love, Simone Jollivet (called “Toulouse” but known as “Camille” in
communication with Beauvoir).
By then, Sartre had been introduced to philosophy. The origin of this
interest is somewhat cloudy. It is commonly believed to have resulted
from Sartre’s encounter with the work of Bergson while at the Lyce ́e
Louis-le-Grand, but in this interview Sartre ascribes it to his earlier
study under Professor Chabrier at the Lyce ́e Henri IV. It was the
comprehensiveness of philosophy that attracted him: “I concluded that
if I specialized in philosophy, I would learn about the whole world I was
going to talk about in literature” (Ce ́r 177 ). In his assessment of the
young student at the end of the term, Chabrier writes: “excellent pupil:
intellect already forceful. Adroit in discussing a question but should be a
little less self-assured.”^36
Sartre’s subsequent “novels,”Er, the Armenian andThe Legend of
Truth, were philosophical in character despite their narrative form.
Sartre admits to Beauvoir that he came to believe that “a writer has to
be a philosopher. From the moment that I knew what philosophy was, it
seemed normal to require it of a writer” (Ce ́r 178 ). And, of course, there
is his “factum” on contingency, later metamorphosed, at Beauvoir’s
urging, from a philosophical treatise to a philosophical novel and finally
baptized “Nausea” by Robert Gallimard and published to considerable
acclaim in 1938.
Bringing Sartre back to her original question, Beauvoir asks why,
inspired by the Spinoza–Stendhal duality, he did not simply write a
parallel set of works, philosophical and literary. Sartre replies simply
that, at the time, he did not want to write properly philosophical
works likeBeing and Nothingnessand theCritique of Dialectical Reason:
“I preferred that the philosophy I believed in, the truths that I relied on,
be expressed in my novel” (Ce ́r 184 ).
The composite picture
What image emerges from these accounts? Despite the fact that they
progressively illuminate the same subject across the decades, it is pre-
mature to apply to Sartre the method of phenomenological description
(^36) Cited by Ronald Hayman,Writing Against. A Biography of Sartre(London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1986 ), 42.
The composite picture 17