editor, Jean Paulhan, even awarded him a contract for monthly essays on
whatever topic interested him.^11 His literary career was launched.
The Diary of Antoine Roquentin
This was one of the suggested titles for Sartre’s novel in French and was
used for its British publication.^12 Though scarcely arresting, it does
describe the format of the work: the intimate revelations of a biographer
and world traveler who finds himself mired in the provincial banalities of
Bouville (Mudville), a thinly disguised depiction of the port of Le Havre,
where Sartre held his first teaching assignment.^13
We have already encountered the “solitary man” inThe Legend of
Truth. Sartre’s excessively individualist neurosis would be cured with his
mobilization in 1939. As he observed on several occasions, his participa-
tion in the war, including imprisonment in a stalag, marked a major
break in his life. He had “discovered” society.^14
(^11) Among the topics that interested him were the subjects of public lectures he had delivered
while in Le Havre on contemporary French, British and American authors such as Girau-
doux, Mauriac, Dos Passos, Faulkner and his friend Nizan. Essays on each soon began to
appear in theNouvelle Revue Franc ̧aisebeginning in February of 1938. They were later
reprinted in the first volume ofSituations. For notes on his second set of lectures at Le Havre
on the contemporary novel, dealing with Andre ́Gide, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Jules
Romains, Virginia Woolf, and briefly, John Dos Passos, seeConfe ́rence de la Lyre havraise
novembre 1932 –mars 1933 , ed. Annie Cohen-Solal and Gilles Philippe with collaboration
from Gre ́gory Cormann and Vincent de Coorebyter,E ́tudes Sartriennesno. 16 (Brussels:
Ousia, 2012 ), 35 – 162 ; hereafterCHR.
(^12) See Contat and Rybalka 1 : 52.
(^13) Cohen-Solal points out certain similarities with the home town of the Sartre family, Thiviers
in the Dordogne, southwest France. “Along with Jean-Baptiste and Annie [Simone Jollivet,
to whom the book is dedicated], Thiviers lurks everywhere throughoutNausea”(Life 90 ).
(^14) SeeL/S 44 ;Sitx: 176. Curiously, his “fraternal” relations as a Normalien, though occurring
during what he declared were the happiest years of his life, did not evince this experience of
the “social.” Perhaps this was because of the socioeconomic homogeneity of the student
population, its competitiveness, and its unabashed elitism. In what could easily be taken as a
parody of Roquentin as well as of the “solitary individual,” Paul Nizan took Sartre as the
model for the character Lange in his novelTrojan Horse: “Lange was alone with the town. It
was his fate to be alone in towns, to walk among stones which were as paralyzed as he was,
who had no more communion among themselves than he had with his fellows” (Trojan Horse,
trans. Charles Ashleigh [New York: Howard Fertig, 1975 ], 125 ). Nizan claimed that he was
depicting Brice Parain, a philosopher friend and reader at Gallimard, but Sartre did not
believe a word of it (seeOR 1658 ,n. 4 ).
140 The necessity of contingency:Nausea