Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir; Pantheon, New York.

It may hurt, but it is useful to know that in matters of foreign translations available at our publishers and bookstores, we live in a well-guarded ghetto. There are protective turrets in the ghetto’s wall, called Sartre, Beauvoir, Gunter Grass, Hein­ rich B6ll, Luigi Barzini, and a few Latin American Marxist writers whose works are eagerly bought by U.S. publishers, regardless of the rubbish they concoct. They are the foreign equivalent of, say, Norman Mailer. Since publishers hardly ever buy the rights to other non-English language books, we must live in a near­total ignorance of the truly important works—essays, novels, scholarship-appearing abroad. Browsing in bookstores from Paris to Budapest, then in New York or Chicago, is to step from a developed to an underdeveloped country.

This much to greet the publication of another futile book, Beauvoir’s farewell to Sartre. To anybody but the snob or the entomologist, the reading of these dreary memoirs and records or conversation is a waste of time. A pair of rich, comfort­ loving bourgeois-the type they supposedly detested-are presented here by the more vicious member of the couple; the pages read as if they were written by a senile and dying British lord of the 19th century: both Simone and Jean-Paul are mostly drenched in whiskey, they hop from Montparnasse cafes, bars and restaurants to restaurants, bars and cafes on the Piazza Navona, with enthusiastic side­ trips to Havana or Peking. On their circuit, they subvert, corrupt and revolutionize, mix with other culture-scum, and utter irrelevancies peddled as thought.

The book, 450 pages (one hopes the paper is recycled), consists of two parts. The first 127 pages is a “farewell,” a detailed description of Sartre’s last years, as this intellectual Pol Pot slipped into semi-coma, and only awoke to pronounce such profundities as: “I believe in illegality,” or for Simone to say of him casually that “Sartre presided over the coal-mine strike.” In the intervals of whiskeys and heavy doses of medication, Sartre helped to launch anarchistic and/or obscene magazines, visited the terror-murderer Baader in his German prison, and assisted other terrorists in their escape. The company the two kept reads like a mixture of street gang and politburo: Cohn Bendit, Alain Geismar, Gisele Halimi, Klaus Croissant, Francis Jeanson, Benni Levi-all Maoists, extreme anarchists, assassins (or their defenders), derelict professors, agitators.

The second, longer part is the transcript of tape-recorded conversations the odd couple had in and out of luxury hotels, from 1974 on. Culture-snobs will salivate and devour these pages full of the master’s intellectual tidbits. This justifies the publisher’s investment-and what else is there to worry about? Why give other than financial thought to the elucubrations of these two intellectual monsters, as they cover subjects like Sartre’s stealing, at 12, his mother’s money (he was psychologically wounded when found out), his fear of making decisions (deciding is apparently not existentialist), his sexual appetites and exploits when young, mature, and old. I repeat that of the two, the woman is far more repulsive. She exclaims: “What! You had a sexual morality? That’s pretty amusing!” Or: “Belief in God? Then one cannot be an independent man!”

For a cleansing cure, read or reread Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs, The Calf and the Oaktree.

P.S. In 450 pages there is one passage that might save the rest Some years ago I quoted those sentences in a National Review obituary of Sartre and have been sorry ever since that readers interpreted the passage as proof of Sartre’s last-minute “conversion.” Here is the passage, quoted on p. 438: “I don’t see myself [said Sartre] as so much dust that has appeared in the world, but as a being that was expected, pre­ figured, called forth. In short, as a being that could, it seems, come only from a creator; and this idea of a creating hand that created me refers me back to God. Naturally, this is not a clear, exact idea that I set in motion every time I think of myself. It contradicts many of my other ideas; but it is there, floating vaguely ….”I repeat here that these few sentences give the lie to Sartre’s entire oeuvre, to the whole atheistic existentialism. Perhaps with another companion than this fanatic female, his thought would have taken a less destructive tum.