When Susan Sontag died in 2004, she left behind a closet full of nearly 100 notebooks. As her son and editor, David Rieff, has explained in his harrowing memoir Swimming in a Sea of Death, Sontag fought to the exceptionally bitter end, refusing to admit the prospect of death, eventually dying "as she had lived: unreconciled to mortality". In his restrained preface to Reborn, Rieff reveals that one of the few times Sontag even implied that she might die was in a "conversation" about the journals. It wasn't much of a conversation: she whispered to him, "You know where the diaries are", and that was it; she offered no further guidance about her wishes, leaving Rieff to draw his own conclusions. Given that she had already sold all her papers to UCLA, he decided, not unreasonably, that they would be published anyway, and he would prefer to edit them himself.
The first of three projected volumes, Reborn offers a portrait of the critic as a young woman, from a frighteningly precocious 14-year-old to a 30-year-old divorcée and mother. It ends as she is about to publish her first novel, and a year before "Notes on Camp" would launch her career as America's most famous public intellectual. Reborn makes plain that Sontag sprang fully formed from her own forehead; the notebook outlines her efforts to will herself into critical existence. Although Sontag always prized her fiction most highly - especially her 1992 novel The Volcano Lover - it was her astute cultural criticism that made her name. And it is that developing critical intelligence, rather than any especially novelistic impulse, that dominates the pages of Reborn.
Sontag's drive towards self-improvement is indefatigable: Reborn eschews narration in favour of admonitory, appraising notes and observations, prescriptions, judgments and an embryonic impulse towards moralising. The journal consists in great part of schedules, plans and lists, especially of the books, music and films she intends to consume, or has just finished consuming. She frequently upbraids herself, as, for example, 10 days before her 24th birthday, for wasting her ideas in conversation: "The leakage of talk. My mind is dribbling out through my mouth." Those who are familiar with Sontag's often censorious approach to her society may be relieved to discover that she started out no more lenient with herself than with the rest of us. Her most characteristic intellectual traits are evident early on: ferocious acuity, formidable ambition, a tendency towards pretension, and a deeply earnest approach to life that would lead her to declare herself "a zealot of seriousness". As a young woman, predictably, this just meant that she took everything far too seriously - especially herself. As Reborn begins when Sontag is an adolescent, her solipsism seems perfectly understandable. However, your average 16-year-old probably wouldn't track down and "interrogate" Thomas Mann, record in detail his thoughts on The Magic Mountain and then sniff: "The author's comments betray his book with their banality."
The book begins with Sontag a bored and frustrated 14-year-old, contemptuous of her suburban family's philistinism and determined to broaden her aesthetic and sexual horizons. Her exceptional cleverness made Sontag self-important, sometimes pompous, as a young woman; but her intellectual complacency is tempered by a sexual insecurity exacerbated by the era's intense homophobia. By 15 she was acknowledging her desire for women, while resisting it: "I feel that I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this)." At barely 16, she matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley, and almost immediately she was, she ecstatically declares in the journal, "reborn" after making drunken love with a woman the diary calls H. The next entry, touchingly, reads: "6/4/49 Shostakovich Piano Concerto / Scriabin Preludes / Franck D Minor Symphony / Prokofiev Symphony #5 // [Bach's] Mass in B Minor / Sex with music! So intellectual!!"
Sontag will not long permit herself such unguarded juvenility as those double exclamation marks, however. Soon she is exploring San Francisco's gay underground, earnestly keeping a primer on gay slang and its proper usage.
After just one semester at Berkeley, Sontag transferred to the University of Chicago. At the end of November 1949, she notes that she will do research work for a sociology instructor named Philip Rieff. The next entry, 10 days later, says only: "Last night, or was it early this (Sat) morning? - I am engaged to Philip Rieff." She was 16. The next entry muses briefly on morality, and then comes the long passage about "interrogating" Mann. Rieff has been consigned to the margins. For the reader, it is a startling, disorienting swerve from the rapturous girl "resurrected" through lesbian sex, to what seems, reading between the lines (which is all the reader can do, faced with huge gaps in narration), like an all-too-common mid-century effort at going straight. A decade later Sontag will recall that she "did desire Philip tremendously during the first year", but that desire does not appear on the page. Instead, she writes a year after the marriage that she wed Rieff on 3 January 1950, 13 days before she turned 17, with "full consciousness + fear of will toward self-destructiveness". As omens go, its not auspicious.
The journals then skip two years, during which Sontag had her son David and battled a depression that is never named, but strongly implied by the long silence itself. After a few years of increasingly bitter musings on the entrapments of marriage, and some charming maternal anecdotes about her small son, Sontag abruptly left her husband and child, at 24, to study at Oxford. From there she went on holiday to Paris, and instead of returning to England she embarked on a painful, doomed affair with none other than her first lover, H, whom she re-encountered there. Eventually returning to New York, Sontag successfully sued Rieff for custody of David and began an affair with the next letter, "I", a woman with whom both she and H had previously been involved. That relationship seems little happier than the one with H, although it was considerably longer lasting.
If her two lovers do not come off well in Sontag's sometimes blistering analysis ("I say that H's honesty is not honesty; it's nastiness. Honesty means being honest all the time, not just when you can afford it"), the young Sontag seems frankly exhausting. Needy, nearly masochistic in what she depicts as her own submissiveness (it is worth asking whether her lovers might have found her more combative), she chose self-destructive relationships and then tended towards self-dramatisation and martyrdom: "A crucifixion, these last two weeks . . . Must deserve it. Love is ridiculous." The quick slash dates Rieff reproduces ("2/8/58") make it difficult for the reader to remember how young she is, especially given how mature her voice always sounds. The post-adolescent histrionics leave little room for humour, especially at her own expense, but occasionally Sontag offers an astringent little taste of self-knowledge, as when she suddenly admits how voluntary, even wilful, are these hopeless affairs: "I remember expressing amazement (+ feeling superior) when H said once in Paris that she didn't know whether or not she had ever been in love with someone. I couldn't understand what she was talking about . . . for me being in love is deciding: I'm in love + sticking with it, I'm always well-informed."
Sontag seems to have spent the time when she wasn't agonising over love watching films and voraciously consuming New York's cultural offerings. She continued to probe arguments, dissect her emotions, jot down the occasional graphic sexual anecdote and develop theories of aesthetics and moral philosophy. But she was actually working on a novel, to which the notebooks give short shrift; to support herself she taught, in a desultory way, at Sarah Lawrence College, regularly missing lectures and arriving late. Her son, who lived with her, seems not to have occasioned much thought. The journal ends with a characteristic, undated note from 1963: "The intellectual ecstasy I have had access to since early childhood. But ecstasy is ecstasy. Intellectual 'wanting' like sexual wanting." Despite her consistent association of intellectual and sexual energy ("the orgasm focuses. I lust to write"), and however strong her urge to experience life, from pleasure to pain, what comes through most powerfully is not the desire to feel, but the need to understand.
Like many an aspiring writer, Sontag wrote her notebooks with a self-conscious awareness that, ultimately, her words were meant to be read. At 24, she offered thoughts "On Keeping a Journal": "Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself." But Sontag also used her journals as a whetstone, sharpening her blades, as is clear from a rather unpleasant episode, in which she deliberately reads H's journal and discovers a "curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment" of herself. Sontag rationalises her snooping by defining the journal as a "social" text: "One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal." She then wonders when H will read this entry. "No mask is wholly a mask", she says, covertly acknowledging that journal-keeping by writers is often an exercise in the art of the open secret, and in covert revenge.
Reborn grows considerably more compelling as it progresses: even a precocious adolescent's thoughts and emotions are adolescent. Near the end of this first volume, one can feel Sontag's mind beginning to ripen and bloom, and the full force of the intellectual originality that would be her hallmark emerging. As fascinating as this fragmented glimpse into Sontag's mind is, it remains a kind of tease. Volumes two and three may well be where the real pleasure comes: not from gossip, but from genius.
Sarah Churchwell is a senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia.
