Archivo

“Jean-Paul Sartre: Problematic Pillhead”

Leonard’s review of Annie Cohn-Solal’s Sartre: A Life and Ronald Hayman’s Sartre: A Biography.  He starts with the statement, “Giacometti…tortured metals, Sartre…tortured ides,” and describes Sartre this way:

…philosophizing novelist, pamphleteering playwright, celebrity intellectual, “pope of existentialism,” …one-eyed, chain smoking, piano playing booze hound, pillhead, womanizer.

Leonard clearly doesn’t like Hayman’s treatment of Sartre (his “potted psychologizing is a trial throughout.”) and likes Solal’s less judgmental approach ( …"who’s along for the ride with a wicked grin.”)

Leonard ends with a quote from Solal but, just before sums up Sartre this way, “He talked himself into commitment and stayed there, even at the price of relinquishing his claim on us as a great imaginative writer.”

Great quote from Che Guevara to Sartre, “It’s not my fault that reality is Marxist.”

New word: corydrane = a combination of aspirin and amphetamines.

New learning: When Sartre was in high school, he and his friends would hide in the stairwell waiting for the rich kids to return from a night out, “…and then drop water bombs on them shouting, ‘Thus pissed Zarathustra!’”

Che and Jean-Paul in 1960: