Susan Sontag's Playground of Ideas

"I strive to compose myself..."

Some notes breathe new life into me. I feel almost giddy with their intelligence, elated by their insights. That is how I felt last week, while reading Susan Sontag’s (1933-2004) notes in UCLA’s archives. It was the closest I’ll ever get to thinking alongside one of our most storied public intellectuals.

Photograph of Susan Sontag by Peter Hujar, 1975

That feeling of energetic immersion in a brilliant thinker’s notebooks is something that Sontag, herself, experienced as a teenager while reading the French author, André Gide’s journals.

Returning to her own notebook, Sontag writes:

I strive to compose myself, and so return to the Gide Journals again… They affect me in the same magical way; for immersion into an order and a discipline is the only thing that can soothe me….¹

Sontag composed herself in her journals, which I mean in two senses of the word. First, she journaled her way into her identity of intellectual rigor and moral certitude. Secondly, she soothed herself with her journals, composing her thoughts and putting them into order.

But what I loved most was how Sontag used her notes as an intellectual playground. How thrilling to see her working through ideas that she would enshrine in her most lasting works: On Photography, “Notes On Camp”, Regarding the Pain of Others.

In this post, I look at Sontag’s discursive intellect—the joys of learning, of thinking deeply, of engaging with difficult ideas—and, ultimately, of intellectual play.

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Sontag’s Construction of Self

Writing in her journals was a lifelong habit. Sontag left behind over 100 notebooks—and many, many more piles of scrap paper filled with her searing insights.

On her death bed, she thought of these notebooks and told her son, David Rieff, that they were “the most important thing” she left him.²

David subsequently published his mother’s notebooks—with understandable discomfort. Knowing someone else would do it if he didn’t, he became his mother’s editor once again—as he had before while working at the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Sontag with her only child, David Rieff, Photograph by Diane Arbus, 1965

For the first volume, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963, David borrows a word from an early teenage journal, where Sontag writes:

I AM

REBORN IN

THE TIME RETOLD

IN THIS NOTEBOOK

1949 Notebook, UCLA, Box 123, Folder 5

Sontag began this notebook while studying at the University of California, Berkeley, awaiting notice of admission to the University of Chicago (the sticker at the bottom of the page).

Once accepted with a scholarship, she joyfully announces it in all caps in this journal.

1949 notebook, UCLA, Box 123, Folder 5

Attending Chicago would change Sontag’s life in many ways. While immersing herself in the school’s core curriculum, she also married a professor, Philip Rieff, with whom she had her only child, David.

She encloses her acceptance letter in this very journal—a practice, I learned, Sontag continued throughout her life. Her notebooks were not just spaces to write upon, but storage containers for many material scraps.

This idea of self-construction morphed into self-conversation in later journals. Sontag seemed to think journaling was the only way she could converse with herself. Noting that she never spoke to herself out loud she wrote:

Maybe that’s why I write—in a journal. That feels “right.” I know I’m alone, that I’m the only reader of what I write here—but the knowledge isn’t painful, on the contrary I feel stronger for it, stronger each time I write something down. (Hence my worry this past year—I felt myself terribly weakened by the fact that I couldn’t write in the journal, didn’t want to, was blocked, or whatever.) I can’t talk to myself, but I can write to myself.

Then, in another parenthetical, Sontag wonders if this isn’t quite true. What if she’s writing for a future reader?

(But is that because I do think it possible that someday someone I love who loves me will read my journals—+ feel even closer to me?)³

While it’s probably not what she meant, those of us who already loved Sontag through her published writing, cannot help but love her even more in her journals. At least, that has been my experience.

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Sontag’s Notebooks as Containers

Sontag’s acceptance letter to the University of Chicago is only one of many loose scraps she tucked into her notebooks. In fact, she stuffed nearly all her notebooks with newspaper cuttings, scraps of notes, telegrams, letters, sometimes even a bird’s feather or a leaf.

UCLA, Box 126, Folder 10

For a woman as fascinated by memory, by objects, by possession, this compulsion to collect makes sense. Sontag famously described photography as the ultimate note-taking device. Photography is, she wrote,

..note-taking on potentially everything in the world from every possible angle.⁴

In a similar impulse, Sontag literally strained the bounds of her notebooks to fit ever more inside.

Accumulation was the effect of being intensely interested in everything. Sontag’s notebooks are filled with so many lists. Here is a small sample:

• Lists of possible essays—note her inclusion of “Against Interpretation” and “Camp”

  

  UCLA Box 125, Folder 1

• The greatest films (divided into first class and second class)

  

  Box 125, Folder 3

• 100 of her favorite books

  

  UCLA, Box 125, Folder 4

• “Movies I saw as a child when they came out”

UCLA, Box 125, folder 4

• Adjectives

“Death-Kit Notes,” UCLA, Box 125, Folder 7

This desire to be intensely interested in everything was something Sontag pondered in her notes. She saw list-making as an extension of this.

I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create—or guarantee—existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.⁵

Does an active interest maintain a thing’s existence? Of course not. But in a very real sense, it maintained the thing’s existence for Sontag. After all, as a thought fades from memory, it stops existing for the thinker.

Sontag applied this logic to her own thoughts as well. There is evidence that she returned to older notebooks to pick out quotes and ideas she wanted to re-integrate into her thinking—a kind of list-making of older diary entries.

For example, on this page in a 1974/5 notebook, Sontag records

Old Notes (from 1970?)

UCLA, Box 127, Folder 9

Sontag’s notebooks are filled with recursions and returning to thoughts. Her mind constantly returned to well-worn thoughts, to perennial interests.

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Sontag’s Drafts

Among Sontag’s material papers, I also got to look at drafts of work stored on her computer. I learned that she often preceded her draft with more lists. Before she launches into her essays, she populates the document with reminders. Here are the notes she had for herself before drafting Where the Stress Falls:

“Where the Stress Falls”

notes; sources of quotes

verve arresting

warmly tethered to amorous

bereft treacherous

***********************************************************

My Second Sentence:

investing it with the allure of the untimely, supervening World Events having dislodged

it might seem trivial now, in the light of supervening World Events to give who thinks now that the “war and peace” that goes on in the psych

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The instability of the narrator’s perceptions is Wescott’s method of making his characters complex.

Character is unstable; more exactly, the narrator’s perception of character is unstable…⁶

With these notes—tone-setting language lists and reminders for her arguments—Sontag records her outline before she begins her draft.

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Sontag understood the magic of material presence. I like to think she would have recognized my own excitement at seeing her papers, that she would have recognized my own intense interest. As much as I love Sontag’s published works, I have to say that I loved her notebooks even more.

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Notes on Sontag’s Notes

Throw-out note-taking categories: Sontag’s notebooks resist categorization. They include quotations, like a commonplace book; they include confessions, like a diary; they include travel schedules; they include clippings like a scrapbook. Often, with notes, we can get caught up in labels (is this a diary or a journal?) but the truth is that once a notebook gets into an individual’s hands, those categories cease to hold as much sway.

Begin drafts with a list of reminders: Before she began drafting essays, Sontag filled word documents with quotes and reminders. It’s a great way to combat a fear of the blank page and to ensure you don’t forget important points. It’s really, just another example of Sontag’s lists.

Lists as a foil against forgetting: If you find yourself forgetting things, make a list. Go through old notebooks and create new lists of quotes and ideas you want to salvage and keep top of mind. If you’re starting a new essay, assemble quotes and words you’d like to use at the top of your document.

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Yours in Note-Taking,

P.S. There is so much more to say about Sontag’s notes. She was, herself, obsessed with note-taking—fascinated by her own process as well as those of other writers. And, as it turns out, she had a lot of thoughts on writing itself—especially style. But that’s the subject for our postscript.

1. Entry from May 15, 1949. UCLA Box 123, folder 5.

2. Quoted in Moser, Benjamin. Sontag: Her Life and Work. HarperCollins, 2019.

3. Sontag, Susan. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, p. 257.

4. Sontag, “Photography Unlimited,” New York Review of Books, June 23, 1977.

5. Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, p. 219.

6. Sontag’s Laptop Box 125 Collection 612, UCLA.