Books
TALENT AND CAREER OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
L'ETRE ET LE NEANT.
Par Jean-Paul Sartre. Gallimard.
L'AGE DE RAISON. LE SuRSIS.
Par Jean-Paul Sartre. Gallimard.
I
T IS
reported that an overflow crowd of several thousand were turned
away from a recent lecture by Sartre in Paris. New York would require
Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby at the Paramount to produce the same
result. This is a tribute to France, where a literary leader can be a public
figure, but even in France the quality and degree of Sartre's publicity
point to something new in French letters, especially when we compare
his to the literary leadership in previous generations. Mallarme was a
leader, and of the most important kind, but he created a circle of dis–
ciples and not a public movement. Valery, as Academician and public
guardian of the French spirit, and Gide, as moralist, became leaders
for a wider audience, but scarcely swayed a general public. Proust was
dead at the time he could have been a leader.
If
Sartre appears a de–
flated figure after these names, I make the comparison only on the basis
of common leadership. But this in itself is a remarkable phenomenon,
since leadership in letters now requires different qualities and confers
a different status upon the writer-and in France, too.
The leader, for one thing, must now be incomparably more busy:
he launches a magazine, has political views, temporizes with the Com–
munist Party, gives lectures, pours out at least two volumes a year: plays,
essays, or novels. Valery, Gide, and Proust were
rentiers,
sons of the
bourgeoisie, and they raised the happy accident of leisure into a prin–
ciple of the literary work. The literary work exacted a concentrated
withdrawal, the gestation of long silence and infinite strokes of retouch–
ing. But now, if the bourgeoisie still exists in western Europe, it is by
the skin of its teeth, and it no longer dares to lay down its values as
the values of the nation. Sartre's doctrine of
literature engagee
does not
spring full-armed from his existential philosophy; it also reflects a change
going on in French society-a change ambiguous and uncertain, whose
immediate future we cannot precisely measure, but which already places
the literary leader in a different relation to his public.
Another historical event raises Sartre to his present eminence: the
French Resistance. The Resistance required an heroic and secular philo–
sophy, in which heroism is born out of absolute despair, out of the
experience of nothingness, and Sartre, ready with his version of Heideg–
ger, became the man for that hour. Except for the Communists, whose
