Susan Sontag - Reborn: early diaries, 1947-1963

PENGUIN BOOKS

One of Americas best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time and Against Interpretation and Other Essays, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

FICTION

The Benefactor

Death Kit

I, etcetera

The Way We Live Now

The Volcano Lover

In America

ESSAYS

Against Interpretation

Styles of Radical Will

On Photography

Illness As Metaphor

Under the Sign of Saturn

AIDS and Its Metaphors

Where the Stress Falls

Regarding the Pain of Others

At the Same Time

FILM SCRIPTS

Duet for Cannibals

Brother Carl

PLAY

Alice in Bed

A Susan Sontag Reader

Early Diaries

19471963

EDITED BY DAVID RIEFF

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 9o Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Tornoto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd,11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

vwww.penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2009
Published in Penguin Books 2009

Copyright The Estate of Susan Sontag, 2008
Preface copyright David Rieff, 2008
All rights reserved

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193259-0

I have always thought that one of the stupidest things the living say about the dead is the phrase so-and-so would have wanted it this way. At best, it is guesswork; most often it is hubris, no matter how well intended. You simply cannot know. So whatever else there is to be said about the publication of Reborn, this first of what will eventually be a three-volume selection of Susan Sontags journals, it is not the book she would have producedand that assumes she would have decided to publish these diaries in the first place. Instead, both the decision to publish and the selection have been mine alone. Even when there is no question of censorship, the literary dangers and moral hazards of such an enterprise are self-evident. Caveat lector.

It is not a decision I ever wanted to make. But my mother died without leaving any instructions as to what to do with either her papers or her uncollected or unfinished writing. This might seem out of character for someone who took such care of her work, who labored furiously on translations even in languages she knew only passably, and had informed and decisive opinions about publishers and magazines the world over. But despite the lethality of myelodysplastic syndrome, the blood cancer that killed her on December 28, 2004, she continued to believe until only a few weeks before her death that she was going to survive. So instead of speaking about how she wanted others to look after her work once she was no longer around to look after it herselfas someone who was more resigned to death probably would have doneshe spoke emphatically of returning to work, and of all that she would write once she got out of the hospital.

As far as I am concerned, she had an absolute right to die as she wished. She owed posterity, let alone me, nothing as she fought to live. But obviously there are unintended consequences of her decisionthe most important here being that it has devolved to me to decide how to publish the writings she left behind. In the case of her essays, which appeared in At the Same Time two years after her death, the choices were relatively straightforward. Despite the fact that my mother certainly would have substantially revised the essays for republication, they had already been either published during her lifetime or delivered as lectures. Her intentions were clear.

These diaries are a completely different matter. They were written solely for herself, and she produced them steadily from early adolescence to the last few years of her life, when her delight in the computer and in e-mail seems to have curbed her interest in diary-keeping She had never permitted a line from them to be published, nor, unlike some diarists, did she read from them to friends, although those close to her knew of their existence and of her habit after filling a notebook of placing it alongside its predecessors in the walk-in closet in her bedroom, near other treasured but somehow essentially private possessions, such as family photographs and mementos of her childhood.

By the time she fell ill for the last time, in the spring of 2004, there were close to a hundred such notebooks. And others turned up as her last assistant, Anne Jump, and her closest friend, Paolo Dilonardo, and I were sorting through her effects in the year after her death. I had only the vaguest idea of what was in them. The sole conversation I ever had with my mother about them was when she first fell ill and had not yet rekindled her own belief that she would survive her blood cancer as she had the two previous cancers she had suffered from in her lifetime. And it consisted of a single, whispered sentence: You know where the diaries are. She said nothing about what she wanted me to do with them.

I cant say for sure, but I tend to believe that, left to my own devices, I would have waited a long time before publishing them, or perhaps never published them at all. There have even been times when Ive thought that I would burn them. But that was pure fantasy. The reality, in any case, is that the physical diaries do not belong to me. While she was still well, my mother had sold her papers to the University of California at Los Angeles library, and the agreement was that they would go there upon her death, along with her papers and her books, as they have. And since the contract my mother concluded did not restrict access in any important sense, I soon came to feel that the decision had been made for me. Either I would organize them and present them or someone else would. It seemed better to go forward.