Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, edited and translated by John Gerassi

This is the record of a Intellectual with an In who takes a tape recorder to the feet of a Master. In the case of John Gerassi’s new book, the Master, of course, is his godfather Jean-Paul Sartre, but like other books of its kind, it’s Gerassi, the Intellectual, who gives Talking with Sartre its character and focus.

Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on whether Gerassi’s Sartre is your Sartre. Fans of Sartre the Nobel Prize-winning author of Nausea, The Wall, et al won’t necessarily find much to excite them here. Ditto for fans of Sartre the literary critic or Sartre the dense ontological theorist. But if, like Gerassi, you’re especially fond of Sartre the political philosopher and activist, or if you have the sort of voyeuristic turn of mind that thrills at watching the author of Being and Nothingness describe lunch with Picasso and then cop to relentlessly hitting on Gerassi’s mom (the book sometimes feels like highbrow A&E, Anais Nin style), you’ll admire Talking with Sartre’s ability to pin down Sartre the activist and Sartre the man in ways you’ve rarely seen in other works by and about him.

In fact, Gerassi’s strongest claim to being a worthy interlocutor for Jean-Paul, and the strongest argument for the book itself, is how intrepid Gerassi is when it comes to calling Sartre out on his obscurities and contradictions. Take for example the following exchange, one of the few in the book with a predominately literary focus:

Sartre: Men always want to discuss ideas, to tell you how they interpret something. Women tell you what they feel, what they felt. . . . But most men are a royal bore. Like Malraux. He’ll tell you why two juxtaposed colors work beautifully, but never what he feels when he looks at those two colors.

Gerassi: But all your work is made up of ideas.

Sartre: Which is why I must test them in concrete situations, hence my plays and novels.

Gerassi: So I don’t need to read Being and Nothingness if I read or go see No Exit?

Sartre: In a way that’s true.

As an interviewer, Gerassi has guts, but rarely does he have bile: throughout their conversations, succinct objections like “But all your work is made up of ideas” allow Gerassi to subtly nudge Sartre into making comments that are either surprising (did he really just get Sartre to absolve me from reading Being and Nothingness?) or unwontedly concrete for a dyed-in-the-wool French intellectual. At times, this dynamic verges on the poetic: Sartre the godlike but cryptic intelligence being constantly pulled down to the battlefield of political reality by the ever-dogged Gerassi.

The book never quite makes it as a modern-day Bhagavad-Gita, though. For one, it has little to offer to those who are uninterested or unversed in early to mid-century European political and intellectual culture. If the file in your brain marked “Trotsky” is a little thin, or your flawless understanding of the forces underlying the major acts of Charles de Gaulle’s presidency turns out to be yet another one of your vestigial undergraduate delusions, don’t expect Sartre, Gerassi, or the book’s notes to help you out. Politically and historically insightful as the book and its players often are, Talking with Sartre comes with all the pitfalls of listening to two friends who have known each other forever hash over old memories and older headlines in a Parisian cafe—fascinating as it is, the heft of shared experience weighs so much on their conversation that at times they might as well be speaking in code. Gerassi himself admits as much in his Introduction:

Obviously much that we talked about is now redundant, repetitious, even incoherent, and often refers to incidents that no longer interest either the academician or the fidgety reader. So in translating our conversations I have edited those parts out.

Depending on how familiar you are with Gerassi and Sartre’s historical, political, and social milieu, you might wish a little more had ended up on the cutting room floor.

Perhaps the book’s worst shortcoming, though, is that Sartre and Gerassi’s personal relationship distorts the focus of the book more than it colors it. Ostensibly, Gerassi, who was commissioned to write Sartre’s official biography at the time Talking with Sartre’s conversations take place, was out to get Sartre to express as coherently as possible how he reconciled being an artist with being politically engaged. At times it works, and we get brilliant monologues from Sartre on the nature of the artist’s social guilt and how political consciousness can overcome it:

[Writing] was a way of eliminating all passion from my life, which meant all real fears, all ambiguities. . . . Whatever happened, my books would be on the shelf, hence I was immortal. . . . [But then] social depression [at the political conditions of the time] threw me into the soup of mankind, alienated, exploited, insecure, terrified. . . .It made me realize that my struggle is yours and vice versa.

But more often than not, such revealing moments are interrupted or skirted around altogether by Gerassi’s need to constantly bring the conversation back Sartre’s relationship with Gerassi’s father, the painter Fernando Gerassi, or else to get Sartre’s impression of countless soirees attended by Gerassi, his father, Sartre, and mutual friends like Fidel Castro and Ernest Hemingway. This would be fine if the book were a personal memoir, or the story of Gerassi’s search for his father as a young man—in fact, some of the best sections of Talking with Sartre are Gerassi’s highly emotional “Introduction” and “Farewell,” which, interesting, don’t involve talking to Sartre at all. But as a chronicle of the intellectual progression of Sartre the Master from detached artist to engaged activist, the book offers plenty of revealing moments, but rarely manages to feel like more than the reminiscences of an Intellectual who was really really happy that he had an In with one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.

Reviewed by Lee Plaxco

Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, edited and translated by John Gerassi
Yale University Press, 2009
Paper, 336 pp, $20.00
ISBN-10: 0300159013