BOOKS
533
FICTION CHRONICLE
THE AGE OF REASON.
By Jean-Paul Sartre. Tr(J)nslatcd by Eric Sutton.
Knopf.
$3.00.
THE CoLLECTED TALES OF
E.
M. FoRSTER.
Knopf.
$2.75.
PRINCE OF DARKNESS.
By ]. F. Powers. Doubleday.
$2. 75.
C
ERTAINLY NO ONE except the most piously reticent or shamelessly
envious could resent the appearance from time to time of those
vigorous intellectual and artistic personalities who manage to impress
their image upon their own decade, or even their own year. No matter
what their final value may be, these people, by arousing gossip and
controversy, disturbing Philistines and exhilarating college students, help
to keep alive the interest in art and to remind the world of the ex–
citement of the intellectual life. Sartre, as one of the most energetic
"personalities" of the moment, gives a certain richness to the whole
possibility of cutting a figure; he is everywhere and everything, a
philo~opher,
journalist, novelist, playwright- the very opposite of Ger–
trude Stein's warning that "it takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have
to sit around so much doing nothing.. ,.. " To some extent his ver–
satility, a quality of which Americans have always been unreasonably
suspicious and which Sartre has in many ways dignified, and his energy
make Sartre invulnerable: if you don't like him as a philosopher you
remember that he's a man of letters, and if you don't like him as a
writer you consider his merits as a philosopher, and if you don't like
him as either you must admit that, in these sullen days, he's a bright
and buoyant human being whose intellectual vitality alone is enough to
make him one of the most important living writers.
To consider one side of him, his novels and plays, Sartre is, from
the slight and inconclusive evidence of the work translated in this
country, an awkward successor to the older avant-garde tragic figures
who were primarily concerned with defending, through their work and
the force of their personalities, the very possibility of art itself, and
whose strength and foolishness came from the terrible agony of the
creative life. Undoubtedly none of our old gods would have written a
novel like
The Age of R eason,
the first volume of a trilogy, and the
weakest piece of Sartre's writing, in any form, to be translated here.
The most interesting thing about
The Age of Reason
is its medio–
crity, the fact that it is no better and no worse than it is. It just barely
gets by as an o:-dinary, naturalistic novel with a few good moments and,
surprisingly enough, no special quality; but an ordinary, naturalistic novel
is exactly the sort of project that puts the greatest strain upon Sartre's
talents.
No Exit
and
Th e Flies,
for all their limitations, at least gave him
a chance to use his brilliance in argument and did not too painfully
