Had a play given a reading in Paris today.

Congratulations!

By the way, I saw your father in “A Walk in the Sun” and “I Love Trouble” this week.

 

Can I be Frank? Or Sam? Or Charlie?

You’re a better person when you’re outside P&R. Just saying.


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Think I woulda liked your old man...

((At age 45, on his affair with 16-year-old Tuesday Weld] If there wasn't such a difference in our ages I'd ask her to marry me. That and her mother are the only things that stop me.))

 

That was an excellent war movie. Even the title is great. I can’t believe I’d never seen it before.

 

Very impressed, congratulations.

My French Parisian grandfather did business in American in the twenties and thirties, where he tried his hand at writing plays for amateur performances in a few American cities. It was the vogue in certain circles; and he spoke good English. We still have a few of his scenarios ad scripts. He dreamed of getting a show on Broadway!

Now, decades later, I'm returning to America for a different reason, but with echoes of my grfandfather . Next week I'll deliver at paper in WashingtonDC, at the annuel conférence of the North American Sartre Society. A minuscule audience, but I wil be thinking of my grandfather.

 

I tried to read Sartre several times. Gave up. His writing makes suicide look like a viable option.


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Now that is very interesting. Did you know that John Huston commissioned Sartre to write the scenario for a film he was to make, a biopic of Sigmund Freud? Simone de Beauvoir recounts the story. The couple spent some time at Huston's grand estate in Ireland, where the director had settled late in life. Sartre and Huston disliked each other from the word go. Sartre remained dressed in his ill-fitting suits and tie throughout the stay, in the middle of the Irish countryside. Huston was absent on several occasions, as he was Mater of the Hounds for the local hunt.

Sartre completed the film script and got paid. Huston chucked it -it would have made a film eight hours long- and he hired another scriptwriter to complete the scenario.

I would dearly like to read your plays, though ideally see them in Paris, which I visit every other month.

My paper at the NASS conference was based on an incident from 1965. Sartre had been invited by Cornell to give a series of talks on literature and philosophy. With a month to go, Sartre cancelled rescinded his visit, ostensibly on the grounds that America had increased its aerial bombardment over North Vietnam. The cancellation stirred interest and Sartre was subjected to a probing interview by a French current affairs weekly called Le Nouvel Observateur (still going). One of the Cornell professors wrote an open letter 'An Américain écrit a Sarte', reproving him for his cancellation. In the Nouvel Observateur, Sartre replies briefly that further discussion would be pointless, that this is a dialogue of the deaf. Thirty years later, a Cornell president gave an a commencement address in which echoes of the dispute lingered, because in his address he accused Sartre of 'wanting to keep his bands clean', citing Sartre's play 'Les Mains Sales.'

https://www.northamericansartresociety.org/ My talk is in session 5.

Texas, I think John's advice to read 'The Words' is worth following up. His wry autobiography, self-deprecating, is a good and easy book.

The NASS holds its annual conference each year in a different city. In 2018 I gave a paper at their gathering in Fredericksburg. I have grown fond of the small group of academics, mostly philosophers, who carry the flame for existentialism in the US



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Thank you, John, that's a generous invitation. I was last in Los Angeles three years ago (another conference, this time on art spoliation and restitution) and I've always enjoyed the city. Meanwhile, I'll check out Belle Vie and get back to you.

Yes, I agree with your perspective on the divide in American and European philosophies. My own divide is, roughly, two, or two and a half tendencies. The European school, rationalism vs British empiricism in the 18th and 19th century; then their outgrowths in the 20th, so phenomenology in the early European 20th century vs Anglo-American analytic schools; the 'half' is as in Wittgenstein, the philosophy of language, more Anglo than Continental. Meanwhile, I'm going to look up Fritz Perls.

 

I wish I was a better man and could read Sartre. But at 70, I’m not interested in philosophy. All I want to do is drive or dance.





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