Vol. 31 No. 3 · 12 February 2009
pages 3-7 | 5920 words
Still Superior
Mark Greif
- BuyReborn: Early Diaries, 1947-64 by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff
Hamish Hamilton, 318 pp, £16.99, January 2009, ISBN 978 0 241 14431 2
One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn’t ask to be liked. Other postwar American writers who cut the same sort of public figure pleaded with you to love their outsized faults, embrace their dumb enthusiasms, and cast in your lot with theirs through recounted divorces, nervous breakdowns, lusts. Sontag’s persona was not personal. It was superior. Sontag made you acknowledge that she was more intelligent than you. That cost little enough. She then compelled you to admit that she felt more than you did. Her inner life was richer, even if she didn’t fully disclose it. She responded to art more vividly and completely. Not only her sense, but her sensibility, was grander.
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Letters
Vol. 31 No. 5 · 12 March 2009
From Edward Field
As someone who was around at the time, I’d like to add a note to Mark Greif’s review of Susan Sontag’s diaries (LRB, 12 February). As I recall, Susan inherited the gig of theatre critic at Partisan Review from Alfred Chester, who was one of her mentors, though she gives him short shrift in her diaries. Alfred claimed that when he left for Morocco in 1963 he turned the job over to Susan, though it’s unlikely that a young writer could have acted in so high-handed a manner with William Phillips, who was in charge of the magazine: it is more likely that Susan was simply Alfred’s successor. Perhaps he recommended her to Phillips, and since she’d already published there, and was attracting attention at the literary parties she attended, he signed her on. It certainly put her in a good position to get ‘Notes on Camp’ accepted. Alfred, seething with jealousy and never willing to believe she had an original idea in her head, told me she’d got her ideas from Auden’s essay on Oscar Wilde in the New Yorker the previous winter.
Edward Field
New York
From Lisa Appignanesi
Mark Greif notes that Susan Sontag essentially cowrote Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. According to his source, Sontag’s son, David Rieff, the book had ‘appeared under PR’s sole authorship after their separation and subsequent divorce’.
I had often wondered why the magisterial yet fiery prose style of Rieff’s biography bore so little relationship to the more academic tone of his subsequent writing. In a long interview with Susan Sontag, recorded for Radio Three in January 2002, I raised this with her. She confessed that since Rieff had had writer’s block at the time, she had simply written the book for him. All their close friends knew it. There was an understanding that Rieff would someday return the favour. The divorce meant that it never happened. I asked Sontag whether this had affected her subsequent stance ‘against interpretation’. She laughed and acknowledged that it might well have.
Lisa Appignanesi
London N19
