Don't get the wrong idea. I hate publishing parties and hardly ever go to them. Typically they are hot and sweaty and the wine is warm, and most people who work in publishing are not very attractive. I have difficulty hearing what people say and my own voice seems to recede down my throat so I can't make myself heard either. I lose all confidence in what I'm saying and see people want to edge away. We look into each others' and know we have mo interest in talking to each other. The names of even my oldest and dearest friends disappear from my mind completely and beyond all recall the moment I'm required to introduce them.
The only time I wanted to go to publishing parties all the time was when I was a bookseller and impoverished enough to jump at the chance of a free drink, and I was also on the pull, which gave parties a point – though I don't think it over worked.
But I really enjoyed the party we held for Carol Seymour-Jones to celebrate publication of A Dangerous Liaison – her joint biography of Sartre and de Beauvoir.
Carol has deserves the wonderful reviews she's had in all the nationals. She had the lead review in the Sunday Times and the review in the Observer was everything you'd want. She has really captured, she really promotes the glamour of the intellectual life – you want to be in the Deux Magots when Sartre waddled fatly in. All this is exhilarating partly because it's quite alien to English culture. (Lytton Strachey first delineated English anti-intellectualism in his biographical sketch of General Gordon, and nothing's changed.)
I met Philip Johnston,
deputy editor of the Telegraph, genial and pugnacious in the way of journalists
who still remember
Hannah, a colleague, made a speech with a good joke in it in which she seemed to be talking about Jordan and Peter Andre but turned out to be talking about de Beauvoir and Sartre. We toasted Carol. There was a portly gentleman who was very taken with Hannah and another colleague, Rina, and kept bearing down on them with gleaming eyes and asking me if all women in publishing are this beautiful? He said, more than once, that he was allowed to say these things because he was gay. I wasn't sure I believed him.
His partner – or at least the woman he arrived and left with – was a film producer and we wondered whether Carol's book would make a film, and if so, who would play the leads? I suggested Emma Thompson and Roy Kinnear.
How shifty was Sartre? He seems to have found in Simone someone with whom he could be completely honest about his sexual inclinations. (A few years ago I commissioned Angela Lambert's biography of Eva Braun, fascinated by the idea of someone seeing Hitler through the idea of love – what would that look like? I was also fascinated by Angela's friendship with Dennis Potter, and, talking about this she once told me that men have all sorts of sexual inclinations they are ashamed of and felt they had to keep secret, but that women would understand. Oh yeah? Simone de Beauvoir, Angela and who else?)
Being and Nothingness was one of my favourite books as a student. I still have my copy, well thumbed and with all the good bits underlined (!) Years later I invested - very heavily, there being no cheap, student edition - in a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time, and I think that I came to the conclusion that large parts of Being and Nothingness were little more than parts of Being and Time translated into French. (There was guesswork involved, because I was reading both in English, but you know what I mean.)
But for my money Sartre's plays and novels, especially La Nausee have stood the test of time. I love the French tradition – going back to Voltaire - of using narrative, in a very overt way, as a vehicle for exploring and dramatizing philosophical ideas - something I was aiming to replicate in my own book.
I think La Nausee is extremely important, because it is the most honest account, down to a visceral level, of what it feels to live life believing that it has no meaning, apart from what we choose to give it. I reckon that most people who hold life to be meaningless on an intellectual level don't allow the implications to work into their lived experience in a way which is honest or – as Sartre would say - authentic. If you do so, as I did for a short while as a student, life is extremely painful, and this is what La Nausee portrays.
Sartre couldn't keep it up for very long, and I suspect it's difficult to do so without risking mental illness.
Reminds me that have been times in my own life when I would've thought my book drivel from beginning to end.
That was before the great waves of dimethyltrtamine began to roll on down.
Hallelujah.
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