244
PARTISAN REVIEW
almost single intense lines, single curves of action, so to speak, illustrating
separately cowardice, Lesbianism, infanticide. After a certain point they
have no surprises for us, they are without contingency-and this from an
author who denies the existence of "character" as a fixed thing. Cocteau,
handling the same theme, might have let it degenerate into a great deal
of wisecracking, but the play would have abounded in extraordinary
strokes of theare, discoveries, surprises, situations within situations; Sartre
creates, instead, a melodrama-perhaps a little too "well-constructed"–
that drives straight ahead, without pause, along a single line of action.
We confirm here what was observed of
La Nausee:
Sartre succeeds
most
.~urely
where the union of philosopher and creative writer is most
intimate. The writer is always drawing secret drafts on the credit of
the philosopher. This dependence, which in itself is no fault, is never–
theless, in Sartre's case, a sign of his narrower talents. What we do not
get from him are those happy strokes of contingency-the faculty of
abounding and arbitrary invention-which, without going to the greatest
novelists, we can also find in his contemporaries, Malraux or Faulkner.
Sartre attempts to cut loose from this philosophic background in
his last two novels,
L'Age de Raison
and
Le Sursis
(which are volumes
I and II of a trilogy,
Les Chemins de la Liberte).
True, the hero is a
young teacher of philosophy, who seems to bear a certain resemblance
to Sartre himself, and the theme of the novel, the search for human
liberty, is central to Sartre's philosophy. But for the actual content and
form (or formlessness) Sartre throws over ideas for raw experience.
The influence of the American novel triumphs. Here are the raw chunks
of reality so dear to the hearts of American novelists: banal and mean–
ingless conversations, characters wandering in and out, bars and dance–
halls. American fiction is the African sculpture of French writers. A
novel by Steinbeck or Dos Passos has the same fascination of the primi–
tive and exotic that a Gold Coast carving had for the French painters at
the beginning of the century. But
caveat lector!
these last novels of
Sartre are grim reminders that one cannot read Steinbeck and Dos
Passos as great novelists with impunity.
L'Age de Raison,
the first of the trilogy, manages at least to be
in–
teresting reading: it has some form, a single plot, rather skillfully con–
trived in parts, and one interesting character: a malicious homosexual
who is fond of cats, disgusted physically by the presence of a pregnant
girl, whom he nevertheless marries in order to satisfy his longings for
self-torture. But what happens to this character is typical of the novel:
Sartre is in too much of a hurry to make him fully credible, and he
remains a kind of immense melodramatic caricature.
The novel affords, ip.cidentally, a painful revelation that Sartre is
well along the road to Stalinism. The noblest character in the book is a
Communist, Brunet, who invites the hero to join the Party with the
