Dear Jansy,
Sartre was a toad. I too was once a wide eyed adolescent and wasted too much time trying to read his l'Etre et le Neant. What a waste. But I survived. The toad actually loved that mass murderer Mao Tse Tung - well, he wasn't alone in that, was he?
Bailey is too intelligent to be swayed by that toad. By the way, I once got very angry with VN for his dismissal of such wonderful writers as Pasternak and Albert Schweitzer, the latter of whom was related to Sartre. Schweitzer's biography (forget the author's name) is fascinating. Like Einstein he was a very slow starter, but once a teacher understood how his mind worked and learned how to intrigue the young genius, there was no stopping him. I do not recall the details now,
but it seems to me that Sartre as his Alsatian cousin knew him when they were both young does not come off well at all.
Carolyn
p.s. As to VN's sado-masochistic tendencies, like Marianne Moore's toads, they are all too real. But, you know, what artist doesn't have his little quirks and/or vices? The pinch of salt that leavens the loaf and all that. Let's not try to make saints of our heroes.
* C.Kunin, you mentioned John Bailey in a recent posting. At the time I was
reminded of Iris Murdoch, whose booklet on Sartre I read while still a wide-eyed
adolescent. It occurred to me that Bailey might have been influenced
by Sartre's negative views on Nabokov - but I couldn't find the
article to indicate it to you or to check that hunch. After I re-read.
Edmund Wilson's famous article, with his mention to Nabokov's
"sado-masochistic tendencies...noted by Sartre," I was led back to that one
query of yours. It's not a very good explanation, sure, but perhaps it can
encourage others to ponder the eggs you've been offering to the
VN-L...