June/July/Aug 2017 Under the Sign of Sappho The diaries of Susan Sontag Melissa Anderson

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag Farrar, Straus and Giroux $24.00 List Price For more info visit:

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SUSAN SONTAG’S JOURNALS AND NOTEBOOKS, which totaled close to one hundred by the time of her death, at age seventy-one in 2004, were kept in a walk-in closet in her bedroom. Their location is almost too perfect. Although never explicitly acknowledged while she was alive, Sontag’s same-sex relationships were for many years an open secret. The closet door, in other words, had been left ajar; you could enter and exit without too much effort. For even longer, it seems, she had wanted to be found out. And with the publication, in 2008 and 2012, respectively, of the first two (of a planned three) volumes of her journals and notebooks—Reborn, covering 1947–63, and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, spanning 1964–80—she was.

“One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal. Will H ever read this?” Sontag, then twenty-four, wrote in her journal on New Year’s Eve, 1957, while in Paris. “H” is Harriet Sohmers, Sontag’s girlfriend at the time, who had earlier seduced the writer when she was a sixteen-year-old student at Berkeley. After “H,” Sontag would be involved for several years with “I.,” the playwright María Irene Fornés, who, before she was with Sontag, had been Sohmers’s lover, a quasi-incestuous sequence of events not uncommon among the sapphically inclined. The psychic enmeshment deepens after reading syntactically peculiar passages like these, both from 1960: “I. and I don’t really talk any more”; “Why haven’t I told

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