Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963
by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff
For Sontag it seems to have been less an intellectual stance than it was part of a constellation of burdensome characteristics, deeply rooted in her personality—though hardly exclusive to her—which she comes to identify and, for a while at least, to refer to as X. Here are bits about X from entries throughout February 1960 ("I." is Irene Maria Fornes, Sontag's lover at the time):
I. thinks "X" is the reason I can't talk to two people at a time (but always focus on one) and also why I block other people out—even casual intruders like waiters—when I am with someone....
So with each person I betray everyone else. Then after I feel guilty, my accounts are messed up again....
I didn't feel X toward Philip. Because I was satisfying his demands as well as I could, because I wasn't discussing him with anyone else, because he was #1.
"X" is when you feel yourself an object, not a subject. When you want to please and impress people, either by saying what they want to hear, or by shocking them, or by boasting + name-dropping, or by being very cool.
America a very X-y country....
The tendency to be indiscreet—either about oneself or about others (the two often go together, as in me)—is a classic symptom of X....
How many times have I told people that Pearl Kazin was a major girlfriend of Dylan Thomas? That Norman Mailer has orgies? That [F.O.] Matthiessen was queer? All public knowledge, to be sure, but who the hell am I to go advertising other people's sexual habits?
How many times have I reviled myself for that, which is only a little less offensive than my habit of name-dropping.... And my habit of criticizing people if other people invite it....
I have always betrayed people to each other. No wonder I've been so high-minded and scrupulous about how I use the word "friend"!...
The source of X is: I don't know my own feelings....
...So I look to other people (the other person) to tell me. Then the other person tells me what he or she would like my feelings to be....
...That's why I'm so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be. Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal directly?...
All the things that I despise in myself are X: being a moral coward, being a liar, being indiscreet about myself + others, being a phony, being passive.
"Think of Blake," she exhorts herself in September 1961; "He didn't smile for others." And "No matter what I have said," she writes in January 1960, "my life, my actions say that I have not loved the truth, that I have not wanted the truth."
