RONALD HAYMAN
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drugs while writing what he considered to be "literary" works. But
for him the distinction between "literary" works and "philosophical"
books was less meaningful than the distinction between work which
demanded painstaking writing and work which did not.
If
he ap–
proximated, while talking, teaching or lecturing, to thinking out
loud, he approximated in most of his writing to talking, teaching or
lecturing. His predominant feeling was that style should take care of
itself, and that a writer should not waste time on painstaking revi–
sion of each sentence. He still enjoyed the process of finding the right
words and arranging them in the right order but forbade himself to
believe that the task of writing was any more than the task of ex–
tricating sentences from himself, as if the book already existed inside
his consciousness. Drugs not only had the effect of encouraging this
illusion: they seemed to be speeding the process of extrication, and,
as he went on working in this hurried way, Sartre came to depend
less and less on either observation or research: he wrote as if every–
thing he needed was already present inside his brain.
This was something he increasingly needed to believe as he
grew older. The future was shrinking as demands on his time were
increasing. Always unrealistically optimistic about completing at
least some of the projects that were in abeyance, he had more and
more reason to hurry. The quality of his writing deteriorates as he
relies less on new observation, information, research, more on
knowledge he has accumulated, and more on drugs that seemed to
make him go faster. In chasing after his ideas, he was also chasing
after the creativity that had deserted him.
Much of his better, earlier, writing had depended on his ability
to chronicle the play of consciousness, dovetailing the drama into ac–
curate description of external circumstances. Some of his best prose
is to be found in
La Nausee,
which is written in the form of a diary,
and in his army diaries,
Carnets de la drole de guerre.
In these fictional
and factual journals the pulse of the sentences excitingly follows the
rhythm of Sartre's thinking, whereas the latter part of the Flaubert
biography is written in amorphous sentences with flaccid rhythms.
Judging by the number of words he was producing each day, the army
diaries were not written any more carefully, but the life Sartre was
living then was more conducive to good writing, though he never
shut himself entirely off from new experiences and new social con–
tacts, on which observations could have been based. While he was
teaching he was alert to the people around him;
Les Chemins de la
liberte
rests on his prewar friendships in Paris and on his experience
