634
PARTISAN REVIEW
one can argue that it gives us nothing more - and probably a good
deal less - than does a serious reading of the biographical subject's
books .
Yet the heterogeneous approach of Ronald Hayman's
biography of Sartre seems perfectly appropriate to its subject.
Throughout his career Sartre himself was obsessed with biography:
his alter-ego Roquentin, in
Nausea,
gives up one biography (that of
M. de Rollebon) only to save himself by imagining writing another
(the life of the composer of "Some of These Days") ; and Sartre wrote
I
biographies (after his own fashion) of Baudelaire, Genet , Mallarme
I
(never completed), Freud (a film script, never filmed) , and, on a
monumental scale, Flaubert (three volumes published, never com-
l
pleted).
In
addition, he wrote an autobiography , which does not get
beyond his childhood
(The Words).
And even his works that are n9t
overtly biographical deal with the same problems of bad faith
~~d
commitment, novels such as
The Age of Reason
and
Death in the Soul,
plays like
Dirty Hands
and
The Devil and the Good Lord.
Sartre's
biographies of thinkers are characterized precisely by a lack of
respect for the dividing line between their works and their personal
experiences. He passes moral judgement not on the content of a
novel or poem, but on early "life decisions" that in many cases can-
not be substantiated. There is confusion between what rea\ly counts
in a writer's life - his or her writings - and that which is qtraneous,
unsupported, or irrelevant detail.
But it is not only Sartre the biographer who forces his own
strategy on his biographer; it is Sartre the subject. Sartre's life itself
was strangely heterogeneous, involving both a private literary activ–
ity, the production of important works whose larger "meaning" is
really very obscure (one thinks especially of
Nausea),
and a media
figure, an intellectual superstar whose writings (at least in the larger
public sphere) became virtually irrelevant , but whose many trips
(Cuba, Russia, Brazil, various prisons, factories, presidents' man–
sions), activities (selling a Maoist newspaper in the streets), and
signatures (often of documents he had not read) came to have a very
real importance for many and entertainment value for perhaps just
as many others . Sartre's biographer cannot possibly disentangle his
personal activities - nearly all of which after 1945 were carried out in
public - and the content and possible function of Sartre's writings.
This really begins to strike the reader of Hayman's biography
about midway through . Sartre before 1945 - before the massive
fame that fell on him virtually out of the blue - was a writer fervently
