HUMOUR . . .POSSIBLY FOOD-RELATED

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir Had A Weird But Intriguing Relationship . . . Did She Ever Try His Tuna Casserole?

A profound, but absurd question.

I took half a semester of Philosophy 101 in college so, of course, I know everything about Sartre and Existentialism and how life is absurd and much weirder than we think.

( I would have completed the semester, but it all became empty and hollow. I preferred instead to examine the void I felt while imbibing the juice of grapes at the Jolly Roger, a congenial and nearby watering hole.)

Anyway, Sartre is all about how life isn’t really what we assume it to be. I am not sitting down to eat at the dinner table, for example, I’m sticking my legs under pieces of a chopped-up tree and stuffing my mouth with bits of dead animal and some plant matter. . . I’ll get to the tuna casserole in a bit.

Take the character in Sartre’s novel, Nausea, who gets on a tram, and suddenly the seat he has just taken is not a seat at all but the bloated belly of a dead donkey.

Really, how much of that could you take before you started gibbering?

Ask Simone de Beauvoir — whose memoirs and books I definitely prefer. She and Sartre had a fifty-year relationship. They’re buried together in Paris. How did she stick it out? It couldn’t have been easy.

Simone: “Breakfast, darling? An omelette, perhaps?”

Sartre — “Non. Omelette in its traditional form is bourgeois. I will make one out of cigarette, some coffee, and four tiny stones.”

Call me shallow, but I think Sartre would have got on my nerves pretty quickly. Short, blind in one eye, and indifferent to personal hygiene and dental care, yet he liked his women to be pretty.

“Were you ever attracted by an ugly woman?” de Beauvoir asked in a letter — they were big letter writers. “ Truly and wholly ugly?” he responds. “No, never.”

So only pretty women and only those who didn’t annoy him with female prattle about ideas. “I’m bored out of my mind when I have to converse in the realm of ideas,” Sartre said.

On the plus side, he’s described in various biographies as generous, very funny, and a big fan of drinking and talking all night. Except, of course, when he was seducing other women.

Apparently, de Beauvoir also liked to drink and talk and seduce — other men and a few women — which maybe explains why she stuck around. And, although they were viewed as a couple, they led independent lives, met in cafés where they wrote their books and were free to enjoy extracurricular relationships — as long as they told each other everything. That was the agreement.

But come on — surely they weren’t out carousing and seducing every night? Weren’t there a few nights when they just stayed home — either his or hers — stuck their legs under pieces of a chopped-up tree and enjoyed a home-cooked meal?

Something bourgeois and domestic.

Tuna casserole, let’s say.

Well, yes. And I just happen to have Sartre’s recipe.

Tuna Casserole a la Sartre Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish Instructions: Place the casserole dish in a cold oven.

Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever.

Think about how hungry you are.

When night falls, do not turn on the light.

It wasn’t a great success, as Satre’s later writings revealed.

While this recipe expresses a void, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish?

I am becoming more and more frustrated.

Oh well, win some, lose some. I hope Simone was at least able to enjoy a little wine with the meal.

Credit for the omelet and the tuna casserole recipes belong to a 1987 piece, by Marty Smith, The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook, for the Free Agent, a Portland Oregon Alternative Newspaper.

I came across it while looking for a real tuna casserole recipe. Bourgeois, I know. But occasionally one wants such things . . . it helps calm the existential dread.

The cookbook also has an enigmatic, but ultimately meaningless recipe for a Black Forest cake containing five pounds of cherries and a live beaver. See details below.

Speaking, or writing, of the strange and existential, de Beauvoir would probably have felt quite at home with Salvadore Dali — the entrance to his house in Port Lligat, Spain is guarded by a polar bear.

The rest of the house is equally bizarre.

Jerry Hall, the ex-partner of Mick Jagger, now married to Rupert Murdoch, once had lunch in Paris with Sartre and de Beauvoir. She was very young. She also hung out with Dali.

“ He wanted to film me nude running through his garden wrapped in white chiffon. I didn’t feel comfortable doing it, but I wish I had.”

Here’s another food story — maybe slightly more approachable than the tuna casserole. Or not: