ARGUMENTS
through the desert and the rocks said to the sand: "Someone's
missing here. It's Sartre."
257
The important thing, though, was his initiation into the
art
of
writing. His grandfather would write to him at Arcachon, where Sartre
was
generally taken by his mother and grandmother for the summer.
Charles Schweitzer would write, says Sartre:
-... two pages for Louise, a post-script for Anne Marie and a
whole letter in verse for me. In order to make me fully aware
of my good fortune, my mother learned and taught me the
rules of prosody. Someone taught me to scribble out a versified
reply. I was urged to finish it, I was helped. When the two
women sent off the letter, they laughed till the tears came at
the thought of the recipient's astonishment. The habit was
formed; the grandfather and his grandson were united by a
new bond. They spoke to each other . . . like the Montmartre
pimps, in a language from which women were barred.
We never see the young Sartre distinctly. We do have some glimpses
of
him,
but we are never a:ble to separate
him
from the witty, eloquent,
and
often astonishing observations the mature Sartre has made about
him.
Similarly, we are unable to distinguish Sartre's grandfather Charles
Schweitzer, his grandmother Louise, his mother Anne Marie, from the
Iettled opinions Sartre has formed of them. But
if
these opinions are suf–
ficient to take Sartre back into the past, they are not sufficient to take us
back;
or, at least,
they
are insufficient to take me. I can enjoy what Sartre
bas
to
say about his relatives; I cannot enjoy their presence, for which
Same
has entirely substituted his unflattering opinions. But I, for one,
find
it as difficult
to
keep opinions-even brilliant opinions-in mind, as
I
find it easy to remember persons.
An autobiography, I take it, is a recounting of the events of the
author's life as they happened, together with what the author may have
felt or thought at the time of these happenings, insofar as he can
laIlember them exactly. In which case,
The Words
is not an auto–
biography in any clear meaning of the term.
What then is
The Words?
But before giving my own answer to
Ibis
question, I want to meet a possible justification of Sartre's procedure
in
writing this book as he did. The claim may be made that if someone
wanted
to write the story of his life, yet judged all his past postures and
lisa
the postures of the persons with whom he was most intimately
involved, including his mother, his grandmother, his grandfather, to have
been
radically false, what alternative would there
be
to setting down
the
facts
of this life in the manner Sartre adopted in writing
The Words?
