Susan Sontag's marriage
With the publication of Susan Sontag's diaries, it becomes even harder to maintain the hoary traditionalist argument that a writer's sexuality is irrelevant to the work: For Sontag, her discovery of her bisexuality, of her talent, and her potential for celebrity were all clearly interwoven.
Sontag's adventurousness in all arenas seems so obvious, so early on -- from May 1949, near the end of her first and only semester at Berkeley: "I know what I want to do with my life, all of this being so simple, but so difficult for me in the past to know. I want to sleep with many people -- I want to live and hate to die -- I will not teach, or get a master's after I get my B.A." -- that her decision to marry Philip Rieff, the significantly older cultural critic whom she meets at the University of Chicago, seems a bafflement. The seven-year marriage, not a happy one, produced the writer and critic David Rieff, who edited his mother's journals.
But in an unusually knowledgeable and penetrating review in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Daniel Horowitz, who teaches American studies at Smith, points out that David Rieff made some chronological errors in the page proofs (the version that most reviewers read) that made the wedding to Philip Rieff seem even more abrupt -- tragically abrupt -- than it may have been.
The uncorrected proofs of the book, Horowitz writes, have Sontag meeting Rieff in Nov. 1949, not long after she'd arrived at the University of Chicago, the same year in which she recounts her first sexual experience with another woman. ("I am reborn," Sontag comments.) In December comes a terse reference to her engagement to Rieff, followed by a grim note about the wedding, dated January 1950: "I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness." In between the engagement and the marriage falls an account of a visit with the novelist Thomas Mann, in Los Angeles. The effect is to make the decision to marry seem like the closing of an iron curtain, and the Mann visit a form of self-distraction.
But Horowitz, who is familiar with the journals, housed at the University of California at Los Angeles, writes that the first encounter with Rieff, and the marriage, actually took place a year later than David Rieff placed it -- i.e., in late 1950 and early 1951. Horowitz also observes that Sontag also had relationships with men, not represented in the (published) journal, in between her lesbian awakening and her decision to marry. The marriage, therefore, came at the end of a period of experimentation, rather than grounding that experimentation just as it took flight. Sontag's mother also entered a financial crisis at the time, so the marriage may have resolved issues of both security and -- temporarily -- sexual identity. Horowitz says that he alerted the book's publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, of the problem with the chronology, and that corrective notes have been added to the final book.
The correction, of course, does not make the marriage any more satisfying, in the long run -- Sontag once compared Rieff, devastatingly, to Professor Casaubon, the desiccated scholar in "Middlemarch" who marries Dorothea Brooke and almost ruins her life -- but Horowitz's explanations render it plausible, at least.
UPDATE, 12/30: I've made some tweaks to clarify the chronology here, after talking with Horowitz. For one thing, I now say when she was at Berkeley and when she was at Chicago.
