BOOKS
LES SEQUESTRES D'ALTONA.
By
Je<'!n-P~ul S~rtre.
Jean-Paul Sartre's newest play,
Les Sequestres d'Altona,
which
opened in Paris in September 1959, brought Sartre rapidly out of the
literary eclipse into which he had fallen in France since the post-war
vogue of existentialism. Yet although Ionesco's
The Rhinoceros,
which
appeared in France the same year and was there considered a much
lesser play, has long since become a domestic American animal,
Les
Sequestres
remains virtually unknown. Knopf brought out a good transla–
tion (as
The Condemned of Altona)
in March 1961; no one noticed.
It may be too much to expect that Broadway should produce such
a fascinating and difficult play; but why should it go unread amongst
us?
Sartre, it seems, was dropped from the contemporary American
intellectual canon with the coming of Beckett, Ionesco, and the American
beats. Even earlier, the more readily digestible humanism and compara–
tive humility of Albert Camus (and perhaps his more acceptable political
views) had made America adopt Camus as the more suitable interpreter
for its youth of the heritage of the last war. Camus was the intellectual
"most likely to succeed" in creating a viable neo-Christian ethic for the
cold war-exacerbated immaturity of our American conscience. Thus
America mis-read
The Fall
as a statement of movement toward religious
faith-naively projecting its own hopes and insecurities into Camus' acid
satire of the Christian belief that confession absolves. Camus' work lent
itself to this sort of easy mis-reading. "We must not be afraid to love,"
Camus seemed to say, a statement with which few would disagree; and,
agreeing, young America hurried out to sign petitions protesting nuclear
tests and capital executions or to rejoin the church, easily reassured of
good faith.
Les Sequestres d'Altona
will not bring such facile comfort. The
reader of this play will not find himself absolved simply through a
moment of repentant self-recognition. Although Sartre intended the
play at the time most immediately as a comment on France's conduct in
Algeria, with which Sartre and other French intellectuals were to become
deeply involved a year later with the Jeanson trial and the
Declaration
on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War,
he means his
analysis of contemporary motives and actions to carry far beyond the
current French situation. As the damnation of the hero Frantz (note
the near homonymy with
la France)
accumulates, he avows, "Je suis
