observations of Lagache on the role of respiratory rhythm in auditory
hallucinations” (Ion 105 n.). It was to his former classmate at the ENS,
Daniel Lagache, that Sartre turned for a drug-induced experience to
further his inquiry into imaging consciousness. In January 1935 ,at
Sartre’s request, his psychiatrist friend injected him with the hallucino-
gen mescaline. The result was a “bad trip.” For the next six months,
Sartre suffered from depression as well as the delusion that, among other
things, he was being pursued by large crustaceans. This condition came
abruptly to an end, as Beauvoir recounts, when he declared that he was
“tired of being crazy.” That remark betrays a voluntarist strain in
Sartre’s thought that recurs at various junctures, as when, for instance,
he insisted that people simply let themselves become seasick.
This experience came in the midst of a period of self-doubt and
fatigue. Soon to celebrate his thirtieth birthday, Sartre, who at age
22 had recorded in his diary that if a person is not famous by 28 he
never will be,^27 was still relatively unknown. Mescaline aside, his depres-
sion was intensified by a very complex romantic entanglement, lasting
for several years, with a former student of Beauvoir’s in Rouen, Olga
Kosakiewiecz. Olga’s stormy relationship with both Beauvoir and Sartre
was recounted in Beauvoir’s first successful novel,She Came to Stay
( 1943 ). Sartre’s connection with Olga was of sufficient intensity to cause
Beauvoir to feel her own relationship with him threatened. Even during
the war years, whether writing from the Front or visiting Paris on leave,
Sartre would not always inform the one woman what he was writing to
the other or let them both know precisely when he was in town. As Annie
Cohen-Solal observes, “Olga remains one of the two or three passions of
Sartre’s life.”^28 His adopted daughter, Arlette, admits that his “love for
Olga haunts theWar Diaries[Carnets]” (CDG-F, 276 n.).
But in the midst of this emotional turmoil and perhaps as a way of
taming it, Sartre managed to work on his “factum” on contingency and,
(^27) He was quoting the Swiss aesthetician Rodolphe To ̈pffer: “I can appreciate the extent of my
disappointment [with my writing] today, when I recall that at twenty-two I’d noted down in
my diary this dictum from To ̈pffer, which had made my heart beat faster: ‘Whoever is not
famous at twenty-eight must renounce glory forever.’ A totally absurd dictum, of course, but
one which threw me into agonies. Well, at twenty-eight, I was unknown. I’d written nothing
good, and if I wanted ever to write anything worth reading I had my work cut out for me”
28 (CDG-E^76 –^77 ).
Life 106.
94 First triumph:The Imagination