From her memorable debut in 1966 with the essay collection Against Interpretation until her death in 2004, Susan Sontag was America’s most famous intellectual, a cultural critic who always seemed one step ahead of her turbulent times. Striking in appearance and supremely assured in her convictions, she mixed a daunting erudition with a radical sensibility that allowed her to write with authority on subjects ranging from an obscure Romanian philosopher to the Vietnam war, from the aesthetic merits of photography to America’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. She was also an award-winning novelist and a theatre director who staged a candlelit Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo.

Despite this high profile, Sontag, born in 1933, was always something of a mysterious figure when it came to her private life. Although she seldom publicly discussed her sexuality, there was clearly much going on: she married her sociology professor at 17 and became a mother two years later, only to leave her husband while still young to enter into a series of relationships with other women, the last of which was with the celebrity photographer,Annie Leibovitz.

The publication of Reborn, the first volume of Sontag’s journals and notebooks (two more are planned), promises to cast some light on the woman behind the image. Edited by her son David Rieff, it spans the period from Sontag’s early teens until she was 30. Unfortunately, the book proves to be distinctly unenlightening. Filled with lists, half-baked thoughts and confusing anecdotes, it reads more like the blanched skeleton of a book than the thing itself.

The early entries point to an adolescent who was undoubtedly precocious, but not in a particularly interesting way. “There are so many books and plays and stories I have to read,” the 15-year-old auto-exhorts, before offering a long list of old standards (Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud). “I note with amusement my entrance into the anarchist-aesthete phase of my youth,” the 16-year-old claims as she commences college at the University of California at Berkeley.

This blend of encyclopedic zeal and cloying pretentiousness remains intact after Sontag leaves home, supplemented now by a conflicted awareness of her bisexuality. Her early forays into the gay demimonde of San Francisco are catalogued without much evocative detail, while the travails of her ill-considered marriage are also rendered in broad strokes: “Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition.”

The closest the book comes to providing a real sense of Sontag’s private life comes with her references to a tumultuous affair she conducted in Paris during her mid-twenties with a woman identified only as “H”. But even here Reborn ultimately provides little that would grip the general reader, primarily because the focus remains squarely on Sontag’s inner moods rather than the give-and-take of a dramatic love affair. “Poor little ego, how did you feel today? Not very well, I fear – rather bruised, sore, traumatised. Hot waves of shame, and all that. I never had any illusion she was in love with me, but I did assume she liked me.” At times like this, that precocious teenager of a decade earlier appears to have turned into merely a teenager.

At their best, a writer’s journals should provide a counter-narrative to their main body of work. John Cheever’s diaries, for instance, open the closet door to reveal truths about his homosexuality and alcoholism that amplify his remarkable short stories. No such alchemy happens with Reborn. This is partly because the writing is so scattershot, and because we do not yet have an overall sense of Sontag’s oeuvre, what unifies it, or its place in our culture. Perhaps once a definitive biography and well-edited selection of her writings are issued, this piecemeal book will have more relevance. As of now, its publication is a case of too little, too soon.

Reborn by Susan Sontag
Hamish Hamilton £16.99 pp336