450
PARTISAN REVIEW
world, wntmg articles and books calculated to influence Com–
munism from outside.
This part of his life was governed by his fame and his eagerness
to be useful. Because he attracted so much attention from the media,
his presence was constantly in demand, and he was generous with it,
but a discontinuity grew up between his public life and his writing.
The young Sartre cared enormously about his relationship with his
readers . He revised, reshaped, rewrote energetically, often following
Simone de Beauvoir's canny advice, and in 1946 he maintained that
the author's work is incomplete until the reader has collaborated by
letting the book slowly disclose itself until it is "a unified object" (so
termed in his essay
Q:uest-ce que c'est que la litterature).
But once Sartre
had become a public man his needs changed. Some energy went into
maintaining his image. Should he visit the United States during the
Vietnam War? Should he reject the Nobel Prize? Should he declare
himself in favor of Israel's survival as an independent state? These
decisions were not taken without careful calculation about how his
supporters would react. No longer depending on books to give him a
relationship with the public, he no longer worried about whether
readers would - or could - collaborate with him. Writing had become
a private activity. He even took to working in his room instead of
writing in cafes. He had always been careless about losing manu–
scripts; he became less interested in whether his books were pub–
lished, or if published, read, or if read, understood. Few people can
have read the million and a quarter words that make up his Flaubert
biography, and still fewer can have digested them. There was no
question, later, of cutting, revising, reshaping, to make a book more
accessible; what mattered to Sartre was the relationship he had with
his own intellect while sitting at his desk.
Though the best of his work is important, his importance
depends no less on his central position in European intellectual
history since the vogue for existentialism, which started in 1945. He
could not have remained in this position for thirty-five years if he
had been averse to either inconsistency or opportunism. His uneven
trajectory illustrates the problem of the intellectual caught between
the impossibility of having and the impossibility of not having a rela–
tionship with the Communist Party. Even his philosophical pro–
nouncements were liable to be adulterated by
realpolitik.
In 1957,
when he decreed that existentialism could hand itself over to Marxism
if only Marxism would "take on the human dimension [the existen-
