“One of the most striking things to me reading her journals was the impression that, from youth to old age, my mother was fighting the same battles, both with the world and with herself.” Thus David Rieff, describing his encounter with the diaries of his mother, Susan Sontag. I found it in this review of a new biography of her, but I think I recall reading it in his introduction to one of the volumes of journals.

The review is by Leslie Jamison, who is one of a batch of "new" essayists who have appeared over, say, the last ten years.  I do think she's pretty impressive, and this is a nice review--I highly recommend it.  But I don't want to talk about the review, but about what the review reveals about what the biography reveals about Sontag.

It's a bit depressing, or dislocating, to realize that even those people you respect, you imagine to have it all together, don't have it all together. Of course this is one of the oldest stories that humanity tells itself. No one is actually a hero. No one is actually a full grown-up. No one is a winner. Everyone has some flaw, and almost everyone has many. It is theologically wrong, but empirically pretty plausible, to affirm what a scholar of Dante once wrote: "sin is an individuating principle." Insofar as we are who we are, we are who we are more because of our failings and flaws and errancies than our perfections or successes.

Truth be told, which of course it rarely is, this ought to be comforting to us, shouldn't it? I mean, it's a statement that ought to relieve some of ou superego's pressure on us, our continual reminding of ourselves of the many ways that we have failed, how we have not done what we should have done, and the things we have done, we ought not to have done. Why would a frank recognition of this not be, in its deepest honesty, good news? I think it would be good news. But it is hard to believe, and harder to swallow, and harder to digest, and harder to metabolize, and at each of those steps fewer and fewer of us manage to accomplish the task.

Susan Sontag was something of a genius--by which I mean, she was in touch with levels of understanding and insight inside herself that were more profound than most of us will ever access, and she then managed to communicate something of those levels, however semaphorically, to the rest of us. It was not simply a matter of style, though her prose style was very much part of her gift to the rest of us. (The book Sontag and Kael by Craig Seligman remains one of my favorite books, and it is a very nice introduction to how Sontag wrote, and a reasonable hypothesis about why she wrote that way, what she was trying to get us to see and understand by using sentences in the way she did.) It was also a matter of turning a relentless intelligence on objects—typically cultural objects, sometimes political ones—that had not yet been examined with a scrutiny so merciless, and a suggestion that such a scrutiny was warranted, indeed needed.

And also that that scrutiny should be carried on with standards of excellence so very high that the object of attention was likely in some important respects to fail the examination—to reveal defects of conception or realization, misbegettings or errors or carelessnesses, that needed to be registered, so that we might see the real thing there. Sontag was a clinician of the intellect, not a general practitioner or someone who works primarily with actual patients, but a specialist in a lab, the outcomes of whose interrogations were phrased in such way as to be better digestible not by ordinary people but by intellects astutely trained yet gifted as well with a human touch. Sontag had no human touch. She had no readily displayable sense of humor in her thinking (or rather, her writing, though as Seligman notes, part of the point of her writing was to display a model of thinking for us to emulate, in order to manage more thoughtfully, minimally thoughtfully to inhabit this world; this is perhaps one thing she took from Henry James). What her thinking exuded above all was seriousness, and an expectation—even an imperative—that we would meet her on the level of this seriousness as well. This was not a scholarly obligation, indeed in some ways it was the opposite of the scholarly; scholarship, I suspect she thought, was too contingent, too voluntary, too bureaucratic, too much a way of inquiry that was itself embedded in a certain nine-to-five job but didn’t reach inside the soul. (If she thought this, I think she was wrong, by the way.) Interestingly, this made her a “public intellectual” but it also made her a teacher. Maybe a “public intellectual” is always a teacher, in this way.  Even one as Olympian as Sontag.

Anyway.  I could go on about Sontag. She wasn’t perfect, and if you needed to be reminded of this platitude, this biography seems willing to remind you. Nor do I find myself agreeing with everything she wrote or said.  And it’s always a danger that the attitude of seriousness can become a pose.  Certainly it does for many people, much of the time, and for her, some of the time, it did as well.  But I hope that’s enough to say: I think she was someone valuable for us.

What is then depressing, and sobering, about this biography is the evidence that at some basic level her seriousness did not help her become a kind of superior sort of person. She had the same hang-ups, the same screw-ups, that the rest of us did. I know I should not be surprised at this. And yet I am both surprised at it, to some degree, and also surprised by my own surprise, ambushed by the predictable revelation of my own naiveté. Anyone who has known me in the past ten or fifteen years knows one of my favorite stories comes from André Malraux’s Antimemoires. Malraux once met a very old priest, and asked him what sixty years of hearing confessions had taught him. “Nothing,” he replied dismissively. “Wait, no, one thing: There are no grownups."

What if the struggle of life is hard for everyone and never stops being hard? What if we never get better at it? Or what if we do get better at it, but never better enough to move securely away from problems we had when we were five or ten or fifteen? What if the difficulties of life, and especially the difficulties of the self-inflicted variety, always remain? What if we have met the enemy, and he is us?  What if, however far we go, we arrive to find our old selves already there, waiting for us? What do we do then? Maybe that is the final kind of seriousness that Sontag has for me; maybe for all of us.