Good as her Word: Selected Journalism. Lorna Sage

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       Last testament

      Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR TRANSLATED BY PATRICK O’BRIAN

      THIS BOOK IS A deliberate affront to conventional notions of privacy and dignity. It’s an exact, stoical account of Sartre’s disintegration during his last 10 years, and in writing it Simone de Beauvoir is testifying, with a kind of obstinate scrupulosity, to their shared freedom from all such conventional decencies as would – for example – keep a great man’s image ‘intact’.

      ‘Honesty suited us,’ she said in a 1973 interview – as though too much truth might be damaging in less extraordinary lives. And there’s something of the same pride in the writing here. Sartre’s dying, you are meant to feel, is watchable because he had himself unfolded the possibilities of his experience (in the books, in his political life) so honestly. The book is as much a matter of keeping the record straight as a labour of love, from this point of view, and indeed the refusal of sentimental language is itself part of the pain of the thing.

      We start in 1970, with Sartre at 65, in a frenzy of activity, involved with the militants, the Maoists in particular. Protest meetings, speeches, articles, manifestos, demonstrations, jostle with his work on Flaubert. He is working to redefine the role of the intellectual, in terms of ‘decentralising and concrete’ alliances when, out of the blue, come the first cruel intimations that old age means to decentralise him in its own way: at the start only hints of dizziness and vertigo; then in May of the following year a slight stroke, that pulls his mouth sideways in the night; and in July, another.

      Still, he’s most inconvenienced by terminal problems with his remaining teeth. He resurrects himself, almost magically. At the same time, he suffers from incontinence, leaving behind occasional small puddles that could be blamed on the cat, if there was a cat. You get the sense that the people around him now start to divide into two groups – those intimate (mostly women) friends, de Beauvoir above all, who read the signs; and the activists and literary contacts who see him as a figurehead, a spokesman, a signatory, and through whom he maintains a kind of collusion with youth.

      Since de Beauvoir insists on the material truth, her focus shifts more and more onto the daily business of living (dying), away from the political life and the projects. They go on, but at a painful distance after the third stroke, in 1973, which leaves him for the first time undeniably mentally damaged, ‘wandering’, haunted by phantom appointments, and wearing ‘a fixed smile of universal kindness’ upon his face, ‘caused by a slight paralysis of the facial muscles’. Worse blows follow: the progressive failure of his eyesight, which divorces him from the world of books; the last cigarette, the never-quite-last whisky; the diabetes. All this interspersed with happy but no longer believable periods of recovery, travel, talk.

      One of the things that de Beauvoir most wants to insist on is the way the style of life they’d evolved held up under the strain. The women friends that surrounded Sartre shared him with her, as usual, and shared something of her dread. And he was helped, supported, ‘coddled’ even, without being immobilised or isolated. Until nearly the end he lived in ‘vagrant’ style, which removes some of the bitterness from her account of the closing stages of his public career – the legs that won’t carry him on marches, his being increasingly ‘spoken for’ by others, in particular by Pierre Victor, under the guise of the ‘dialogue’ with a new generation he so prized.

      She tried, she says, to persuade herself that he had somehow ‘chosen’ his death, but she failed. True, he had driven himself obsessively, but he was not ‘the master of his fate’. When the end came in 1980 she wanted him lied to, and was grateful for the drugs that blurred his consciousness. At the funeral, ‘I told myself that this was exactly the funeral Sartre had wanted, and that he would never know about it.’

      His dispersal was finally complete. The only kind of consolation she allows herself is his afterlife in words: here (in the second part of the book) she transcribes a series of taped conversations they had in 1974, as a substitute for the work he could no longer do, in which she prompted him to gather his thoughts, once again, on writing, childhood, sexuality, and time.

      It is a sceptic’s testament – a sort of upside-down version of those confessions and conversions priests like to extract from atheists on their death-beds. What de Beauvoir extracts is a set of casual and irreverent reflections on the necessity of living in the present. Or even the future:

      I’ve always thought … that you don’t have experience, that you don’t grow older. The slow accumulation of events and experiences that gradually create a character is one of the myths of the late nineteenth century.

      He congratulates himself on belonging to old age, at least in the sense that ‘I’m not an adult any more’ and ‘only faintly’ male. ‘Adult,’ ‘male’ sex, we learn, he never really enjoyed (‘I was more a masturbator of women than a copulator’) perhaps because he disliked ‘letting СКАЧАТЬ