In Praise of Messy Lives (14 page)

If anyone is under the impression that Susan Sontag was just like everyone else, a quick perusal of
Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947–1963
, edited by her son, David Rieff, should put that idea to rest. The extraordinary notebooks begin when she is a teenager, heading off to Berkeley, and carry her through her unhappy marriage to Philip Rieff, to Oxford and Paris, and, finally, back to New York. The diaries are shocking, singular, in both the intimacy of their brisk, notelike form and the astonishing personality they reveal.

Sontag does not expend the energy on being charming, or even comprehensible, that most people paradoxically do in their private journals. Her notes are scattered, aphoristic, sharp. There is a seriousness, an almost preternatural lack of humor, to the entries that is both the amazing power and the curiosity of Son-tag’s thought. The imperial voice of
Against Interpretation
is here aimed at herself. The critic takes her own personality on as a subject and dissects, often unflatteringly, her own weaknesses on the
highest and most trivial levels. “I had never realized how bad my posture is,” she writes. “It has always been that way.… It’s not only that my shoulders + back are round, but that my head is thrust forward.” The journals are largely composed of lists, ways to improve herself, books she should read, chronologies. They give evidence of a fierce and unrelenting campaign to work on herself as an intellectual, as a woman, as a mother. “In the journal,” she writes, “I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.” She was twenty-four years old.

What is remarkable here is the ferocious will, the conscious and almost unnatural assembly of a persona that rises above and beyond that of ordinary people. The determination she devotes to figuring out who to be, on the most basic and most sophisticated levels, is breathtaking. “Better to know the names of flowers than to confess girlishly that I am ignorant of nature,” Sontag writes. There is, in these pages, no sense of a woman comfortable in the world, a woman at ease. “Don’t smile so much, sit up straight,” she admonishes. “Think about why I bite my nails in the movies.” How is it possible that anyone is this self-conscious? And how is it possible that this degree of self-consciousness could be so fruitful?

In fact, there is no other diary I can think of that makes such liberal use of the imperative mood. Sontag is unremitting in her efforts to transcend her limitations, to imagine a different way of existing. She writes, “Admitting my mistakes, when I have been cheated or taken advantage of—a luxury that should be rarely indulged. People may seem to sympathize, really they despise you a little. Weakness is a contagion, strong people rightly shun the weak.” She seems to harbor a secret image of herself as
sloppy, idle, and weak that lies somewhere behind her spectacular efforts; she writes of herself over and over as naturally weak and accommodating to other people. The strength we associate with Sontag is an image, it seems, that she labored on, like an essay. In these strange and admirable journals, she feels at times like an alien from another planet who has settled in our midst and is studying our ways: “Most Americans start making love as if they were jumping out a window with their eyes closed.” One can’t help coming away with a sense of one’s own slack acceptance of a comfortable existence.

In the passages about her romantic life, which are the most conventionally human in the journals, Sontag comes across as surprisingly ardent and vulnerable. By her own account, she has a series of relationships with women in which she loves more than she is loved. “H. thinks she is decadent because she has entered into a relationship which neither physically or emotionally interests her. How decadent then am I, who know how she really feels and still want her?” All of the confidence we associate with Sontag, the opinionated force of her personality, crumbles in these associations with women in a manner almost hard to watch. Her descriptions of her affairs are filled with pain and self-contempt: “I can already envisage H.’s brittle demonstrativeness, my own gaucherie—my idiotic attempts to elicit her love.”

The Sontag in these diaries is mesmerizing, brilliant, abrasive, not quite likeable. Rieff mentions that he has not edited extensively and that she never read her journals out loud or intended for other people to read them. This appears to be true. They feel raw, unprocessed, like scribbled notes to herself, which gives them a greater power and immediacy than other, more polished diaries and memoirs that seem to anticipate and cater to their
public. They were meant for
her
, and she did not write and move on: Sontag comments in the margins later, like a professor weighing in judgment on a former self, never leaving herself alone. There is in an important way no difference between her own experience and a particularly absorbing book she might be reading. One can’t help but admire the intricate mental apparatus at work: she is writing notes on her notes. These private jottings are, like her famous essays, almost entirely abstract and cerebral: she almost never describes the physical world, what the sky looked like, the smell of orange trees in Seville, or what she and her lover ate for breakfast.

And yet the innumerable tiny details that preoccupy Sontag over the years, the moments when she does describe her relation to the physical world, are revealing. There are a surprising number of entries in which she resolves to bathe more frequently. “Take a bath every day,” she writes over and over, which somehow one doesn’t imagine reading in the journals of an adult. But bathing is difficult for her; it involves a confrontation with the physical body she finds distressing. She tells us she sometimes falls asleep in her clothes. There is something endearing in this self-portrait: the arrogant command of her authorial voice somehow belied by a sweet image of the unworldly woman writer, so uncomfortable with the basic physical demands of life, so flustered by soap and water.

If there was any doubt, the notebooks confirm that the uncompromising intelligence, the unsparing honesty Sontag shows in her work is not a pose or affectation. Her entries give evidence that she is to her core as unrelenting, unironic a critic in life as she is in her work. The harshness and purity and impossibility of her writing carry through into her days. All the weakness she fears in
herself, the baroque and excessive self-contempt she feels, is marshaled for the highest cause: she wills herself into a strength of vision and ambition of voice unrivaled in a woman thinker. She writes, “The writer is in love with himself,” and so she labors to create a self she can love, to reflect that perfect, arrogant writer’s confidence, that necessary narcissism. In his rather beautiful and tormented introduction, Rieff wonders whether he should have published these journals at all, as his mother never made her wishes clear before she died. But the reader, at least, is grateful that he did. The notebooks are invaluable for anyone interested in how the serious and flamboyant intellectual dreamed up her greatest project: herself.

One can’t say Susan Sontag died a particularly private death. She once declared she wouldn’t tell her readers “what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there,” but it seems other people were determined to do it for her. The latest glimpse we have of her sickbed is
Swimming in a Sea of Death
, David Rieff’s superbly intelligent, disordered account of his mother’s final illness.

It is perhaps not surprising that Rieff objects violently to the frank and controversial photographs that Annie Leibovitz took of his mother as she was dying. He writes that Sontag was “humiliated posthumously” by Leibovitz’s “carnival images of celebrity death.”

Rieff himself seems to have made a compromise with the business of intimate revelation; in his indirection one feels the
tastefulness, the reserve, of the reluctant or ambivalent memoirist. His images of his mother are vague, a figure weeping in another room; if they were sketches, they would be rendered in a delicate charcoal smudge. We see her underlining a pamphlet put out by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, but we do not see her illness itself in any detail. Rieff tells us he is not taking notes during her final months (which echoes Leibovitz’s assertion that she stopped taking pictures during that same time). He tells us, in one elliptical passage, that “she might be covered in sores, incontinent and half delirious,” but he does not want to write straightforwardly that she is.

What is shocking about the memoir is how ordinary Sontag seems. The reactions of this strong, singular woman to her illness, as Rieff reports them, are oddly generic. In a car returning from receiving the terrible diagnosis, he writes, she looks out the window, and “ ‘Wow,’ she said, ‘Wow.’ ” It tells us something important, surely, that one of the most articulate women of the last century should say, in the face of her cancer, “Wow.”

In fact, Sontag’s confrontation with her own ordinariness is the most intriguing element of Rieff’s story. For a woman who had always believed in her own exceptionality, who had defined herself by her will to be different, to rise above, the terrifying democracy of illness is one of its most painful aspects. Throughout her final illness, she tells Rieff, “This time, for the first time in my life, I don’t feel special.” In the most profound and affecting passages of the book, Rieff questions whether, on some level, his mother thought that she was too special to die. He investigates the line between hubris and bravery, grandiosity and vitality. Do we ever truly accept that we will die? Is there a part of the mind, especially for someone as ambitious, as avid, as Sontag, that refuses
to believe in its own extinction? Rieff enumerates the qualities that enabled her to transcend her unhappy girlhood in Arizona and her early unhappy marriage to become one of the country’s most formidable intellectuals. “Her sense that whatever she could will in life she could probably accomplish … had served her so well for so long that, empirically, it would have been madness on her part not to have made it her organizing principle, her true north,” he writes. That same belief in the power of her own desire, that spectacular ambition, that intellectual bravado, made it impossible to accept that fatal illness was not another circumstance she could master.

Of course, Sontag’s belief in her exceptionality had a history. In her first bout with breast cancer in her early forties, she survived. In early interviews after her recovery, she seemed intoxicated by her brush with death. She claimed she had acquired a “fierce intensity” that she would bring to her work; and she incorporated the idea of radical illness into the drama of her intellect, the dark glamour of her writer’s pose. Sontag had written in her diary during her treatment that she needed to learn “how to turn it into a liberation.” And it was that determination, that stubbornness, that constant act of self-transcendence that she thought she could reproduce at seventy-one, when cancer was diagnosed for a third time. But this time it didn’t work. “She had the death that somewhere she must have come to believe that other people had from cancer,” Rieff writes, “the death where knowledge meant nothing, the will to fight meant nothing, the skill of the doctors meant nothing.”

For a writer who voluntarily embarks on a memoir about his mother, Rieff is curiously silent on the subject of their relationship, but the contrast in styles speaks for itself. If Sontag was incomparable
in her confidence, grand scale in her ambition, constitutionally incapable of self-irony, her son is the opposite. He is disarming in his tentativeness, his self-doubt. “I am not even remotely smart enough to resolve any of this, even in my own mind,” he writes.

The book is haunted by Rieff’s anxiety that Sontag may have undergone an arduous treatment that was almost certain to fail, and in doing so put herself through an unnecessary ordeal. One of the doctors Rieff consults suggests a “folie à deux” between some cancer patients and their doctors, where physicians offer elaborate treatments, holding out hope when there is essentially none, in order to honor their patients’ last wishes to battle their disease. Did Sontag undergo a painful and doomed bone marrow transplant because she refused to accept the basic medical facts of her case? Rieff suggests that she might have. She struggled past the moment it was rational to struggle. Rieff seems to wish she had died a more peaceful death.

One of the fascinations of this memoir is watching Sontag’s thoughts play themselves out in the medium of life. In her elegant polemic
Illness as Metaphor
, she argues against the various fantasies that surround disease. Instead of poetry and emotionally charged beliefs, she argues, patients need to see clearly, think rationally, arm themselves with medical information to prepare themselves for the hard work of the cure. When Sontag was sick, she wrote in her journals that “I have become afraid of my own imagination.” It was this fear she so brilliantly investigated and rejected in
Illness as Metaphor
. The imagination, the romantic overlay we give disease, becomes the patient’s worst enemy.

The purity and charisma of the ideas Sontag laid out in
Illness as Metaphor
are irresistible, and yet this time around, for Sontag,
seeing clearly and absorbing information would lead only to the certain knowledge that she would die. In her final confrontation with cancer, she needed consolation; she needed fantasy; she needed not to think clearly. This was the dilemma for Rieff: Should he act according to what he felt his mother wanted as she lay in her hospital bed, nurturing false hopes and offering comforting lies? Or should he follow the dictates of her rigorous, uncompromising work, and tell her the truth? Rieff returns again and again to his guilt over whether he should have been more honest. The book’s very structure mimics the restlessness of a family member in a hospital room: pacing, circling, hovering. In the end, Sontag couldn’t live her illness without metaphor; she needed the idea of a fight even after the fight was lost.

Ultimately, Sontag’s strength is hard to disconnect from her folly. Her way of dying seems impossible, arrogant, heroic. Her conclusions, so hard won, so beautifully wrought, in
Illness as Metaphor
, seem a luxury here. In the introduction to that book, Sontag wrote about the kingdom of the ill, but in the real kingdom of the ill, as Rieff reminds us, there is no place to ruminate on metaphors: there is only death. From her bed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, when she was recovering from breast cancer, Sontag wrote in her journal, “In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.” Rieff, his mother’s son, unwilling to mystify, to romanticize, adds that “this was not the way she died.” But it is, of course, the way she lived.