by Susan Sontag
1713
André Breton in the early 1940s called up Meyer Schapiro to ask him if Newton’s treatise on light was published in 1713; was exceedingly disappointed when Schapiro said it wasn’t. Had wanted to put the date, as a signature, in painting.
Schapiro knew, collected the paintings of [the German-American artist] Jan Müller (d. 1958)
…
12/9/77
A great subject for a novel: the temptation (corruption) of the good. Communism. Who will be the Solzhenitsyn of the “clercs communisants” [“communizing clerks”] of the West?
Pound > Lowell. Poetry should be a record of everything that comes into your head.
Visit with Joseph to [Ezra Pound’s companion] Olga Rudge between 5 + 8 pm—252 San Gregorio (near Salute)
Olga Rudge always referred to Eliot as “Possum …” Said that Pound was not contrite or penitent in the years between his release from St. Elizabeths and his death … With a hint of tears in her eyes, she paused (only once) and said: “You know, Ezra was right. He was right. There’s too much democracy. There’s too much free speech …” Said that [the American writer] Natalie Barney [in the margin: knew Djuna Barnes] spent most of the war in Rapallo, as Pound’s guest … In the tiny living room she has [Henri] Gaudier-Brzeska’s big bust of Pound (on the floor) + the Wyndham Lewis drawing of Pound … She insisted on the fact that Pound had a “Jewish first name” and didn’t change it—“from the beginning—his first book—he signed himself ‘Ezra Pound,’ not ‘E. Loomis Pound’ or ‘Loomis Pound’” and that the Loomises were a good family (“Look in the New York Social Register; you’ll see many Loomises.”). “A biblical name,” I said. “That’s right, a Jewish name. So if Ezra were an anti-Semite, as people say, he wouldn’t have kept that Jewish name, now would he?”
She has an English accent. She says, “Capito?” after many sentences.
“ … I’m like the ancient mariner,” she said at the door. Joseph + I, in our coats, had been standing there for fifteen minutes while she went on without a stop. “Now what was his story about? Oh, yes, wasn’t it something about a dead bird?” A closing line she must have used many times.
Sinyavsky not only brought out his family from the Soviet Union but hundreds of books and his black poodle Matilda. His wife has been back several times. A deal was made.
An inscription in a copy of Cal’s writing—a line drawn through “Robert Lowell” on the title page and underneath: “For Ezra, with love and admiration, more than for any other.” CAL
New occupation: a free-lance drug designer.
Every century (era) invents its own noble savages. Ours are the Third World.
[A vertical line is next to this entry:] Joseph: “Akhmatova used to say, ‘When I was young I loved architecture + water; now I love the earth and music.’”
Creaking of the vaporetto piers, audible at night, when the boat unloads. Cooing of gulls riding the water. The damp smells. The left side of the basilica, black and white, that is better + more sharply seen at night than in the daytime. One sees too much in the day. The senses are sharper at night.
Calvin was a spiritual aristocrat. I like his verticality. Luther was a slob. He didn’t even see the point of what he was destroying.
[Carlo] Ripa di Meana [the director of the Venice Biennale] (smiling a little): “As you know, Italians don’t drink lion juice for breakfast.”
When I say that I hate stupidity what I really mean is that I can’t stand spiritual vulgarity. But it would be vulgar to say that.
12/10/77
I’m reading [Beckett’s] Malone Dies. That’s prose that changes your life—that is, the way you write. How can anyone write the same in English after reading that?
György Konrád: “L’écrivain qui a des positions militantes est un masochiste: il se prive de ses propres dons.” [“The writer who takes militant (political) positions is a masochist. He deprives himself of his own gifts.”]
My political positions: all adversary. I am against (1) violence—+, in particular, colonialist wars and imperialist “interventions.” Above all, against torture. (2) Sexual and racial discrimination. (3) The destruction of nature and the landscape (mental, architectural) of the past. (4) Whatever impedes or censors the {movement of people, art, ideas.
{transport
(If I’m for anything, it is—simply—the decentralization of power. Plurality.)
In short, the classic libertarian / conservative / radical position. I can be no more. I should not want to be more. I am not interested in “constructing” any new form of society, or joining any party. There is no reason for me to try to locate myself on either the left or the right—or to feel I should. That shouldn’t be my language.
I feel guilty when I don’t write, and that I don’t write “enough.” Why? What’s this “guilt”? Joseph says the same of himself. Why should you feel guilty, I asked? “Because I used to write 20 good poems a year. Now I write only 7 or 10—though they’re mostly better than what I used to write.”
I accuse Joseph of doing his Ninotchka number [Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 comedy starring Greta Garbo as a Soviet agent]. (Which corner of the room is mine? [a paraphrased line from (Which corner of the room is mine? [a paraphrased line from the film] etc.)
Ripa de Meana: “Intellectuals in Europe have a Tabasco role.” Are, inevitably, drawn to extreme positions.
The enemy is the thought: All problems are, finally, political problems. And, therefore, to be solved by political means.
“Nothing survives in the same form” ([the French Marxist literary critic] Pierre Macherey). Until recently the main form in which G[ree]k art survived in Western society was as a hegemonic ideal, through what Marx refers to as its capacity to “count as a norm and as an unattainable model.”
[The following entry has a box drawn around it:] Art in the West: this once unwanted, but now accepted, telescope into ourselves.
In 17th + 18th century, Greek art functioned as essentially an attainable model. With the industrial revolution it begins to acquire attributes as unattainable (an “ideal”). Now the classics have been replaced by the study of national literatures. “The home of the totality has become literary criticism.” ([The contemporary English critic and historian] Perry Anderson)
The formalist method: suitable for those ignorant of, or indifferent to, history. This, surely, is part of its appeal now. One doesn’t need to be “learned” to understand a literary text or a painting, only intelligent. One doesn’t need more than the work itself.
12/12/77
Churches: San Silvestro (in Piazza San S[ilvestro]). And Sant’Ignazio (in Piazza Sant’I[gnazio]. [Rome]): Baroque (Counter-Reformation, Jesuit) folie. The ceiling that is too high—the vertiginous scene—the false cupola (trompe l’oeil) that’s right only from the center of the church! And now you have to pay 100 lire to see it!
Beckett the opposite of Joyce. Get smaller, more precise, fussier, bleaker … smaller and briefer. Could one be the opposite of Beckett now? That is, not Joyce. But not only bleak; and larger, and less old—
[Dated only “Note from 1977”]
So far as it is really denied, death becomes the most important thing. (Like anything which is denied.) It is nowhere, and it is everywhere. While we deny death, the morbid has a supreme attraction for us. Perhaps because no transcendent source of values can anymore be detected, death (the extinction of consciousness) becomes a seal of value, of importance. (In a sense, only what concerns death has value.) This leads to both a promotion and a trivialization of the concept of death, which gives perhaps the deepest stimulus to the persistent iconography of violence + violent death in the artifacts of our culture. (The extraordinary frequency with which the plot of a serious contemporary novel turns on, or resolves itself, by a murder—compared with the extreme unlikelihood that the educated writers of vanguard fiction have ever been anywhere near a murder in their lives.)
Best films (not in order)
1. Bresson,
Pickpocket
2. Kubrick, 2001
3. Vidor, The Big Parade
4. Visconti, Ossessione
5. Kurosawa, High and Low
6. [Hans-Jürgen] Syberberg, Hitler
7. Godard, 2 ou 3 Choses …
8. Rossellini, Louis XIV
9. Renoir, La Règle du Jeu
10. Ozu, Tokyo Story
11. Dreyer, Gertrud
12. Eisenstein, Potemkin
13. Von Sternberg, The Blue Angel
14. Lang, Dr. Mabuse
15. Antonioni, L’Eclisse
16. Bresson, Un Condamné à Mort …
17. Gance, Napoléon
18. Vertov, The Man with the [Movie] Camera
19. [Louis] Feuillade, Judex
20. Anger, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
21. Godard, Vivre Sa Vie
22. Bellocchio, Pugni in Tasca
23. [Marcel] Carné, Les Enfants du Pradis
24. Kurosawa, The Seven Samurai
25. [Jacques] Tati, Playtime
26. Truffaut, L’Enfant Sauvage
27. [Jacques] Rivette, L’Amour Fou
28. Eisenstein, Strike
29. Von Stroheim, Greed
30. Straub, … Anna Magdalena Bach
31. Taviani bro[ther]s, Padre Padrone
32. Resnais, Muriel
33. [Jacques] Becker, Le Trou
34. Cocteau, La Belle et la Bête
35. Bergman, Persona
36. [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder, … Petra von Kant
37. Griffith, Intolerance
38. Godard, Contempt
39. [Chris] Marker, La Jetée
40. Conner, Crossroads
41. Fassbinder, Chinese Roulette
42. Renoir, La Grande Illusion
43. [Max] Ophüls, The Earrings of Madame de …
44. [Iosif] Kheifits, The Lady with the Little Dog
45. Godard, Les Carabiniers
46. Bresson, Lancelot du Lac
47. Ford, The Searchers
48. Bertolucci, Prima della Rivoluzione
49. Pasolini, Teorema
50. [Leontine] Sagan, Mädchen in Uniform
[The list continues up to number 228, where SS abandons it.]
1978
1/17/78 NYC
Tannhäuser tonight at the Met [the Metropolitan Opera] (with [the American literary critic] Walter Clemons). The music is about sex—eroticism—voluptuousness. That’s why one goes on loving Wagner. The stories of the operas, alas, are something else: the vulgarity; the kitsch problems (sex vs. soulfulness); the martial proto-Nazi volkishness. Nietzsche was right about Wagner—more right than he knew. And yet, and yet—that voluptuousness …
The Hebrew word for life, “chai,” is spelled with two letters, chet and yod. These letters have numerical equivalents, chet, 8, and yod, 10, which add up to 18. Tradition of giving $18 as a charitable donation. (To give a “chai” for … to give a “triple chai” ($54), one chai for my family, one chai for my friends, … etc.) …
The need to find patterns, the need to pattern …
…
1/21/78
Sex is getting a bad reputation. The 1960s—seemed like energy, joy, freedom from stuffy taboos, adventure. Now seems to many people more trouble than it’s worth. A disappointment. Sex a sublimation of the desire to work. Sexual drive took them, into a wall … Male homosexual “world” abandoned the gentle / bitchy homosexual (the “fairy,” “fag,” “fruit”—compulsively attending to his sexual needs)—+ gave itself over to lechery, vice, and sexual manias.
Distinction of “novel” from “romance” important through 19th c[entury] ([Samuel] Johnson’s Dictionary defines a novel as “a small tale, generally of love”). Only rather recently did the term “novel” spread imperialistically to cover any long prose fiction.
Another way of thinking about why the questions, “Is this a novel?,” “Is the novel dead?” are stupid.
—Scrim (transparent curtain)
3/1/78 [or 3/9/78—the date is unclear in the notebook]
I’m not thrilled anymore by literary criticism as auto-critique—the construction of methodologies, the deconstruction of texts. Criticism that is about itself.
Illness as Metaphor is an attempt to “do” literary criticism in a new way but for a pre-modern purpose: to criticize the world.
It’s also “against interpretation”—once again. With a subject, instead of a text.
I AM against turning illness into a “spiritual condition.”
About how the metaphoric understanding, and the moralization of a disease, belies the medical realities.
So many modern ideas thought to be liberating to some class or relationship or just aspiration have turned out to be more enslaving than not.
Don B[arthelme]: “I know you have a lot on your plate right now.”
Sci-fi: heartless apocalypse.
Furies and demons with electric guitars, narrow shirts, and back-lit hair.
3/16/78
… “A plot so thin you could thread a needle with it.” [Film critic Janet Maslin, The New York Times, on American Hot Wax]
“Never mind. No matter …”
3/24/78
[The American choreographer] Merce Cunningham said in an interview the other day (NY Times) that his dance (events) were constructed so that there is no particular focus of attention (de-centered?), + the viewers can choose what they want to look at: “like television—where we switch from one channel to another.” !
…
I want to fight my resignation—but I have only the tools of resignation to fight with.
…
Spelling went out when reading went out.
5/10/78
Pulse of red on the horizon for the ten minutes after the sun has set
… the rim of the mountain behind which the sun has just set
like the top of a volcano—
5/14/78 Madrid
Reading Benjamin—the new volume—and finding him less extraordinary, less mysterious. I wish he hadn’t written the autobiographical works.
A story about the city. Two people traverse it, wander about—one looking for sexual adventure (prostitutes?), the other looking for an apartment. A. looks forward: desire. B. looks backward: regret, nostalgia for the lost space. Two experiences of time, two experiences of space (the labyrinth).
5/20/78 Paris
In 1874, Mallarmé started—and edited—a fashion magazine: La Dernière Mode. There he discovered (?), made his first experiments with layout and typography.
5/23/78
Old [German publisher] Carl Hanser: He lives in a Biedermeier bunker.
Lots of emotion, but only five channels.
Benjamin wrote radio dialogues in the early 20s—+ hundreds of reviews. Spent a lot of his time chasing women; frequented prostitutes—bourgeois romance about crossing into forbidden class-territory through sex.
Novels of [the contemporary Swedish writer] Lars Gustafsson + essays. Novels of [Siegfried] Kracauer.
This is a time for inventing new things, not new ideas. True?
Enzensberger writing a two-hundred-page poem about the sinking of the Titanic—an epic subject—how people face death. No more politics!
[The Italian writer Italo] Calvino is writing stories set in 19th c[entury] Paris.
The fact that I now wear two pairs of glasses, one for seeing far, one for seeing close. It doesn’t really work, for example, in a bookstore—or sitting in a café, where I want both to read and to look at people.
The language of a consumer society: the jargon of satiety.
…
5/24/78 Venice
Venice makes me weep. Walking alone in the Piazza San Marco in the early morning. So I went into the cathedral, sat among the five or six faithful, heard the mass, and took communion.
Puritanism: a variety of moral kitsch. ([The Bulgarian-British writer Elias] Canetti)