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Once the most celebrated
intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost
faded from view. He was already being attacked for his 'blindness'
about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even
his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism
and sheer energetic reach. Sartre's whole career was offensive both
to the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre attainments
had only a fervid anti-Communism to attract any attention, and to
the post-structuralists and Post-Modernists who, with few exceptions,
had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism deeply at odds
with Sartre's populism and his heroic public politics. The immense
sprawl of Sartre's work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer,
philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to
repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted
of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of
about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous
positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work
on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical
during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his
extraordinary range and literary distinction (for which he both
won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He had become
a maligned ex-celebrity, except in the Anglo-American world, where
he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always
read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and
memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and
compelling as (the far less talented) Camus.
Then, as with many
things French, the fashion began to change back, or so it seemed
at a distance. Several books about him appeared, and once again
he has (perhaps only for a moment) become the subject of talk, if
not exactly of study or reflection. For my generation he has always
been one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century, a
man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of
nearly every progressive cause of our time. Yet he seemed neither
infallible nor prophetic. On the contrary, one admired Sartre for
the efforts he made to understand situations and, when necessary,
to offer solidarity to political causes. He was never condescending
or evasive, even if he was given to error and overstatement. Nearly
everything he wrote is interesting for its sheer audacity, its freedom
(even its freedom to be verbose) and its generosity of spirit.
There is one obvious
exception, which I'd like to describe here. I'm prompted to do so
by two fascinating, if dispiriting discussions of his visit to Egypt
in early 1967 that appeared last month in Al-Ahram Weekly. One was
in a review of Bernard-Henry Lévy's recent book on Sartre;
the other was a review of the late Lotfi al-Kholi's account of that
visit (al-Kholi, a leading intellectual, was one of Sartre's Egyptian
hosts). My own rather forlorn experience with Sartre was a very
minor episode in a very grand life, but it is worth recalling both
for its ironies and for its poignancy.
It was early in January
1979, and I was at home in New York preparing for one of my classes.
The doorbell announced the delivery of a telegram and as I tore
it open I noticed with interest that it was from Paris. 'You are
invited by Les Temps modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the
Middle East in Paris on 13 and 14 March this year. Please respond.
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.' At first I thought the
cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an
invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or
from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the
offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from
various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine,
and far less time than that to despatch my unconditional acceptance
(this after learning that les modalités, the French euphemism
for travel expenses, were to be borne by Les Temps modernes, the
monthly journal established by Sartre after the war). A few weeks
later I was off to Paris./Les Temps modernes had played an extraordinary
role in French, and later European and even Third World, intellectual
life. Sartre had gathered around him a remarkable set of minds -
not all of them in agreement with him - that included Beauvoir of
course, his great opposite Raymond Aron, the eminent philosopher
and Ecole Normale classmate Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who left the
journal a few years later), and Michel Leiris, ethnographer, Africanist
and bullfight theoretician. There wasn't a major issue that Sartre
and his circle didn't take on, including the 1967 Arab-Israeli war,
which resulted in a monumentally large edition of Les Temps modernes
- in turn the subject of a brilliant essay by I.F. Stone. That alone
gave my Paris trip a precedent of note.
When I arrived, I found
a short, mysterious letter from Sartre and Beauvoir waiting for
me at the hotel I had booked in the Latin Quarter. 'For security
reasons,' the message ran, 'the meetings will be held at the home
of Michel Foucault.' I was duly provided with an address, and at
ten the next morning I arrived at Foucault's apartment to find a
number of people - but not Sartre - already milling around. No one
was ever to explain the mysterious 'security reasons' that had forced
a change in venue, though as a result a conspiratorial air hung
over our proceedings. Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban,
lecturing anyone who would listen about her forthcoming trip to
Teheran with Kate Millett, where they were planning to demonstrate
against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising and
silly, and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had to say,
I also realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing
with at that moment. Besides, she left an hour or so later (just
before Sartre's arrival) and was never seen again.
Foucault very quickly
made it clear to me that he had nothing to contribute to the seminar
and would be leaving directly for his daily bout of research at
the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased to see my book
Beginnings on his bookshelves, which were brimming with a neatly
arranged mass of materials, including papers and journals. Although
we chatted together amiably it wasn't until much later (in fact
almost a decade after his death in 1984) that I got some idea why
he had been so unwilling to say anything to me about Middle Eastern
politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller
reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia and had left
the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault
had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror
at the 'anti-semitic' anti-Israel riots of the time, common in every
Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his
in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a different
story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported
because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still
have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris
seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran
as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. 'Very exciting, very
strange, crazy,' I recall him saying about those early days of the
Islamic Revolution. I think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say
that in Teheran he had disguised himself in a wig, although a short
while after his articles appeared, he rapidly distanced himself
from all things Iranian. Finally, in the late 1980s, I was told
by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends,
had fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault expressing
support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians.
Foucault's apartment,
though large and obviously extremely comfortable, was starkly white
and austere, well suited to the solitary philosopher and rigorous
thinker who seemed to inhabit it alone. A few Palestinians and Israeli
Jews were there. Among them I recognised only Ibrahim Dakkak, who
has since become a good Jerusalem friend, Nafez Nazzal, a teacher
at Bir Zeit whom I had known superficially in the US, and Yehoshofat
Harkabi, the leading Israeli expert on 'the Arab mind', a former
chief of Israeli military intelligence, fired by Golda Meir for
mistakenly putting the Army on alert. Three years earlier, we had
both been fellows at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, but we did not have much of a relationship.
It was always polite but far from cordial. In Paris, he was in the
process of changing his position, to become Israel's leading establishment
dove, a man who was soon to speak openly about the need for a Palestinian
state, which he considered to be a strategic advantage from Israel's
point of view. The other participants were mostly Israeli or French
Jews, from the very religious to the very secular, although all
were pro-Zionist in one way or another. One of them, Eli Ben Gal,
seemed to have a long acquaintance with Sartre: we were later told
that he had been Sartre's guide on a recent trip to Israel.
When the great man finally
appeared, well past the appointed time, I was shocked at how old
and frail he seemed. I recall rather needlessly and idiotically
introducing Foucault to him, and I also recall that Sartre was constantly
surrounded, supported, prompted by a small retinue of people on
whom he was totally dependent. They, in turn, had made him the main
business of their lives. One was his adopted daughter who, I later
learned, was his literary executor; I was told that she was of Algerian
origin. Another was Pierre Victor, a former Maoist and co-publisher
with Sartre of the now defunct Gauche prolétarienne, who
had become a deeply religious and, I supposed, Orthodox Jew; it
stunned me to find out later from one of the journal's assistants
that he was an Egyptian Jew called Benny Lévy, the brother
of Adel Ref'at (né Lévy), one of the so-called Mahmoud
Hussein pair (the other being a Muslim Egyptian: the two men worked
at Unesco and as 'Mahmoud Hussein' wrote La Lutte des classes en
Egypte, a well-known study published by Maspero). There seemed to
be nothing Egyptian about Victor: he came across as a Left Bank
intellectual, part-thinker, part-hustler. Third was Hélène
von Bülow, a trilingual woman who worked at the journal and
translated everything for Sartre. Although he had spent time in
Germany and had written not only on Heidegger, but on Faulkner and
Dos Passos, Sartre knew neither German nor English. An amiable and
elegant woman, Von Bülow remained at Sartre's side for the
two days of the seminar, whispering simultaneous translations into
his ear. Except for one Palestinian from Vienna who spoke only Arabic
and German, our discussion was in English. How much Sartre actually
understood I shall never know, but it was (to me and others) profoundly
disconcerting that he remained silent throughout the first day's
proceedings. Michel Contat, Sartre's bibliographer, was also there,
but did not participate.
In what I took to be
the French style, lunch - which in ordinary circumstances would
have taken an hour or so - was a very elaborate affair taken at
a restaurant some distance away; and since it had been raining non-stop,
transporting everyone in cabs, sitting through a four-course meal,
then bringing the group back again, took about three and a half
hours. So on the first day our discussions about 'peace' lasted
for a relatively short time. The themes were set out by Victor without
any consultation with anyone else, so far as I could see. Early
on, I sensed that he was a law unto himself, thanks no doubt to
his privileged relationship with Sartre (with whom he occasionally
had whispered exchanges), and to what seemed to be a sublime self-confidence.
We were to discuss: (1) the value of the peace treaty between Egypt
and Israel (this was Camp David time), (2) peace between Israel
and the Arab world generally, and (3) the rather more fundamental
question of future coexistence between Israel and the surrounding
Arab world. None of the Arabs seemed happy with this. I felt it
leapfrogged over the matter of the Palestinians. Dakkak was uneasy
with the whole set-up and left after the first day.
As that day wore on,
I slowly discovered that a good deal of negotiating had gone on
beforehand to bring the seminar about, and that what participation
there was from the Arab world was compromised, and hence abridged,
by all the prior wheeling and dealing. I was somewhat chagrined
that I hadn't been included in any of this. Perhaps I had been too
naive - too anxious to come to Paris to meet Sartre, I reflected.
There was talk of Emmanuel Levinas being involved, but, like the
Egyptian intellectuals whom we'd been promised, he never showed
up. In the meantime all our discussions were being recorded and
were subsequently published in a special issue of Les Temps modernes
(September 1979). I thought it was pretty unsatisfactory. We were
covering more or less familiar ground, with no real meeting of minds.
Beauvoir had been a
serious disappointment, flouncing out of the room in a cloud of
opinionated babble about Islam and the veiling of women. At the
time I did not regret her absence; later I was convinced she would
have livened things up. Sartre's presence, what there was of it,
was strangely passive, unimpressive, affectless. He said absolutely
nothing for hours on end. At lunch he sat across from me, looking
disconsolate and remaining totally uncommunicative, egg and mayonnaise
streaming haplessly down his face. I tried to make conversation
with him, but got nowhere. He may have been deaf, but I'm not sure.
In any case, he seemed to me like a haunted version of his earlier
self, his proverbial ugliness, his pipe and his nondescript clothing
hanging about him like so many props on a deserted stage. I was
very active in Palestinian politics at the time: in 1977 I had become
a member of the National Council, and on my frequent visits to Beirut
(this was during the Lebanese civil war) to visit my mother, regularly
saw Arafat, and most of the other leaders of the day. I thought
it would be a major achievement to coax Sartre into making a pro-Palestinian
statement at such a 'hot' moment of our deadly rivalry with Israel.
Throughout the lunch
and the afternoon session I was aware of Pierre Victor as a sort
of station-master for the seminar, among whose trains was Sartre
himself. In addition to their mysterious whisperings at the table,
he and Victor would from time to time get up; Victor would lead
the shuffling old man away, speak rapidly at him, get an intermittent
nod or two, then they'd come back. Meanwhile every member of the
seminar wanted to have his or her say, making it impossible to develop
an argument, though it soon enough became clear that Israel's enhancement
(what today is called 'normalisation') was the real subject of the
meeting, not the Arabs or the Palestinians. Several Arabs before
me had spent time trying to convince some immensely important intellectual
of the justice of their cause in the hope that he would turn into
another Arnold Toynbee or Sean McBride. Few of these great eminences
did. Sartre struck me as worth the effort simply because I could
not forget his position on Algeria, which as a Frenchman must have
been harder to hold than a position critical of Israel. I was wrong
of course.
As the turgid and unrewarding
discussions wore on, I found that I was too often reminding myself
that I had come to France to listen to what Sartre had to say, not
to people whose opinions I already knew and didn't find specially
gripping. I therefore brazenly interrupted the discussion early
in the evening and insisted that we hear from Sartre forthwith.
This caused consternation in the retinue. The seminar was adjourned
while urgent consultations between them were held. I found the whole
thing comic and pathetic at the same time, especially since Sartre
himself had no apparent part in these deliberations. At last we
were summoned back to the table by the visibly irritated Pierre
Victor, who announced with the portentousness of a Roman senator:
'Demain Sartre parlera.' And so we retired in keen anticipation
of the following morning's proceedings.
Sure enough Sartre did
have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages
that - I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory
of the moment - praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal
platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said
about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic
past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism,
similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about
as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious
Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off
the hook. I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual
hero had succumbed in his later years to such a reactionary mentor,
and that on the subject of Palestine the former warrior on behalf
of the oppressed had nothing to offer beyond the most conventional,
journalistic praise for an already well-celebrated Egyptian leader.
For the rest of that day Sartre resumed his silence, and the proceedings
continued as before. I recalled an apocryphal story in which twenty
years earlier Sartre had travelled to Rome to meet Fanon (then dying
of leukemia) and harangued him about the dramas of Algeria for (it
was claimed) 16 non-stop hours, until Simone made him desist. Gone
for ever was that Sartre.
When the transcript
of the seminar was published a few months later, Sartre's intervention
had been edited down and made even more innocuous. I cannot imagine
why; nor did I try to find out. Even though I still have the issue
of Les Temps modernes in which we all appeared, I haven't been able
to bring myself to reread more than a few extracts, so flat and
unrewarding do its pages now seem to me. So I went to Paris to hear
Sartre in much the same spirit as Sartre was invited to come to
Egypt, to be seen and talked to by Arab intellectuals - with exactly
the same results, though my own encounter was coloured, not to say
stained, by the presence of an unattractive intermediary, Pierre
Victor, who has since disappeared into well deserved obscurity.
I was, I thought then, like Fabrice looking for the Battle of Waterloo
- unsuccessful and disappointed.
One further point. A
few weeks ago I happened to catch part of Bouillon de culture, Bernard
Pivot's weekly discussion programme, screened on French television,
and broadcast in the US a short time later. The programme was about
Sartre's slow posthumous rehabilitation in the face of continuing
criticism of his political sins. Bernard-Henry Lévy, than
whom in quality of mind and political courage there could scarcely
be anyone more different from Sartre, was there to flog his approving
study of the older philosopher. (I confess that I haven't read it,
and do not soon plan to.) He was not so bad really, said the patronising
B-HL; there were things about him, after all, that were consistently
admirable and politically correct. B-HL intended this to balance
what he considered the well-founded criticism of Sartre (made into
a nauseating mantra by Paul Johnson) as having always been wrong
on Communism. 'For example,' B-HL intoned, 'Sartre's record on Israel
was perfect: he never deviated and he remained a complete supporter
of the Jewish state.'
For reasons that we
still cannot know for certain, Sartre did indeed remain constant
in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was because he was
afraid of seeming anti-semitic, or because he felt guilt about the
Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of
the Palestinians as victims of and fighters against Israel's injustice,
or for some other reason, I shall never know. All I do know is that
as a very old man he seemed pretty much the same as he had been
when somewhat younger: a bitter disappointment to every (non-Algerian)
Arab who admired him. Certainly Bertrand Russell was better than
Sartre, and in his last years (though led on and, some would say,
totally manipulated by my former Princeton classmate and one-time
friend, Ralph Schoenman) actually took positions critical of Israel's
policies towards the Arabs. I guess we need to understand why great
old men are liable to succumb either to the wiles of younger ones,
or to the grip of an unmodifiable political belief. It's a dispiriting
thought, but it's what happened to Sartre. With the exception of
Algeria, the justice of the Arab cause simply could not make an
impression on him, and whether it was entirely because of Israel
or because of a basic lack of sympathy - cultural or perhaps religious
- it's impossible for me to say. In this he was quite unlike his
friend and idol Jean Genet, who celebrated his strange passion for
Palestinians in an extended sojourn with them and by writing the
extraordinary 'Quatre Heures à Sabra et Chatila' and Le Captif
amoureux.
A year after our brief
and disappointing Paris encounter Sartre died. I vividly remember
how much I mourned his death.
[Editor's
Note: Edward Said is professor of Comparative Literature
at Columbia University.]
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