(Film 24 ). This reflects the idealism that had plagued him from the start
and which he would seek to combat as he articulated his metaphysics.
Sartre’s valedictory interview with Beauvoir, August–September 1974This exchange, given less than six years before his death, offers us a
much fuller account of how Sartre saw his life as a writer, philosopher
and public intellectual. His life-long partner, who was not above editing
their correspondence for public view, admits to having arranged these
conversations according to topic and having “suppressed” material that
was “without interest.” Despite his starting to show his age with occa-
sional lapses in attention, Sartre seems ready to greet her questions with
direct and reliable answers.
The material covering the childhood years, including Sartre’s “exile”
in La Rochelle, is roughly the same as that discussed above. We are
reminded of the works Sartre read before returning to Paris and the
crucial role played by his young friend Paul Nizan in introducing him to
“modern” literature, especially Giraudoux, whose work Nizan admired
greatly and whom Sartre learned to like as well. In fact, he wrote an early
novel inspired by Giraudoux,L’Ange du morbide, at the age of 18 , while
in his second year of preparation for admission to the ENS.^35
One senses that, as the end approaches for both of them, Beauvoir
wants to sound Sartre out on several issues that she believes he has not
discussed adequately in previous interviews or on matters that mean the
most to her. A topic that fits both categories well is Sartre’s view on the
relation between philosophy and literature, between the conceptual
and the imaginary. “When I [first] knew you, you told me that you wanted
to be both Spinoza and Stendhal” (Ce ́r 165 – 166 ). Sartre allows that his
initial interest in literature was “cultural.” But the initial transition, he
insists, occurred within his relation to the imaginary itself: the move
from childhood “cloak and dagger” tales to literary realism. His initial
stories, “Jesus the Owl” and “The Angel of Morbidity” were based on his
experiences in La Rochelle and Alsace respectively. What he called his
first “novel,”Une De ́faite, though modeled on the triangle of Nietzsche,
Wagner and his wife, Cosima, is actually inspired by Sartre’s first serious
(^35) Ibid., 44 – 49.
16 The childhood of a genius