by Susan Sontag
Her heart was one often broken, and much of this volume is the elaboration of romantic loss. In a sense, that means it gives a false impression of my mother’s life in that she tended to write more in her journals when she was unhappy, most when she was bitterly unhappy, and least when she was all right. But while the proportions may not be quite right, I think her unhappiness in love was as much a part of her as was the profound sense of fulfillment she derived from her writing, and the passion she brought, particularly when she was not writing something, to her life as a perpetual student, as a kind of ideal reader of great literature, and ideal appreciator of great art, an ideal spectator of great theater, film, and music. And so, true to herself, that is, to her life as she lived it, the journals move from loss to erudition, and then back again. That it was not the life I would have wished for her is neither here nor there.
My edit of this volume of my mother’s journals has been immensely improved by Robert Walsh’s generous willingness to review the final manuscript. In doing so, he caught a large number of errors and lacunae in the draft.
Responsibility for remaining mistakes is, of course, mine and mine alone.
1964
5/5/46
The right hand = the hand that is aggressive, the hand that masturbates. Therefore, to prefer the left hand! … To romanticize it, to sentimentalize it!
I am Irene’s [the Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés—SS’s lover for a time in Paris in 1957 and then her partner in New York between 1959 and 1963] Maginot Line.
Her very “life” depends on rejecting me, on holding the line against me.
Everything has been deposited on me. I am the scapegoat.
[This entry is emphasized by a vertical line in the margin:] As long as she is occupied in warding me off, she doesn’t have to face herself, her own problems.
I can’t convince her—persuade her—with reason—that it is otherwise.
Any more than she could convince me—when we lived together—not to need her, clutch at her, depend on her.
There is nothing in it for me now—no joy, only sorrow. Why do I hang on?
Because I don’t understand. I don’t really accept the change in Irene. I think I can reverse it—by explaining, by demonstrating that I am good for her.
But it is as indispensable for her to reject me—as it has been indispensable for me to hold on to her.
“Whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” [a paraphrase of Goethe]
There is no love, no charity, no kindness for me in Irene. For me, to me, she becomes cruel and shallow.
The symbiotic tie is broken. She cast it aside.
Now she only presents “bills.” Inez, Joan, Carlos!
I have damaged her ego, she says. I and Alfred [the American writer Alfred Chester].
(The inflated, fragile ego.)
And no repentance, no apology for, no change from what was truly damaging in my behavior will appease her, or heal her.
Remember how she received the “revelation” at the New Yorker [a Manhattan movie theater that showed foreign and revival films, where SS went several times a week in the 1960s] two weeks ago!
“I am a stone wall,” she says. “A rock.” It’s true.
There is no responsiveness, no forgiveness in her. To me, only hardness. Deafness. Silence. Even a grunt of assent “violates” her.
Rejecting me is the shell Irene constructs around herself. The protective “wall.”
—Why I didn’t nurse David:
Mother didn’t nurse me. (I vindicate her by doing it to David—it’s ok, I do it to my own child)
I had a difficult birth, caused M[other] a lot of pain; she didn’t nurse me; she stayed in bed for a month after.
David was big (like me)—a lot of pain. I wanted to be knocked out, not to know anything; it never occurred to me to nurse him; I stayed in bed for a month after.
Loving = the sensation of being in an intense form Like pure oxygen (as distinct from air)
Henry James—
All based on a particular stylization of consciousness
Self & world (money)—no body consciousness, among many ways of being-in-the-world which he omits.
Edith Wharton’s biography. Banal sensibility capped, periodically, by strong intelligent conclusion. But her intelligence doesn’t transform the events—i.e. disclose their complexity. It only supervenes upon the banal telling of them.
…
8/5/64
Ontological anxiety, “Weltangst.” The world blank—or crumbling, shredding. People are wind-up dolls. I’m afraid.
“The gift” has meant to me: I wouldn’t buy this for myself (it’s nice, a luxury, not necessary) but I buy it for you. Denial of self.
There are people in the world.
A constriction in the chest, tears, a scream that feels as if it would be endless if I let it out.
I should go away for a year.
8/6/64
To say a feeling, an impression is to diminish it—expel it.
But sometimes feelings are too strong: passions, obsessions. Like romantic love. Or grief. Then one needs to speak, or one would burst.
The desire for reassurance. And, equally, to be reassured. (The itch to ask whether I’m still loved; and the itch to say, I love you, half-fearing that the other has forgotten, since the last time I said it.)
“Quelle connerie” [“What idiocy”]
I valued professional competence + force, think (since age four?) that that was, at least, more attainable than being lovable “just as a person.”
I can’t drive out my obsession with I[rene]—my grief, my despair, my longing—with another love. I’m not capable of loving anyone now. I’m being “loyal.”
But the obsession must be drained, somehow. I must force some of that energy elsewhere.
If I could get started on another novel …
From Mother, I learned: “I love you” means “I don’t love anyone else.” The horrid woman was always challenging my feelings, telling me I had made her unhappy, that I was “cold.”
As if children owe their parents love + gratification! They don’t. Though parents owe these things to their children—exactly like physical care.
From Mother: “I love you. Look. I’m unhappy.”
She made me feel: Happiness is disloyalty.
She hid her happiness, challenged me to make her happy—if I could.
Therapy is deconditioning [SS’s therapist at the time, Diana] (Kemeny)
Mary McCarthy’s grin—grey hair—low-fashion red + blueprint suit. Club woman gossip. She is [her novel] The Group. She’s nice to her husband.
Fear of the other going away: fear of abandonment
Fear of my going away: fear of retaliation by the other (also abandonment—but as revenge for the rejection of going away).
8/8/64
I have a wider range as a human being than as a writer. (With some writers, it’s the opposite.) Only a fraction of me is available to be turned into art.
A miracle is just an accident, with fancy trappings.
Change—life—comes through accidents.
My loyalty to the past—my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.
Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret of good sex.
The best things in SW [the philosopher Simone Weil] are about attention. Against both the will + the categorical imperative.
One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.
8/18/64 London
“Variety of Uniformities makes compleat Beauty.”—Sir Christopher Wren
Buster Keaton: Candide with a frontal lobotomy
[Description of the American novelist James Jones:] Shoulders coming out of his ears
Ectoplasm is (displaced) seminal fluid—19th c. mediums are aberrant symptom of the wakening of “modern” female sexuality
cf. [Henry James’s] The Bostonians, Padmore book
“The psychology and physiol
ogy of ‘the instant’”
Mary McCarthy can do anything with her smile; she can even smile with it.
A brain-damaged woman who—even after she’d mostly recovered—couldn’t follow a movie.
The Beatles, their quaternity.
Damp mollusks of 12-year old girls.
Dexamyls [a form of amphetamine on which SS became dependent for writing in the mid-1960s and which she used until the early 1980s, though in diminishing doses] are called, in England, “Purple Hearts” (they’re purple, not green [as in the U.S.]—kids take them 20 at a time, with Coke … Then (lunch hour) pop into a “cave” (nobody over 21 admitted) and [dance the] Watusi
Hemingway wrote a parody of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio; it’s his 2nd novel, Torrents of Spring (1926), just before The Sun Also Rises.
Arnold Geulincx (1624–69), the Belgian philospher—follower of Descartes—[Samuel] Beckett, as a student, read him—[Geulincx] holds that a reasonable man is nowhere free, except in his own mind—doesn’t waste energy trying to control his body in the external world.
Adjectives:
Punctuate (Punctate?)
Simian Vermillion
Impudent Crafty
Whooping Glottal
Laconic Unnerved
Besotted Cerulean
Gritty Stout
Cracking Vivid
Septic Feckless
Ruttish Ogival
Aporetic
Terse Toothy
Barmy Streamlined
…
8/19/64
Story: “The infinite system of Couples”
…
Cockney slang: rhyming plus knight’s move to the side
Breasts = Bristol (city > titty)
Teeth = Hampteads (heath > teeth)
Verbs:
Slash Slip away
Flake Barter
Judder Tamper
Spurt Blunt
Sprint Bash
Jar Whimper
…
Horrifying to feel one’s integument (skin) pierced
Annealed …
[the American writer William S.] Burroughs:
Language = control
“Terrorist” attacks on language (cut-up method)
cf. [The French experimental writer Raymond] Roussel—Comment J’ai Écrit …
Escape into space (sci-fi) vs. History
[The] Soft Machine
Nova Express
Naked Lunch
Dead Fingers Talk
“Bumtrinkets”—bits of feces stuck to hairs of anus (cf. Cicely Bumtrinket in [the seventeenth-century dramatist Thomas] Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday)
Ditto for “dingleberries”
Nouns:
Panache Armature
Parameter Scuffle
Neologism Cistern
Guts Persiflage
Integument Tempo
Snap brim fedora Furore
Gruel Imbroglio
…
“Une incertitude de jeunesse” [“youthful uncertainty”] (of [Bertolt Brecht’s first play] Baal)
Sci-fi essay
1. Films better than the books—why?
2. Content
Figure of the scientist as Satanist ([Goethe’s] Faust, Poe, [Nathaniel] Hawthorne)
• treatment of the scientist as one who releases forces which if not controlled for good could destroy man himself
• cf. old vision of scientist (Prospero, etc.) as a dotty magician only partly in control of the forces in which he dabbles.
Sci-fi as modern allegory:
Modern attitude toward madness (being “taken over”)
Modern attitude toward death (incineration, extinction)
Rich fund of metaphors (Jonathan [Miller, British writer and director]) from:
1. Computers
2. Hydraulics
3. Photography; optics
4. Physiology of crustaceans
5. Architecture
6. Chess + military strategy
[Examples of Miller’s use of these metaphors:]
“Like the kick-start on a motor-bike—now I’m going on my own.”
“Yards of prose.”
“Final suicidal Pickett’s charge against …”
“Chromium-plated with charm.”
Jonathan: the intersection between psychiatry and aesthetics
…
British pops
Lonnie Donegan
Chris Barber
…
Cliff Richard + his Shadows
Cilla [Black]
Helen Shapiro
…
Mersey [Beat]:
Beatles
Dave Clark 5
The Rolling Stones
The Beasts
The Pretty Things
The Birds
…
Dusty Springfield
…
Sequence of a migraine:
Loss of perspective (flattening out) > “fortification phenomena” (white lines—zooming in from side; one-sided) > nausea and vomiting > acute hemicrania
(holding site is always part of acute pain)
SMELL is the largest sensory area in the brain and also the most primitive
Very powerful but not articulated—can’t do anything with it (just naming)
All accent, no syntax
Smelling gives one a knowledge of sensation rinsed clean of thought (unlike hearing and seeing)
Osmology, as opposed to logology
[The French writer Nathalie] Sarraute—
Tropismes (first book)—something like “prose poems”—Sarraute calls them that.
First one written in 1932.
Volume was published in 1939 (Denoël), republished by Éditions de Minuit in 1957, with 6 more written between 1939 + 1941
This is her form!—her texture is anti-novelistic, though she’s decided to write “novels” + launched an important critique of the novel on the basis of her method.
Sperlonga—beach near Rome
…
In old age, the cereberal arteries silt up—gradual diminution of blood supply to the brain
8/20/64
…
Influence of photography on painting:
1. Off-centering: main subject is in a corner ([the Italian director Michelangelo] Antonioni, [the Swiss-American photographer] Robert Frank).
2. Figures in motion: [the nineteenth-century English photographer Eadweard] Muybridge. Previously, all figures are either at rest (in repose) or at the end of a motion (e.g. farthest the limb can be extended)
Compare dancing figures in Breughel with Degas’s Horses at Longchamps
3. Understanding of focus: eye can’t see focusing, since it does so automatically, it’s a function of attention.
All painting prior to photography is in even focus. As the painter’s eye traveled from plane to plane, each went into focus.
Quality of film [stock] is important—whether grainy or not; old stock or new ([Stanley] Kubrick used WWII unused newsreel stock for War Room sequences in Dr. Strangelove)
Mont Blanc fountain pen (Fr.)
Italic script (get book on)
Read Poe on “Magnetism,” and “The Imp of the Perverse.”
[This is highlighted:] Off-centering big technique in modern fiction and poetry
Words have their own firmness. The word on the page may not reveal (may conceal) the flabbiness of the mind that conceived it. >
