As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

"The title of the second volume of Susan Sontag's diaries comes from a note in the margin next to an entry from 1965: 'spiritual project – but tied to making an object (as consciousness is harnessed to flesh)'. It is a curious phrase, suggesting the paradox that is art: a real, tangible thing resulting from a long, indefinable process. It evokes, too, the duality of Sontag herself: the public figure, whose provocative essays can seem to readers intimidatingly confident, and the mind that made them – which, as her diaries reveal, was unusually full of pain. The title was presumably chosen by Sontag's son, David Rieff, who will edit three volumes in total; the first, Reborn, which came out in 2009, started in 1947 . . . This second volume covers the period in which she produced the main body of her essays and fiction. Rieff edits his mother's innermost thoughts only lightly, adding in names and correcting factual errors, but leaving it up to the reader to establish which of the notes might refer to which of the essays. Having abandoned academia, Sontag spent her 30s writing and consuming New York's culture: watching films, attending 'happenings', visiting the studios of her artist friends Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Thek and Jasper Johns. Her diary entries are often short and elliptical, consisting of observations ('Jasper Johns = Duchamp painted by Monet'), quotations from her reading, and, most of all, lists. But the majority of the volume is devoted to Sontag's consciousness, her notes clearly coloured by the 'deconditioning' that took place on the couch of her therapist, Diana Kemeny . . . Unlike her essays, which warned against looking for hidden depth, her personal prose champions Freudian conjecture: on her dislike of her body (particularly her legs), her desire to please others, her 'insatiable' appetite for culture. Sontag's essays are arch, intransigent – so it is a rare pleasure to read, in her diary, discoveries being made in real time . . . As her diaries reveal with such intensity, she harnessed only a fraction of her mind to produce the writing we have seen until now; the rest is consciousness."—Emily Stokes, The Guardian

"In its fragmentation and incoherence and passion, its combination of the erudite and the everyday, it is more true to life, both intellectual and emotional, than the most artful novel or careful biography. It may well be that Sontag's diaries, like Virginia Woolf's (which she knew and admired) will come to be seen as just as brilliant and important as anything she wrote."—Anne Chisholm, The Telegraph

"The impersonality of so much of Sontag's writings—an impersonality by turns bold, willful, and elegant—naturally leaves us wondering whether a different kind of writer will be revealed in her journals and notebooks. Will the writing be more spontaneous and less guarded? Will it turn out that there was some lyric mode that she chose to suppress in what she published? . . . With the second of three volumes of journals and notebooks skillfully edited by her son, the writer David Rieff, we are in the period when Sontag was a figure to be reckoned with. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh moves from 1964 to 1980, the years when she published three works of fiction and five works of non-fiction . . . If the journals do anything for Sontag's reputation, it may be to demystify her to a degree, for there is an earnestness and even a flat-footedness that cannot be reconciled with the sense of Sontag as the girl with dark hair from California who appeared miraculously to revitalize New York's literary culture in the 1960s. What we discover in these pages is very much the writer we have already known, though often in a less polished form. And the absence of polish has a way of underscoring her painful deliberateness, the sense that she is not so much writing a journal as observing herself writing a journal . . . Few writers of the past fifty years have been so expert at keeping the educated public so enthralled. Those who dismiss Sontag entirely will say it was all a matter of celebrity placement: the good looks, the up-to-the-minute subjects, the posh friends. But whether one likes much of what she wrote or not, the case is more interesting. There is something of the intellectual showman about Sontag, with the showmanship taken very seriously indeed . . . This author of instruction manuals for the thinking public had a way of locating herself in a kind of middle distance in relation to her readers—neither risking a familiarity that might compromise her authority nor standing so far away as to seem entirely out of reach . . . Sontag brings her frequently lofty subjects close to the reader, but not too close—so that she satisfies some yearning in the public to know or to understand without ever satisfying it entirely."—Jed Perl, The New Republic
"Sontag is an enthusiast but not, properly speaking, a popularizer; she writes for the initiate, not the naif. The seduction of her sentences is their hardness and authority; they could never be accused of a light touch. She wears her learning like chain mail."—Christine Smallwood, Bookforum
"As in Reborn, the first volume in the planned Sontag journals and notebooks trilogy, Sontag's son, David Rieff, begins the second with a strikingly candid introduction. In the full-tilt, questioning, and expressive entries that follow, Sontag suffers epically over love and heartbreak in her relationships with women and her hasty marriage and grapples with haunting memories of her wounding childhood. Angst blooms repeatedly, followed by self-chiding for her emotional turmoil and an oft-repeated refrain, 'I must be strong.' Toward her son, adoration flows unstintingly, however self-sustainingly. 'One thing I know: if I hadn't had David, I would have killed myself last year.' A champion list-maker, Sontag keeps track of books, movies, resolutions, even 'qualities that turn me on.' Her journals accompany her all over the world as her stature rises. She writes incisively about the many remarkable writers, dancers, and artists she meets, and she is happiest recounting time spent with Joseph Brodsky. A truly moving and illuminating chronicle of the vital inner life of an exceptionally nuanced thinker and risk-taking artist coming into her full powers."—Donna Seaman, Booklist