At the Existentialist Café (34 page)

In doing this, he interpreted Genet above all as a
writer
, who took control of the contingencies of his life by writing about them. But where did Genet get this ablity to transform the events of his life into art, asked Sartre? Was there a definite moment when Genet, a despised
and abused child abandoned by his unmarried mother and taken in by an orphanage, began to turn into a poet?

(Illustrations Credit 9.2)

Sartre found the moment he was looking for in an incident that occurred when Genet was ten years old and living with a foster family. Such a child was expected to be humble and grateful, but Genet refused to comply, and showed his rebellion by stealing small objects from the family and their neighbours. One day, he was sticking his hands in a drawer when a family member walked in on him and shouted,
‘You’re a thief!’ As Sartre interpreted it, the young Genet was frozen in the gaze of the Other: he became an object slapped with a despicable label. Instead of feeling abashed, Genet took that label and changed its meaning by
asserting it as his own. You call me a thief? Very well, I’ll
be
a thief!

By adopting the other person’s objectifying label as a substitute for his unselfconscious self, Genet was performing the same psychological contortion as the one
Beauvoir had observed in women. She believed it put a strain on women all their lives, and made them hesitant and full of self-doubt. But Sartre saw Genet as performing the manoeuvre defiantly, reversing the effect: instead of keeping him down, his alienation gave him his escape. From then on, he
owned
his outsider identity as thief, vagrant, homosexual and prostitute. He took control of his oppression by inverting it, and his books take their energy from that inversion. The most degrading elements of Genet’s experience — excrement, bodily fluids, bad smells, imprisonment, violent sex — become the ones held up as
sublime. Genet’s books turn shit into flowers, prison cells into sacred temples, and the most murderous prisoners into the objects of the greatest tenderness. This is why Sartre calls him a saint: where a saint transfigures suffering into sanctity, Genet transfigures oppression into freedom.

Sartre intuited all this largely because he was thinking at least as
much of his own life as Genet’s. His own bourgeois childhood had little in common with Genet’s, yet he too had been through dark times. When his family moved to La Rochelle, the twelve-year-old Sartre had been confronted with a stepfather who intimidated him, and with life at a rough school where the other boys beat him, branded him a pariah, and sneered at him for being ugly. In his misery, Sartre decided on a ritual gesture that, he imagined, would make their violence a part of himself and turn it against them. He stole change from his mother’s purse and used it to buy pastries for his tormenters. This seems a funny kind of violence — depending on what the pastries were like. But for Sartre it was a magical act. It was a transformation: his bullies had taken his possessions from him, so now he would
give
them something. Through his Genet-like theft and gift, he redefined the situation on his own terms and made a sort of artwork out of it. After that, as he told Beauvoir in later conversation, he was ‘
no longer someone who could be persecuted’. Interestingly, he remained a compulsive gift-giver for the rest of his life.

Like Genet, Sartre also had a more powerful way of taking control: he wrote books. For both of them, being a writer meant giving the world’s contingencies the ‘necessary’ quality of art, just as the jazz singer in
Nausea
turns the chaos of being into beautiful necessity. All Sartre’s biographies turn on this theme. In his 1947 study of
Baudelaire, he shows us the young poet bullied at school but transforming his miseries into literature. The same thing happens in
Words
, which Sartre began drafting the year after publishing
Saint Genet
, in 1953. His driving question, he said in a later interview, was: ‘
how does a man become someone who writes, who wants to speak of the imaginary?’
Words
was his attempt to find out what makes a child like himself fall into the ‘
neurosis of literature’.

In fact, by the time he was
writing
Words
, Sartre was worrying that something was ideologically wrong with this analysis of freedom and self-determination as modes of being enjoyed most fully by writers. Should one really spend one’s life trying to take control of existence solely through art? Is this not self-indulgent? Perhaps one’s energy should be used another way — such as marching shoulder to shoulder
with the proletariat in the service of revolution. Working on
Words
, Sartre filled it with gleeful irony at his own expense — making it one of his most entertaining works by far. He then announced that it represented his ‘farewell to literature’.

But Sartre’s was never going to be the kind of farewell to literature that meant
stopping
writing, as the poet Rimbaud had done. It turned out to mean writing more and more, in an ever greater mania, while abandoning the attempt to revise and give careful shape to his thoughts.
Words
was, rather, Sartre’s farewell to careful crafting and polishing — a process that may have been becoming more difficult for him, as his vision worsened. He managed to make it sound like a virtuous renunciation, but from the point of view of his readers it feels more like a declaration of war.

The next stage of Sartre’s life-writing career would lead him to the work he thought would be his greatest achievement in the genre, and which instead is one of the world’s impossible books.
The Family Idiot
is a multivolume life of Gustave Flaubert, in which Sartre prioritised — as before — the question of what leads a writer to become a writer. But he approached it differently. Sartre traced Flaubert’s way of writing to his childhood in a bourgeois family who had dismissed him as an ‘idiot’ because of his tendency to stare blankly into space for long periods, daydreaming or apparently thinking about nothing. In
labelling him as idiot — a typical bourgeois act of exclusion — they cut him out of normal social intercourse. Sartre compares the infant Flaubert to a
domestic animal, partly absorbed in human culture and partly separated from it, and haunted by what he is missing.

What he lacks, above all, is familial love, which would have drawn him into the realm of the fully human. Instead, Flaubert is left with what Sartre calls ‘
the acrid, vegetative abundance of his own juices, of the self. Mushroom: elementary organism, passive, shackled, oozing with abject plenitude.’ This abandonment in the mushroom patch of the soul makes him confused about his own consciousness, and about the boundaries between self and other. Feeling ‘superfluous’, Flaubert does not know what his role in the world is supposed
to be. Out of this comes his ‘
perpetual questioning’ and a fascination with the fringes of conscious experience. As Sartre said to an interviewer who asked why he had wanted to write about Flaubert, it was because of these fringes: ‘
with him I am at the border, the barrier of dreams’.

The project took Sartre’s own writing to the border too — the border of sense. He weaves together a Hegelian and a Marxist interpretation of Flaubert’s life, with much emphasis on the social and economic, but he also brings in a quasi-Freudian notion of the unconscious. He often uses the term
‘le vécu’
, or ‘the lived’. Beauvoir and others used this word too, but in Sartre’s hands it becomes almost a substitute for ‘consciousness’. It denotes the realm in which a writer like Flaubert manages to understand himself without being fully transparent to himself — or, says Sartre, in which ‘
consciousness plays the trick of determining itself by forgetfulness’. The idea is at once seductive and difficult. Perhaps the best way of putting it is to say that
The Family Idiot
is Sartre’s attempt to show how a writer becomes a writer without ever becoming fully conscious.

Sartre himself struggled to manage his immense project. Having begun to write it in 1954, he ran out of steam and put the manuscript aside for a long time, then rolled up his sleeves again and rapidly finished three volumes, which came out in 1971 and 1972. These ran to an astonishing 2,800 pages, or about 2,000 pages longer than one might expect from even the most long-winded biography. Even now, he had not finished: this took the story only to Flaubert’s writing of
Madame Bovary
. A fourth volume was projected, but never appeared. This makes it unsatisfying, but a greater problem is that the existing volumes are almost entirely unreadable.

One person enjoyed it, at least. Simone de Beauvoir read it in draft, as she did all Sartre’s books. She read it
several times
. Then she wrote in her memoirs:

I do not know how many times I went through
L’idiot de la famille
, reading long sections out of sequence and discussing them with Sartre. I went right through it again from the first
page to the last during the summer of 1971 in Rome, reading for hours on end. None of Sartre’s other books has ever seemed to me so delightful.

I wish I could see what Beauvoir saw. I have tried — I’ve rarely started a book with such a
desire
to like it, but it was a desire thwarted. I am saucer-eyed with awe at the achievement of the
translator, Carol Cosman, who spent thirteen years meticulously rendering the whole work into English. I am less impressed with Sartre, who had clearly decided that the very nature of the project ruled out revisions, polishing or any kind of attempt at clarity.

The book has its moments, though. Occasional lightning flashes strike the primordial soup, although they never quite spark it into life, and there is no way to find them except by dredging through the bog for as long as you can stand it.

In one such moment, while talking about the power of the gaze, Sartre recalls being present at a scene in which a group of people were talking about a dog — a variant on the scene described by Levinas in his prison camp, where the dog looked joyfully at the humans. This time, as the people look down at him, the dog realises they are paying him attention, but cannot understand why. He becomes agitated and confused, gets up, bounds towards them, stops, whines, and then barks. As Sartre wrote, he seems to be ‘
feeling at his expense the strange reciprocal mystification which is the relationship between man and animal’.

Sartre rarely grants other animals the compliment of recognising their forms of consciousness. Until now he had implicitly set them all in the realm of the ‘in-itself’ along with trees and slabs of concrete. But now it seems his view has shifted. Animals may not be fully conscious — but perhaps humans are not either, and this may be what Sartre means by taking us to the border of dreams.

Sartre’s interest in his subjects’ unconscious or semi-conscious minds had developed well before the Flaubert book. Towards the end of
Being and Nothingness
, he had explored the idea that our lives might
be arranged around projects that are genuinely ours, yet that we do not fully understand. He also called for a new practice of
existentialist psychoanalysis, to be based on freedom and on worldly being. He never accepted
Freud’s picture of the psyche as being arranged in layers, from the unconscious upwards, as if it were a slice of baklava or a geological sediment to be studied; nor did he agree on the primacy of sex. But he did take an increasing interest in the more impenetrable zones of life, and in our mysterious motivations. He was particularly interested in the way Freud — like himself — had changed and refined his own ideas as he went on. Freud was a thinker built on the same monumental scale as himself; Sartre respected that — and of course he too was a writer above all.

In 1958, Sartre had a chance to explore Freud’s life in more detail when the director John Huston commissioned him to write a screenplay for a biopic. Sartre took the job on partly because he needed the money: a huge tax bill had left him short. But, having agreed to do it, he threw himself into the job with his usual energy, and produced a screenplay that would have made a seven-hour film.

Huston did not want a seven-hour film, so he invited Sartre to come and stay in his house in Ireland while they worked together on cutting it down. Sartre proved to be an overwhelming guest, talking incessantly in rapid French which Huston could barely follow. Sometimes, after leaving the room, Huston would hear Sartre still raving on, apparently having failed to noticed his listener’s departure. In fact, Sartre was just as puzzled by his host’s behaviour. As he wrote to Beauvoir, ‘
suddenly in mid-discussion he’ll disappear. Very lucky if he’s seen again before lunch or dinner.’

Sartre obediently cut some scenes, but, while writing his new version, he could not resist adding new ones in their place and extending others. He presented Huston with a script that would no longer make a seven-hour film, but an eight-hour one. Huston now fired Sartre and used two of his regular screenwriters to script a much more conventional film, which duly appeared in 1962 with Montgomery Clift playing Freud. Sartre’s name was never credited, apparently by his own request. Much later, his screenplay was published in its multiple
versions, so that (if so inclined) one can now pore over all the variant passages and reflect on yet another of
Sartre’s non-standard contributions to literary biography.