In Which We Step Back From The Light Of Thomas Lanier Williams

The Broken Mirror

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Not that I like being struck, I hated it, but the keenness of the emotional situation, the material for art.

The notebooks of Thomas Lanier Williams, called Tennessee, retain the defining characteristic of all his writing - they are a half truth. These entries admit much, but not everything. They attempt to explain circumstances, as best they can, but come short of encapsulating his positions in a single artistic or philosophical statement. Surety was a luxury for others who had more enthusiasm for such things. From his point of view, there was a far more pressing dilemma: how could a person so eminently incomplete transcend this in his art?

the cover of Williams' 1941 notebook

3/12/41

Wednesday night.

Very blue. Very down hearted. Thoughts of despair in my feverish head. Very sick last night. Raging fever and pounding heart. The grippe I suppose. Tormented till daybreak. Then felt asleep and woke much improved, fever gone, but weak. Spent the day walking idly about Tampa — wound up at a movie, the usual anesthesia. Visited a bar with plump child-like B-girls & soldiers — called The Broken Mirror.

Home & read a detective story account of the bestial treatment of prisoners in Alcatraz — which made me feel even worse. I feel helpless, unprotected. This little moratorium seems to have stretched its limit and I have written no long play nor do I have a reliable idea for one — and my eye looks worse and I am unbearably shy and had no luck at sex for several weeks.

So I feel wretched & frightened, more than usual.

Tomorrow I will pack off to St. Pete and the beach — God be merciful. Truly.

Thursday, AM.

Just now coughed and spit up a bloodstained phlegm — first time since Mexico. Wasn't even interested really.

Okay. Now we pack up and invade St. Pete and brave the terrors of general delivery. My agent's letters are frightening to me cause I never know when they will pronounce my doom.

Later —

Well, I have arrived in St. Pete and I have a dollar room for the night. Got here in the rain. Fever, headache. Very weak and aching. Lie in my room with a copy of Time.

Audrey's letter contained a cheque without comment. She is bored & irritated no doubt.

A sweet letter from Mother enclosing $5.00 check & May Wright address. I think I will be all right when the sun comes out and this fever passes. A fever is optimistic and imaginative and poetic. The poet's best friend is three degrees of fever.

I have cut out coffee & cigarettes last 2 days. will try to keep it up. so long.

The two defining memes in Williams' notebooks are (1) the search for sex with other men and (2) complaining about his lack of health. Surprisingly, he is quite humble about both of these subjects. (His work was the centerpiece of his confidence; life demanded at least some caution lest his carnal desires destroy him completely.) While he was not above trolling the local bars for intimate companions, it's evident that Thomas Lanier was a quite lonely man, and it is not merely sexual satisfaction but true knowledge of his partner that he craves.

8/12/41

Monday a.m.

America entered the war yesterday, against Japan. Dirty business. I knew some boys on the S.S. Oklahoma reported afire in Pearl Harbor.

on the beach in santa monica

12/18/41

Thursday —

Been back in Nola. about a week.

Crisis is Approaching in my life.

Completing re-write of "Stairs to the Roof" by forced marches. wearing out my nerves - physical wreck - nearly explode every evening.

Restless search for sex — fruitless, and tortured.

I look awful — Clothes shabby, eyes bleared.

Too nervous for any social composure. Feel little hope of production for a play. A commendable efffort — no more I'm afraid. A frantic little caged beast — Me!

En Avant!

12/19/41

A lover tonight. Picked up in Mack's bar. Nice not very goodlooking but pleasant exercise. Gay.

It is about 3:30 a.m. Heart pounding so I can't sleep. The old ticker has been taking a beating lately. Too much coffee. I suppose I am digging myself a grave. But what else would I do? — Today very bitter — play seemed bad. Only the athletic club pulls me thru these days - the hot shower the swim — the quiet, sedative reading room. What will it come to? Yes, the crisis is surely approaching I could probably go on skidding downhill quite a ways — but I am more likely to improve my fortune or crack up.

O how sleepy — Just taken a mebaral — peace except for heart. O how sweet peace is. I am not afraid of death anymore. I am clean and white like an old bone. There is nothing left. Yes. I am purified in a way.

thomas' mother and Grand

There is a tendency to look back at the careers of those we know so well and imagine they enjoyed success in their field at every opportunity. It was famously untrue of Fitzgerald, and although critics, agents and readers immediately saw value in Williams' work, his fiction in particular received a hazy reception. More clear was his marvelous ear for dialogue, for putting all of something in a glib phrase that represented it, and this ability was most obvious to others in his plays.

12/21/41

Sunday night

Oh last night I was drunk and I kissed Otto and Jerry — the lovely, the young — I charmed them with my rare gaiety and wit — so seldom it flowers but when it does it is fine.

They gave me their lips freely, warmly — and we left them alone with each other to make love. Till 6 a.m. I tagged along with an attractive soldier but finally gave him up as he fell into the clutches of a female whore. Returned home and found Frank had collected an attractive blond youth. He slept between us and the nightingales chirped a little. But I was judicious & respected F's priority tonight.

hungry — broke

Heart bad — I think we draw near the close. So? - Byebye.

I talk about extinction. But do I believe it? Am I not rather inclined to think some startling good fortune is coming?

set design for production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

1/6/42

Tuesday — I have just acquired this new eversharp pencil.

It is 11:15 p.m. I am reading the opening pages of Proust in a book I inadvertently confiscated from the library of the University of Iowa. It is one of the 3 books I own. My collected letters of D.H. Lawrence was acquired in the same way, but deliberately from the public library in New Orleans. Hart Crane was given to prevent me from stealing it "from an idiot."

Why this discussion of my library?

I am frightened thinking of the changes or rather the increased vicissitudes the war might create in my life. I suppose if it did not affect me personally my feelings about it would be only abstractly regretful. Things have to impinge on my own life to matter to me very much. Is that the way with most people? Yes. I am sure that it is.

self portrait of the artist

Well, I have been here about a week — no swimming, just sitting around, writing, eating, going to movies, relaxing in the effortless matrix of "home" created by Grand and Mother and grandfather. Bad for my figure, not much good for my soul. When have I ever done anything for the benefit of my soul? Horse shit.

Well, I must get moving. Where? Undecided as never before. A letter from Audrey will probably precipitate a decision. Macon? New York? Back to New Orleans? Or even, Florida — Mexico? Mexico City would be lovely, wish it were possible.

No, I feel no desire to participate in war work.

O, I might would be glad to be a Florence Nightingale if I could but — incompetent and lazy me. Thank god I don't have to go to camp or fight.

Proust writes, "For a long time I used to go to bed early."

Dear selfish, shameless, heroic, honest sissy — Proust.

We would have understood each other, my dear. How we might have "dished" the world in that cork-lined room of yours. I wonder if you turned over and would I ! heavens!

C'est assez Good night.

Later

Proust bores me tonight — I find myself, "No it isn't quite that involved, dear boy, at least not quite that involuted. The involvement is not so subject to analysis as you make it. A little more impressionism, please!

Williams did have one relationship with a woman. As you might imagine, it was short lived. He doted on his boyfriends, who were routinely younger and less experienced than he himself. He tended to live somewhat in fear of their departure, although he possessed an intense charisma that usually drew people into his orbit.

8/24/42

This evening a stranger picked me up. A common and seedy-looking young Jew with a thick accent. I was absurdly happy. For the first time since my arrival here I had a companion.

I took him all over town, bought him a beer, found him a place for the night. He was a hitch-hiker with a bag of cheese and rolls for food.

It was like cool water after hot thirst, just being with somebody. Left me quiet and relaxed.

I went home and read Robinson Jeffers' extraordinarily good-and-bad verse.

This afternoon I wrote and it was no fun but I got some probably not so bad work done.

No mail. Tomorrow?

The New York silence disturbs me. I guess it will have to be home for a while, at least.

Feel not bad tonight.

Hungry — very little to eat.

Salad for supper.

Milk for lunch.

Coffee for breakfast.

Bon nuit

12/18/42

From five o'clock on I am alone. I swim, exercise, and go out alone to the movie. I return and the floor is quiet. My former friend, the dancer, is in a room with someone else. Desertion!

But last night I had a sudden and hot affair with a party from Wisconsin. I was told that I had a lovely body and the compliment was apparently sincere. As we increase the distance from our youth, such speeches have more and more pathetic value to us. It used to be taken for granted, that we were as desirable to the other as that one is to us. Now we seldom are or we do not see how we could be, for we pursue the younger and lovelier than ourselves — Why do I write in the plural? Is it too sad to say "I"? But I don't think much about losing my youth. It happens and is accepted gradually. I feel very young. In a way. And in a way very old. I do not feel the time sense of much longer living. No, it seems as though it would not be long to the finish. But I started feeling that a number of years ago.

I want to go back to creation.

Strongly, brightly, with a fresh and free spirit and a driving power.

To do the monument.

So long.

with donald windham Williams never attempted much in the way of criticism, but his taste was impeccable. In the following excerpts, he relates his first and ongoing experiences with his peers and progenitors.

Anton Chekhov

Why can't I write like Chekhov? I could gouge my good eye out because I can't do something lovely and haunting like "The Sea Gull."

Thomas Wolfe

Scene after scene has the stamp of genius on it.

Whether the total effect will be as powerful as the parts is a question doesn't modify the fact that here is a man who has left his stamp on our human consciousness — and a very great stamp it is.

The picture of Webber's homecoming — particularly Randy and his boss — are as fine as anything of the kind I have seen — finer — Men like Wolfe — and the mess of this world — how do you reconcile it? You don't — can't. The world is ruled by Randy's bosses. The Tom Wolfe's are observers — but their work makes them a threat to their evil masters. They lift the scales from the slaves' eyes - if the slaves dare to let them.

William Saroyan

Saroyan is likeable enough with his somewhat calculated but fresh candor and probably has for many a charm. I felt too much space between us.

Miguel de Cervantes

Love him.

Hart Crane

I've been reading a lot of Hart Crane's poetry — like it but hardly understand a single line — of course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect — much of it has at least the atmosphere of great poetry — it is a lot of raw material, all significant and moving but not chiselled into any communicative shape.

TLW's New Orleans

Andre Gide

Miss Gide seems to have been an old auntie all her life! Her writing has never moved me though I observe its excellencies. She is a bit dry for my fruity tastes. I doubt that she and I would have hit it off — still, she has some qualities I would enjoy. However I don't have the impression, from her journal, that she liked anyone really very deeply except Miss Gide, whom she pretends to deprecate but whom I think she regards as a girl of destiny pretty much all the way through.

Perhaps I envy the length and felicity of her days.

D.H. Lawrence

When I met other writers, I knew without knowing how different altogether Lawrence was. They may have been good writers, but Lawrence was a genius.

Friedrich Nietzsche

"The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly."

Was it possible that all things could be so useless and indefinite as Nietzsche made them look?

November 1947, letter to Pancho Rodriguez

In my life there has been so much real tragedy, things I cannot speak about and hardly dare to remember, from the time of my childhood and all the way through the years in between that I lack patience with people who are spoiled and think that they are entitled to go through life without effort and without sacrifice and without disappointment. Life is hard. As Amanda said, "It calls for Spartan endurance." But more than that, it calls for understanding, one person understanding another person, and for some measure of sacrifice, too. Very few people learn until late in life how much courage it takes to live, but if you learn it in the beginning it will be easier for you...

Of all the people I have known you have the greatest and warmest heart but you also unfortunately have a devil in you that is constantly working against you, filling you with insane suspicion and jealousies and ideas that are so preposterous that one does not know how to answer them. It is a terrifying thing. You must face it and make a determined effort to master it now before it becomes too well-established.

with his brother

"Body Ache" - Britney Spears (mp3)

"Don't Cry" - Britney Spears (mp3)

The new album from Britney Spears is entitled Britney Jean, and it will be released on November 29th.

with his sister rose

In Which We Experience The Pain Of Susan Sontag

photo by annie leibovitz

Frantically Impure

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The problem for me is to transfer a detached intellectual skepticism into a way of harmonious all-around living.

-Aldous Huxley

Susan Sontag's father died when she was four, and her mother Mildred moved the sad family to Tucson. Mildred was not very motherly, at least not in the way Susan thought she should be, having read a biography of Madame Curie and Little Women. Descendants of European Jews, Susan's parents had met in the Catskills, where Mildred Rosenblatt worked as a waitress. It is a familiar story to anyone who knows Jewish women of that generation who lived in the tristate area.

Her mother remarried. Susan's new stepfather, Nathan Sontag, was a veteran of the second World War. He provided for her and her mother, although Susan regarded him as something of a square. She was one of three Jews at North Hollywood High, as astonishing as that is to believe today. Growing up in Arizona and then in the San Fernando Valley, Susan felt completely outside of the culture in which she lived. She quickly grew tall, a fact not readily evident in the majority of her glamour photos. Her unique height was a troublesome fact of her teenage existence.

She wrote in her journal:

I believe:

(a) That there is no personal god or life after death

(b) That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e. Honesty

(c) That the only difference between human beings is intelligence

(d) That the only criterion of an action is its ultimate effect on making the individual happy or unhappy

(e) That it is wrong to deprive any man of life

(h) I believe, furthermore, that an ideal state (besides "g") should be a strong centralized one with government control of public utilities, banks, mines + transportation and subsidy of the arts, a comfortable minimum wage, support of disabled and age. State care of pregnant women with no distrinction such as legitimate and illegitimate children.

And then on April 13th of the next year, when she was just fifteen, "Ideas disturb the levelness of life." She was perhaps imitating Kafka's journals and way of speaking in these early efforts, but the prose is still incredibly imaginative for her age and experience.

Susan wanted to attend the University of Chicago, but her mother would have none of that. In Susan's journals Mildred and Nathan actually seem strikingly normal - it is she who stands out of the flow of life, not her staid guardians. She made a reading list for herself that year:

The Counterfeiters - Gide
The Immoralist - Gide
Lafcadio's Adventures - Gide
Corydon - Gide

Tar - Sherwood Anderson
The Island Within - Ludwig Lewisohn
Sanctuary - William Faulkner
Esther Water - George Moore
Diary of a Writer - Dostoyevsky
Against the Grain - Huysmans
The Disciple - Paul Bourget
Sanin - Mikhail Artsybashev
Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
The Forsyte Saga - Galsworthy
The Egoist - George Meredith
Diana of the Crossways - Meredith
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel - Meredith

poems of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Tibullus, Heine, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire

The list goes on for another five pages, naming over a hundred books.

Her mother allowed her to go to Berkeley instead, closer to home. Susan found herself as distant and impossible to others as she had been in southern California. On April 16th of 1949, she wrote, "I read the major part of The Brothers Karamazov and suddenly feel frantically impure. I wrote three letters to Peter and Audrey completely severing those relationships and to Mother, semi-declaring my revulsion for the past." This is just a sampling; in April of 2012 FSG will release the next volume of Susan's brilliant journals, and they are sure to be full of illuminating putdowns. In her private writing, Sontag was able to free herself of the academic jargon that, although it connected with her intense interiority, ruined her prose.

After transferring to the University of Chicago, Susan received the classical education that would change her life. It is impossible to imagine the esoterically liberal Sontag worshipping at the feet of the godfather of neoconservatism Leo Strauss, but at Chicago many things were possible. Jewish or atheist professors like Strauss, Kenneth Burke and Ned Rosenheim became Susan's idols. On campus, she was consistently the center of attention. Men vastly outnumbered women there, and Susan's combination of beauty and intellectual ambitions drew the faculty and student body to her like a totem. One such entranced individual was professor of sociology Philip Rieff. After she appeared late for his class on Kafka, Rieff took her aside and asked her out. They were married the next day, him 27 and her all of 18.

At Berkeley she had engaged in her first lesbian relationships. She continued to date men as well; for Susan attraction was as much an intellectual engagement as it was sexual. She did not think of herself as a lesbian, but she found more enjoyment and enlightenment in her relationships with women. Although eager to learn, she feared falling into any category, as if this represented the staidness of her parents. Later, Camille Paglia and other feminists would call her to task for her refusal to self-identify as a gay woman. In 1949 she took baby steps in that direction, writing a list of gay slang:

gay
"a gay boy"
"a gay girl"
"the gay kids"

straight (east)
jam (west)
normal (tourist)

"he's straight"
"he's very jam"
"I lead a jam life"
"a jam friend of mine"
"I'm going normal"

"drag"

"be in drag"
"go in drag"
"a drag party"

Philip's place in her life was both as her companion and intellectual bean bag. Her other comforts were the works of Kafka, for in his diaries of alienation, she found a soul similar to her own: "Besides him Joyce is so stupid." Soon enough, her son David Rieff began to serve as a similar reflection of herself. He would be her only child. Although she admittedly was not fond of children, she grew to enjoy being a mother, writing in December of 1956:

Tonight David — on the dressing table in the bathroom, being prepared for bed by Rose — said: "How do people have two husbands? When one dies?" I answered: "That's right. If one dies, you can marry again if you want." To which he answered, "Well then, when Daddy dies I'll marry you." I was so startled + delighted that I could only reply: "That's the nicest thing you ever said to me, David."

She grew closer to David than her husband, as it quickly became clear what a traditional wife Philip expected her to be. Engrossed in his book about Freud, he could not help wanting what the analyst idealized: a standard Jewish household with the woman as a kind of queen to his king. In 1957, she left both Phillip and David in the care of her husband's family to study at Oxford.

Sontag found England profoundly sexist and unwelcoming. Before she left, she had a dream that she did not quite understand: "A horse came up behind me as I was going down a short flight of stairs — into a swimming pool, it seemed — and placed its two front legs on me, one over each shoulder. I screamed and tried to free myself from the weight, then awoke. An objective correlation for my darker moods. Goethe declared that the only insufficient knowledge is creative." Later that month, her son told her that whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Jesus' crucifixion.

As she freed herself from her obligations, she managed to write a timeline of the 19th century in her notebook.

1805: Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz
1809: Tennyson born
1811: Kleist's suicide
1813: Kierkegaard born
1814: Napoleon defeated
1831: Hegel died
1844: Hopkins born
1850: In Memoriam published
1855: Kierkegaard died
1856: Freud born
1857: Origin of Species
1861: A.H. Clough died
1864: Notes from the Underground published
1865: Yeats born
1875: Rilke born
1882: James Joyce born
1885: D.H. Lawrence born
1888: Matthew Arnold died
1889: Hopkins died
1892: Tennyson died
1900: Nietzsche died
1926: Rilke died

In England, separated from the "totalitarian" Rieff and her son, she began writing in her journal again. Whereas before her style had been almost a parody of Kafka's unrelated yet interconnected literary observations, a new, emerging voice began to creep into her work. She had always seen herself as first and foremost a writer rather than a burgeoning academic, and now her confidence grew outside of Rieff's shadow.

Sontag returned to America, ended her marriage for good in the car at the airport, and began gallivanting around New York with Richard Howard in tow. The gay translator and poet marked a funny contrast to the drably dressed Sontag, whose seriousness was observed by others as mere affectation. She rejected alimony and spousal support from Rieff; even her detractors at the time were forced to admit she was a woman of conscience. As she desired, and as a result of her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'", her fame exploded.

photo by Irving Penn

Although she had what she always wanted, some of the trappings did not interest her. She turned down a film column in Esquire, calling the magazine "loathsome." Notoriety for her was undesirable because it relinquished control; perhaps she did not realize the full gravity of being "the It girl", posing for magazine spreads in a profession that judged such decisions as well as celebrated them. When a Village Voice writer threatened to expose Sontag as a lesbian, rage crept into her features. After her author photograph for 1967's Death Kit was a small snap located inside the flap, she blasted her publishers for eschewing her usual glossy photo that would canvas the entire back cover.

Sontag purchased a new apartment in 1969, moving from her cramped Greenwich Village environs to a Riverside Drive penthouse, with a view of the Hudson. On a personal level, she was deeply unhappy.

In Susan's early journals, edited by her son for paperback consumption in 2008, there is a nagging absence of humor. Placed as she was before the public at large, Sontag never made light of herself, a fact that her biographers Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock treat with their own guarded amusement in their 2000 volume, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon. Yes, there is something strange about taking yourself so seriously, but consider the time and place — Susan's entire marketability was based on not being a comedic figure. If she laughed at herself, she was not an artist — besides, there's never been any proof she was capable of self-deprecation to begin with. What exactly was the point of not taking herself seriously, when that was all her enemies really wanted the world to do?

Ms. Stephane

More and more, she hated the idea of being an academic, and longed to create her own art. Assisted by her lover and film producer Nicole Stéphane, she pursued a new medium. "I never was a critic," she declared later in a 1977 interview. Her breakup with María Irene Fornés had come directly after a similar parting with Harriet Sohmers, whom she had met at Berkeley and who subsequently introduced her to the Cuban-born Fornés. To the charismatic, brilliant and beautiful Stéphane, Susan was infinitely desirable, but she herself was already in a relationship and it was Sontag who had to wait for her. Stéphane also possessed knowledge that Sontag required for her work — although Susan had written about the films of Bergman and Godard, she had little idea of what went into making one.

Sontag's first two films, Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl, were something of a disaster, and although she convinced Simone de Beauvoir to pass along the rights for her first novel L'Invitee for free, she never made the movie and abandoned another screenplay for which she had accepted a $5,000 advance. She would make two more films, including a documentary in Israel, but her heart was never in the process. Writing comprised the standard to which she ultimately measured himself; she told an interviewer in 1975 that she never owned a camera because she "might get hooked" on taking photographs. She returned to fiction and criticism, writing to her publisher Roger Straus, "I'm back in the race to become The Most Important Writer of My Generation and all that shit." Early returns were not great: The New Yorker found Susan's attempts at stories inescapably dull (they would publish her essays, including the magnificent "Approaching Artaud").

In 1975, Susan survived a very serious bout of breast cancer. To some extent, it changed her life, giving her something visceral to focus on. She still refused to stop smoking cigarettes. Her son later wrote in his memoir, "My mother loved science, and believed in it (as she believed in reason) with a fierce, unwavering tenacity bordering on religiosity. There was a sense in which reason was her religion." A collection had to be taken up for her medical bills, since she had no insurance. The result of her illness was On Photography, her meditation on the form she had effectively abandoned. Her political writing, including some embarassing observations from a trip to North Vietnam, loomed squarely in the past. A burgeoning friendship with the Jewish Russian expat Joseph Brodsky oriented her opinions about oppression outside of the United States in a different direction.

getting arrested on Whitehall Street in the late 1960s

As her views changed, former comrades were happy to turn on her. Victor Navasky and Katha Pollitt authorized a savaging of 1982's The Susan Sontag Reader by Walter Kendrick in The Nation that concluded:

I must confess, I don't know anyone who looks to Sontag for aesthetic guidance. But she takes herself so seriously, and her publisher treats her with such awe, that I can only presume the existence of a vast, anonymous readership, hungry for Sontag's pearls. If these readers exist, their reverence is Sontag's only real achievement, to be sure, but a far more trenchant criticism of the world of American letters than any essay she ever wrote.

Nor was Kendrick alone in this evaluation. The 1980s were a tough time for Susan, who dipped in and out of fashion. Harper's titled their review, "Susie Creamcheese Makes Love, Not War." After Hilton Kramer's lengthy 1986 essay on Sontag, "Anti-Communism and the Sontag Circle", Roger Straus hilariously wrote to Kramer to say, "Did you have to start a magazine in order to attack Susan?" Some of this was unfair — Sontag was hardly the only public intellectual to fall in and out of love with the Soviet Union. The fact that her princely son (who she published without a second thought in volumes she edited without mentioning the connection) was now her editor as FSG only widened the target on her back. Her decision to become president of the writer's organization PEN did not help matters, taking attention away from what should have been her real work.

Her mother died in 1986, her stepfather the next year.

Annie and Susan

Annie Leibovitz entered Susan's life in 1989. For a long time the two did not live together, maintaining their own separate spaces, and Sontag categorically adopted the role of master. At six feet tall, Leibovitz towered over Susan physically, but their relationship was a matter of give and take. In The Making of an Icon, Rollyson and Paddock recall Susan loudly observing, as she examined an exhibition of Leibovitz's snapshots, "You just might be a photographer after all."

Her return to fiction in 1992 remains her most impressive writing in the long form. The Volcano Lover is a historical novel of the avant-garde, a genre not exploited often enough. It retains enough of the modern in its tale of the 18th century to be both interesting as a depiction of an unfamiliar place and time, as well as a mastery of the avant-garde she admired on its own terms. The language here closely resembles the best of Sontag's wonderfully personal journals.

The ensuing two decades would end with another terminal diagnosis. Sontag herself is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetetary in Paris, between Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre lies somewhere across the way, as does Baudelaire. Reading the essays of her last years, you get the sense that she had run out of things to say. Critics pounced on her insensitive thoughts on the day of September 11th, but even more disturbing is her posthumous volume of essays and speeches, At the Same Time. Besides yet another introduction by Rieff, the discourse within is painfully thin. Her return to the subject of photography, for example, begins, "Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself." Geez.

Thrown asunder by the responses of critics in her last decades — she once composed a feigned angry rebuke to Adrienne Rich in the NYRB after telling her editor, "What else can I do but punch back?" — she lost that solid base of surety which made her writing so entertaining. She would never have survived in this time of social media; her fragile ego would have cracked into shards. At one time you could write something so over the top that it succeeded simply on the magnitude of its accusation. But now we have a generation of intellectual cowards hedging their bets and quoting experts at every turn.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about a new film from David Cronenberg. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Amazing and Wonderful" - Peaking Lights (mp3)

"All the Suns That Shine" - Peaking Lights (mp3)

"Marshmellow Yellow" - Peaking Lights (mp3) 

25th anniversary of NYRB: Robert Silver, Sontag, Didion, Darryl Pinckney, Jonathan Miller, James Fenton, Rea Hederman, Alma Guillermoprieto; seated are Elizabeth Hardwick and Jason Epstein