“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:
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