I May Explode

When he wrote the “Critique,” Sartre, a lifelong caffeine fiend and serious drinker, was also frying his brains on corydrane, a form of amphetamine mixed with, of all things, aspirin. The philosopher was using corydrane on a daily basis, first to cut through the fug of the barbiturates he was taking to help him sleep—and he was having trouble sleeping not least because of all the corydrane he was putting away—but also to keep him at his desk, churning out the “Critique.” “To put it briefly,” he told Simone de Beauvoir some time later, “in philosophy, writing consisted of analysing my ideas; and a tube of corydrane meant ‘these ideas will be analysed in the next two days.’ “

We hear a lot these days about drug abuse, but there is also such a thing as drug use—a utilitarian attitude to our body chemistry in which drugs are simply aids to productivity. That’s how Sartre treated them, and Marcus Boon argues that “several of Sartre’s works show the influence of speed,” including “The Idiot of the Family,” his incomplete and close to definitively unreadable five-volume study of Flaubert, and “Saint Genet,” which, Boon relates, “began as a 50-page preface to Genet’s writings, and ended up an 800-page book.”