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My Encounter with Sartre
Edward Said
Once the most celebrated intellectual,
Jean-Paul Sartre had,
until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being
attacked for
his 'blindness' about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in
1980, and even
his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism
and
sheer energetic reach. Sartre's whole career was offensive both to the
so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre attainments had only a
fervid
anti-Communism to attract any attention, and to the post-structuralists
and
Post-Modernists who, with few exceptions, had lapsed into a sullen
technological narcissism deeply at odds with Sartre's populism and his
heroic
public politics. The immense sprawl of Sartre's work as novelist,
essayist,
playwright, biographer, philosopher, political intellectual, engaged
activist,
seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most
quoted of
the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about
twenty
years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions
on Algeria and Vietnam
were forgotten. So were his
work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist
radical
during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his
extraordinary range
and literary distinction (for which he both won, and rejected, the
Nobel Prize
for Literature). He had become a maligned ex-celebrity, except in the
Anglo-American world, where he had never been taken seriously as a
philosopher
and was always read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional
novelist
and memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and
compelling
as (the far less talented) Camus.
Then, as with many things French, the fashion
began to change back,
or so it seemed at a distance. Several books about him appeared, and
once again
he has (perhaps only for a moment) become the subject of talk, if not
exactly
of study or reflection. For my generation he has always been one of the
great
intellectual heroes of the 20th century, a man whose insight and
intellectual
gifts were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our
time. Yet he
seemed neither infallible nor prophetic. On the contrary, one admired
Sartre
for the efforts he made to understand situations and, when necessary,
to offer
solidarity to political causes. He was never condescending or evasive,
even if
he was given to error and overstatement. Nearly everything he wrote is
interesting for its sheer audacity, its freedom (even its freedom to be
verbose) and its generosity of spirit.
There is one obvious exception, which I'd
like to describe here.
I'm prompted to do so by two fascinating, if dispiriting discussions of
his
visit to Egypt
in early 1967 that appeared last month in Al-Ahram Weekly. One
was in a
review of Bernard-Henry Lévy's recent book on Sartre; the other was a
review of
the late Lotfi al-Kholi's account of that visit (al-Kholi, a leading
intellectual, was one of Sartre's Egyptian hosts). My own rather
forlorn
experience with Sartre was a very minor episode in a very grand life,
but it is
worth recalling both for its ironies and for its poignancy.
It was early in January 1979, and I was at
home in New York
preparing for
one of my classes. The doorbell announced the delivery of a telegram
and as I
tore it open I noticed with interest that it was from Paris. 'You are
invited by Les Temps
modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East in Paris on 13 and
14 March
this year. Please respond. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.' At
first I
thought the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have
been an
invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or
from T.S. Eliot and Virginia
Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took
me about
two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that
it was
indeed genuine, and far less time than that to despatch my
unconditional
acceptance (this after learning that les modalités, the French
euphemism
for travel expenses, were to be borne by Les Temps modernes,
the monthly
journal established by Sartre after the war). A few weeks later I was
off to Paris.
Les Temps modernes had played an
extraordinary role in
French, and later European and even Third World,
intellectual life. Sartre had gathered around him a remarkable set of
minds -
not all of them in agreement with him - that included Beauvoir of
course, his
great opposite Raymond Aron, the eminent philosopher and Ecole Normale
classmate Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who left the journal a few years
later), and
Michel Leiris, ethnographer, Africanist and bullfight theoretician.
There
wasn't a major issue that Sartre and his circle didn't take on,
including the
1967 Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in a monumentally large edition
of Les
Temps modernes - in turn the subject of a brilliant essay by I.F.
Stone.
That alone gave my Paris
trip a precedent of note.
When I arrived, I found a short, mysterious
letter from Sartre and
Beauvoir waiting for me at the hotel I had booked in the Latin Quarter. 'For security reasons,' the
message ran, 'the meetings
will be held at the home of Michel Foucault.' I was duly provided with
an
address, and at ten the next morning I arrived at Foucault's apartment
to find
a number of people - but not Sartre - already milling around. No one
was ever
to explain the mysterious 'security reasons' that had forced a change
in venue,
though as a result a conspiratorial air hung over our proceedings.
Beauvoir was
already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would listen
about her
forthcoming trip to Teheran with Kate Millett, where they were planning
to
demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising
and
silly, and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had to say, I
also
realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at that
moment.
Besides, she left an hour or so later (just before Sartre's arrival)
and was
never seen again.
Foucault very quickly made it clear to me
that he had nothing to
contribute to the seminar and would be leaving directly for his daily
bout of
research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased to see my book Beginnings
on his bookshelves, which were brimming with a neatly arranged mass of
materials, including papers and journals. Although we chatted together
amiably
it wasn't until much later (in fact almost a decade after his death in
1984)
that I got some idea why he had been so unwilling to say anything to me
about
Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and
James
Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia
and had left the country in
some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time
that the
reason he left had been his horror at the 'anti-semitic' anti-Israel
riots of
the time, common in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A
Tunisian
colleague of his in the University
of Tunis
philosophy
department told me a different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she
said,
had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young
students. I
still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned
from a
sojourn in Iran
as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. 'Very exciting, very
strange,
crazy,' I recall him saying about those early days of the Islamic
Revolution. I
think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say that in Teheran he had
disguised
himself in a wig, although a short while after his articles appeared,
he
rapidly distanced himself from all things Iranian. Finally, in the late
1980s,
I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of
friends,
had fallen out over the question of Palestine,
Foucault expressing support for Israel,
Deleuze for the Palestinians.
Foucault's apartment, though large and
obviously extremely
comfortable, was starkly white and austere, well suited to the solitary
philosopher and rigorous thinker who seemed to inhabit it alone. A few
Palestinians and Israeli Jews were there. Among them I recognised only
Ibrahim
Dakkak, who has since become a good Jerusalem friend, Nafez Nazzal, a
teacher
at Bir Zeit whom I had known superficially in the US, and Yehoshofat
Harkabi,
the leading Israeli expert on 'the Arab mind', a former chief of
Israeli
military intelligence, fired by Golda Meir for mistakenly putting the
Army on
alert. Three years earlier, we had both been fellows at the Stanford Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, but we did not have much
of a
relationship. It was always polite but far from cordial. In Paris,
he was in the process of changing his position, to become Israel's leading establishment dove, a
man who
was soon to speak openly about the need for a Palestinian state, which
he
considered to be a strategic advantage from Israel's
point of view. The other
participants were mostly Israeli or French Jews, from the very
religious to the
very secular, although all were pro-Zionist in one way or another. One
of them,
Eli Ben Gal, seemed to have a long acquaintance with Sartre: we were
later told
that he had been Sartre's guide on a recent trip to Israel.
When the great man finally appeared, well
past the appointed time,
I was shocked at how old and frail he seemed. I recall rather
needlessly and
idiotically introducing Foucault to him, and I also recall that Sartre
was
constantly surrounded, supported, prompted by a small retinue of people
on whom
he was totally dependent. They, in turn, had made him the main business
of
their lives. One was his adopted daughter who, I later learned, was his
literary executor; I was told that she was of Algerian origin. Another
was
Pierre Victor, a former Maoist and co-publisher with Sartre of the now
defunct Gauche
prolétarienne, who had become a deeply religious and, I supposed,
Orthodox
Jew; it stunned me to find out later from one of the journal's
assistants that
he was an Egyptian Jew called Benny Lévy, the brother of Adel Ref'at
(né Lévy),
one of the so-called Mahmoud Hussein pair (the other being a Muslim
Egyptian:
the two men worked at Unesco and as 'Mahmoud Hussein' wrote La Lutte
des
classes en Egypte, a well-known study published by Maspero). There
seemed
to be nothing Egyptian about Victor: he came across as a Left Bank intellectual, part-thinker,
part-hustler. Third was Hélène
von Bülow, a trilingual woman who worked at the journal and translated
everything for Sartre. Although he had spent time in Germany
and had written not only on
Heidegger, but on Faulkner and Dos Passos, Sartre knew neither German
nor
English. An amiable and elegant woman, Von Bülow remained at Sartre's
side for
the two days of the seminar, whispering simultaneous translations into
his ear.
Except for one Palestinian from Vienna
who spoke only Arabic and German, our discussion was in English. How
much
Sartre actually understood I shall never know, but it was (to me and
others)
profoundly disconcerting that he remained silent throughout the first
day's
proceedings. Michel Contat, Sartre's bibliographer, was also there, but
did not
participate.
In what I took to be the French style, lunch
- which in ordinary
circumstances would have taken an hour or so - was a very elaborate
affair
taken at a restaurant some distance away; and since it had been raining
non-stop, transporting everyone in cabs, sitting through a four-course
meal,
then bringing the group back again, took about three and a half hours.
So on
the first day our discussions about 'peace' lasted for a relatively
short time.
The themes were set out by Victor without any consultation with anyone
else, so
far as I could see. Early on, I sensed that he was a law unto himself,
thanks
no doubt to his privileged relationship with Sartre (with whom he
occasionally
had whispered exchanges), and to what seemed to be a sublime
self-confidence.
We were to discuss: (1) the value of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel
(this was Camp David time), (2) peace between Israel
and the Arab world generally, and (3) the rather more fundamental
question of
future coexistence between Israel
and the surrounding Arab world. None of the Arabs seemed happy with
this. I
felt it leapfrogged over the matter of the Palestinians. Dakkak was
uneasy with
the whole set-up and left after the first day.
As that day wore on, I slowly discovered that
a good deal of
negotiating had gone on beforehand to bring the seminar about, and that
what
participation there was from the Arab world was compromised, and hence
abridged, by all the prior wheeling and dealing. I was somewhat
chagrined that
I hadn't been included in any of this. Perhaps I had been too naive -
too
anxious to come to Paris
to meet Sartre, I reflected. There was talk of Emmanuel Levinas being
involved,
but, like the Egyptian intellectuals whom we'd been promised, he never
showed
up. In the meantime all our discussions were being recorded and were
subsequently published in a special issue of Les Temps modernes
(September 1979). I thought it was pretty unsatisfactory. We were
covering more
or less familiar ground, with no real meeting of minds.
Beauvoir had been a serious disappointment,
flouncing out of the
room in a cloud of opinionated babble about Islam and the veiling of
women. At
the time I did not regret her absence; later I was convinced she would
have
livened things up. Sartre's presence, what there was of it, was
strangely
passive, unimpressive, affectless. He said absolutely nothing for hours
on end.
At lunch he sat across from me, looking disconsolate and remaining
totally
uncommunicative, egg and mayonnaise streaming haplessly down his face.
I tried
to make conversation with him, but got nowhere. He may have been deaf,
but I'm
not sure. In any case, he seemed to me like a haunted version of his
earlier
self, his proverbial ugliness, his pipe and his nondescript clothing
hanging
about him like so many props on a deserted stage. I was very active in
Palestinian politics at the time: in 1977 I had become a member of the
National
Council, and on my frequent visits to Beirut
(this was during the Lebanese civil war) to visit my mother, regularly
saw
Arafat, and most of the other leaders of the day. I thought it would be
a major
achievement to coax Sartre into making a pro-Palestinian statement at
such a
'hot' moment of our deadly rivalry with Israel.
Throughout the lunch and the afternoon
session I was aware of
Pierre Victor as a sort of station-master for the seminar, among whose
trains
was Sartre himself. In addition to their mysterious whisperings at the
table,
he and Victor would from time to time get up; Victor would lead the
shuffling
old man away, speak rapidly at him, get an intermittent nod or two,
then they'd
come back. Meanwhile every member of the seminar wanted to have his or
her say,
making it impossible to develop an argument, though it soon enough
became clear
that Israel's enhancement (what today is called 'normalisation') was
the real
subject of the meeting, not the Arabs or the Palestinians. Several
Arabs before
me had spent time trying to convince some immensely important
intellectual of
the justice of their cause in the hope that he would turn into another
Arnold
Toynbee or Sean McBride. Few of these great eminences did. Sartre
struck me as
worth the effort simply because I could not forget his position on Algeria, which as a Frenchman must have
been
harder to hold than a position critical of Israel.
I was wrong of course.
As the turgid and unrewarding discussions
wore on, I found that I
was too often reminding myself that I had come to France
to listen to what Sartre had
to say, not to people whose opinions I already knew and didn't find
specially
gripping. I therefore brazenly interrupted the discussion early in the
evening
and insisted that we hear from Sartre forthwith. This caused
consternation in
the retinue. The seminar was adjourned while urgent consultations
between them
were held. I found the whole thing comic and pathetic at the same time,
especially since Sartre himself had no apparent part in these
deliberations. At
last we were summoned back to the table by the visibly irritated Pierre
Victor,
who announced with the portentousness of a Roman senator: 'Demain
Sartre
parlera.' And so we retired in keen anticipation of the following
morning's
proceedings.
Sure enough Sartre did have something for us:
a prepared text of
about two typed pages that - I write entirely on the basis of a
twenty-year-old
memory of the moment - praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most
banal
platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about
the
Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly
no
reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways
to
French practice in Algeria.
It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by
the
egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command,
off the
hook. I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had
succumbed in his later years to such a reactionary mentor, and that on
the
subject of Palestine
the former warrior on behalf of the oppressed had nothing to offer
beyond the
most conventional, journalistic praise for an already well-celebrated
Egyptian leader. For the rest of that day Sartre resumed his
silence, and
the proceedings continued as before. I recalled an apocryphal story in
which
twenty years earlier Sartre had travelled to Rome to meet Fanon (then
dying of
leukemia) and harangued him about the dramas of Algeria for (it was
claimed) 16
non-stop hours, until Simone made him desist. Gone for ever was that
Sartre.
When the transcript of the seminar was
published a few months
later, Sartre's intervention had been edited down and made even more
innocuous.
I cannot imagine why; nor did I try to find out. Even though I still
have the
issue of Les Temps modernes in which we all appeared, I haven't
been
able to bring myself to reread more than a few extracts, so flat and
unrewarding do its pages now seem to me. So I went to Paris to hear
Sartre in
much the same spirit as Sartre was invited to come to Egypt, to be seen
and
talked to by Arab intellectuals - with exactly the same results, though
my own
encounter was coloured, not to say stained, by the presence of an
unattractive
intermediary, Pierre Victor, who has since disappeared into well
deserved
obscurity. I was, I thought then, like Fabrice looking for the Battle
of
Waterloo - unsuccessful and disappointed.
One further point. A few weeks ago I happened
to catch part of Bouillon
de culture, Bernard Pivot's weekly discussion programme, screened
on French
television, and broadcast in the US a short time later. The
programme was about Sartre's slow posthumous rehabilitation in the face
of
continuing criticism of his political sins. Bernard-Henry Lévy, than
whom in
quality of mind and political courage there could scarcely be anyone
more
different from Sartre, was there to flog his approving study of the
older
philosopher. (I confess that I haven't read it, and do not soon plan
to.) He
was not so bad really, said the patronising B-HL; there were things
about him,
after all, that were consistently admirable and politically correct.
B-HL
intended this to balance what he considered the well-founded criticism
of
Sartre (made into a nauseating mantra by Paul Johnson) as having always
been
wrong on Communism. 'For example,' B-HL intoned, 'Sartre's record on Israel
was
perfect: he never deviated and he remained a complete supporter of the
Jewish
state.'
For reasons that we still cannot know for
certain, Sartre did
indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was
because
he was afraid of seeming anti-semitic, or because he felt guilt about
the
Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of the
Palestinians as victims of and fighters against Israel's
injustice, or for some
other reason, I shall never know. All I do know is that as a very old
man he
seemed pretty much the same as he had been when somewhat younger: a
bitter
disappointment to every (non-Algerian) Arab who admired him. Certainly
Bertrand
Russell was better than Sartre, and in his last years (though led on
and, some
would say, totally manipulated by my former Princeton classmate and
one-time
friend, Ralph Schoenman) actually took positions critical of Israel's
policies towards the Arabs. I guess we need to understand why great old
men are
liable to succumb either to the wiles of younger ones, or to the grip
of an
unmodifiable political belief. It's a dispiriting thought, but it's
what
happened to Sartre. With the exception of Algeria,
the justice of the Arab cause simply could not make an impression on
him, and
whether it was entirely because of Israel or because of a
basic lack
of sympathy - cultural or perhaps religious - it's impossible for me to
say. In
this he was quite unlike his friend and idol Jean Genet, who celebrated
his
strange passion for Palestinians in an extended sojourn with them and
by
writing the extraordinary 'Quatre Heures à Sabra et Chatila' and Le
Captif
amoureux.
A year after our brief and disappointing Paris encounter
Sartre died. I vividly
remember how much I mourned his death.
Edward Said's memoir, Out of
Place, was
published last year. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After will
appear in this country in September.
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