Birth of a Public Intellectual

Page 17 March–April 2009 B O O K R E V I E W S Birth of a Public Intellectual Yevgeniya Traps Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 Susan Sontag Edited by David Rieff Farrar, Straus and Giroux http://us.macmillan.com/FSG.aspx 336 pages; cloth, $25.00 Susan Sontag on keeping a journal: “In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.” Creation—the act of writing herself into being, revising, editing, returning again and again to the page to refine and correct and proofread, to rewrite, to ceaselessly, tirelessly regenerate—is the central preoccupation of Sontag’s journals and notebooks, the notes, ideas, observations she kept, sometimes dated and sometimes not, throughout her life. The published selections, dating from 1947 to 1963, bear the title Reborn, for this title seems to David Rieff— Sontag’s son and the volume’s editor—to capture his mother’s life, her self-conscious, self-aware determination to invent and establish herself as she wanted and imagined herself to be. Sontag’s musings, annotations, quotations, occasional deprecations of herself and others, and, always, always, her thoughts fill a veritable pillow book, serving as an important account of one woman’s intellectual history, the birth of her public-intellectual-self. It has long been critical and popular commonsense that Sontag was anything but commonplace. Certainly, Sontag wished to foster a sense of her own exceptionalism; in Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, a chronicle of his mother’s final illness published in early 2008, Rieff suggests that Sontag’s experience of herself as extraordinary was great enough to lead her to believe she would not be subject to the rules of mortality. Because Reborn allows us to see a young Sontag come into this sense of self, come by this faith in her own powers, intellectual and physical and spiritual, it is an important document, one that, through its very title, confirms that she was not, after all, subject to those rules. Just as birth is merely accident, merely fact and not a revelation, neither a thought nor a desire, so too death is inconvenience and hardship but no match for the great, for the brilliant mind. But just as the volume is elevated by its ability to make us see Sontag again, it is also circumscribed by it, for if we turn to memoir, to other people’s reminiscences, to see a reflection of their times, the places they inhabited, Sontag’s journals are interested, for the most part, in reflecting herself and her self. Sontag often used her journals as a kind of mirror. Yet she was, it seems fair to say, interested in constructing the mirror too, insistent on assembling reflection and reflective surface.The first volume in a projected threevolume series, the entries here begin shortly before Sontag’s departure for Berkeley, proceed through several love affairs, with their attendant yearnings and longings, a marriage and a baby, an array of reading and writing and thinking , and always the focus is on her development, her sense of her intellect, her formidable powers of observation, extraction , note-taking-and-making. Sontag wills herself into being , molding herself in her own image of the intellectual, an image she carefully shapes and reshapes; what emerges is at once an intensely private vision and a public commitment to the intellectual life. That is, the portrait of Sontag sketched in Reborn is simultaneously revealing, revelatory, and shifting, distorting, frustrating in its refusal of a final, concrete likeness. But then, Sontag was always a contradiction; her power as an intellectual, as a public figure of largely undisputed significance, a woman of inordinate acuity, bravery, strength of wit and observation and dedication, derived largely from her detachment, a carefully calculated pose that promised disclosure while withholding exposure. We wanted to know more of what she thought and what she believed about America and about Europe, about illness and photography and art and literature and film, and she delivered her insights in a tone part confessional and part objective. She was an intensely private public figure, a woman who...