SARTRE
VS.
PROUST
MI
journalist who had questioned Gide's manhood on the grounds
that he was "chilly" and preferred to stay indoors, wrapped in a
shawl; Sartre righteously replied "mais il y a
des
courages"-'-there
is
more than one kind of courage. Might we not say with equal
justice "11 y a
des
engagements"?
The lesson of labor, patience, self-discipline, devotion, un–
sentimental idealism involved in a work like
A la Recherche
would seem to some of us to be a sufficient commitment to
s0-
ciety. Mter
all,
it is the civilizing force which ultimately counts,
not the particular direction of it. Though Proust showed con·
siderable interest in social questions--especially the Dreyfus case
-obviously, given his temperament and build, he could no more
have cut the kind of figure Sartre does than the latter could
ef·
fectively imitate Maurice Thorez. And
do
the Calas pamphlet of
Voltaire, Zola's
j'accuse,
Gide's
Voyage au Congo
bulk as large
in
our estimation of these men as Sartre claims? Only for the tri–
vial, and essentially philistine, view which would run down
ShakespeaJI'e because of a few unthoughtful pages on women or
Jews, slight Yeats because of his inconsequential and naive reo
actionary politics.
Secondly, Sartre calls Proust flatly and unsportingly a
"pederast" (a technique he could have learned from Senator
McCarthy) , all the while knowing better,
vide
the following pas–
sage from
L'Etre et Ie N eant
:
He does not wish to allow himself to be considered as a thing. . . .
He would
be
right in fact if he understood that phrase "I am not
a pederast" in the sense of "I am not what I am". That is to say if
he declared ''To the degree that .. . I performed these acts I am a
pederast. To the degree that human reality defies all definition by
acts, I am not one."
Proust precisely reveals this human complexity by (a) ad–
mitting fairly openly that he had performed homosexual acts and
(b) in
his
novel, condemning homosexuality from a socially re–
sponsible viewpoint (not quite Sartre's- ) either · directly,- in
