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 Fleet Street as a lost and very drunken Eden.
It seems that David Brent management types are taking over newspapers too. We
said ain't it awful, and PJ said he'd threatened to throw one of them out of a
window, and I thought 'hats off'.
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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