RONALD HAYMAN
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the other hand he displays immense pride when he talks about what
he's expecting to do. This is the metaphysical and unpersonal pride
of a liberty which tries to be absolute, which refuses to be constrained
by circumstances."
He was afraid of possessions, afraid they would possess him or
anchor him to one place, one situation, one identity. Had he been
inclined to keep the money he earned, he could have become ex–
tremely rich; instead he not only spent, gave and tipped with com–
pulsive generosity, but supported a small retinue of dependents. The
busier he became, the easier he found it to give money rather than
time, attention or sympathy . Nor did he ever want to own space. For
much of his life he made his home in hotels or in his mother's little
flat, where his room was so small that he could not have kept many
books in it, even if he had not been in the habit of discarding them
as soon as he had read them. (His formidable memory had been
strengthened by a lycee education, which involved learning long
passages by heart.) The narrow divan became his bed at night, and
in the morning, when Jean Cau arrived, "a fearsome smell of to–
bacco and nocturnal breathing, spread into an atmosphere you could
cut with a knife, jumped at my face and into my throat ...." Cau
then worked at a table which had to be cleared for lunch if Sar.tre was
going to eat with his mother.
But with space on paper Sartre was lavish. He never squeezed
additions or alterations into a margin, and whenever he had to cross
words out he started a new sheet. He was in Italy with Michelle
Vian when he wrote the preface to Andre Gorz's
Le Tra£tre.
Arriving
at the post office to mail the manuscript to the Paris publisher, she
found that the cost of postage would have left them without enough
cash to pay their hotel bill. With a pair of scissors she snipped off the
unused paper from each page.
Sartre felt most at home in cafes and restaurants where he
could annex space by dominating the conversation and exhaling
smoke . He noticed that pipe-smoking made him feel like settling
wherever he was , watching people and talking through reassuring
clouds of smoke. But, like Kafka, he never felt more free than when
he was writing, creating an imaginary space. Paper as magic carpet;
pen as wand. But if he felt uncomfortable with the literary conquest
of imaginary space, his discomfort had one of its roots in the awkward
relationship his mind had with his body. After a paradisiacal infancy
centered on the belief that he was beautiful, he huffily but systemat-
