Elaine Showalter
'I CREATE MYSELF'
Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1964
By Susan Sontag (Hamish Hamilton 336pp £16.99)

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Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, was one of the most venerated intellectuals of her generation, but her enemies found her arrogant and aloof, while even her admirers often saw her as forbidding and Olympian. The only time I met her, she explained to me with disdain that although she regarded herself as an authority on American popular culture, she had never owned a television set. Male and female gay activists, who appreciated her support for AIDS, nonetheless deplored her refusal to acknowledge her sexual relationships with women, including the photographer Annie Liebovitz, her partner for the last decades of her life. 'My life is entirely private,' she proudly declared in an 1989 interview in the New York Times.

Sontag's image of remote and disciplined rationality was altered by Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), her son David Rieff's painful and dismaying memoir of her frantic, self-deluded fight against the leukaemia that killed her. It will be further changed by the publication of three volumes of her private journals, meticulously, if reluctantly, edited by Rieff, who has explained in interviews that while he himself would have preferred not to publish the journals, Sontag sold them to UCLA without restriction, and he decided to do the editing job himself rather than leave it to a stranger. The first volume, Reborn, takes Sontag from adolescence to the beginnings of her ascendancy among the New York intellectuals of the 1960s. Relentlessly self-analytical, unsparingly honest and explicit, she describes her identity as a lesbian and an outsider, her unhappy marriage, her flight to Oxford and Paris, her experience of motherhood, her determination to survive alone, and, always, her ambitious self-formation as an artist and thinker.

Sontag began to keep an intimate record of her thoughts and experiences in 1947, when she was a terrifyingly precocious girl of fourteen. As she later observed, she used her writing to try out new selves, and to construct her formidable persona. 'In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person. I create myself.' She started with a bold credo: '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.' She would remain true to these rigorous assertions for the rest of her life.

Sontag wanted far more than her middle-class upbringing in Arizona and California could offer. 'I want to write - I WANT TO LIVE IN AN INTELLECTUAL ATMOSPHERE,' she declared at sixteen. Her sexuality was a key element in her literary ambition. 'I feel that I have lesbian tendencies,' she noted in 1948, and by May 1949, at Berkeley, she had had her first, ecstatic sexual experience with a woman, Harriet Sohmers. In the aftermath, she decided against a career in academe, and embraced absolute sexual and intellectual freedom. 'I intend to do everything ... I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere, and find it, too. I AM REBORN.'

Sontag threw herself into the homosexual subculture of San Francisco, earnestly listing names of gay clubs and dictionaries of gay slang alongside books to buy and classical music to hear. But as she prepared to leave for the University of Chicago, a male friend warned her against the lesbian life: 'Your only chance of being normal is to call a halt right now. No more women, no more bars.' His advice may have alarmed her. By November of her freshman year, she had become the research assistant of a charismatic young professor, Philip Rieff. By December, they were engaged, and on 3 January 1950 she married him 'with full consciousness + fear of will toward self-destructiveness'. The next year they moved to Boston, where Rieff had a job teaching at Brandeis University, and she quickly had a baby. There are no journals from 1951 and 1952 in the archive; Sontag was depressed, suffering from constant migraines, despairing of her future. 'Whoever invented marriage is an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution COMMITTED to the dulling of feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong mutual dependencies.' She began writing lists of instructions for herself - don't gossip, don't brag, don't complain, bathe regularly, write more, eat less. She and her husband quarrelled all the time, and she drily noted that 'in marriage, I have suffered a certain loss of personality'.

In September 1957, Sontag left the marriage and the United States to study abroad. After she moved to Paris later that autumn, and although her affairs with strong women were full of torment and rejection, she began to recover her personality, sexual drive, self-confidence and determination. She fought Rieff successfully for custody of David, and returned to the US in 1959, to live in New York and support herself and her son through her writing. Sontag's portrait of the artist as a young woman is one of a passionate will to succeed against the odds in a difficult era. Reborn makes me look forward to the next volumes, and to Sontag's continuing account of her difficult choices and remarkable achievements.

Elaine Showalter is Avalon Foundation Professor Emerita at Princeton University.