Existentialism and Excess: the life and times of Jean-Paul Sartre
GARY COX

It looked like a Hollywood funeral. Twenty-thousand mourners in the Montparnasse Cemetery, another 30,000 lining the streets thereabouts. The president himself paid his respects, staying with the body for more than an hour to make sure everyone understood the grandeur of the star who’d gone. Except that France wasn’t saying farewell to an actor. True, Jean-Paul Sartre could sound awfully like a Method School graduate as he explained how the roles we play in life are less expressions of our inner being than constituent of it. But as the cover of Gary Cox’s Existentialism and Excess shows, Sartre would never have made it in the movies. To quote John Huston (who worked with him on a screenplay about Freud), Sartre was “as ugly as a human being can be”.

Huston spoke more truly than he knew. The disinterested reader can’t finish this book without thinking its subject as wicked as a man who never actually murdered anyone could be. Brilliant though Sartre was, he was also a boor and a brute, devoid of the empathy anyone who fancies himself a moralist must surely have. Swift once joked that while he “hate[d] and detest[ed] that animal called man … [he] heartily love[d] John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth”. Sartre saw things the other way round. He loved people in the abstract. But face to face with un homme actuel, he was as mean as he looked.

With women he was even worse. When his 19-year-old cousin Annie died of tuberculosis, Sartre, who had been dating the poor girl, picked up a substitute squeeze at her funeral.