Gotham Diary:
Intellectual
25 April 2012
The second volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries has appeared, entitled As Consciousness Is Harnessed to the Flesh. What a ghastly title — I can’t believe that Sontag herself would have chosen it. “I’m irritated with images, often: they seem ‘crazy’ to me. Why should X by like Y?” Why speak of consciousness as harnessed when horses are harnessed precisely because they’re naturally independent (not to mention two of a kind). Reading Brian Dillon’s review in the Irish Times, I’m doubting that I’ll buy the book. I bought the first installment, Reborn, but almost immediately handed over to Ms NOLA.
It was embarrassing to see how insecure Sontag was about her gifts and her budding career, and Dillon writes that these worries did not dissipate even as she became the intellectual goddess of the Sixties. Her anxieties were excised from the published work that we got to see at the time. In public, Sontag spoke with a cool bravado that casually presumed that her readers were on the same page, if perhaps a sentence or a thought behind her. She was, in her photographs, so beautiful! Her beauty was the source of her authority. That’s so obvious now! When I do read the diaries — when they all come out, and, maybe if I’m lucky, get published in one volume — I’ll be interested to see how much she dared write even privately about the importance of her good looks. Certainly no ordinary-looking doofus would have been permitted to talk about all the unheard-of writers whom she served up like so many hot restaurant tips. (If you haven’t seen Annie Leibovitz’s utterly heartless photograph of Sontag’s corpse laid out for a wake, count yourself fortunate.)
I was in college when I read Against Interpretation. It convinced me that I would never measure up as an intellectual, possibly because the effort would be too great. Reading all the books and understanding them wouldn’t be the hard part. The hard part would be maintaining the stance (which you are free to think of as what it really is, a pose). Sontag could be a goddess because she was prepared to suppress her everyday humanity in a blaze of cerebral stylishness. The humanity is revealed in her diaries; she is perpetually announcing that she is on the verge of becoming a great writer — but she never, to her own satisfaction, quite gets there.
I also thought, reading “Notes on Camp,” that, if this was what the world was really like, it was arguably not worth saving.
***
Perhaps if I’d grown up ten years earlier, I would have seen “intellectual” for what it was, a fashion. The concept had been around for a century or so; it signified belief in the more or less Hegelian conviction that the universe was governed by metaphysical laws — scholasticism, in short — and that these laws would eventually but inevitable rid the world of what was not at the time called “yuppie scum.” And what could have been more scholastic than all the feuds on the Left? The Wars of the Cafés! After World War II, in this country, “intellectual” described a mildly paranoid view of the civil order as a vast conspiracy, or rather the conspiracy of a handful of secret agents operating over the vastness of the nation. One indispensable item in every intellectual’s kit was “contempt for the bourgeoisie.” Or so it seemed. In fact, there was always a tension between intellectuals who had been born and raised in bourgeois families and those from working-class backgrounds, with the latter substituting rudeness for clever condescension.
I am glad that no one sets out to be an intellectual anymore.
***
I hoped to revisit the subject of intellectuals this afternoon, but the hour that I’d have spent writing got chewed up by scheduling problems. I went to an earlier showing of Darling Companion (about which more tomorrow) and then trudged eastward to Alphabet City. I arrived before Will and his mother, but that was no inconvenience, just this once, for I was lugging a garden kneeler, one of those handy contraption that upends as a nice little bench. When they arrived, I was reading A Game of Hide and Seek in the late afternoon light. I say “just this once” because I won’t be carrying the bench in future; I had bought the one I was carrying to leave at Will’s. It makes picking up after him and sitting wherever he wants to play a great deal easier. Well, easy; it wasn’t.
Where did Will’s train table go, I asked Megan. Turns out Will played Godzilla with it, roaringly overturning the table top and sending Plan Toys tracks and Thomas the Tank Engines flying in all directions. The third time was the charm for his mother: the table was not set up again. I am sanguine about the savagery, for I believe that Will is the sort of child who will put this sort of behavior behind him fairly quickly. Been there done that, &c. With Kathleen and me, he was a quiet little fellow, engaged by Kipper when not hiding behind the sofa.
I must remember to wear an undershirt next time, no matter how warm it is. I know that he will sooner or later push his small wooden bus between the plackets of my dress shirt. I could fairly see the cogs turning while he played in my lap.
It was Megan and Ryan’s fourth anniversary! I’m so used to thinking of them as the world’s greatest parents that I lose sight of the romantic preliminaries.