My Encounter With Sartre

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, andeven 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 hadonly 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 populismand 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 itattracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of abouttwenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam wereforgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction (for whichhe both won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He had become a maligned ex-celebrity, except inthe Anglo-American world, where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always readsomewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, notquite 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. Severalbooks about him appeared, and once again he has (perhaps only for a moment) become the subject of talk, if notexactly of study or reflection. For my generation he has always been one of the great intellectual heroes ofthe 20th century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of nearly every progressivecause of our time. Yet he seemed neither infallible nor prophetic. On the contrary, one admired Sartre for theefforts he made to understand situations and, when necessary, to offer solidarity to political causes. He wasnever condescending or evasive, even if he was given to error and overstatement. Nearly everything he wrote isinteresting 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 Lotfial-Kholi's account of that visit (al-Kholi, a leading intellectual, was one of Sartre's Egyptian hosts). Myown rather forlorn experience with Sartre was a very minor episode in a very grand life, but it is worthrecalling 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 doorbellannounced 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 13and 14 March this year. Please respond. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.' At first I thought the cablewas a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to cometo Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. Ittook me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, andfar 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 journalestablished 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 ThirdWorld, intellectual life. Sartre had gathered around him a remarkable set of minds - not all of them inagreement with him - that included Beauvoir of course, his great opposite Raymond Aron, the eminentphilosopher and Ecole Normale classmate Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who left the journal a few years later), andMichel Leiris, ethnographer, Africanist and bullfight theoretician. There wasn't a major issue that Sartre andhis circle didn't take on, including the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in a monumentally large editionof Les Temps modernes - in turn the subject of a brilliant essay by I.F. Stone. That alone gave myParis trip a precedent of note.

When I arrived, I found a short, mysterious letter from Sartre and Beauvoir waiting for me at the hotel Ihad booked in the Latin Quarter. 'For security reasons,' the message ran, 'the meetings will be held at thehome of Michel Foucault.' I was duly provided with an address, and at ten the next morning I arrived atFoucault's apartment to find a number of people - but not Sartre - already milling around. No one was ever toexplain the mysterious 'security reasons' that had forced a change in venue, though as a result aconspiratorial air hung over our proceedings. Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturinganyone who would listen about her forthcoming trip to Teheran with Kate Millett, where they were planning todemonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising and silly, and although I was eager tohear what Beauvoir had to say, I also realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at thatmoment. 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 beleaving directly for his daily bout of research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased to see my book Beginningson his bookshelves, which were brimming with a neatly arranged mass of materials, including papers andjournals. Although we chatted together amiably it wasn't until much later (in fact almost a decade after hisdeath in 1984) that I got some idea why he had been so unwilling to say anything to me about Middle Easternpolitics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teachingin Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the timethat the reason he left had been his horror at the 'anti-semitic' anti-Israel riots of the time, common inevery Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his in the University of Tunis philosophydepartment told me a different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of hishomosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of theParis seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy of Corriere dellasera. 'Very exciting, very strange, crazy,' I recall him saying about those early days of the IslamicRevolution. 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 thePalestinians.

Foucault's apartment, though large and obviously extremely comfortable, was starkly white and austere, wellsuited to the solitary philosopher and rigorous thinker who seemed to inhabit it alone. A few Palestinians andIsraeli Jews were there. Among them I recognised only Ibrahim Dakkak, who has since become a good Jerusalemfriend, 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 GoldaMeir for mistakenly putting the Army on alert. Three years earlier, we had both been fellows at the StanfordCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, but we did not have much of a relationship. It wasalways polite but far from cordial. In Paris, he was in the process of changing his position, to becomeIsrael's leading establishment dove, a man who was soon to speak openly about the need for a Palestinianstate, which he considered to be a strategic advantage from Israel's point of view. The other participantswere mostly Israeli or French Jews, from the very religious to the very secular, although all were pro-Zionistin one way or another. One of them, Eli Ben Gal, seemed to have a long acquaintance with Sartre: we were latertold 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 heseemed. I recall rather needlessly and idiotically introducing Foucault to him, and I also recall that Sartrewas 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 laterlearned, was his literary executor; I was told that she was of Algerian origin. Another was Pierre Victor, aformer Maoist and co-publisher with Sartre of the now defunct Gauche prolétarienne, who had become adeeply religious and, I supposed, Orthodox Jew; it stunned me to find out later from one of the journal'sassistants that he was an Egyptian Jew called Benny Lévy, the brother of Adel Ref'at (né Lévy), one of theso-called Mahmoud Hussein pair (the other being a Muslim Egyptian: the two men worked at Unesco and as 'MahmoudHussein' wrote La Lutte des classes en Egypte, a well-known study published by Maspero). There seemedto 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 forSartre. Although he had spent time in Germany and had written not only on Heidegger, but on Faulkner and DosPassos, Sartre knew neither German nor English. An amiable and elegant woman, Von Bülow remained at Sartre'sside for the two days of the seminar, whispering simultaneous translations into his ear. Except for onePalestinian from Vienna who spoke only Arabic and German, our discussion was in English. How much Sartreactually understood I shall never know, but it was (to me and others) profoundly disconcerting that heremained 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 orso - was a very elaborate affair taken at a restaurant some distance away; and since it had been rainingnon-stop, transporting everyone in cabs, sitting through a four-course meal, then bringing the group backagain, took about three and a half hours. So on the first day our discussions about 'peace' lasted for arelatively short time. The themes were set out by Victor without any consultation with anyone else, so far asI could see. Early on, I sensed that he was a law unto himself, thanks no doubt to his privileged relationshipwith Sartre (with whom he occasionally had whispered exchanges), and to what seemed to be a sublimeself-confidence. We were to discuss: (1) the value of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (this was CampDavid time), (2) peace between Israel and the Arab world generally, and (3) the rather more fundamentalquestion of future coexistence between Israel and the surrounding Arab world. None of the Arabs seemed happywith this. I felt it leapfrogged over the matter of the Palestinians. Dakkak was uneasy with the whole set-upand left after the first day.

As that day wore on, I slowly discovered that a good deal of negotiating had gone on beforehand to bringthe seminar about, and that what participation there was from the Arab world was compromised, and henceabridged, by all the prior wheeling and dealing. I was somewhat chagrined that I hadn't been included in anyof this. Perhaps I had been too naive - too anxious to come to Paris to meet Sartre, I reflected. There wastalk of Emmanuel Levinas being involved, but, like the Egyptian intellectuals whom we'd been promised, henever showed up. In the meantime all our discussions were being recorded and were subsequently published in aspecial issue of Les Temps modernes (September 1979). I thought it was pretty unsatisfactory. We werecovering 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 babbleabout Islam and the veiling of women. At the time I did not regret her absence; later I was convinced shewould 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 disconsolateand remaining totally uncommunicative, egg and mayonnaise streaming haplessly down his face. I tried to makeconversation with him, but got nowhere. He may have been deaf, but I'm not sure. In any case, he seemed to melike a haunted version of his earlier self, his proverbial ugliness, his pipe and his nondescript clothinghanging about him like so many props on a deserted stage. I was very active in Palestinian politics at thetime: in 1977 I had become a member of the National Council, and on my frequent visits to Beirut (this wasduring the Lebanese civil war) to visit my mother, regularly saw Arafat, and most of the other leaders of theday. I thought it would be a major achievement to coax Sartre into making a pro-Palestinian statement at sucha '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 forthe 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 athim, get an intermittent nod or two, then they'd come back. Meanwhile every member of the seminar wanted tohave his or her say, making it impossible to develop an argument, though it soon enough became clear thatIsrael's enhancement (what today is called 'normalisation') was the real subject of the meeting, not the Arabsor the Palestinians. Several Arabs before me had spent time trying to convince some immensely importantintellectual of the justice of their cause in the hope that he would turn into another Arnold Toynbee or SeanMcBride. Few of these great eminences did. Sartre struck me as worth the effort simply because I could notforget his position on Algeria, which as a Frenchman must have been harder to hold than a position critical ofIsrael. I was wrong of course.

As the turgid and unrewarding discussions wore on, I found that I was too often reminding myself that I hadcome to France to listen to what Sartre had to say, not to people whose opinions I already knew and didn'tfind specially gripping. I therefore brazenly interrupted the discussion early in the evening and insistedthat we hear from Sartre forthwith. This caused consternation in the retinue. The seminar was adjourned whileurgent 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 tothe table by the visibly irritated Pierre Victor, who announced with the portentousness of a Roman senator: 'DemainSartre 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 writeentirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment - praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in themost banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or aboutterritory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similarin many ways to French practice in Algeria.