Consciousness, which was a book she admired greatly), but the great autobiographical novel she never cared to write. To pursue the conceit along its conventional trajectory, the first volume of the journals, Reborn, would be the bildungsroman, the education novel—her Buddenbrooks, to cite Mann’s great achievement, or, on a lesser literary plane, her Martin Eden, a novel by Jack London that my mother read as an adolescent and spoke of with fondness until the end of her life. This current volume, which I have chosen to call As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, a line plucked from one of the journal entries contained within it, would be the novel of vigorous, successful adulthood. About the third and final volume, I will not speak for now.
The problem with this account is that my mother, by her own proud and fervent admission, was a student her entire life. Of course, in Reborn, the very young Susan Sontag was quite consciously creating, or, rather, re-creating herself as, the person she wanted to be, far from the world in which she was born and in which she grew up. This volume does not involve the physical leaving of the southern Arizona and Los Angeles of her childhood for the University of Chicago, Paris, New York, and fulfillment (emphatically not happiness, which is something altogether different and, I fear, was not a well from which my mother ever was able to drink deeply). But the great success as a writer that my mother chronicles in this volume, the company of writers, artists, and intellectuals of every cast and persuasion—from Lionel Trilling to Paul Bowles, Jasper Johns to Joseph Brodsky, and Peter Brook to György Konrád—and the ability to travel anywhere, virtually at will, which had been her most cherished dream as a child, did not make her less of a student. If anything, it made her more of one.
For me, one of the most striking things about this volume is the way in which my mother moves between different worlds. Some of this had to do with her deep
ambivalence, and with contradictions in her thought that, to me, far from diminishing it, in fact makes it deeper, more interesting, and, in an ultimate sense, quite resistant to … well, to interpretation. But a more important element, I think, is that while my mother was not exactly known for suffering fools gladly (and her definition of fool was, to say the least, ecumenical), with people she genuinely admired she became not the teacher she liked to be so much of the time but rather the student. That is why for me the strongest parts of As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh are its exercises in admiration—of many people, but perhaps most poignantly, and in their very different ways, of Jasper Johns and of Joseph Brodsky. To read these passages is, indeed, to better understand those of my mother’s essays—I think particularly of those on Walter Benjamin, on Roland Barthes, and on Elias Canetti—that were themselves first and foremost acts of homage.
I like to think that this volume can also be fairly called a political bildungsroman, precisely in the sense of a person’s education, her coming to maturity. In the early parts of the book, my mother is at once angry and overwhelmed by the follies of the American war in Vietnam, against which she became a prominent activist. I think even she, in retrospect, would have winced at some of the things she said during her visits to Hanoi under U.S. bombardment. I have included them without hesitation, though, just as I have included many other entries on diverse subjects that either worry me for her sake or cause me pain of my own. Where Vietnam is concerned, I will only add that the horrors of war that made her go off to an extreme were anything but figments of her imagination. She may have been unwise, but the war was still the unspeakable monstrosity she thought it was at the time.
My mother never recanted her opposition to the war. But she did come to regret, and, unlike so many of her peers (I will be discreet here, but the discerning reader will know the American writers of my mother’s generation to whom I refer), to publicly recant, her faith in the emancipatory possibilities of Communism, not just in its Soviet, Chinese, or Cuban incarnations, but as a system. I cannot say for certain whether she would have had this change of both heart and mind had it not been for her profound relationship with Joseph Brodsky—perhaps the only sentimental relation of equals that she had in her entire life. Brodsky’s importance to her, despite their estrangement during the last period of his life, cannot be overstated, whether aesthetically, politically, or humanly. On her deathbed in Memorial Hospital in New York, on the penultimate day of her life, as she gasped for air, for life, and the headlines were full of Asian tsunamis, she spoke of only two people—her mother and Joseph Brodsky. To paraphrase Byron, his heart was her tribunal.