On the sidewalk an elderly gent, resembling a grandfatherly spaceman,

is taking short careful steps.  It is Sartre.  He is on his way to be read to,

nearly blind now.  Simone de Beauvoir is inside at their regular table.

Sartre enters, shuffles towards the interior.  I am sitting on the terrace.

Words, Sartre's account of his childhood, is open before me.  It is 1974.

As to Words . . . Sartre tells us there that he, as a child, was up against

a grandiloquent character, a kind of white-maned fraud, who happened

to be his grandfather.  He presents for our consideration that he too was a fraud.

Now the problem was this: if you attack a man that well (even if you

purposely inculpate yourself) and with that intensity and relentlessness,

you, in the act of doing it, magnify him.  The childhood that Sartre despised

is more vivid than anything he loved . . .

I think it over.  Did Sartre want his book to have that effect?  Surely not.

I write in the margin: "We are what we despise."  I cross out despise

and substitute ridicule.  I cross out ridicule and substitute criticize.

Should I take it down a notch with an adverb?  Lower it from a generalization

to a percentage statement?  What I'm getting at is this: Sartre devotes

a small book of packed prose to the demolition of his youth

but instead of demolishing it, builds it higher.  Is criticism covert love?

I could ask him . . . but don't.  He is listening to de Beauvoir.  She's reading

from Le Monde.  He seems to be cogitating over the spoken words,

but his eyes look off.   I close my copy of Words, nod to the waiter,

and leave La Coupole.   My mind is filled with questions.   How do we

write about people?   What do we say about them?  What judgments

are valid, if any?  Or do we just comment on one another endlessly?