Debriefing: Collected Stories

by Susan Sontag

Craving more uncertainty than the essay allowed for, Sontag turned from time to time to a form in which one need only persevere, making up one’s mind about nothing: the infinitely flexible, ever-amenable short story.

December, 1947. I was fourteen, steeped in vehement admirations and impatience for the reality to which I would travel once released from that long prison sentence, my childhood. End almost in sight. Already in my junior year, I’d finish high school while still fifteen. And then, and then … all would unfold. Meanwhile, I was waiting, I was doing time (still fourteen!),

Another new setting, with fresh possibilities of escape—I welcomed that.

where I was currently pretending to sit still for a facsimile of family life and the remainder of my unconvincing childhood.

I ate and ate—how could I not, as I watched my morose, bony mother fiddling with her food? His animation was as threatening as her apathy. They couldn’t start playing family now—too late!

I felt I was slumming, in my own life. My task was to ward off the drivel (I felt I was drowning in drivel)—the jovial claptrap of classmates and teachers, the maddening bromide I heard at home.

whose racket filled the living room on weekday evenings and much of Saturday and Sunday, was an endless torment. I ground my teeth, I twirled my hair, I gnawed at my nails, I was polite. Though untempted by the new, tribal delights of suburban childhood that had quickly absorbed my sister, I didn’t think of myself as a misfit, for I assumed my casing of affability was being accepted at face value. (Here the fact that I was a girl seeps through.)

What other people thought of me remained a dim consideration, since other people seemed to me astonishingly unseeing as well as uncurious, while I longed to learn everything: the exasperating difference between me and everyone I’d ever met—so far. I was certain there was a multitude like me, elsewhere. And it never occurred to me that I could be stopped.

If I didn’t mope or sulk, it was not just because I thought complaining wouldn’t do any good. It was because the flip side of my discontent—what, indeed, throughout my childhood had made me so discontented—was rapture. Rapture I couldn’t share. And whose volume was increasing ste...

For in the eight houses and apartments of my life before this one I had never had a bedroom to myself. Now I had it, and without asking. A door of my own. Now I could read for hours by flashlight after being sent to bed and told to turn off the light, not inside a tent of bedclothes but outside the covers. I’d been a demon reader from earliest childhood (to read was to drive a knife into their lives), and therefore a promiscuous one: fairy tales and comics (my comics collection was vast), Compton’s Encyclopedia, the Bobbsey Twins and other Stratemeyer series, books about astronomy, chemistry, China, biographies of scientists, all of Richard Halliburton’s travel books, and a fair number of mostly Victorian-era cl...

my sense of possibility unfolding, with each book, like a carpenter’s rule.

the first of my bookstore-besotted life:

Odd that I never thought of going to a library. I had to acquire them, see them in rows along a wall of my tiny bedroom. My household deities. My spaceships.

O golden age! It not only was, I knew it was. Soon I was sipping at a hundred straws.

had had a life even more marked by displacements than my own.

Well, Thomas Mann said, what authors do you like? Merrill said he liked Romain Rolland, meaning Jean-Christophe. And Joyce, meaning Portrait of an Artist. I said I liked Kafka, meaning Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, and Tolstoy, meaning the late religious writings as much as the novels; and, thinking I must cite an American because he seemed to expect that, I threw in Jack London (meaning Martin Eden). He said we must be very serious young people. More embarrassment. What I remember best is how embarrassing it was. I was still worrying about Hemingway. Should I read Hemingway?

Years later, when I had become a writer, when I knew many other writers, I would learn to be more tolerant of the gap between the person and the work. Yet even now the encounter still feels illicit, improper. In my experience deep memory is, more often than not, the memory of embarrassment.

I still feel the exhilaration, the gratitude for having been liberated from childhood’s asphyxiations. Admirations set me free. And embarrassment, which is the price of acutely experienced admiration. Then I felt like an adult, forced to live in the body of a child. Since, I feel like a child, privileged to live in the body of an adult. The zealot of seriousness in me, because it was already full-grown in the child, continues to think of reality as yet-to-be. Still sees a big space ahead, a far horizon. Is this the real world? I still ask myself that, forty years later … as small children ask repeatedly, in the course of a long, tiring journey, “Are we there yet?” Childhood’s sense of plenitude was denied me. In compensation, there remains, always, the horizon of plenitude, to which I am borne forward by the delights of admiration.

I never told anyone of the meeting. Over the years I have kept it a secret, as if it were something shameful. As if it happened between two other people, two phantoms, two provisional beings on their way elsewhere: an embarrassed, fervid, literature-intoxicated child and a god in exile who lived in a house in Pacific Palisades.

Yes. * * * Archaeology of longings. * * * But it’s my whole life!

Don’t panic. “Confession is nothing, knowledge is everything.” That’s a quote but I’m not going to tell who said it.

I will visit a place entirely other than myself. Whether it is the future or the past need not be decided in advance. * * * What makes the Chinese different is that they live both in the past and in the future.

Hypothesis. Individuals who seem truly remarkable give the impression of belonging to another epoch. (Either some epoch in the past or, simply, the future.) No one extraordinary appears to be entirely contemporary. People who are contemporary don’t appear at all: they are invisible.

Moralism is the legacy of the past, moralism rules the domain of the future. We hesitate. Wary, ironic, disillusioned. What a difficult bridge this present has become! How many, many trips we have to undertake so as not to be empty and invisible.

From The Great Gatsby, p. 2: “When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

The truth is simple, very simple. Centered. But people crave other nourishment besides the truth. Its privileged distortions, in philosophy and literature. For example. * * * I honor my cravings, and I lose patience with them.

I was drifting away, discovering life was actually possible without him. But I did write, each evening. During the day I’d be composing my letter to him in my head, I was always talking to him in my head. I was, you see, so used to him. I felt safe. I didn’t feel like a separate person. Whatever I saw when I was apart from him for an hour made me think first of how I would describe it to him; and we never separated for more than a few hours, just the time he taught his classes and I took mine—we were insatiable.