66
PARTISAN REVIEW
writers temporarily impotent, to find the contemporary mood. That this
mood is also a fashion does not deprive it of significance; there are
patients who boast of their symptoms who are nevertheless
ill;
the theater,
of all the arts, has, with its parochial, sheltered, and rather high-minded
and unfashionable audience, been the last to succumb to the mode of the
morbid and the perverse. The fact that it now does so is perhaps an
index of the world's extremity, another example of which is to be found
in the play of Sartre,
Huis Clos,
produced in New York under the title
No Exit.
Here a modernist philosopher, to present his view of the mod–
ernist predicament (the damned soul in the locked room), resorts to
the most ancient theatrical methods. A collaborationist who is really a
coward, a society woman who is really a murderess, and a lesbian who is
really a sadist die and go to hell, which they find is simply a hotel room
where their own characters hold them prisoner as in life. Of this play,
however apt its subject, it need only be said that M. Sartre's sense of sin is
rudimentary. The crimes his characters confess to are so crude as to
appear innocent and artless-a clergyman in the course of a five-minute
solitary walk commits sins graver, more multifarious, more subtle, than
are dreamed of in M. Sartre's philosophy. Only in the acting of Ruth
Ford can a glimpse of evil be caught. She endows the society girl with
a rattling silliness and vanity that is surely more repugnant to God than
the infanticide M. Sartre ascribes to her. Those older writers, who were
not existentialists, had, even in their failing moments, a less journalistic
sense of the horror of existence.
MARY McCARTHY
