RONALD HAYMAN
451
tialist project] as the basis for anthropological knowledge," he was
behaving like the leader of a small country offering to make a deal
with an irresistibly aggressive neighbor- he was an ideological Doll–
fuss trying to negotiate with a Communist Hitler. Wanting to change
Marxism, Sartre believed that his best chance lay in offering a con–
ciliatory package; had he succeeded, his main importance would
have been as a political philosopher, but he failed .
Even if he solved none of the problems he tackled, he plunged
into them more deeply than anyone of comparable intellectual acuity,
and it will go on being impossible to ignore him as a model. He con–
fronted not only the difficulties created by the divergence of Soviet
practice from Marxian theory but also the problems produced by the
disintegration of the great empires, while, in his eagerness to be
useful, he experimented in different ways of making both his literary
activity and his physical presence into political weapons. Like Brecht
but unlike Flaubert or D. H. Lawrence, he cared too much about
public issues to immerse himself in fiction about personal relation–
ships . Though he theorized authoritatively about commitment in lit–
erature, he became-no less than other committed writers-a rope in
a tug-of-war between the compulsion to develop his artistic potential
and the obligation to exert influence through didactic writing and
political action.
He was not ineffectual. In France he had more influence than
anyone else over intellectual opinion. He raised the temperature of
anti-American feeling, made it harder for anti-Semitism to surface,
and improved the intellectual standing of the Communist Party. He
played a major role in politicizing a whole generation of French
students, and the leaders of the 1968 rebellion had mostly absorbed
Marxism through a Sartrean filter; during the same year his in–
fluence contributed - Czech witnessess tell us - to the slackening of
oppression during the Prague Spring.
Though he managed to complete nine original plays, seven
short stories, and several screenplays, nearly all his other major proj–
ects in literature and philosophy were abandoned . How could the
subject be closed? Why should it be?
If
energy had not been diverted
into political action, he might have left less work unfinished, but this
is by no means certain. He deeply disliked bringing anything to a
conclusion. In 1938, as soon as
La Nausee
appeared in the bookshops,
he started planning to revive the central character, Antoine Roquen–
tin, in a sequel. At the end of both his major philosophical books,
