The problem for the biographer of Sartre is that he wrote an autobiography. Words (Les Mots) was written in the 1950s, then revised and published in 1963. It is, as everyone agrees, a magnificent piece of writing and it earned him the Nobel Prize for literature which he refused to accept. All his biographers complain that the autobiography ceases when the author is only 11 years old, but they seek to find clues in it. They dwell on the special period, that of Paradise.
Sartre was a child, according to his account, in the most united family in the finest country in the world. Then, his widowed mother (his father having died when he was 15 months old) remarries. There, say his biographers, is the reason for his interest in the ives of Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Genet. There is Baudelaire's shame and rage at his mother's re-marriage, Flaubert's feeling of expulsion when he could no longer accompany his doctor father on his rounds, Genet's belief that he was rejected by everyone, by life itself.
Yet there is more to the autobiography than the frustration of its rapid ending (and there are many prefaces, interviews and films where Sartre is very informative about himself and his life), and there is more to it than possible indications why he should have interested himself in certain figures of the past. The autobiography presents us with conflicts and dilemmas.
Via his grandfather the young boy becomes aware of great literature and a great literary tradition; but he also discovers children's adventure stories, thrillers and the popular cinema. There is the awareness of the contrastive values which were to dominate him: he was the distant intellectual, but he wanted to be associated with the working class; he professed to be glad that his father had died before he knew him because he was thereby liberated from paternal tyranny, but as a creative writer he saw a father figure as playing a mediating role between the individual and society. Through a carefully concocted mixture of revelation and concealment in Words Sartre has confused all the issues.
The result is that no biographer has yet succeeded in presenting or in explaining him. Both Ronald Hayman, whose biography was published a few months ago, and Annie Cohen-Solal, whose highly successful biography now appears in an unpleasant English translation, tell us a great deal about their subject. But neither gives us a convincing portrait of the man. With Words Sartre has destroyed the trail, and these, the most assiduous and well-organised of biographers, fail to come to any conclusions about this writer.
Annie Cohen-Solal tells us that when he was writing Words he was sufficiently curious about his origins to take a train to Perigueux and to call on his father's sister. But she had died some three months before. Even had he made the journey earlier, or even had he seen the trunk full of letters and family souvenirs which was still in his aunt's flat (and which this biographer has seen) in all probability this would not have made any change in the dialectic which was to dominate his life or to the ideological mystifications to which he was subject. He did not believe in the importance of literature in the world, yet he believed that he was born from the act of writing and that the process of writing was of overwhelming importance.
Annie Cohen-Solal tells us of a visit which Sartre paid to the Ecole Normale Superieur in 1960 or 1961. He lectured on 'the possible in history' and he found himself confronted by Althusser and his pupils. In the discussion that followed it was the professional Marxist who was the more successful. Dialectic for Sartre was a natural, instinctive way of thought; it was not a rigorously elaborated philosophical position. He was far from being a thinking machine.
Therefore we need to know about Sartre the man. Of these two biographers Annie Cohen-Solal is the more informative and has been the most persistent in finding out new material. Ronald Hayman is meticulous in bringing together the details of the life and the nature of the intellectual development, but he does get somewhat lost in reconstructing the many journeys which Sarte took and which have often been fully recorded by Simone de Beauvoir. After all it does not matter exactly where it was that Sartre's friends left him sitting in a field, busily filling a writing pad in spite of the high wind.
Annie Cohen-Solal presents us with the outline of a pattern in the life. For example, she finds Sartre's interest in different options in his love affairs, and his compartmentalisation of them, significant. She remarks, perhaps sententiously, that the choice of a mate is an indication of the type of future that is contemplated. When a student, Sartre met one of his cousins, Simone Jollivet, who was leading a somewhat rackety life in Toulouse (and later in Paris), and he had an off-on relationship with her. Around this he wrote the beginnings of a novel, and he was able to luxuriate and brood in self-confidence and self-doubt.
About the same time he became officially engaged to the cousin of one of his fellow narmaliens, whose family he believed (or sought to believe) had him followed by a private detective. The engagement was broken off when he failed his examination for the aggregation in philosophy. But the episode gave him satisfaction. He was able to magnify the girl's passion for him, and he was able to get over his sadness with a few tears and a bottle of wine. Did he weep because he was drunk, he asked. At all events he felt good. In 1945, talking about his novels, he said that everyone of his characters was free to do anything whatsoever. Within each of them there was the possibility of a new action which would stand unconnected with previous actions or inconsistent with them. So it was with Sartre himself.
When he was writing Words he approached his former pupil and close friend Pontalis, and asked that he might be psychoanalysed by him. The suggestion was made hurriedly and it may not have been meant very seriously. At all events Pontalis refused the suggestion. However, this is not the end of the story. In 1956 Sartre had made the acquaintance of a 19-year-old Jewish Algerian girl, Arlette Elkaim, who was studying philosophy. She became closely attached to him, a member of the 'household' as such friends were called, and some ten years later he was to adopt her as his daughter. Although he did not seek another analyst after Pontalis had refused him, he decided to note down his dreams, and it was to Arlette that he used to dictate accounts of them on waking.
Twenty-five years later Pontalis agreed to study the notebooks that Arlette had kept and he has told Annie Cohen Solal, in very general terms, that they show a repeated preoccupation with success and failure. This is interesting. On the one hand Sartre was genuinely uninterested in fame and unconcerned about posterity. He had tried to refuse the Nobel Prize discreetly, he had written asking that his name be not considered, and it was only by accident that his letter was received too late. His carelessness about manuscripts and money was legendary and he was not interested in material possessions.
Yet he had been amongst the most ambitious of his generation of normaliens and his inability to refuse to take part in any cause celebre, his readiness to give interviews, attend congresses, be the militant traveller, all testify, like his dreams, to a desire for fame. Perhaps, in adopting Arlette Elkain, he wanted to ensure that his posthumous works would be properly published (as they have been).
He objected to General de Gaulle writing to him 'mon cher Maitre' ('only waiters who know that I am a writer can call me that,' was his angry riposte). But in 1960 when the Algerian crisis was at its height, and when Sartre's support for the Algerian revolutionaries had so angered many Frenchmen that they demanded that he should be put in prison (or shot), de Gaulle remarked, 'You do not imprison Voltaire.' Would Sartre really have objected to that? Even for de Gaulle there was something special about Sartre. And we are still in the process of learning how special he was.
