by Susan Sontag
Valuable subjects:
Destroy the bourgeois myth of the artist, the creator (anti-[Fellini’s] 81/2)
Political action by women
That the enemy is human, but still the enemy (Stalingrad letters [of German soldiers])
Spiritual action by a woman
The sacred
[Undated, December]
“The sacred” + the bourgeois myth of the solitary alienated artist-creator are antithetical.
Experiencing the sacred is the opposite of being alienated. It is being integrated. Always implies relations to others—“a public.”
“Sacred” always involved risk of death, annihilation.
Is it possible that the notion of the “sacred” is a mystification? (Most sophisticated form of universalism, denying class conflict and concrete struggle)
1972
[Undated, January]
Author’s note for a thriller (Dick Francis, Forfeit): “is now, as a splendid thriller writer, exceeding his fame as a champion steeplechase jockey.” Think about that idea of a writer.
Kindness, kindness, kindness.
I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.
Right now, this moment. I’m not afraid. A tremendous weight that I feel almost all the time isn’t there.
Why am I so afraid? Why do I feel so weak, so guilty? Why haven’t I been able to write M[other] for a year now, or open her letters?
I must see C[arlotta], who has returned to Paris today with Gio[vanella Zannoni]. I must not be afraid … And call [Robert] Bresson, and Yuyi [Beringola] + Hugo [Santiago, Argentine exiles in Paris with whom SS had become friendly], and [the French academic] Violette [Morin], and Paul [Thek]. And write Roger [Straus, SS’s publisher and friend] + [the New York psychiatrist] Lilly [Engler] + Joe [Chaikin]. Why have I been so afraid these last two months?
[SS must have shown this entry to someone as, below it in another hand and underlined, is written:] Please don’t be afraid!
3/10/72
[The Chilean filmmaker, theater director, and poet Alejandro] Jodorowsky:
Grotowski the end of bourgeois psychological theatre, its final purification.
[Constantin] Stanislavski > Gordon Craig > Grotowski
“I used to ask [the French mime] Marcel Marceau, ‘Why don’t you talk?’ You know why? Because he has a little squishy voice, like this—”
Can’t do plays anymore—What?
Magic ceremonies. Rituals.
Three centers: belly, chest, head.
Play music for each [of the] three.
(Tibetan tapes.)
A meditation room.
Grotowski: an actor who trains as a monk does. Jodorowsky: a monk who can act.
Do comic strips. (His models: Little Nemo, Popeye before 1938, Flash Gordon.)
“G. likes a poor theatre. OK. So do I. (Mime, etc.) But I like a rich theatre too. (I like Cecil B. DeMille.)”
Buy:
Goethe, Elective Affinities
Paul de Man, Blindness + Insight
Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants
Idea for a novel:
Look up Paris newspapers, late 1934—Galapagos adventure of baroness and three young men, recounted by [Paule] Thévenin …
Dr. Friedrich Ritter and Frau Dore Strauch von Koerwin arrived at the Galapagos Islands in 1929 to live there—both were Germans. Before coming there they had taken the precaution of having all their teeth extracted—replacing them by “râteliers” of steel. They wanted to create an Eden—which they called Friedo (first syllables of their first names). In 1924 (?) the famous Baroness Basquet von Wagner, accompanied by three very young men, arrived on the island. The total disappearance of the Baroness, who had herself called the Queen of the Galapagos, and two of her suitors; the fortuitous discovery of the third on the beach along with the corpse of a “pecheur de passage” [“passing fisherman”] made big headlines in the papers toward the end of 1934 …
3/13/72
[The founder of The New American Review, Ted] Solotaroff—our generation (Chicago, etc.): we knew all about values, but we didn’t understand the connection between our values and our experience. We “evaluated” our experience, dismissing most of it as unworthy of our values.
The “Art Nouveau” appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. “I’m alive.” “I’m decorative.”
5/10/72 Cannes/Cap d’Antibes
Two films seen here I’ve learned from, admired. Herzog’s TV-STYLE documentary about blind-deaf people [Land of Silence and Darkness]. The new Jancsó “about” Attila [La Tecnica e Il Rito]—his obsessional meditation about war (armed struggle), power-domination—one of the most erotic films I’ve ever seen (the eroticism of men). A dream about how a charismatic world-conqueror is created: the psychological elements oneirically reconstituted. The opposite of the analysis made in [Roberto] Rossellini’s La Prise du Pouvoir par Louis XIV, but equally valid.
Feminism: “GEDOK,” an organization of feminist artists that began in Germany in 1926—was disbanded by Hitler in the 1930s
Romaine Brooks, [Dora] Carrington, [Gertrude] Stein
The Kurago—the black-clad men who handle the Bunraku doll puppets
[Masahiro] Shinoda film of Monzaemon Chikamatsu’s 1720 doll drama, The Double Suicide [Shinjû: Ten No Amijima (1969)]
6/21/72
Idea for a fiction-meditation (in style of [Kenneth Bernard’s] King Kong in NAR [New American Review] # 14: “On Women Dying,” or “Deaths of Women,” or “How Women Die.”
Material:
death of Virginia Woolf
death of [the German soprano] Henriette Sontag (in Mexico—cholera—on tour—June 17, 1854)
death of Alice James
death of [the Russian mathematician] Sofia Kovalevskaya (Stockholm, 1891)
death of Marie Curie (July 4, 1934—pernicious anemia due to radiation)
death of Jeanne d’Arc
death of Amelia Earhart
death of Hélène Boucher ([French] aviator—d. 1934)
death of Rosa Luxemburg
death of [the French playwright and political activist] Olympe de Gouges (d. 1793—guillotined)
death of Carrington
another title: “Woman and Death”
Women don’t die for each other. There is no “sororal” death as there is a fraternal death (Beau Geste)
…
Get Cahiers de L’Herne number on [the twentieth-century American writer H. P.] Lovecraft
Modern operas: Schoenberg, Moses und Aron, Die Glückliche Hand; [Bernd Alois] Zimmermann, Die Soldaten; [Luigi] Nono, Intolleranza; Luigi Dallapiccola, Il Prigioniero, Ulisse; [Franz] Schreker.
Forgotten writers:
Georges Rodenbach (Fr[ench] “symbolist”)
Paul Nougé (Belgian Surrealist)
[Undated, July]
French, unlike English: a language that tends to break when you bend it—
7/5/72 Paris
A writer, like an athlete, must “train” every day. What did I do today to keep in “form”?
[The American writer] Leonard Michaels at the [Café] Flore: He said we looked alike (Russian-Polish-Jewish …), that what first turned him on to me was that I mentioned [the Cuban-American torch singer] La Lupe in the “camp” essay and he went to see her. He wants to write like La Lupe—writing for him is “musical”—the beat. He liked the fucking in the train at the beginning of Death Kit. He thinks [Samuel Richardson’s] Clarissa is the greatest English novel. “Do you read? I mean do you read a lot?” He thinks the gauchistes are “barbarians.” He can’t speak French and he never heard of the Flore. He was born at the beginning of January 1933 on the Lower East Side—his father immigrated in the early 20s, his mother at the beginning of the 30s—his first wife committed suicide (in the next room, 47 sleeping pills) while he was a graduate student—his second wife, naturally, is a DAR [Daughter of the American Revolution] (his words)—he has tw
o sons, age 3 + 6 … He went to Music + Art [public high school in New York City] > Univ[ersity] of Michigan > Berkeley
7/20/72
…
I am invited to China for three weeks, starting Aug[ust] 25.
A China book? Not Trip to Hanoi—I can’t do the “West meets East” sensibility trip again. And I certainly have no intention of recounting my actual trip. I’m not a journalist. Je ne suis pas raconteur. Je déteste raconter [“I’m not a storyteller”]. (Unless it is to use the story to illustrate a point—or to be able to analyze + discuss the story afterward + extract reflections from it.)
What book? Could I do now a “Notes Toward a Definition of Cultural Revolution”? Probably I’ll get to see very little of the C[ultural] R[evolution]. (How could I? I’ll never be alone. It will probably be mostly visits to factories, schools, museums). But the idea is there.
Another idea of the family—
An alternative to “société de consommation” [ “consumer society”]
Against 4 Old’s: Old Culture, Old Habits
Against art made by artists (people specializing in art)
Compare turn to East of non-political people ([the French poet René] Daumal, Hesse, Artaud)—for “wisdom”—with Maoist turn to East. La Cina è vicina [a reference to the 1967 film China Is Near by Marco Bellocchio that SS greatly admired].
Yunan lectures on art.
Recount story of film. My father. The China in my head as a child. The “book” on China for Miss Berken’s 4th grade class that was the first long thing I ever wrote. The Chinese furniture in the house in Great Neck [New York]. Mr. Chen.
Opening: “I was, as far as I know, conceived in China (in Tientsin, in 1932), but since my parents returned to the United States for my birth (in New York, in 1933), I spent the first years of my life—in the United States—making up for their disappointing prudence by telling school friends that I was born in China. They had gone back to China soon after I was born in New York, and stayed there most of the first five years of my life. My father was a fur trader; he had an office in New York, in the fur district (231 W 31st St), at the head of which he put his kid brother Aaron—and he ran the main office of the company, in Tientsin, which is where he and my mother had lived most of the time since they married in 1930. My father died in Tientsin while the city was under bombardments (it was the time of the Japanese invasion) but of TB on Oct. 19, 1938. He had been born, the fourth of five children of a poor immigrant family on the Lower East Side in New York City on March 6, 1906—had started public school in 1912, at the age of 6, quit school in 1916, at the age of 10 to go to work as a delivery boy in the fur district, and made his first trip to China in 1932, by then a representative of the fur company he worked for at the age of 16. He went into the Gobi Desert on the back of a camel to buy fur skins from Mongolian nomads. He was eighteen when he had his first attack of TB.”
Dedicate book to my father.
For Jack Rosenblatt (b. New York 1906—d. Tientsin 1938)—“Daddy”—a set of photographs—a boy, as I think about him now—an unfinished pain, Death, the Great Disappearance. My son wears your ring. I don’t know where you are buried. I weep when I think of you.—You keep getting younger. I wish I had known you.
Can use photographs:
[Auguste and Louis] Lumière 1900 material
Pudovkin, Storm over Asia
Daddy’s pictures
Bataille photo of a man flayed to death
Chinese-looking photo of Marx on China News cover
Biblio[graphy]:
Ezra Pound on calligraphy
[The French sinologist] Marcel Granet
[The British sinologist and historian of science] Joseph Needham
2 issues of Tel Quel
Malraux
Blue Columbia “China”
Chinese pornography (Skira)
In Tides in English Taste (2. Vols.) on Chinoiserie
Look at Barthes on Japan
Perhaps it’s something like a Broch-ish novel—a meditation on China. The opposite of Fred Tuten’s book [The Adventures of Mao on the Long March] in tone, not a parody at all. But also mixed in form.
The everything book I’ve been trying to write. Remember what Richard Howard said 5 years ago when Death Kit came out? I have to find my own form—philosophic récit, reflections. Perhaps this is it, quite different from what he imagined but serving the purpose.
I can put my whole life into this book. It’s about everything, and yet it’s about the moon—the most exotic place—about nothing at all.
Another model for the book: John Cage, A Year from Monday. A collage. I can even photostat the cover and two pages from the China book I wrote when I was ten years old. Use cover—with Susan Rosenblatt—as faded cover design, over which the title of this book and Susan Sontag will be superimposed in heavy black print.
A collage: The Shanghai Gesture, Turandot, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, The Good Earth, Shanghai Express (Dietrich), Myrna Loy [sic] in Jules Verne’s Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine, Kafka, The Great Wall, The East Is Red, La Cina è vicina, Storm over Asia.
Themes:
Search for dépaysement
Vie Collective (fight individualism)
Courtesans + cruelties
Situation of women
Sex—Chinese pornography
Can do a Brecht-type analysis of a speech of Mao Tse-Tung: in two columns (like texts Barthes used)
… Idea of “the saying” in China
idea of wisdom
…
Calligraphy
Style of hagiography:
Confucius
Norman Bethune [a Canadian doctor who was on the Long March with Mao]
Mao Tse-Tung
Possible book
Narratives / collages / discussions
Interspersed with 10 passages about my father + that Gatsby-ish life—autobiographical
“If one out of every four persons born each second is Chinese, does that mean that if I have four children, my fourth baby …”
Importance of China landscape (Jesuit who painted)
Life of the concessions
II. Courtesies On being good—style of hagiography
III. Chinese torture
“If white is the color of mourning, then black …” reversal of values
Twelve Travellers:
Marco Polo
[Matteo] Ricci
Jesuit who painted
Soulié de Morant
Paul Claudel
Malraux
Teilhard de Chardin
Edgar Snow
Norman Bethune
My father
Richard Nixon
Me
VI. “And besides the I Ching”
Chinese religion Turn to East
“You have to finish your plate. Think of all the starving people of China.”
Imperialism: Storm over Asia, Lumière
Imperialist imagery. Tell of British opium trade, the concessions
Lumière Bros. 1900 film
VIII. Not since Napoleon [—] Mao Tse-Tung [—] Long March
IX. Notes Toward a Definition of Cultural Revolution
X. To be a Maoist (ouside China)
Materials: jade, teak, bamboo
10 meditations (1 page each)
Chinese food
Chinese laundries
Mah Jongg
Chinese torture
I could write the book now. But I don’t have the title, the permission, the credentials unless I go (even only for a short time, in which I’ll see nothing).
…
Image of the monkey in Chinese mythology: wily, practical. Odysseus. Anti-heroic, “human.”
