by Susan Sontag
A long convalescence. I am resigned to that. Under Diana [Kemeny]’s tutelage, I’ll find my dignity, my self-respect.
A moment’s backsliding: the news from California. Judith’s reunion with Bob (“happy ending”) made me dream for an hour of———
But I must not think of the past. I must go on, destroying my memory. If only I felt some real energy in the present (something more than stoicism, good soldierliness), some hope for the future.
I’m not seeing anyone, really. Paul [Thek] growing distant, tapering off. I stayed home this evening. The phone didn’t ring. That’s what I wanted, didn’t I? Not these people …
The detective story (Gadda, “Un Crime”). All told from his point-of-view.
[Conversation with the American writer Stephen] Koch [on] Borges:
Indefinite postponement of revelation (: opposite of poetry; cf. Rimbaud: poetry must be revelation or nothing)
[Borges’s] Ficciones = illustrations of the problematical relation of (+ to) the “real” world; part of a highly reasoned dialogue with the “world”; all examples of a fundamental human act. (World is a pattern of irresolvable ambivalences, of which his aesthetic is an interpretation). Allegories of complete ambivalence. Unity only exists at the end of the labyrinth.
Hence, Borges an artist of ideas. But resists the conventional art-life distinction.
Career based on faith in the Word, an eternal Logos. (cf. studies of Carlyle, Hawthorne, Pascal). A series of metaphors, all images of infinite regression … God is infinite regression: He is hidden, but His endless labyrinthine depth is also his diversity.
Problem of “meaning.” (Not passion)
Posits for the artist an ideal impersonality. (Hence, B[orges] often accused of coldness). B[orges] the greatest living artist of the contemplative.
Read [the Dutch historian Johan] Huizinga’s essay, “The Task of Cultural History.”
10/18/65
T. Faulk, like Hippolyte [the protagonist of The Benefactor], ends imprisoned in his own house. The only difference is that in the new novel the coercion + pain of that “decision” (defeat) are exposed.
But still, it’s the same story. Hog-tied + flayed by the terrible parents, disguised as the ageing mistress and older friend (then) and now as older sister and older friend (now).
10/21/65
A marvelous title for T. Faulk:
The Eye and Its Eye (a book pub[lished] by Surrealist writer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes after WWI)
buy: Georges Lemaître, From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature (Harvard U.P., 1947)
Julien Levy, Surrealism (NY: Black Sun Press, 1936)
More stills: [SS collected film stills.]
Dietrich in tux
[A shot from the Russian director Abram Room’s 1927 film] Bed and Sofa
[Laurence Olivier in] Wuthering Heights
Two kinds of wax:
pure beeswax: it’s white, translucent; when melted down, becomes clear + transparent
Carnauba wax (more exp[ensive]): opaque—shellac, light-brown color—comes in shards—when melted down becomes translucent—melts at higher temperature
[Salvador] Dalí: “The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.”
11/7/65
Picasso: “a work of art is a sum of destruction”
With D.G. [Richard Goodwin, American writer and former speechwriter and aide to President Lyndon Johnson who later worked for Robert Kennedy, and who drafted the 1966 State of the Union; SS was briefly involved with him] a whole new continent of neurosis sailed into view. (Atlantis) Who I am. I won’t let “them” take it away from me. I won’t be annihilated. (Something I didn’t understand! She [SS’s mother] only saw that I flirted a little, and exaggerated that.) Women accept that I am a person—most, anyway; the Jackie Kennedys don’t bother me because they’re so exotic—while “they” see me as woman first, person second.
Greatest influence on Barthes: reading [Gaston] Bachelard (Psychoanalysis of Fire—then books on earth, air, + water), second [the French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel] Mauss, structural ethnology, + , of course, Hegel, Husserl. The discovery of the phenomenological p-o-v [point of view]. Then you can look at anything, + it will yield up fresh ideas. Anything: a doorknob, Garbo. Imagine having such a mind as Barthes has—that always works … But Blanchot really started it.
Two greatest and most influential critics—Valéry; then Blanchot
11/8/65
Through 2/3 of [The] Private Potato Patch [of Greta Garbo by J. Roy Sullivan at the Judson Poet’s Theater] I wanted to be Garbo. (I studied her; I wanted to assimilate her, learn her gestures, feel as she felt)—then, toward the end, I started to want her, to think of her sexually, to want to possess her. Longing succeeded admiration—as the end of my seeing her drew near. The sequence of my homosexuality?
[The American actress] Joyce Aaron: She expresses everything she feels. Instant outlet. (To be in touch with one’s feelings. Not to have them always lagging behind—chronic “esprit de l’escalier.”)
Make a play (with songs?) out of [SS’s short story] “The Dummy.” Transformations (Joe’s [Chaikin] work).
…
In NY, little or no “community,” but a great sense of “scene.” What’s started in London now—last couple of years.
My biggest pleasure the last two years has come from pop music (The Beatles, Dionne Warwick, The Supremes) + the music of Al Carmines.
I told [the American cartoonist] Jules Feiffer last night at the Fellini party that I was going to sue him!
In the next apt. I’ll have lots of plants, massed together.
Write an essay for Don Allen’s anthology, “Toward a New Poetics.”
Joe [Chaikin] is not very sensuous.
D[ick] G[oodwin] says you know if you can trust someone to be discreet if he or she 1) has a strong character; 2) is a shrewd judge of people; 3) doesn’t gossip himself. For example, Lillian [Hellman] doesn’t pass the test because she is 1) + 3) but not 2).
11/12/65
Movies, since I’ve been back in NY (Sept. 17)
[At the New York Film] Festival:
Kurosawa, Red Beard—[Toshir] Mifune
Visconti, Vaghe Stelle …—[Claudia] Cardinale
Franju, Thomas L’Imposteur
[Jerzy] Skolimowski, Walkover
[Marco] Bellocchio, Pugni in Tasca
Godard, Le Petit Soldat—[Anna] Karina
[Seen elsewhere:]
[Richard] Lester, Help—Beatles
[Jean] Renoir, The Lower Depths—[Louis] Jouvet, [Jean] Gabin
[Roman] Polanski, Repulsion—Catherine Deneuve
Visconti, La Terra Trema
[Arthur] Penn, Mickey One—Warren Beatty
[Frédéric Rossif,] To Die in Madrid [produced by SS’s companion of the late 1960s, early 1970s, Nicole Stéphane]
[D. W.] Griffith, Lady of the Pavements—Lupe Velez
[Bert I. Gordon,] Village of the Giants
[Otto] Preminger, Bunny Lake Is Missing—Olivier, Keir Dullea
[Walter Grauman,] A Rage to Live—Suzanne Pleshette
[Jack Arnold,] The Mouse That Roared—Peter Sellers
[Charles Crichton,] The Lavender Hill Mob—[Alec] Guinness
[Clive Donner and Richard Talmadge,] What’s New, Pussycat?—Peter O’Toole
Fellini, Juliet of the Spirits
[John Schlesinger,] Darling—Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde
Sternberg, The Last Command (1928)—Emil Jannings
Lang, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)—Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine
Lang, Rancho Notorious (1952)—Dietrich, Mel Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy
Sternberg, The Docks of New York (1928)—George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Baclanova
[Don Sharp,] The Face of Fu Manchu—Christopher Lee
[Franklin Schaffer,] The Warlord—Charlton Heston
[William Castle,] I Know [What You Did]
Mervyn LeRoy, Q
uo Vadis—Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov, Leo Genn
A problem: the thinness of my writing—it’s meager, sentence by sentence—too architectural, discursive
Subjects:
The “ritual” murder of a helpless old tramp—ceremonial execution of a derelict performed by unknown butchers in a deserted house near The Elephant + Castle—or the murder, by a coven of louts, of a neglected baby in a pram
A father tyrannizing over a daughter
Two incestuous sisters
A space-ship has landed
An ageing movie actress
McLuhan—Art is a DEW, a Distant Early Warning system.
Paul [Thek’s] problem at the moment: a square snake, metal skin, bloody flesh ends. How to make the organic (“meat”) + anti-organic (the square cylinder, the metal + metal-spray paint) go together
What interests me in narrative are:
The elements of narration (hence, I like to break up the narrative in short sections—continuous text seems problematic to me, perhaps even fraudulent)
The inessential detail—what fractures reality (rather than versimilitude)
…
11/13/65
Jasper Johns [on Duchamp]: “painting of precision and beauty of indifference”
The Zero zone: the zone of our boundless expectations
A prologue à la [Laura] Riding story:
In the beginning was the Org—the strong people + the weak people—
11/14/65
The book is getting clearer in my mind, and I want to do it fast, in first draft, by January. If I do five pages a day, in sixty days I’ll have 300 pages.
…
11/16/65
…
Laura Riding: sign above her bed: GOD IS A WOMAN
…
LSD: everything decomposes (blood, cells, wire)—no structure, no situations, no involvement. Everything is physics.
…
11/20/65
Keep an image-log. One a day.
Today: five brides motionless (in tableau) on a bare white stage, one Negro—high cheek-bones
Light from above is kind, light from below is cruel. Of one woman, when the light shone from below, you could see what she would look like age 60.
Tape—with echo chamber “I-I-I-I”
“That’s not you” (boy’s voice)
“It’s me”
…
for “The Bird” :
Look at English novel in 18th C. form, before it hardened. Defoe, [Samuel] Richardson, [Henry] Fielding, Sterne: You could have mixed “media” there too—
Essay passages (erudition, etc.), poetry, etc. as well as story.
One future of the novel is in the mixed media form.
Examples:
Ulysses
Naked Lunch (film scenario, “erudition,” etc.)
Pale Fire (poem, notes, etc.)
[Burt Blechman’s] The Octopus Papers
What about “The Organization” as a mixed-media form >
…
Function of boredom. Good + bad
[Arthur] Schopenhauer the first imp[ortant] writer to talk about boredom (in his Essays)—ranks it with “pain” as one of the twin evils of life (pain for have-nots, boredom for haves—it’s a question of affluence).
People say “it’s boring”—as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us.
But most of the interesting art of our time is boring. Jasper Johns is boring. Beckett is boring, Robbe-Grillet is boring. Etc. Etc.
Maybe art has to be boring, now. (Which obviously doesn’t mean that boring art is necessarily good—obviously.)
We should not expect art to entertain or divert any more. At least, not high art.
Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention—say, favoring the ear more than the eye—but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring … e.g. listening for sense rather than sound (being too message-oriented). Possibly after repetition of the same single phrase or level of language or image for a long while—in a given written text or piece of music or film, if we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or—maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).
Mailer says he wants his writings to change the consciousness of his time. So did DH L[awrence], obviously.
I don’t want mine to—at least not in terms of any particular point of view or vision or message which I’m trying to put across.
I’m not.
The texts are objects. I want them to affect readers—but in any number of possible ways. There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written.
I’m not “saying something.” I’m allowing “something” to have a voice, an independent existence (an existence independent of me).
I think, truly think, in only two situations:
at the typewriter or when writing in these notebooks (monologue)
talking to someone else (dialogue)
I don’t really think—just have sensations, or broken fragments of ideas, when I am alone without a means to write, or not writing—or not talking.
I write—and talk—in order to find out what I think.
But that doesn’t mean “I” “really” “think” that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when-talking). If I’d written another day, or in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently.
This is the most useful extrapolation / interpretation one can give to what Socrates said about “dialogues” vs “treatises” in the Seventh Epistle.
This is what I meant when I said Thursday evening to that offensive twerp who came up after that panel at MOMA [the Museum of Modern Art] to complain about my attack on [the American playwright Edward] Albee: “I don’t claim my opinions are right,” or “just because I have opinions doesn’t mean I’m right.”
…
11/21/65
Gustav Klimt—painter (contemporary of [Gustave] Moreau) —erotic
Show last year at Guggenheim—get catalogue
Most of his works are in Brussels + Vienna
Hardly any point in short fiction (“story”)—practically anything good must be 100 pp. long
Carlos [the Cuban-American film critic and friend of SS’s Carlos Clarens] (Dorian Gray)—all the years I’ve known him, he doesn’t get any older-looking; what’s even more amazing, he doesn’t get any smarter either
…
Movies to see:
The Bride + the Beast (1948?)—bride was really a gorilla in former incarnation “Lulu” (Asta Nielsen) [in Leopold Jess-ner’s 1923 Erdgeist]
Read Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (> [the French filmmaker Roger] Vadim, Et Mourir de Plaisir)
…
11/24/65
Lillian [Hellman] identified with Becky Sharp [in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair]—always wanted to be a bitch, to bait people.
I never got past admiring and envying her for being able to throw the dictionary back at the drippy schoolmistress. All that manipulative stuff with men was beyond me.
Analysis: two or three cataracts have fallen from my eyes. A hundred more to go?
