Reading Susan's Journal

A link arrived in my email today from a friend wagering, “because we’re in love with public intellectuals …why should we not read them in [their] private [moments]…?”. The click took me to a section of the NYT’s magazine that reprinted entries from Susan Sontag’s journals. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/magazine/10sontag.html?pagewanted=1)

I have always been fascinated by the prospect of reading diaries and journals (as mentioned on my first post). Regarding influential or famous people, the idea is not that their diaries will represent an authentic revelation of their non-public souls, as I would bet they (famous people) always write with some consciousness of potential public eyes. Perhaps many have so deeply ingrained the mental habit of publicity that the public, or a relatively broad public at least, is the default addressee of most of their thoughts. So it is not a chance to peel beneath all persona and posturing that is unique about encountering them through journals, but rather the opportunity to see how they write without revision. It may not always be true, but I assume that journals entries are written with greater haste and much less editing than published works (even for Kerouac). This speed I assume does reveal what comes most “naturally” for them as writers, meaning only the habits of thinking/writing that are most automatic for them. What I look for is: what kinds of mental connections and associations arise most reflexively for the writer? This is a vague statement, so let me break it down in two exemplary but not exhaustive ways. What is the texture of their quick writing like, i.e. the vocabulary range and specificity of detail? And what is the style of their narrative? Underlying these investigations is the question of how naturally (in the sense above) good writing comes to great writers. Inevitably I end up making comparisons with my own journal writing, which I tend to think of as involving overly earnest narratives and a dependance on cliched phrasing

So how did Sontag’s journal affect me? Most striking is the energy and frenzy of her thought (along with the fixated self-consciousness which is something I’ll leave unexamined here). Many of the entries follow the logic of a list, as I assumed she followed whims and swirls of thought/memory rather than approaching her journal with desire to sort everything out into a neat little story. Even through lists, she evokes some enchantment, an oddball kind of energy. She is not without her cliches. I noticed a few words that might make it to my list of “fresh words” – deracinated, marauding – but not many.

The frenetic aspect of her impression may come in part from the spin with which the journals are introduced by the Times, “Susan Sontag appears, to a reader of her journals, to have filled every idle moment with a notation.” I have sometimes thought I should pursue relentless note-taking to be really productive (of course at a certain bulk notes would lose their advantages of condensed guides, but the point is more to exercise the passage of experience to words). I can’t really say from the journal selections if Sontag had this fantasy too or fulfilled it, but clearly writing was crucial to her even in the form of notes.