by Susan Sontag
The theatre of Mei Lanfang. (Idea of Chinese theatre chez Brecht + Artaud)
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How did Kafka understand China—from Prague—in 1918–1919?
7/21/72
Telling Nicole [Stéphane] today how the whole story of Death Kit came in a minute—fell into my lap—the whole histoire: the train, Hester, Incardona, the business conference, the hospital, the return to New York—huis clos [“closed hearing”]—the entry into the land of death.—everything, on the mention of that mysterious word “Diddy” by John Hollander at the beginning of our midnight coffee date at the Tant Mieux, that now-defunct coffee house on Bleecker Street where I used to go all the time. “What did you say?” “Diddy—Oh. Excuse me. I mean, Richard [Howard]. I always forget. That’s what he was called in Cleveland, when he was a child.” “Diddy?” “Yes.” “How do you spell it?” “I don’t know. D-id-d-y, I guess.” And all the while, Death Kit was filling my head—and I asked John to excuse me, I couldn’t stay. I had to go home. I was expecting a long-distance phone call—and I rushed home at 12:30 and began to write Death Kit—the opening part, Diddy & his life, his suicide attempt—in a fever until six in the morning …
Telling that story today to Nicole, the story of how the novel was given to me, intact, in a flash, all on the mention of the word “Diddy”—because Diddy has nothing to do with Richard Howard, is in no way even remotely based on him—it was just the word, a kind of “coup de foudre” [“love at first sight”] à la [the French psychoanalyst Jacques] Lacan for that word qui a tout déclenché [“that unleashed everything”]—but why? Why that word? I’ve never [understood]—telling Nicole that tale, as I’ve already told it thirty times in the last five years (remembering, as I told it, more my other tellings than the actual event)—suddenly, today, in a flash—again a flash—I understood. After five years, I understand. (And why today?)
Why Diddy? If John Hollander had said his nickname was Bubu or Toto—or Dig? No! Diddy, Diddy only. Those five letters. Why? I’ve never understood. Today [I] saw.
Diddy
Daddy
That’s the source of the meditation on death I’ve carried in my heart all my life.
Diddy is 33 years old. So was Daddy when he died.
Did-he? Did he die? The theme of false death, la mort équi-voque, la résurrection inattendue [“unexpected”] in all my work—
Frau Anders (The Benefactor)
The Bauers (Duet for Cannibals)
Incardona (Death Kit)
Lena (but it fails) in Brother Carl
An essay to write—on death.
The two deaths in my life.
1938: Daddy: far away, unassimilable.
1969: Susan [Taubes]: same name as me, ma sosie [“my double”], also unassimilable
It’s finished. Daddy did die.
The resurrection of Lena fails because Susan did die. The manner of her death—and Karen’s dream of her resurrection—are taken from that pain. (I ended by not shooting the actual suicide, and cutting the dream!) I had Karen’s dream. I told it to Diana [Kemeny], who responded as Martin does.
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In the first notebook for [Dostoyevsky’s] The Idiot, it was Prince Mishkin who killed Natasya Filipovna, not Rogozhin.
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Four days a year perhaps, I have “visits”—things come. Visitations, rather than inspirations. I live the rest of the year on that—executing the orders + sketches I’ve taken down … I turn myself into a commodity. The typewriter is my assembly-line. But what else could I do?
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[William] Hogarth: everything is exteriorized. A person’s face is his character and his social status and profession. Everyone is 100% what he is … Balzacian conception of his own work: paint (dissect, show the conflicts in, unmask the hypocrises of) a whole society. Painting that you have to “read” (a defect?). Cinema. Themes: conflict; hypocrisy; sensual excess.
Antonioni’s L’Eclisse—his best film, a great film. All [the French writer and filmmaker Marguerite] Duras is there—but so much greater, richer. The Bourse scene is worthy of Eisenstein. Between [Alain] Delon + [Monica] Vitti, the second half of film: a huis clos ambulant, dehors [“walking closed court, outdoors”]. Delon (a really professional actor; opposite of [Jean-Paul] Belmondo, all charm) sets the rhythm—the way he moves, never stops moving.
A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent—more important than any words.
Proust is not Balzac plus all the rest. Balzac was Balzac plus all the rest! The social portraiture plus the theories about society, love, genius, personality—pages and pages of stuff in Balzac just like Proust on time, Proust on recognition, Proust on the [connection] between homosexuals and Jews.
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[The twentieth-century French writer Pierre] Drieu La Rochelle / Mishima [—] fascism < > virility cult < > suicide
a subject: the phenomenology of ideology
[On Wagner’s] Die Walküre
… Incest is instant eros (like homosexuality)—the erotic couple of the first act are brother + sister, the erotic couple of the last act are father + daughter
Some of what is wonderful to listen to in Walküre—orchestral passages w[ith]o[ut] singing—becomes de-valued when one sees the opera. Then the music suddenly becomes just the accompaniment or illustration of the actor’s gestures: like staring longingly.
7/28/72
It’s not true that the ideal situation would be that every person be an artist (gauchiste-utopian cliché) [anymore] than it would be desirable that every person be a scientist.
What would the world do with all those things?
The universalization of art [would] be an ecological disaster. An idea of infinite productivity.
No better than the idea of infinite inventiveness (technology) or the infinite acquisition of knowledge. Concept of limits.
Fear of engaging in “élite” activities is what makes people say that, ideally, everyone should be [an] artist.
But some activities are possible only if a few people do them.
The only sense in which everybody could be an artist is if art were understood exclusively as performance—or throw-away art. Art would be something people did, and if it resulted in an object you wouldn’t have to (perhaps even be able to) keep it, store it in a museum. Cage, therefore, has a right to say he wants everybody to be an artist. There’s very little product-making in his notion of art. There’s nothing to keep, monumentalize. It self-destructs.
To repeat: it’s an ecological problem.
Essay on cemeteries (or film?)
> 20 min. (Franju)
1. “morbidity” as a form of sensibility
2. Cemetery as ideal city urban space “Streets,” “garden”—flowers, “houses”
3. Cemetery as structures [—] cf. [the twentieth-century Italian writer Umberto] Eco bad taste kitsch “photographs”—Linguaglossa (Sicilia)
4. Cemetery & memory (time-effacement)
5. Individuality < > mass grave
6. Cemetery as literature [—] epitaphs [—] legibility
7. Cemetery + the family (love = the couple) Cemetery: artifice + reality
9) colors: white
Cemeteries:
New one in Marseilles
Haramont [a village outside of Paris where Nicole Stéphane had a house]
Linguaglossa (Sicilia)
Long Island
Highgate (London)
Near Taroudant [Morocco]
Panarea [island off Sicily]
9/3/72 NYC
Ego: Bobby Fischer, James Joyce, Norman Mailer, Richard Wagner, Mark Spitz, [Herman] Melville
Connection between male homosexuality and fascism, between Puritanism and communism: sex + politics
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9/16/72
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Best model for interview tone: Robert Lowell …
China book—cross between Hannah Arendt + [the American writer Donald] Barthelme, I told [then
editor of The New Yorker] W[illia]m Shawn yesterday
Kinesics and Context, Essays on Body Motion Communication—by Ray L. Birdwhistell (Ballantine pb, 1972)
Why is this book so reactionary and repulsive in tone?
its sexism (“appropriate mating,” use of “he,” etc.)
its assumptions of the rights of the scientist—
patient
layman // professional
amateur
its notion of the social e.g. universe / idioverse
the moral implications of its jargon
10/15/72 Paris
Model for noble tone in essay form—Arendt, Men in Dark Times
Re-read [Arendt’s Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing + [Walter] Benjamin essays, often!
Hong Kong—the Lu Hu Bridge spanning the Sham Chun River, between China and Hong Kong. Walk across. Peaked cloth caps. [SS used the first sentence virtually verbatim in her autobiographical story “Project for a Trip to China.”]
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Modern idea of paradise: the place we don’t understand (Katmandu, the Tarahumaras, Tahiti, etc.)
10/20/72
(theme of a novel) relationship between fascism and “the fantastic.”
Lovecraft
Fantasia, Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here
mechanization of people
use of color
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10/21/72
Two root metaphors of my life:
trip to China
the desert
Two-part book (prose poem à la Cendrars): Return to desert (Tucson); trip to China
Desert—statis, emptiness, stripped-down, too few people, being simple-minded, rinky-tink history
China—movement, superior culture, green landscape, grand history, too many people
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10/28/72
Just learned that the China trip has been postponed until Feb. 15
Thank God I wrote “Project.”
Instinct of self-preservation!
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[Undated, November]
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Recycling one’s own life with books
11/6/72 Paris
Idea for a short story or novella (from a visit of [the film producer] Lise Fayolle and her husband Claude Breuer chez Nicole last night):
A man—handsome—42 years old—born in Brussels, brought up in Montreal. A writer. Drinks. Long hair. All the clothes he wears have been bought by women. A raté [“failure”]. Knows “everything.” Doesn’t keep anything—possessions, old manuscripts, journals. Has worked very little—occasional journalism, free-lance PR photography (John Lennon and Yoko at Colombe d’Or at Cannes Festival in 1970), script doctoring. Published his first novel two years ago; brought out by a small independent publisher in the Alpes-Maritimes, Robert Morel—a modern building in the middle of 180 hectares on the top of a hill … with one steel door “that closes like a safe”; printed 10,000 copies—all sold, but only in the South of France—not one copy in Paris (publisher refuses to send the books to Paris bookstores, even when they are ordered); [Une Journée un peu chaude]; won a small, prestigious literary prize, le Prix Roger-Nimier. Has finished second novel, started on third. Has quit Robert Morel—“it was painful”—“I love him”—letter: “Cher Robert, Je vous quitte. Claude.” [“Dear Robert, I am leaving you. Claude.”] No explanation, no expression of regret. “He’s pleasing himself. Why shouldn’t I please myself?”—“It’s for the most stupid of reasons. I want to be able to walk into a bookstore in Paris and see how my book is doing.” Now he has an introduction (via [the French novelist Françoise] Sagan) to [the Paris publishers] Flammarion and to Grasset, one of whom will take his second novel. And he has 100 pp. of the third.
He has written all his life, but never had enough “confidence” to publish until 3 years ago. Plays, stories, novels. All the old stuff lost, thrown out, torn up.
Married twice—to a Canadian girl, when very young (she demanded fidelity), then after coming to Paris—in [his] late 20s, early 30s—Lise! Now lives in St. Tropez with a rich girl named Catherine. House in the pines.
Went to Cornell. Lived for a while in New York.
From a rich family. (What does father do?) One of four sons. (Is Claude the oldest?) One of his brothers is dead. The third? The fourth, Philippe, is 39 years old and is a Mongolian idiot.
Philippe didn’t “speak” until age 6, didn’t walk until age 9. “It was I who taught him to walk.” The mother is 82 now. Has never left Philippe for one minute of her life. Is capable of tumbling in the garden now, age 82, to make Philippe laugh.
“My mother is a monster.”
He calls Lise “Fayolle” [—] “Hey, Fayolle …”
Photograph of Philippe (5’ 5”, wears thick round glasses, receding hair, short-sleeved white shirt, grey slacks), mother (white-haired), and Claude—dirty, straggly-haired, unshaven.
1 in 50 children born to mothers age 45 and up are Mongolian; 1 in 2,000 to mothers under the age of 30.
“Mongolian idiot” called, properly, Down’s Syndrome.
Claude: “Don’t feel sorry for Mongolians. They’re not unhappy. They’re happy.”
What do they want? “Nothing. They just want to be left alone. To be left in peace.”
“C’est le contestataire dans l’état pur. Il est contestataire. C’est le refus total.” [“It’s protest in its purest state. He is the protest. It’s total refusal.”]
“Everything a Mongolian says is false.” It’s learned. It’s an imitation.
“The refusal begins at conception. The sperm refuses the ovum, the ovum refuses the sperm.”
Mongolians are less “affectionate” with each other than with normal people.
They often have a good memory.
“My mother doesn’t understand Philippe. She is his reason for living, he is hers.”
“If she dies, he would die the same day.” Most Mongolians die young. He is one of the oldest alive in the world.
He [Claude] didn’t see his mother for 17 years.
“They don’t want to talk. They learn to talk because they are forced to.” (Not True)
Says that his mother loved Philippe much more than her three other sons or her husband. “He is the strongest.”
“One is never bored being with him.”
“The novel I’m writing is not about my brother. It happens that I have a Mongolian brother, that’s all.”
The novel is in the 1st person. “I want to put myself inside the mind of a Mongolian. Describe the world that he sees—that I see as him.” A world without “normal” assumptions and structures.
“My mother is not admirable. What she has done is completely egotistical. She should have let him die.”
The claw-like grasp of a Mongolian—the spatulate nails—thick neck, raucous voice, rounded shoulders.
Shows rage and displeasure when he feels like it. A cup is to break as well as to drink from.
“I understand my brother.”
Mother has founded a school—institution—for Mongolians. But Philippe has always been at home with her.
“Maybe I will imagine mental processes in the novel that aren’ t true of Mongolians, but I don’t care. What’s true is what I am capable of imagining.”
Mother was 40 when Claude was born, 43 when Philippe (the youngest) was born.
