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COMMUNICATIONS
doned. Should intellectuals fail in their ultimate responsibility, or have
recourse to petty bourgeois escape mechanisms (Sartre gives his own
work on Flaubert as a likely example), their bad faith will have been
established once and for
all.
And they will become, as he puts it, bor–
rowing the idiom, part of the problem, since they have chosen not to
be part of the solution. (Sartre alludes
~o
to
his
own record. He has,
it seems, done some of the things he calls for.)
What are we to make of this, remembering that Sartre's creden–
tials as a Marxist and an existentialist are impressive and, perhaps,
unique?
It can be said at once that he seems innocent, and, at the same
time, self-derogating to an unusual degree. He is innocent when he as–
sumes that physical risk is,
if
not quite a value in itself, the test of the
authenticity of one's position. Unfortunately, it is not. Some fascists
have been willing to die for (or in spite of) their views and some Marx–
ists have been cowards. Of the leading German existentialists, we need not
speak. Sartre not only overrates a certain kind of courage, he seems
to be confusing courage with truth. Going into the streets may be for
Women you've met. Women you are
about to meet. Women, and their men,
linked together by longing and despair
in fifteen superb stories about girlhood,
love, sexual initiation, motherhood,
and middle age. "Stories," as John
Kenneth Galbraith described an earlier
collection, "both entertaining and ele–
gant-exactly half-way between
Salinger and O'Hara."
$6.50
THE WAY IT
ISNOW
Stories
by Sallie Bingham
THE VIKING PRESS
i
