Ο γιος της Σούζαν Σόνταγκ εξέδωσε τα νεανικά της ημερολόγια

Η μαμά, που θα προτιμούσα να μη γνωρίζω

ΕΠΙΜΕΛΕΙΑ: ΝΑΤΑΛΙ ΧΑΤΖΗΑΝΤΩΝΙΟΥ

«Αν η μάνα μου ζούσε, δεν θα επέτρεπε να δημοσιευτούν αυτά τα κείμενα. Δεν αποκλείεται και να τα έκαιγε». Η παράδοξη παραδοχή προέρχεται από τον γιο τής Σούζαν Σόνταγκ και επιμελητή του πρώτου τόμου των ημερολογίων της. Κι όμως ο Ντέιβιντ Ριφ, ακόμα και στην εισαγωγή του βιβλίου, απέχει ελάχιστα από το να παρακαλέσει τους αναγνώστες να μη διαβάσουν τις υπόλοιπες 317 σελίδες.

Η Αμερικανίδα συγγραφέας σε φωτογραφία του 1962, σε ηλικία 29 χρόνων

Η έκδοση με τίτλο «Reborn» περιλαμβάνει ημερολόγια και σημειώσεις που κρατούσε η περίφημη Αμερικανίδα συγγραφέας και ακτιβίστρια από το 1947 έως το 1963, δηλαδή από τα 14 έως τα 30 της χρόνια. Οι εξομολογήσεις της παρουσιάζονται ωμές και ακατέργαστες, πράγμα που θα μπορούσε να αποδειχτεί και αρετή -αν σκεφτεί κανείς ότι πρόκειται για τα πρωτόλεια μιας από τις πιο ενεργητικές διάνοιες της Αμερικής τον 20ό αιώνα. Κι όμως ο Ριφ επιμένει ότι το περιεχόμενο περιλαμβάνει «πολλά που θα προτιμούσα να μη γνωρίζω ούτε εγώ ούτε οι άλλοι».

Γιατί τότε ανέλαβε την επιμέλεια; Διότι καθώς η Σόνταγκ (1933-2004) κληροδότησε το αρχείο της στο Πανεπιστήμιο της Καλιφόρνιας, χωρίς καμία απαγόρευση ως προς την αξιοποίησή του, αργά ή γρήγορα κάποιος άλλος θα την αναλάμβανε.

Η αποστολή του ήταν ασφαλώς πολύ επώδυνη. Οι αφηγήσεις της μάνας του περιλαμβάνουν λεπτομέρειες για την αφύπνιση της σεξουαλικότητάς της, τις πρώτες ομοφυλοφιλικές εμπειρίες της, αλλά και τον γάμο της, μόλις στα 17 της, με τον καθηγητή της και πατέρα του, Φίλιπ Ριφ. Ο σύντομος έγγαμος βίος τους δεν καταγράφεται λεπτομερειακώς. Μπορεί ωστόσο κάποιος να βγάλει συμπεράσματα για την ποιότητά του από επιγραμματικές σκέψεις: «Ο θεσμός του γάμου αποσκοπεί στην άμβλυνση των συναισθημάτων και στην επανάληψη».

Ούτε οι λεσβιακές εμπειρίες την κάνουν ευτυχέστερη. Για λίγο αντιμετωπίζει εκστατική την προοπτική των ελεύθερων σχέσεων. Αλλά αμέσως μετά περιγράφοντας τη σαδομαζοχιστική της σχέση με μια γυναίκα στο Παρίσι αλλά και με τη δραματουργό Μαρία Αϊρίν Φορνς, βυθίζεται στην απόγνωση. Γράφει: «Ζω τη ζωή μου σαν να είναι ένα θέαμα φτιαγμένο για μένα. Ζω τη ζωή μου, αλλά δεν ζω μέσα σ' αυτήν».

Παρούσες είναι και οι πρώτες λογοτεχνικές της ανακαλύψεις. Γράφει για τον Κάφκα ότι «έχει κάτι που δεν έχει κανένας άλλος μοντέρνος: τη μαγεία της πραγματικότητας ακόμα και στην πιο "εξαρθρωμένη" φράση...>».

Απουσιάζει, όμως, πλήρως η εσωτερική ματιά στον εξωτερικό κόσμο. Θα μπορούσε κανείς να επικαλεστεί κάποια λογοτεχνική αξία; Οι «Νιου Γιορκ Τάιμς» σχεδόν το αποκλείουν: «Για τη Σόνταγκ η συγγραφή ήταν όσο απαραίτητη είναι η αναπνοή. Ηταν όμως ένα είδος εργαστηριακής "αναπνοής". Δεν ήταν αυθόρμητη στην έκφρασή της. Εδώ όμως το γράψιμό της το χαρακτηρίζει μια ανατέλλουσα αταξία. Σπανιότατα κατορθώνει να διακρίνει κανείς την οξύτατη διορατικότητα που έχουμε συνδέσει με τη δουλειά της».

ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΤΥΠΙΑ - 05/01/2009

Susan Sontag: 'It was so beautiful when H began making love to me'

The very personal diaries of Susan Sontag, activist and writer, are to be made public by her only son

By Paul Bignell, The Independent, Sunday, 16 November 2008

ALESSIA PIERDOMENICO/REUTERS

Writer Susan Sontag resting in a garden in Rome in 2003, the year before she died

"I intend to do everything ... I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too for it is everywhere! ... everything matters!" So wrote 16-year-old Susan Sontag in 1946. One of the finest American writers, thinkers, and political activists of the past four decades, Susan Sontag led a rich and creative life. Her opinions would anger and impress critics in equal measure.

Now, four years after her death, her personal diaries are to be published, unveiling an intimate portrait of her early life and her much talked- about sexuality.

The diaries will be released in three instalments, starting next January with Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947-1964, published by Penguin. They were compiled by her only child, the author and academic David Rieff, and will reveal previously unknown aspects of the writer's life.

Although it was common knowledge that Sontag was bisexual – most famously noted by her relationship with the photographer Annie Leibovitz – she never spoke frankly about her bisexuality in public.

The publication of her diaries for the first time, beginning when she was just 14, reveals an intimate portrait of her sexual encounters with women two years later. In the passages, Sontag alludes to her sexuality at the age of 15: "I am very young, and perhaps the most disturbing aspects of my ambitions will be outgrown ... so now I feel I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this)."

Aged 16, she writes of her first sexual encounter, with a woman only referred to as "H", to protect her identity: "Perhaps I was drunk, after all, because it was so beautiful when H began making love to me .... It had been 4:00 before we had gotten to bed ... I became fully conscious that I desired her, she knew it, too...."

Speaking from his home in New York this weekend, Mr Rieff spoke of the difficulties he had with publishing such frank and personal material. "It was a difficult decision for me to make and my reasons are that I didn't have much choice given the fact that she chose to sell the papers to the University of California. So later, down the line, editions of it would inevitably be published, so I would rather do it myself .... I certainly made every effort in the editing not to cut anything on the basis of my being uncomfortable with it, and not to cut anything my mother might have preferred the world not to know."

The diaries demonstrate Sontag's appetite for literature and list making. In the first couple of entries in the diary, Sontag has already devoured works by André Gide and Rainer Rilke. "She was a prodigy and she had a prodigy's appetite. Those of us who are not prodigies, like myself, it takes longer to read the amounts she read," said Mr Rieff. "I do think that the interest of this book to the readers is about somebody creating themselves, that's one of the reasons I included so many of her lists ... there were many more ...."

Mr Rieff also spoke of how similar Sontag's teenage persona was to the mother he later knew. "I don't think she changed that much – that was one of the things that struck me most when I was reading the diary. Her curiosity and voraciousness are there, I don't think that was any different when she was 15. She was remarkably the same in that sense."

Sontag died in New York on 28 December 2004, aged 71, from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome. It had evolved into acute myelogenous leukaemia. She is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Susan Sontag and her son David

Archive: The intimate secrets of Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag
Photo credit/copyright: Annie Leibovitz,
courtesy of the artist

From The Sunday Times, May 25, 2008

The literary giant Susan Sontag was determined to beat the cancer that claimed her. Now her son tells the story of her final struggle, and opens her private papers to reveal intimate secrets about her life

Cathy Galvin

Susan Sontag burst upon the 1960s in a blaze of black hair, black eyes, passion and intellectual potency – the ultimate babe with brains. An exceptional essayist, she challenged accepted cultural wisdom and was particularly brilliant on how photography changes the way we think about the past and present. For her, cameras and celebrity held no fear, and her image was captured by the most avant-garde and distinguished photographers. Before their lenses she is beautiful, haunting: sculpted face, strong body.

Yet two years ago, shocking photographs of Sontag were published, taken by one of the great loves of her life, the celebrity portraitist Annie Leibovitz. In an autobiographical tome, Leibovitz caught in explicit detail the painful last journey that ended in Sontag’s death in December 2004. Here she is unrecognisable, hair shorn, in the final, ugly, bloated stages of a fatal blood cancer; there, dressed for the grave, in grotesque finery.

Philip Rieff (left) and Susan Sontag in 1966. (Reprinted with permission of Insight Magazine. Copyright 2004. Newsworld Communications. All rights reserved. Photo by Brig Cabe (left); Tony Rollo / Newsweek)

This is a story about a woman who lived an epic life and who, in death, still holds power over those who loved her. Long before Sontag became an academic amazon, before others adopted her as an icon, she had been a frightened, asthmatic little girl, abandoned by her alcoholic mother and pregnant at 19. Fleeing the older husband she married within days of meeting him – the sociologist Philip Rieff – she made her way to New York to begin her writing career and bring up their son alone. He, somehow, often gets written out of the details of her life. His name is David Rieff and he has written a book about her painful death. In it he attempts to be truthful about living with the dying Sontag, about universal life-and-death dilemmas. Yet the reader is left wondering why he wrote it; puzzling over what those who loved Sontag believed was right to publish about her private pain. Could capturing her in death have become a way for both her son and her lover to possess her, finally, in a way that wasn’t possible in life?

Rieff agrees to talk in Rome. His mother brought him here when he was a teenager, and he can’t escape thoughts of her: she would, he says, have loved the wine bar he discovered last night; he knows she would have crammed every day here to bursting point... [article continues]

Related Links

• Susan Sontag: The Times obituary

• Agent provocateur of culture

• Where are our Susan Sontags?

Why I had to lie to my dying mother

American writer Susan Sontag was terrified of death. She beat cancer in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, but third time around she wasn't so lucky. In a tender account of her final illness, her son David Rieff recalls how he colluded with his mother's fantasy that she wasn't dying - and what this ultimately cost him after she had gone

Sunday May 18, 2008. The Observer

America, 1967: David Rieff and mother Susan Sontag. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

When my mother Susan Sontag was diagnosed in 2004 with myelodysplastic syndrome, a precursor to a rapidly progressive leukaemia, she had already survived stage IV breast cancer in 1975 that had spread into the lymph system, despite her doctors having held out little hope of her doing so, and a uterine sarcoma in 1998. 'There are some survivors, even in the worst cancers,' she would often say during the nearly two years she received what even for the time was an extremely harsh regime of chemotherapy for the breast cancer.

'Why shouldn't I be one of them?'After that first cancer, mutilated but alive (the operation she underwent not only removed one of her breasts but the muscles of the chest wall and part of an armpit), she wrote her defiant book Illness as Metaphor. Part literary study, part polemic, it was a fervent plea to treat illness as illness, the luck of the genetic draw, and not the result of sexual inhibition, the repression of feeling, and the rest - that torrid brew of low-rent Wilhelm Reich and that mix of masochism and hubris that says that somehow people who got ill had brought it on themselves.

In the book, my mother contrasted the perennial stigma attached to cancer with the romanticising of tuberculosis in 19th-century literature (La bohème and all that). In the notebooks for the book that I found after her death, I discovered one entry that stopped me cold. 'Leukaemia,' it read, 'the only "clean" cancer.' Clean illness, indeed. My poor mother: to think of what awaited her... [Article continues]

Susan Sontag and son

Born 13 January 1933 in New York City. Her father, Jack Rosenblatt, died when she was five, and her mother, Mildred Jacobsen, married Nathan Sontag. They move to Los Angeles.

1949 Admitted to the University of Chicago. Continues graduate study at Harvard, St Anne's College, Oxford and the Sorbonne.

1950 Sontag marries Philip Rieff, a young teacher at Chicago, after a 10-day courtship. They divorce in 1958.

1952 David Rieff is born in Boston, Massachusetts, the only son of Susan and Philip.

1978-89 David Rieff works as a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux with authors including Joseph Brodsky, Philip Roth - and Susan Sontag.

Sontag's books include four novels; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera (1977); several plays, and eight works of non-fiction, including On Photography (1976) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).

Rieff's books include Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (1995) and At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (2005).

· Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir is published by Granta, £12.99.