WILLIAM PHILLIPS
515
The piece on Sartre in the current issue of
Partisan Review
goes
into Sartre's philosophy, fiction, and politics . But I should like to add
a note on the ideas that tied the facets of his life and work together.
In this respect, he lived, as they say, at the right time. France was
torn politically and intellectually .
It
was steeped in shame and guilt.
It was ambivalent about its past and uncertain of its future.
It
lacked
a national will. Conservatives were looked at with suspicion because
of the collaboration, while the communists who had been active in
the resistance became a symbol of activism, though a support of
them required a suppression of the knowledge about the nature of
the Soviet regime. France needed a figure who could be a symbol of
the personal freedom to act and the philosophical necessity to do so.
Sartre supplied this need by ostensibly combining the idea of free–
dom he extracted from existentialism with the historical compulsion
he thought he found in Marxism .
But he never could fuse these two opposing myths successfully.
This is why all his life he shuttled between supporting the Com–
munist Party and the Soviet Union and distancing himself from
them. He was in effect an inconstant fellow traveller. Sometimes he
even condoned the most barbaric Soviet acts. Early in the fifties he
broke with Camus, who insisted on exposing Gulag. Yet later in his
life he was outspoken - along with Simone de Beauvoir - in his sup–
port ofIsrael, for which he received the customary abuse of the com–
munists .
I think this split in Sartre's political philosophy and in his
political activities had much to do with the promotion of his glitter–
ing career, though we should not underestimate his great intellectual
gifts and his flair for displaying himself. But this failure to integrate
himself may also have affected the quality of his philosophy and his
fiction , and might also be the reason why his politics were neither
original nor admirable.
As for Simone de Beauvoir - now being elevated by the pub–
licity being lavished on this odd and charismatic couple, whose ap–
parent ability to combine freedom and necessity in their love life
must be envied by many people - the disciple is clearly below the
master in talent and accomplishment. She was a free-wheeling disci–
ple and lover. Her novel about her love life in America was probably
the best thing she wrote - though a bit too literal . Her
The Second Sex
has to be seen as an early example of feminist writing, full of insights
but also of serious contradictions. Her book on America was studded
with preconceived anti-American notions and factual errors that
