PARTISAN REVIEW
in the end he became somewhat distrustful of his old determinism.
The writing in
The Stoic
is worse than ever, but Cowperwood
flourishes in the dungeon of Dreiser's rhetoric with the same hardy cheer–
fulness that helped him to endure his real imprisonment in Philadelphia.
His reality is achieved by character in action and the three books about
him
ar~
another of Dreiser's victories over the hesitations of any critical
reader.
In
The Reprieve,
the second volume of Sartre's trilogy, we are a
long, long way from Cowperwood's illustrious career, his gigantic suc–
cesses and failures, his magnificence. Sartre's characters do not advance
to tragic knowledge of the world in old age; instead they experience
stoicism, failure, and meaninglessness in their teens and at the age of
thirty the hero, Mathieu, has, by comparison with Cowperwood, almost
given up the ghost. This is fitting: Cowperwood's self-assurance, his
triumphant will, his brilliant possibilities are preserved in our day only
by paretics, locked up in asylums, where they may sell the other inmates
portions of the Brooklyn Bridge.
In
The Reprieve
there is at least one magnificent shadow and that
is Sartre himself, whom one imagines perched on a rooftop in Paris
taking down in rapid shorthand the conversation below him. And in
the evenings there he is again: sitting in a hundred cafes, the guest
in every drawing room, the historian of every love affair. He is com–
pletely democratic, so much so that he has given himself an impossible
task, an entire nation on the wing.
Sartre has chosen eight of the most dramatic days in recent history,
the week beginning with France's mobilization and ending in the Munich
pact. The prospect of an immediate war brings every man face to face
with himself; the future is uncertain, the past unimportant, the present
is everything. To create the atmosphere of national crisis everyone must
be in the book, and instead of the usual tight drama with a few actors
Sartre has devised a loose, overflowing, chaotic pageant with dozens of
characters, some of whom seem to
be
speaking at the same time. He does
not hesitate to shift from one speaker to the other without notice. The
reader, gratefully coming upon Mathieu, lvich, or Daniel, whose per–
sonality he knows from
The Age of Reason,
learns that they have not
the slightest superiority over the new characters about whom nothing
is known.
The large scope of the book enables it to suggest a great deal and
prevents it from defining anything. This is frustrating, but Sartre does
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