by Susan Sontag
The solution to a problem—a story that you are unable to finish—is the problem. It isn’t as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
Freedom of using jump cuts.
8/14/73 Paris
Just re-read K[afka]’s “Investigations of a Dog”—for the first time in fifteen years (?) and realized that the opening line of The Benefactor—the argument of the first pages—indeed something of whole novel—comes directly from that.
Trashy life, rosy mythologies
…
All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
My mother lay in bed until four every afternoon in an alcoholic stupor, the blinds on the bedroom window firmly closed. I was brought up by a freckled elephant of Irish-German extraction who took me to Mass every Sunday and read me aloud stories in the evening paper about car accidents and loved Kate Smith. At seventeen, I met a thin, heavy-thighed, balding man who talked and talked, snobbishly, bookishly, and called me “Sweet.” After a few days passed, I married him. We talked for seven years.
I did my homework with the radio on.
And Monday I reserved for Mahatma Gandhi.
Talking like touching
Writing like punching somebody
Talking in accents …
8/20/73
Story I’m finishing now called “Another Case of Dr. Jekyll”—using the material of story projected as “Walter and Aaron,” built out of parts of “The Organization,” written in 1962–63.
I find the old themes:
Young innocent (with “obsessions,” a “problem” he’s trying to solve) > older, cynical, fascist type
i.e. Thomas / Bauer [Duet for Cannibals] Hippolyte / Jean-Jacques [The Benefactor]
Reversing Diddy / Incardona relationship [Death Kit], it’s the middle-class schmuck who has the good body, and the brute (working-class) who is frail physically.
But that’s what fascinated me in the Stevenson novella when I read it several months ago …—that H[yde] is smaller, frailer, younger than J[ekyll]
And the “Gurdjieff” theme is finally treated openly, so perhaps I can finally purge myself of all that—not make a “Gurdjieff film”—and go on to newer, better obsessions.
The “fascist” sage—
a theme in The Benefactor
the main (unwritten) part of the novel started in June 1965 and abandoned, “The Ordeal of Thomas Faulk.”
Bauer in Duet for Cannibals [—] in first idea of film, Bauer was a psychiatrist—Thomas was his young assistant. The story took place in Bauer’s private clinic where Thomas come to work [In the margin: Caligari, Mabuse.] (Most of “The Ordeal of Thomas Faulk” was to take place in the clinic in So[uth] Carolina where Thomas went after he had his breakdown; in this earlier version … Thomas was a patient, not a young doctor) [In the margin: but in film still has the name of Thomas]
9/3/73
[The German philosopher Karl] Jaspers’s concept of “the exception” in The Philosophy of Existence … (lectures delivered in 1937)
photography successor to Pop Art
The judgment of moral ambition
Buy: Valéry, Cahiers, vol. I (Pléiade)
Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria
Herbert Johnson hats
Paraphasia—garbling, word-scrambling of speech caused by (among other things) a blood clot on the left side of the brain
Dysnomia—things called by their wrong names
Aphasia (loss of speech) of either
the conduction type—word jumbling similar to paraphrasia, or
Broca’s type—implying inability to receive or produce verbal sounds correctly, combined with inability to read intelligently
9/14/73
Léger:
“You don’t make a nail with a nail, but with an iron” painting is piracy
“either a comfortable life and lousy work or a lousy life and beautiful work”
10/15/73
… Get up quickly—just switch on the white light of the will
Francine Gray’s [the contemporary American writer Francine du Plessix Gray] great-great-aunt, a Carmelite nun in the 1880s (already in her 60s)—had never seen a train. Needed dispensation from the Vatican to look out the window.
…
For Adorno essay: look at Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination; Kostas Axelos essay on Adorno in Arguments III, 14 (1959); George Lichtheim, TriQuarterly, Spring 1968
For China book: look at [the twentieth-century German-American sinologist] Karl Wittfogel’s book on China
Jasper quote in John Cage’s last book: “I can imagine easily a world without art.”
Morbidity a defense against sense of tragedy
I prance around cemeteries all over the world—gleeful, fascinated—because I don’t know in what cemetery in Brooklyn Daddy is buried
[At the time of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, SS made Promised Lands, a documentary film shot in Israel and on the front lines (Suez, Golan Heights). I have found no notebooks on the filming, but believe these notes were entered during those weeks.]
Israel
Moshe Flinker—Jews / Germans
Yoram Kaniuk—Holocaust memory
Two myths [about] minorities
revolutionary, secular, socialist
orthodox, religious, conservative
>> consumer society (rejected by both A + B)
Jews < > Israelis
Diaspora: envy, contempt
12/9/73 London
… The San Francisco earthquake; the San Andreas fault.
OK to be paranoid—that expands the imagination—but not to be schizophrenic (that shrinks it). Compare [Thomas Pynchon’s] Gravity’s Rainbow with Death Kit.
In the next novel: no one is catatonic; no one speculates, in self-blindness + dissociation (like Hippolyte + Diddy)
Gore Vidal’s praise of Mary McCarthy—she is “uncorrupted by compassion.” I am. That’s my limit. In the next novel, I won’t put at the center a protagonist who is “corrupted by compassion.” No schmucks!
The hardness of Flaubert in Egypt.
Cupidity; a style of life based on ownership, possessions
… The guru theme—up front treat it honestly; make up your mind!
Too much ambivalence in [SS’s short story] “Doctor Jekyll”—I am not sure how I feel about sublimation ([the American literary critic] Bill Mazzocco’s criticism)
The autobiography of a guru?
The rape of culture—tourism—
(e.g. Samoa)
How do I feel about sublimation?
Story: “The San Francisco Earthquake”—Aunt Anne [SS had a great-aunt who survived the earthquake] in the brothel, standing in the doorway
The Marx Bro[ther]s—it should be funny.
12/10/73
[The historian of Kabbalistic Judaism, adversary of Hannah Arendt, and friend of Walter Benjamin , Gershom] Scholem said it was Jacob Taubes [Scholem’s student in Jerusalem in the late-1940s and Susan Taubes’s husband] who revealed to him the existence of moral evil. He paled when I mentioned Jacob’s name. (The evening D[avid] + I spent with him in Jerusalem [in October 1973].)
Hannah Arendt said that Benjamin was the only person Scholem ever really loved. (The evening at Lizzy’s [Elizabeth Hardwick] house last week in NY. Mary M[cCarthy], [her brother the actor] Kevin M[cCarthy], Barbara E [Epstein, co-editor with Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books], Mme Stravinsky + [the writer Robert] Craft, [the historian] Arthur Schlesinger + [his wife] Alexandra Emmet also there.)
…
12/16/73 Milan
“Topoi” in letters of Resistance people on the eve of their execution:
forgive me for the suffering I am about to inflict on you no regrets
I am dying for … (Party / country / humanity / libe
rty)
Thank you for all you’ve done for me
I live on in x form
Tell so-and-so that I …
Once more, I …
Similarity, no matter what country + what class. (Thomas Mann, in preface to the book [Lettere di Condannati a morte della Resistenza europea]—pub[lished] by Einaudi in 1954—notes I[van] I[lyich]’s letter in Tolstoy story.)
Why?
Need to make a communication that is efficacious
: a) simple
clear
no point in subtlety, refinement
Such a letter is, pre-eminently, a practical communication. Its purpose is:
to relieve (reduce) suffering
to guarantee (shape) posthumous existence, how one will be remembered
(Perfect text to illustrate Aristotle’s Rhetoric)
Nevertheless, some differences:
difference of degree of [u], of personalization, of freedom to express “private” feelings, “sentiments” (least in Albania (+ generally in C[ommunist] P[arty] members), most in France, Norway, Italy, Holland) difference between Prot[estant] + Catholic countries
Letters are mostly to mothers, not fathers—to wives—to children
…
12/23/73 Haramont
Two shattering reading experiences this year—the correspondence of Flaubert, and (yesterday) the two-volume biography by Simone Pétrement of SW [Simone Weil]
How depressed I am by both of them—at moments. I feel real hatred for them—because I understand them both so well, because they represent the two poles of my own temperament (longings, temptations). I could be “Flaubert” or “S.W.”; I am neither of course—because one side corrects, inhibits, compromises the other.
“Flaubert”: ambition; egotism; detachment; contempt for others; enslavement to work; pride; stubbornness; ruthlessness; lucidity; voyeurism; morbidity; sensuality; dishonesty.
“S.W.”: ambition; egotism; neurosis; refusal of the body; hunger for purity; naïveté; awkwardness; asexuality; desire for sanctity; honesty.
What a painful demystification of S.W. this biography is!
Her death was a suicide—and she’d been trying to kill herself (notably, by starving herself) for many years.
“I am not a feminist,” she said. Of course not. She never accepted the fact that she was a woman. Hence, her making herself ugly (she wasn’t), her way of dressing, her incapacity to have any sexual life, her being dirty, unkempt, the disorder of any room she occupied, etc. If she could have slept with anyone, it could only have been with a woman—not because she was “really” au fond homosexual (she wasn’t) but because at least with a woman she wouldn’t have felt she was being raped. But, of course, that was impossible too—given the time she lived, her particular milieu; above all, the way she had survived implied a profound + irrevocable desexualiza-tion of herself.
(How lucky I am, since I could very well have made the same “saving” choice as S.W. But I was saved for sexuality—at least partially—by women. By the age of 16 on, women found me, sought me out, imposed themselves on me emotionally + sexually. I was raped by women and I found that not too threatening. How grateful I am to women—who gave me a body, who made it even possible for me to sleep with men.)
S.W. of course makes me think of Susan [Taubes]. Same hunger for purity, same refusal of the body, same unfitness to live. What was the difference between them? That S.W. had genius and Susan didn’t. That S.W. assumed her own desexual-ization, affirmed it, drew energy from it—while Susan was “weak”: she could never accept the love of women; she wanted to be hurt and dominated by men; she wanted to be beautiful, glamorous, mysterious. Susan’s refusals only weakened her, they didn’t give her energy. Her suicide was second-rate. S.W.’s was an exaltation—that’s how, finally, she succeeded in imposing herself on the world, securing her own legend, blackmailing her contemporaries and posterity.
What is left of Susan? A novel nobody read and a manuscript on S.W. that I keep in a closet in NY (unread) whose existence nobody knows.
I remembered last night that in the story about Susan, “Debriefing,” I had put in the voice of S.W. at one moment. Quite unconsciously—when I was writing the story in March of this year. Now I understand.
A lesson: purity and wisdom—one can’t aspire to both—they’re ultimately contradictory. Purity implies innocence, unselfconsciousness—(even) a certain stupidity. Wisdom implies lucidity, the overcoming of one’s innocence—intelligence. One must be innocent in order to be pure. One can’t be innocent in order to be wise.
My problem (and perhaps the most profound source of my mediocrity): I wanted to be both pure and wise.
I was too greedy.
The result: I am neither “S.W.” nor “Flaubert.” The hunger for purity checks the possibility of real wisdom. My lucidity checks my impulses to act with purity.
I am not attracted to suicide—and never have been.
I love to eat, even though it is easy for me not to eat (when no one feeds me, when there is no food around).
1974
1/20/74 Paris
short film (or long?) on l’habillement [“dress”]
military dress
wedding clothes (creation of mths / white + purity)
actors
transvestites
All dressing-up points [to] travesty, drag
Cf. scene of ecclesiastical fashion in Fellini’s Roma. And to death …
2/6/74
…
“For me a sheet of paper is like the forest to a fugitive”—[the twentieth-century Russian writer and dissident] Andrei Sinyavsky
…
To be a great writer:
know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm)
have moral intelligence—which creates true authority in a writer
2/9/74
“Live as you think, or you will think as you live.” Valéry
A spy in the house of life.
7/25/74 Panarea [Italy]
“Idea” as method of instant transport away from direct experience, carrying a tiny suitcase.
“Idea” as a means of miniaturizing experience, rendering it portable. Someone who regularly has ideas is—by definition—homeless.
Intellectual is a refugee from experience. In Diaspora.
What’s wrong with direct experience? Why would one ever want to flee it, by transforming it—into a brick?
Can something be too immediate?:
Imprisoning.: Too light.
Deficiency of sensuality? But that’s a tautology.
[Undated]
Thinking about my own death the other day, as I often do, I made a discovery. I realized that my way of thinking has up to now been both too abstract and too concrete.
