Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (54 page)

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 sense, 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.

It was the first time in my life that I had felt intellectually
inferior to anyone else. Garric and Nodier, who were much older than me, had impressed me in their time: but their dominance had been remote and vague, and I had had no chance of measuring up to them in person. Day after day, and all day long I set myself up against Sartre, and in our discussions I was simply not in his class. One morning in the Luxembourg Gardens, near the Medici fountain, I outlined for him that pluralist morality which I had cooked up to accommodate the people I liked but whom I didn't want to resemble: he soon demolished it. I clung to my system, because it authorized me to look upon my heart as the arbiter of good and evil; I argued with him about it for three hours. In the end I had to admit I was beaten: besides, I had realized, in the course of our discussion, that many of my opinions were based only on prejudice, dishonesty, or hastily formed concepts, that my reasoning was at fault and that my ideas were in a muddle. ‘I'm no longer sure
what
I think, nor whether I can be said to think at all,' I noted, with a sense of anti-climax. I took no credit for that. My curiosity was greater than my pride; I preferred learning to showing-off. But all the same, after so many years of arrogant solitude, it was something serious to discover that I wasn't the One and Only, but one among many, by no means first, and suddenly uncertain of my true capacity. For Sartre wasn't the only one who forced me to take a more modest view of myself: Nizan, Aron, and Politzer were all much further advanced than I was. I had prepared for the competitive examination at the double: their culture had a much more solid grounding than mine, they were familiar with hosts of new things of which I was ignorant and they were used to discussion; above all, I was lacking in method and direction; to me the intellectual universe was a great jumble of ideas in which I groped my way blindly; but
their
search was, for the most part, well-directed. Already there were important divergencies of opinion between them; Aron was accused of being too much in favour of Brunschvig's idealism; but they had all explored much more fundamentally than I had the consequences of the inexistence of God and brought their philosophy right down to earth. Another thing that impressed me about them was that they had a fairly precise idea of the sort of books they wanted to write. I had gone on fatuously declaring that I ‘would tell all'; it was at once too much and too little. I was alarmed to discover that the novel sets countless problems whose existence I had not even suspected.