Note 10

Posted by Genjo on November 9th, 2009 filed in Notes

Descriptions of Wohl vary a great deal. Indeed the few we have tend to contradict each other. The most detailed comes from the diary of April Ponsard, a student in Paris during the mid-1950s. She’d been to a seminar given by Sartre at the Sorbonne. After a long and rather rambling disquisition on the unethical behaviour of those who did not take responsibility for their own choices in life, Sartre asked for questions. Two students leapt in with convoluted and poorly prepared queries that the sage dealt with in a cursory and almost brutal manner.

Ponsard writes: ‘As he smoked his second cigarette the room became very quiet and the still air seemed to solidify around us. I noticed in one corner, slightly separate from us, a shabbily dressed but very elegant figure. His short grey hair, receding around two deep bays, framed an unruffled brow, a firm nose and a neat faintly-smiling mouth. A grey moustache and goatee beard completed a picture of someone alert, sensitive and rather removed. A kind of familiar strangeness hung about him. Part of this strangeness was the clarity of his eyes, almost the colour of dry hay in vivid sunshine, and the oriental set of his features. But he wasn’t Chinese or Mongolian or Korean because he spoke French with a German or an English accent, but he could have been a cousin to Li Po or Tu Fu.’

Ponsard describes the growing embarrassment of Sartre’s audience as no one spoke and the master waited. Eventually the familiar stranger slowly nodded his head and spoke softly: ‘Sometimes we have to accept choices that are made for us. The apple falling on a particular day and hour did not choose the head of Newton upon which to fall. The child does not choose a mother, but loves her nonetheless. The poet does not choose his muse or the dream that fuels his poem. The teacher does not choose her pupils but lavishes care upon them all. The philosopher does not choose his audience but they have chosen him and so often go away disappointed.’

At which point Sartre stubbed his cigarette on the plastic tabletop and took a gulp of water from the glass before him. All eyes were on the stranger who nodded gently, smiled very sweetly and turned to leave.

Sartre at his most caustic called out: “And who my friend, are you?” To which the stranger replied, courteously: “I am from another country. A fact over which I have no choice. My name is Wohl and I choose to leave. Au revoir.”

Sartre sneered as he often did and asked for more questions. But there were none that could be spoken. But silent questions were in everyone’s minds: who was the polite stranger with the endearing smile? where did he come from? and why was Sartre so irritated at what he’d said?’

Ponsard notes a few pages on in her diary that she met a librarian two weeks later who’d also been at the seminar and recognised the stranger as ‘Heinrich Wohl, a poor scholar and itinerant philosopher from somewhere outside France.’