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large-minded magnanimity of some saintly proselytizer for the Church:
"The Party does not need you, you need the Party." Brunet is repre–
sented as a "real man," who, in contrast to the indecisive hero, has
chosen himself and made his life a destiny.
What a destiny! This "real man" is, in fact, a poor boob who has
let himself become a tool of the enemy of mankind, and by his participa–
tion in a party of gangsters and assassins becomes himself an assassin
and gangster.
Will Sartre's trilogy end with the hero finding his "liberty" in the Com–
munist Party? This political naivete appears just as clearly
in
his maga–
zine,
Les Temps Modernes,
which has so far failed to print anything un–
favorable to Stalinism. Whether this be the result of naivete or Stalinist
pressure, I do not know, but the Communist Party will probably be just
as well pleased to let Sartre keep his nominal, but favorable, indepen–
dence. In New York the newspaper
PM
serves the Communist Party bet–
ter than if it were directly published under the Party's banner.
In the second volume of the trilogy,
Le Sursis
(The Reprieve), the
process of Sartre's decline proceeds further and faster. Form is completely
relaxed, the novel is shapeless, flat, painfully dull to read-one of the
worst books ever written by an author with talent. Sartre has pushed
the panoramic novel of Jules Romains and Upton Sinclair to its final
absurdity. The days of Munich, 1938, arc represented by letting a great
number of characters from all strata of society, none of whom has a
personality or real story of his own, drift across the page. Sartre aimed
perhaps to open the windows of the novel on the world in order to give
an adequate feeling of Being-in-the-world in the existentialist sense; but
instead he has kicked down the walls of the dwelling and the whole world
streams across the scene. The imitative fallacy with a vengeance. It is
like being thrown into a V-J Day mob in order to acquire a dense sense
of the historical happening.
·
From these last novels it begins to be clear why Sartre has attacked
Flaubert so viciously. The memory of Flaubert is his guilty conscience.
If
this appears too harsh, if I seem throughout to have been too severe
on Sartre, I have wished only to hold him rigorously to the standards
which his great talents, for philosophy and for literature, invite-to
separate the writer from the limelight. The trouble may also be the
result
of
the compulsion to be
engage.
'We write for our contemporaries,
we wish to miss nothing in our age,' says Sart11e; and in order to be sure it
is his contemporaries for whom he is writing, he becomes a writer in
a hurry, and in order to miss nothing, he attempts to ram the raw
material of the days of Munich down the reader's throat. But precisely
because we can never possess the whole of our historical epoch, this
doctrine of
engagement
must be inverted: having, in any case, to resign
himself to limitation and selection, the writer had better make necessity
