Young Sontag: Intellectual in Training

By RICHARD EDER writing in The New York Times.
Published: December 31, 2008

It’s not quite a “please don’t read,” but David Rieff comes close in the doleful preface to “Reborn,” the first volume of notebooks by his mother, Susan Sontag, who died in 2004. He refuses to use the classically unprovable “she would have wanted it” to explain his decision to publish them. Alive, she would never have let them appear, he tells us; in fact she might have burned them.

Pic left - Eddie Hausner/The New York Times
Inner vision of the outside world: Susan Sontag in 1962.

REBORN
Journals and Notebooks
1947-1963
By Susan Sontag
Edited by David Rieff.
318 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

Times Topics: Susan Sontag

All but visibly wincing, he states that he would rather have left them unpublished. They are raw and unvarnished and perhaps that is a virtue; still, they contain “much that I would have preferred not to know and not to have others know.” Reading her entries, he writes, he felt like the Greek theatergoer who watched Medea about to kill her children, and shouted, “Don’t do it!”
So why does he do it? His answer, in this oddest of editor’s notes — written with touching laconic power — is that Sontag had left her papers without restrictions to the University of California, Los Angeles. If he did not do the job, thus at least keeping some control, someone else would.
Read the full pice at NYT.