by Susan Sontag
One sign of a strong personality is the love of the impersonal.
5/25/78
Benjamin essay—the theme of the city. Benjamn as writer. Proust; the shock of [Louis] Aragon’s “Le Paysan de Paris” (letter to Adorno, May 31, 1935)
Structure
Labyrinth
The book
Compare with Canetti.
Importance of [the Austrian critic Karl] Kraus essay.
Flâneur. Hidden theme of prostitution. Crossing class barriers.
Surrealist sensibility.
Attraction to Marxism. Servility w[ith] Brecht.
Making a living as a literary journalist. If he had become a professor (like Scholem, Adorno, Marcuse, [Max] Horkheimer!)
Figure of bookish wanderer—Steppenwolf; Kien in [Canetti’s novel,] Auto-da-Fé.
Situation of the exile. Theme of the death of Europe. But he could not support that ultimate exile: America.
Says in a letter that one should weep for the murder of German culture but that it is obscene to be nostalgic over the Weimar Republic.
Benjamin thought of himself as the last European. Not just an intellectual but a German intellectural.
Kant not Hegel (or Nietzsche) “dialectic” conceived as ambiguity, complexity untouched by Wagner–Nietzsche, etc.
Description of Moscow: banality, clarity
5/27/78 Venice
My ninth stay in Venice:
1961—with M[other], I[rene] ([Hotel] Luna; Hotel des Bains)
1964—with D[avid] (Bob + Guido)—Luna
1967—with D[avid] (Film Festival—Hotel Excelsior)
1969—with C[arlotta] ([Hotel] Fenice)
1972—with N[icole] ([Hotel] Gritti)
1974—with N[icole] (Gossens apartment)
1975—with N[icole] (Gritti)
1977, Dec.—Joseph [Brodsky] ([Hotel] Europa)
And he retired to Venice, to write a two-hundred-page poem on the sinking of the Titanic.
Imagination:—having many voices in one’s head. The freedom for that.
In every era, there are three teams of writers. The first team: those who have become known, gain “stature,” become reference points for their contemporaries writing in the same language. (e.g. Emil Staiger, Edmund Wilson, V. S. Pritchett). The second team: international—those who become reference points for their contemporaries throughout Europe, the Americas, Japan, etc. (e.g. Benjamin). The third team: those who become reference points for successive generations in many languages (e.g. Kafka). I’m already on the first team, on the verge of being admitted to the second—want only to play on the third.
Dionysus was bisexual. (cf. [the Austrian-American psychoanalyst and writer] Helene Deutsch lecture)
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6/21/78 NYC
Crisis of Leninist ideology in the 1970s
Judge a regime by what it does with its opponents
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7/2/78
… Woman in Chicago (Jory Graham—columnist for Sun-Times (“A Time to Live”)—sidekick in my cancer minstrel show—telling (on [Irv] Kup[cinet]’s show) how she was recently on a plane that lost an engine—how she panicked, though she tried to convince herself she was better off dying now, in 5 minutes, than going through the smelly, slow, agonizing hideous cancer death that awaits her soon—she wanted not to crash—she wanted her own death, the one she’d been working on, living with, getting reconciled (accustomed) to.
7/8/78 Paris
Modern eroticism—theme of reflections on the erotic:
Foucault on sexuality
Kenneth Anger, Inauguration of the Pleaure Dome
[Nagisa] Oshima, In the Realm of the Senses (?)
Pasolini, Salò
Syberberg, Ludwig + Hitler
The homosexual baroque
Neo-kitsch
The great contribution of the modern homosexual sensibility to eroticism.
Men never forgive women for being their mothers … (>>> Wagner)
[This text has a rectangle drawn around it:] The next ten years must be the best, strongest, boldest
Re: [the Russian writer Andrei] Biely:
Modernism invented several times—once in Soviet Union. Important for us because it was suppressed.
Compare [Biely’s novel] St. Petersburg + [Henry James’s] The Princess Casamassima—ordered to kill a duke, kills himself. Classic plot of revolutionary tragedy: orders to kill.
Cf. Conrad, The Secret Agent
I like films with voice “off” narration or commentary—it reintroduces (allows) the virtues of muet [“silent film”].
[Sacha] Guitry, Roman d’un Tricheur
[Marcel] Hanoun, Un Simple Histoire
Melville, Les Enfants Terribles
Godard, 2 ou 3 Choses …
Straub, … Anna Magdalena Bach
[Michel] Deville, Dossier 51
Bresson, Un Condamné à Mort …
And films that mix genres:
[Benjamin] Christensen, Häxan
[Dušan] Makavejev, WR
> > > > > > [Syberberg’s] Hitler, A Film from Germany
7/17/78 Paris
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Eisenstein directed a production of Die Walküre in Moscow in 1940. After the [Hitler–Stalin] Pact + before the invasion—pro-German period, officially. Are there production notes?
7/21/78
A “Wagner” essay? The Syberberg film and the [the French opera director Patrice] Chéreau / [Pierre] Boulez production of Ring.
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Berlioz didn’t have an ideology—didn’t seek to institutionalize himself.
… Siegfried—the problem: first two acts composed earlier —new conception in third act. Ring breaks in two parts.
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7/25/78 London
Jonathan Miller has metaphoria—metaeuphoria.
“I think I’ve beached my boat in the theater.” (Jonathan)
Only by understanding body as a machine do we give human beings their humanity.
Metaphors for understanding body (e.g. heart = pump) come from machines
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Two basic tools of modern medicine: salt water (saline solution) + other people’s blood
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8/7/78 Paris
… The novel as a “technique of trouble” ([the twentieth-century American critic and poet] R. P. Blackmur), a means of exposing predicaments. Insoluble predicaments of modern existence. (!)
Dec. 31, 1999. I would like to be there. It will be one of the great kitsch moments of world history.
Modernism. Restore the historical view (reference points: French Revolution, Romantic poets). Anti-intellectualism. The project of the intellectual.
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Jonathan made a BBC film of Plato’s Symposium called The Drinking Party
8/11/78 Paris
Remember the exemplary career of Herwarth Walden … Founded Der Sturm (published Kokoschka, Futurists, Kandinsky, Apollinaire) in 1910; married [the German Jewish poet and playwright] Else Lasker-Schüler [in 1903]. In 1932 stopped publication of Der Sturm + emigrated to USSR. Wrote novel there, “Neutral”: never published. Arrested 31 March 1941 at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow; died in the hospital of the camp at Saratov.
8/12/78
334 miles between Odessa and Istanbul, across the Black Sea
Get a large schoolroom map.
Stick white, fluorescent stars on the bedroom ceiling.
Notional Rome in Shakespeare …
… doesn’t have a representation in consciousness. (Of some bodily process)
“Fait Divers” [“news item”] of 1920s (?) in England: the fate of the Vicar of Stiffkey (pronounced Stukey): frequented prostitutes; was defrocked; ended in a circus, exhibited in a barrel; was eaten by a lion.
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[In the margin:] aristos
aristo talk (English):
“inties” (for intellectuals)—
Duchess of Devonshire, overheard on the phone by [the English novelist] Angus Wilson
—Wilson + friend had been invited to tea: during tea, D. of D. got a call from a friend inviting her to her lunch tomorrow with Cyril Connolly. “I’d rather not. I already have two inties for tea today.”
To be older: to find everyone else pathetic.
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No such thing as an “experimental” writer, director, artist. A philistine notion! It assumes an option, a choice. No. You either are original or not.
Play:
Original production
Satellite productions
Heretical production (reverses or contradicts original staging)
Only a great work can survive this process
Wagner > [Adolphe] Appia [the Swiss architect who designed the sets and lit many Wagner operas] > [Wagner’s grandson] Wieland > Chéreau
Cf. Benjamin on the after-life of a woa [work of art]—in essay on the translator
8/13/78
[SS adored Wagner’s music and went to the Bayreuth Festival a number of times.]
Bayreuth notes:
You have been touched by two other models—the bohemian and the aristocratic, I said to Bob [Silvers]. Alternative to middle-class life and concerns. Bohemia: Alfred [Chester]. And look what that led to. Whereas, the discreet charm of the aristocracy …
The code of the nobleman: never complain
Someone could be virtuous, decent, not corrupt through passivity or timidity.
Futurism the source for constructivism and much else
Thesis (?): fascism in Italy was special > [Giulio Carlo] Argan, present C[ommunist] P[arty] Mayor of Rome, was a fascist cultural bureaucrat in the late 30s. Sponsored good artists, protected Jews, gave jobs to many. Got [the Italian classical historian Arnaldo] Momigliano [a] job on Encyclopedia)
May Taback, coming home, stepping over naked one-legged Harold Rosenberg [her husband] fucking girl on living room floor, to HR: “Dinner in one hour.”
8/20/78 NYC
Joseph B[rodsky] says he decides to write a poem—picks a subject and / or a model (a poet he admires); says to himself “I will write an Akhmatova poem” or “ … a Frost poem” or “an Auden poem” or a “[the Italian poet Eugenio] Montale poem” or a “Cavafy poem.” The idea is to do it like the poet, only better. Of course, it never is like the model poet—that’s a game one plays with oneself—if one is a real poet one can only write of one’s own world.
A possible practice for the next year: a Borges story (the discovery of a play of Agathon [the classical Greek playwright whose works were supposedly lost when the great library of Alexandria burned in 48 BC]; a Calvino story; a Walser story; a Konrád story; a García Márquez story.
I’ve already done my Barthelme story—[SS’s autobiographical short story] “Unguided Tour”—that is, written a better story than Barthelme. I should have admitted to myself that’s what I was doing.
An Ideal Story Anthology:
V Woolf, “The Moment” or “The Unwritten Novel”
Robert Walser, “Kleist in Thun”
Paul Goodman, “Minutes Are Flying”
Laura Riding, “Last Lesson in Geography”
[In the margin: the German writer Wolfgang] Borchert, [the Jewish Serbian-Hungarian writer Danilo] Kiš
[Tommaso] Landolfi, “W.C.”
Calvino, “[The Distance of the] Moon” (from Cosmicomics)
Beckett, “The Expelled”
Barthelme, “The Balloon”
Philip Roth, “On the Air” [Roth’s story published in New American Review in 1970]
John Ashbery, “Prose Poem”
John Barth, “Title” or “Life-Story”
Elizabeth Hardwick, “Prologue”
John McPhee, “Boardwalk”
Bruno Schulz, “Hourglass” or “The Book”
[Elisabeth] Langgässer, “Mars”
des Forêts,
Sinyavsky,
[Peter] Handke,
[the Austrian poet Ingeborg] Bachmann,
Borges, “Pierre Menard”
Gadda,
García Márquez,
[Stanisław] Lem, “Probablaism …” [likely means “The Third Sally” or “The Dragons of Probability”]
Ballard,
Essay anthology:
Gass,
Benjamin,
Rivière,
Sinyavsky,
Enzensberger,
Trilling,
[Alfred] Döblin, preface to [Face of Our Time, a book of photographs by August] Sander
Goodman,
Sartre, “Nizan”or “Tintoretto”
Benn, “Artists + Old Age”
Broch, Introduction to [the Ukrainian-Jewish philosopher and critic Rachel] Bespaloff[’s On the Iliad]
Adorno
avant-garde: shallow enigmas
Cioran’s work teaches one how to die
Brecht advised his pupils “to live in the third person”
Nihilistic attitudinizing
Late 18th [century] to now: recurrent walking statues, haunted portraits, and magic mirrors
A constant theme in my writing / imagination (how central): [in French] the vision of an encumbered world, supersaturated by objects, things! In Death Kit (the lists, inventory at the end), in On Photography, in “Unguided Tour” ( + “Debriefing”). The antonym: silence.
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[In the margin and underlined:] “It’s a question of being alone, in writing.” V Woolf (letter to Vita [Sackville-West], Nov. 1925)
“Cheyne-Stokes breathing”: sign of the end [of life]—irregular
Post-[the mass killer Charles] Manson sensibility:
Texas Chainsaw Massacre a new threshold; most imp[ortant] Am[erican] film of the 70s.
punk Grand Guignol—the walking dead—vampire make-up
“danger”
Sex Pistols inspired by a young couple, art school graduates + admirers of the Situationists, who ran a boutique in Chelsea ca. 1975–6, called, successively, “Rock and Roll” > “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” > “Sex” > “Seditionaries”
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shy nihilism
a kind of motiveless sorrow
fanned with strange feelings
geography of pleasure
11/1/78
Dinner yesterday late with Joseph. He’s trying to admire [the English poet John] Betjeman—for his “lightness of touch.” The poet he’s trying to beat now—it’s no longer Mandelstam—is Montale. (Clever Joseph.) “And, Susan, I think I already have.”
Literature and the national echo.
11/17/78
After the party at Roger [Straus]’s for I, etcetera, published today—with Joseph at the coffee shop on the corner of 3rd Ave and 17th at midnight. “I realize that I’ve become a simpleton in the six years I’ve been in America. I’m no longer subtle, as I was in Russia. It’s the American straightforwardness … Everyone is positive here … people trying to be helpful, kind, supportive … explaining, making things clear.”
“You don’t want a last line that’s not an effect.” Joseph’s criticism of the last line of [SS’s story] “Baby.” I think he’s wrong.
I get boosted by reading. But does this help to be subtle? Joseph: that comes only from other people.
