RONALD HAYMAN
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myself lean back against my chair with a feeling of unbearable
deprivation." His immediate future will contain no holiday in the
past.
Two of the crucial questions about Sartre are "Why did he keep
changing tack?" and "Why did he go on committing himself to labors
that even he - and no one has been more of an intellectual Hercules–
couldn't possibly have accomplished?" I cannot believe anybody has
ever written more greedily and sensually than Sartre did. Even when
he was in his twenties his satisfaction when a woman yielded him her
virginity was almost eclipsed by the satisfaction of plucking words
out of the air to describe the seduction, moment by moment, in a
long letter to Simone de Beauvoir. He was never more impatient
than just before starting to write. According to Jean Cau, who worked
as his secretary from 1946 to 1957, he would come into the flat, when
he had slept elsewhere, and immediately sit down on the hard chair
at his desk, never stopping to take off his jacket and tie. He never
typed, and the fountain pens he used - his friend Michelle Vian has
kept several of them - feel as strongly impregnated with his physical
presence as the stems of the pipes he smoked.
When he was writing letters, diaries, and short articles, his
pleasure was unalloyed; when he worked at long-term projects, it
was tarnished by ambivalence. Alternative work would be clamoring
for his time, and simultaneously he would feel guilty about enjoying
words instead of taking action. Something survived from his pas–
sionate boyhood identification with the heroes of adventure stories,
from his fantasies of himself as the dashing rescuer of beautiful vic–
tims, and this helped to color his abortive adult forays into the
Resistance and political activity. His constant restlessness derived
partly from a mixture of romantic optimism and jaded guilt feelings.
Even when he was writing about politics he felt that he should be
fighting more actively against injustice; he also believed that he was
wasting his talent as a writer. In 1969 he grumbled that almost
everything he had written was "exactly the opposite of what I wanted
to write." He felt as though he had spent the major part of his life
working, like a hack, to commission, or like a journalist, in response
to current events. This feeling is relevant to all those moments of
conflict which had been prefigured by Roquentin's triumphant sur–
render- moments of reluctantly fending off a seductive alternative
to keep faith with the project in hand, or moments of deliciously
treacherous capitulation.
The betrayal was fourfold - a betrayal of his readers and his in-
