Waiting for the Barbarians (51 page)

These personal impulses, and other personal preoccupations, often get in the way of the specificity and attention to detail that White himself advocates as crucial ingredients of good writing. When he describes Greenwich Village streets in the 1970s as being “crowded with kids with long hair and burgundy velvet jeans and mirrored vests and filmy shirts with puffy pirates sleeves,” or when he recalls, of a brief stint on the West Coast, that “it seemed to us that everyone in San Francisco were doing yoga and reading Krishnamurti,” you
don’t doubt that it’s true, but there’s something suspiciously generic about these characterizations—they feel cribbed, and don’t have the complex textures of real experience. (Recalling New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s, White writes that Gerald Ford “told New York to drop dead”; but of course Ford never said that—White is quoting the famous
Daily News
headline.)

A comparable laziness informs White’s larger social or political assessments. Do you really need to be told that midcentury suburban Americans were “sealed off in their offices or cars or houses, no one saw anyone outside his or her circle or had any contact with strangers. Suburbia, television, and the automobile had isolated everyone”? Good memoirs should penetrate beyond such clichés, not repackage them. The book itself is carelessly written, and even more carelessly edited: some characters are introduced twice, and a number of descriptions (of New York City, of his own books, of
The New York Times
, against whom he seems to have a particular animus) are repeated verbatim. And sentences like “Yale and Harvard had been a bit sniffy about anything so louche in which mere writers without degrees were allowed to shape young minds” are likely to inspire a bit of anxiety on behalf of undergraduate writing students at Princeton.

I suspect that White, who can be so precise, allows himself to be this lazy because he is, as it were, preaching to the converted—he’s a gay writer writing for a sympathetic, if not wholly gay, audience, and after all “we all know what it was like.” The kind of cozy parochialisms to which this kind of assumption leads make for some embarrassing moments in
City Boy
—and, worse, suggest the intellectual and aesthetic limitations imposed by the gay-niche writing and thinking White had championed in his conversation with Poirier. He doesn’t like E. M. Forster because of his “closetedness”; he finds nothing “human or feeling” in Dante (“terribly underwritten … nothing vulnerable or hesitant”) because the Florentine poet placed his homosexual
master, Ser Brunetto, in Hell. Here, White’s rose-colored glasses have not so much colored his vision as blinded him: to dismiss the
Inferno
, as he does, as “an unimaginative application of the rules to desires” because it isn’t somehow “gay-friendly” is intellectually grotesque—and, anyway, an incorrect reading of the text. It would be hard to find a more poignant passage than the one in which the poet meets his doomed, beloved teacher in Hell.

This reflexive tendency to reduce everything to the dimensions of his preexisting interests and predilections can become wearying in
City Boy
; indeed, it was already wearying to some of White’s friends in the years to which this book is devoted. After reporting to Richard Howard that he’d spent much of his first trip to Rome visiting gyms and cruising spots, Howard exclaimed in dismay: “Here you are in the central city of Western culture and you’ve managed to turn it into some sort of kicky version of Scranton.” White’s honesty in relating the episode is to his credit; the episode is not. In the best memoirs, a single, minutely recorded life can lead to large insight about the world;
City Boy
, by contrast, makes the world feel small.

Howard’s remark, and with it thoughts about the size of our lives in relation the size of the world itself, bring you back to Poirier’s worries, those many years ago, about the reductive implications of a literature by and for gay people. On the one hand, no one would want a biography of a gay (or Jewish, or black) writer that elided his sexuality (or religion, or race); such a work would and should be dismissed as insufficient. On the other hand, a biography (or, for that matter, a novel or a literary essay) that lost sight of the fact that sex and sexuality (or religion, or race) are, finally, a part but not the whole of our lives—there are other influences, other forces at work that
help shape the creative mind, indeed any mind—risks devolving into a pat chauvinism, a kind of cultural boosterism. (At the beginning of his Proust biography, White catalogs writers who have been affected by
À la recherche
in one way or another; after briefly listing Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Genet, and Thomas Mann, he dilates upon Proust’s effect on Andrew Holleran, the author of a 1978 novel about gay alienation—a juxtaposition that, while meant to elevate Holleran’s standing, does him no favors.) White’s bad habits—the lopsided parochialism, the cattiness, the knowing winks that too often substitute for genuine insight—are the defects into which niche-thinking and niche-writing can lead us. Whatever its authentic achievements (those early novels, a number of penetrating meditations on the impact of AIDS on the gay creative community), too much of White’s work can be personal in the wrong way.

And yet whatever the later impulse to turn Rome into Scranton, White, like so many writers, started out by dreaming big dreams of the great world. Again and again in
City Boy
he recalls his youthful yearning to be “famous among the top echelons of the cultural elite,” to have a “lasting reputation” and “literary celebrity”—a yearning to be known that was so great that for him

This kind of self-exposure becomes all the more moving when, in a startling moment of genuine and unusually acute self-reflection (as opposed to mere self-exposure), White worries that the movement
that became the vehicle for his literary renown may have been wrongheaded after all. “I sometimes regret the invention of the category ‘gay,’ ” he startlingly writes at the end of
City Boy
, as he looks back on the history of gay-niche publishing:

This is a far cry from the attitude of the young White who had once resentfully criticized Poirier and other gay writers he knew when he was starting out—even the ones who were unabashedly out of the closet, like Merrill and Ashbery—for wanting to assimilate aesthetically, as he saw it: to write for the larger world instead of—well, preaching to the converted, to that small “community [that] we want[ed] to celebrate in novels that would create our identity while also exploring it.” Hence although
City Boy
, like many a bildungsroman, ostensibly culminates in a happy attainment of maturity—the young White’s successful quest to be a published gay writer—there is another, deeper education that plays out in these pages: the one that culminates in the author’s poignant, late-life admission that real literature
is, in fact, “universal,” that it seeks to dissolve rather than create intellectual and artistic ghettos.

Still, you suspect that White, unabashedly a product of the era he recalls in the new memoir, would be the first to admit that what he has been writing all these years—the ongoing, earnest transcription of gay life and gay lives, of which
City Boy
is but the latest installment—has aimed to fill a niche instead of a universe. What he wanted, after all, was to become celebrated, to have a reputation, to be known as a
writer
, whatever the sentiments and the ideas might be. This he has certainly done. Who would begrudge him the satisfaction that he got what he wanted?

—The New York Review of Books
, September 30, 2010

IT IS SOMEHOW
appropriate that the voice of deep and anguished ambivalence that speaks at the beginning of
Reborn
, the new volume of Susan Sontag’s early journals and notebooks, does not belong to Susan Sontag. Self-doubt was not a quality you generally associated with her. From the moment she burst onto the literary scene nearly fifty years ago, with the publication of the essays subsequently collected as
Against Interpretation
—a cultural-critical Athena, armored with a vast erudition, bristling with epigrams—Sontag exhibited a preternatural self-assurance in matters of art and culture, an unwavering belief in her own judgments and tastes that, as these early private papers now make clear, she possessed already in her early teens. (The first of a projected three volumes of Sontag’s journals, this one takes her to the age of thirty; fully one third of it is a record of her teenage years.)

The embarrassment with which
Reborn
begins belongs, rather, to her son, the writer David Rieff, who edited his mother’s journals. In a preface, Rieff describes how he uneasily consented to publish this
“raw” and “unvarnished” sampling of Sontag’s adolescent effusions about life and her early perceptions about art; he shows a marked queasiness about “the literary dangers and moral hazards of such an enterprise.” The anxiety stems from two sources. The first was ethical and, so to speak, generic: although his mother, in one of her final illnesses, was anxious for him to know where the journals were kept, there was no indication that Sontag would have wanted the contents of these papers to be made public. “The diaries,” Rieff notes, “were written solely for herself.… She had never permitted a line from them to be published, nor, unlike some diarists, did she read from them to friends.”

Rieff’s second scruple, more personal and more revealing, suggests the reason for the first:

Sexuality and ambition are, of course, the reason that many people read the private journals of public figures; in Sontag’s case, the inevitable interest in the raw passions corresponding to “homosexuality” and “ambition” is bound to be particularly strong, because her highly polished public and literary persona seemed designed to quash interest in precisely those two things. On the one hand, there was the famous reticence about her lesbianism, despite the fact that it was, as she awkwardly admitted late in life, an “open secret.” On the other, there was the cool Artemis-like glamour (that silver streak), the sense she projected of being the high priestess of High Culture. (A sense
heightened by her penchant for gnomic utterances: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”; “New York: all sensuality is converted to sexuality.”) All of this conferred upon her an aura of intellectual invulnerability, of an authority that, rather than having been earned or having evolved, she somehow had always possessed complete.

It is unlikely that readers who are motivated by prurience will be satisfied by the strangely scattered document that has resulted from Rieff’s editing. (The volume has a jittery, disjointed feel; it isn’t clear whether this is how the journals were written or if the published version of them was shaped to accord with Sontag’s trademark aphoristic style.) What’s fascinating and, in the end, extremely suggestive is that the journals reveal an adolescent and, later, a young woman in whom “ambition”—in this case, an overpowering yearning to be surrounded by and immersed in literature and culture—vastly outweighed, and seems ultimately to have overpowered, “sexuality.” That disproportion explains a great deal about the strange career, its achievements and its failures both, of a writer who, as her son wrenchingly writes, “was as uncomfortable with her body as she was serene about her mind.” Or for whom, as she herself puts it in the last entry of this journal, “intellectual wanting” was the equal of “sexual wanting.”

The erotic element about which Rieff worries in his preface is, indeed, the least memorable part of Sontag’s private writings, at least in this first volume. There is, to be sure, a good deal of emoting, particularly in the early entries, which are dominated by the usual sorts of adolescent anxieties. “How easy it would be to convince myself of the plausibility of my parents’ life!” she writes in 1947, at the age of fourteen, already showing the impatience with the petit-bourgeois, assimilated Jewish-American background into which she was born,
and at which she would never look back—the impatience that would later drive her to Berkeley, then to the University of Chicago, and then to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life. “I am in love with being in love!” she writes the next year, in one of the many girlish effusions about her already precocious erotic life that are sprinkled through the journals. (She understood that she was a lesbian very early on, and started having serious affairs as a teenager.)