Sometimes we would abandon the Cité for Nizan’s study. He lived with his wife’s parents in a house in the rue Vavin whose façade was covered with glazed earthenware tiles. On the walls of his study there was a large portrait of Lenin, a Cassandre poster and the Venus of Botticelli; I admired his ultra-modern furniture and his very carefully chosen books. Nizan was the most go-ahead member of the trio; he had already had a book published, belonged to various literary circles and had joined the Communist Party; he introduced us to Irish literature and the new American novelists. He was abreast of all the latest fashions in the arts, and even ahead of them. He took us to the dreary Café de Flore ‘to do the old Deux Magots in the eye’, he said, gnawing at his fingernails like a mischievous rat. He was working on a pamphlet attacking ‘official’ philosophies, and was also engaged in writing a book on ‘Marxist Wisdom’. He rarely laughed, but often treated us to his ferocious lop-sided smile. His conversation delighted me, but I found him difficult to talk to because of his air of disdainful abstraction.
How was it that I managed to fit in with them so quickly? Herbaud had taken care not to shock me, but when they were all together the three ‘comrades’ didn’t pull their punches. Their language was aggressive, their thought categorical, their judgements merciless. They made fun of bourgeois law and order; they had refused to sit the examination in religious knowledge: I had no difficulty in agreeing with them on that score. But I was still, in many respects, the dupe of bourgeois humbug; they jabbed a pin in every inflated idealism, laughed high-minded souls to scorn–in fact, every kind of soulfulness, the ‘inner life’, the marvellous, the mysterious, and the precious all fell under their lashing contempt; on every possible occasion – in their speech, their attitudes, their gestures, their jokes – they set out to prove that men were not rarefied spirits but bothes of flesh and bone, racked by physical needs and crudely engaged in a brutal adventure that was life. A year before, they would have scared me; but I had made much progress since the beginning of the academic year and I very often felt the need of stronger meat than that to which I was accustomed. I soon understood that if the world these new friends opened up to me seemed crude, it was because they didn’t try to disguise its realities; in the end, all they asked of me was that I should dare to do what I had always longed to do: look reality in the face. It did not take me long to make up my mind to do so.
*
‘I’m delighted that you should be getting on so well with the comrades,’ Herbaud said. ‘But all the same. . . .’ ‘I know what you mean,’ I answered. * You are different.’ He smiled. ‘You will never be one of them,’ he added. ‘You’re not a comrade, you’re the Beaver.’ He told me he was as jealous in friendship as he was in love and demanded preferential treatment. He insisted on having the first place in my friendship with the ‘comrades’. When the question of our all going out together came up one evening, he shook his head: ‘No. This evening I am taking Mademoiselle de Beauvoir to the cinema.’ ‘Oh, very well,’ said Nizan with a sardonic smile, and Sartre graciously gave his consent. Herbaud was feeling depressed that day because he was afraid he had failed in the competitive examination, and because of obscure reasons connected with his wife. After seeing a Buster Keaton film, we went to a small café, but conversation flagged. ‘I hope you’re not bored?’ he inquired with a touch of anxiety and more than a touch of stuthed charm. No; but his preoccupations made him seem rather remote. We were drawn together again during the day I spent with him ostensibly helping him to translate The Ethics of Nicomachus. He had rented a room in a small hotel in the rue Vanneau and that was where we worked, though not for long, because Aristotle bored us to tears. He made me read him some fragments of Saint-John Perse’s Anabase which I had never heard of before, and showed me reproductions of Michelangelo’s Sibyls. Then he talked to me about the differences between him and Sartre and Nizan. He openly enjoyed the good things of life: works of art, nature, travel, love-affairs, sensual pleasures. ‘They always want to find a reason for everything, especially Sartre,’ he told me. He added, on a note of apprehensive admiration: ‘Except when he’s asleep, Sartre thinks all the timel’ He agreed that Sartre should spend the evening of the Fourteenth of July with us. After dinner in an Alsatian restaurant we sat on the lawn in the Cité Universitaire and watched the fireworks. Then Sartre, whose munificence was legendary, took us in a taxi to the Falstaff in the rue Montparnasse, where we were lushed up with cocktails until two o’clock in the morning. They put themselves out to see who could be nicer to me and regaled me with a host of stories. I was in a seventh heaven of delight. My sister had been mistaken: I thought Sartre was even more amusing than Herbaud; nevertheless we all agreed that Herbaud should have first place in my affections, and out in the street he very ostentatiously took my arm. Never did he give such obvious proofs of his affection as in the days that followed. ‘I really do like you very much, Beaver,’ he would tell me. Once when I was to dine with Sartre and Nizan when he was not free to join us he asked me, with a possessive tenderness: ‘You’ll think about me this evening, won’t you?’ I was sensitive to the smallest inflexions in his voice, and also to his frowns of displeasure. One afternoon as I was talking to him in the entrance hall of the Nationale, Pradelle came up to us and I was delighted to see him. Herbaud said good-bye very angrily and stormed away. All that afternoon I ate my heart out over him. That evening I met him again: he was very pleased with the effect his conduct had had on me. ‘Poor little Beaver! Was I not nice to her?’ he gaily inquired. I took him off to the Stryx which he thought ‘madly gay’, and I told him about my escapades there. ‘You’re out of this world!’ he laughed. He talked about himself, about his country childhood, his coming to Paris, his marriage. We had never talked so intimately before. But we were feeling worried, because the next day we were to get the results of the written papers. If Herbaud had failed, he would leave at once for Bagnoles-de-l’Ome. Whatever happened, next year he would take a post in the provinces or abroad. He promised to come and see me during the holidays, in the Limousin. But something had come to an end.
The next day, I walked to the Sorbonne, my heart thumping with anxiety; at the door, I met Sartre; I had passed, as well as Nizan and himself. Herbaud had been ploughed. He left Paris that very evening, without saying good-bye to me. ‘Give the Beaver my best wishes for her happiness,’ he told Sartre in an express letter which he sent telling him of his departure. He reappeared a week later, for one day only. He took me to the Balzac. ‘What will you have?’ he asked me, and added: ‘In the good old days, it was always lemonade.’ ‘It will always be the good old days with us,’ I answered. He smiled, and said: ‘That’s what I was hoping you would say.’ But we both knew that it wasn’t true.
*
‘From now on, I’m going to take you under my wing,’ Sartre told me when he had brought me the news that I had passed. He had a liking for feminine friendships. The first time I had ever seen him, at the Sorbonne, he was wearing a hat and talking animatedly to a great gawk of a woman student who I thought was excessively ugly; he had soon tired of her, and he had taken up with another, rather prettier, but who turned out to be rather a menace, and with whom he had very soon quarrelled. When Herbaud had told him about me, he had wanted to make my acquaintance at once, and now he was very pleased to have me all to himself; for my part, I was beginning to feel that time which was not spent in his company was time wasted. During the fortnight of the oral examinations we hardly ever left one another except to sleep. We went to the Sorbonne together to sit the examinations and to listen to our fellow-students. We went out with the Nizans. We would have drinks at the Balzac with Aron who was doing his military service in the Meteorological Corps and with Politzer who by now had joined the Communist Party. But usually we went about alone together. At the second-hand bookstalls by the Seine Sartre bought me copies of Pardaillan and Fantomas which he far and away preferred to the Correspondence of Rivière and Fournier; in the evenings he would take me to see
cowboy films, to which I brought all the enthusiasm of a neophyte, for until then I had been mainly interested in abstract cinema and art films. We would talk for hours sitting in pavement cafés or drinking cocktails at the Falstaff.
‘He never stops thinking,’ Herbaud had told me. This didn’t mean that he cogitated over formulas and theories all the time: he had a horror of pedantry. But his mind was always alert. Torpor, somnolence, escapism, intellectual dodges and truces, prudence, and respect were all unknown to him. He was interested in everything and never took anything for granted. Confronted with an object, he would look it straight in the face instead of trying to explain it away with a myth, a word, an impression, or a preconceived idea: he wouldn’t let it go until he had grasped all its ins and outs and all its multiple significations. He didn’t ask himself what he ought to think about it, or what it would have been amusing or intelligent to think about it: he simply thought about it. Thus he was always the despair of the aesthetes who were all yearning for elegant elaboration. A couple of years ago, having heard him give an analysis of a philosophical work, Riesmann, who was dazzled by Baruzi’s verbal quibbling, had told me sadly: ‘He has no soul!’ That same year, giving a talk on ‘classification’ his scrupulous honesty had put our patience to the test: but in the end he had compelled our interest in his subject. He always intrigued people who were not afraid of something new, for though he never tried to be original, he never fell into the trap of conformity. The freshness and dogged tenacity of his perceptions grasped the very essence of things in all their lively profusion. How cramped my little world seemed beside this exuberantly abundant universe! Later, it was only certain madmen who could inspire in me a similar sense of humility when they discovered in a rose-petal a tangle of murky intrigues.
We used to talk about all kinds of things, but especially about a subject which interested me above all others: myself. Whenever other people made attempts to analyse me, they did so from the standpoint of their own little worlds, and this used to exasperate me. But Sartre always tried to see me as part of my own scheme of things, to understand me in the light of my own set of values and attitudes. He listened without enthusiasm to what I told him about Jacques; for a woman who had been brought up as I had been, it would perhaps be difficult to avoid marriage: but he hadn’t a good word to say for it. Whatever happened, I would have to try to preserve what was best in me: my love of personal freedom, my passion for life, my curiosity, my determination to be a writer. Not only did he give me encouragement but he also intended to give me active help in achieving this ambition. Two years older than myself – two years which he had turned to good account – and having got off to a better start much earlier than I had, he had a deeper and wider knowledge of everything. But what he himself recognized as a true superiority over me, and one which was immediately obvious to myself, was the calm and yet almost frenzied passion with which he was preparing for the books he was going to write. In the past I had always despised children who played croquet or worked with less intensity than I did: here was someone in whose eyes my frantic determination seemed weak and timid. And indeed when I compared myself with him, how lukewarm my feverish obsessions appeared! I had thought I was an exceptional person because I couldn’t imagine living and not writing: but he only lived in order to write.
He certainly had no intention of leading the life of a professional liteiary man; he detested formalities and literary hierarchies, literary ‘movements’, careers, the rights and duties of the man of letters, and all the stuffy pompousness of life. He couldn’t reconcile himself to the idea of having a profession, colleagues, superiors, of having to observe and impose rules; he would never be a family man, and would never even marry. With all the romanticism of the age, and of his twenty-three years, he dreamed of making tremendous journeys: in Constantinople, he would fraternize with the dock-workers; he would get blind drunk with pimps and white-slavers in sinks of iniquity; he would go right round the world, and neither the pariahs of India nor the monks of Mount Athos nor the fishermen of Newfoundland would have any secrets from him. He would never settle down anywhere, and would never encumber himself with possessions: not merely in order to keep his freedom of movement, but in order to prove how unnecessary possessions are. All his experiments were to benefit his writing, and he would sweep aside all experiences which would in any way detract from it. We were arguing on firm ground here. I admired, in theory at any rate, the systematic derangement of the senses, dangerous living, lost souls, all excesses – drink, drugs, and sex. Sartre held that when one has something important to tell the world, it is criminal to waste one’s energies on other occupations. The work of art or literature was, in his view, an absolute end in itself; and it was even – though he never said so, I was sure he believed this – the be-all and end-all of the entire universe. He shrugged disdainful shoulders at all metaphysical disputes. He was interested in social and political questions; he sympathized with Nizan’s position; but as far as he was concerned, the main thing was to write and the rest would come later. Besides, at that period he was much more of an anarchist than a revolutionary; he thought society as it was then was detestable, but he didn’t detest detesting it; what he called his ‘opposition aesthetics’ admitted quite openly the existence of imbeciles and knaves, and even required their presence in the world: if there was nothing to attack and destroy, the writing of books wouldn’t amount to much.
Apart from a few minor differences, I found a great resemblance between his attitude and my own. There was nothing worldly in his ambitions. He reproved me for making use of religious vocabulary, but he, too, was really seeking ‘salvation’ in literature; books brought into this deplorably non-essential world a necessity which redounded to the credit of the author; certain things had to be said by him, and were therefore an entire justification for the means he used to express them. He was still young enough to feel emotional about his future whenever he heard a saxophone playing after his third martini; but if it had been necessary, he would have been willing to remain anonymous: the important thing was that his ideas should prevail, and not that he should enjoy any personal success. He never told himself – as I had sometimes done – that he was ‘somebody’, that he had a certain ‘value’ or place in the world; but he believed that important truths – perhaps the Truth itself – had been revealed to him, and that he had a mission to teach those truths to society. In the notebooks he showed me, in his conversations and even in his University writings he persistently put forward a system of ideas whose originality and coherence astounded his friends. He had given a detailed outline of them on the occasion of an ‘Investigation’ carried out among University students by Les Nouvelles Littéraires. ‘We have received some remarkable observations from J.-P. Sartre,’ wrote Roland Alix in an introduction to Sartre’s reply, of which long extracts were printed; indeed, a whole philosophy was brought to light in it, a philosophy which had hardly any connexion with what we were being taught by the ‘official’ philosophers at the Sorbonne:
It is a paradox of the human mind that Man, whose business it is to create the necessary conditions, cannot raise himself above a certain level of existence, like those fortune-tellers who can tell other people’s future, but not their own. This is why, as the root of humanity, as at the root of nature, I can see only sadness and boredom. It’s not that Man does not think of himself as a being. On the contrary, he devotes all his energies to becoming one. Whence derive our ideas of Good and Evil, ideas of men working to improve Man. But these concepts are useless. Useless, too, is the determinism which oddly enough attempts to create a synthesis of existence and being. We are as free as you like, but helpless. . . . For the rest, the will to power, action and life are only useless ideologies. There is no such thing as the will to power. Everything is too weak: all things carry the seeds of their own death. Above all, adventure – by which I mean that blind belief in adventitious and yet inevitable concatenations of circumstances and events – is a delusion. In this se
nse, the ‘adventurer’ is an inconsequential determinist who imagines he is enjoying complete freedom of action.
Comparing his own generation with the preceding one, Sartre concluded: ‘We are more unhappy, but nicer to know.’
This last phrase had made me laugh; but as I talked to Sartre I came to realize the wealth of meaning in what he called his ‘theory of contingency’, and in which were to be found already the seeds of all his ideas on being, existence, necessity, and liberty. It was positive proof that he would one day write a philosophical work of the first importance. But he wasn’t making things easy for himself, for he had no intention of composing a theoretical treatise on conventional lines. He loved Stendhal as much as Spinoza and refused to separate philosophy from literature. In his view, Contingency was no abstract notion, but an actual dimension of real life: it would be necessary to make use of all the resources of art to make the human heart aware of that secret ‘failing’ which he perceived in Man and in the world around him. At the time, such an attempt was regarded as very daring: it was impossible to take as his starting point any existing mode of thought or any model system; and because Sartre’s thought had impressed me by its maturity, I was all the more disconcerted by the clumsiness of the essays in which he expressed it; in order to present its truths in all their singularity, he had recourse to myth-making: Er the Armenian, made use of gods and Titans: the effect of this antiquated machinery was to make his theories lose a great deal of their bite. He realized its shortcomings, but didn’t worry too much about it; in any case, no amount of immediate success would have given him an excuse for rash confidence in the future. He knew what he wanted to do and he had all his life ahead of him: he would do it in the end, all right. I didn’t for one moment doubt this: his vitality and good humour would see him through every ordeal. His self-confidence obviously stemmed from so unshakeable a determination that one day, in one way or another, it would bear fruit.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Page 44
