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PARTISAN REVIEW
His capacity for change was heightened by his awareness that
we must never expect to recognize ourselves in our completed work,
that books and actions deviate like children from parental intentions.
Sartre had an extraordinary capacity for change. Disliking the idea
of the static self and refusing to be tethered philosophically, politically,
or personally to any commitment, he believed he could transform his
life like a snake sloughing off dead skin. Even physically he changed
more than most people do, the slight, narrow-shouldered boy grow–
ing into the wide, squat man who was dubbed by his American
friends "Mr. Five-by-five." When he was twenty-four, his ambition,
he told Simone de Beauvoir, was to become both Stendhal and
Spinoza; later, applying philosophy to politics and
realpolitik
to
philosophy, he tried to negotiate a peace treaty between Marx and
Freud. When this diplomacy failed, he fell back on a gigantic biog–
raphy of Flaubert founded on a combination of Marxist and Freud–
ian insights. By then the young Sartre who never voted had turned
into the radical knight-errant who rode international airlines. The
mature Sartre never tired of demonstrating, agitating, signing mani–
festoes, making political speeches, attending rallies; though, to sea–
soned politicians, he still seemed politically immature, incurably
naive. Despite his formidable intellect, he never quite arrived at
what he called "the age of reason," at adult stability, though the
young writer who made up his mind that success would never induce
him to spend less time on cafes, cinemas, or girls, had grown into the
compulsive worker who always wore moccasins to avoid wasting
time on tying up shoelaces. But the young man who declared that all
anticommunists were swine had turned into an old man who de–
clared that the Communist Party was the worst enemy of freedom,
and the champion of individual freedom had denied freedom to the
individual.
Yet while he took an almost perverse pleasure in asserting his
freedom through protean self-transformation, he could neither learn
from his mistakes nor keep hold of his most valuable insights. He
had so much faith in his ability to form new theories that he forgot
the old ones: rather than build higher on an old foundation he would
start all over again with a new one.
Sartre had two styles of writing because he had two methods of
writing. When he wanted to achieve a polished prose, as in
Les Mots
(Words),
he would fUI only the first three lines on each page, leaving
space for multiple revisions of each sentence. Nor would he ever take
