BOOKS
143
Dirty Hands
( 1948),
and
The Roads to Freedom
novels
(1945-1949),
have not-in many instances-caught up with the
Critique of Dialecti–
ca l Reason
(1960).
Even though the English translation is sixteen years
after the fact, courses and studies on Sartre continue to emphasize the
earl ier thought. The English language publication of interviews with
Sartre-i.e., "The Purposes of Writing"
(1959)
and "The Itinerary of a
Thought"
( 1969)
in
Between Existentialism and Marxism,
and "Self–
Portrait at Seventy"
(1975),
"Simone de Beauvoir Interviews Sartre"
( 1975 ),
and "On
The Idiot of the Family"
(1971)
in
LifeiSituations–
will do more for those seeking to follow his philosophic-literary–
political career than the whole series of minimally substantive remarks
that have appeared here and there. Above all, these interviews help to
complete the more systematic autobiographical ac'count which Sartre
himself has offered in
The Words.
In
Life / Situations,
we learn that music has played a major role in
Sartre's experi ence: he used to listen to jazz extensively before the war;
he once composed a sonata; and he likes composers such as Beethoven
(his favorite), Chopin, and Schumann, but also Schoenberg, Berg, and
Webern. An interview in
Le Monde
(July
1977)
adds that, until his
recent blindness, he played the piano from two
to
four hours a day. The
conclusion of
Nausea
would have been a good clue that music is
centra l to Sartre's world. There Roquentin listens
to
the juke box and
finds harmony with unknown individuals far off in New York. But
Sartre admits that he was never very fond of concert hall music: "Music
is made to be listened to by each person individually. "
When making a plea for intellectuals in
Between Existentialism
and Marxism,
he offers an account on his own behalf: the tools
necessary for self-knowledge include Marxism, sociology, and psycho–
analysis, but the "unique adventure," the "particularity of the individ–
ual ," "the singular universal"-these characterize the individual in his
efforts at communication. He describes his personal circumstances:
grandson of a doctor on one side and of a teacher on the other, petty
bourgeois son of a naval officer, fatherless throughout life, etc. What
we learn from the interv iew entitled " Itinerary of a Thought" is that he
does not expec t much interest in a sequel to
The Words.
The concern
was to study " how a man becomes someone who writes, who wants
to
speak of the imaginary." On this basis, he wrote his biographies of
Genet and Flaubert. Since
The Words
fulfills Sartre's program, we
shou ld not look for more. And yet
Life / Situations
resembles a sequel to
The Words.
By altering the genre to that of the interview, Sartre opens
up a new channel: he gives himself license to reveal that he has little
