BOOKS
633
Soviet Union." But for all his research, Mr. Davis seems not to
realize that before the revolution, the FSLN made clear exactly what
their ideology and goals were - and like other naive observers, he ig–
nores these or fails to take them seriously. The FSLN founders were
trained in the crude Soviet Marxism of the Stalin era, and from the
early 1970s it has been the very Soviet model the FSLN has chosen
to adopt, and which it eventually imposed on the Nicaraguan society.
He asks : "What kind of a revolution can an impoverished and
oppressed society hope to have that the United States will find
desirable and supportable?" He might have asked a different ques–
tion more profitably: What kind of revolution might Nicaragua have
had, had the self-proclaimed vanguard not used its armed might to
impose its private agenda on a once popular and broad-based
revolution? Mr. Davis's failure to ask
that
question is the fallacy of
his entire quest. Mr. Rushdie is an unabashed apologist. But it is
finally Peter Davis who serves the Sandinistas' propaganda goals far
more effectively.
RONALD RADOSH
SARTRE AND BIOGRAPHY
SARTRE: A BIOGRAPHY. By Ronald Hayman.
Simon and Schuster.
$22.95.
THE FAMilY IDIOT: GUSTAVE FlAUBERT, 1821-1857, Vol. II.
By Jean·Paul Sartre. Translated by Carol Cosman.
The University of Chicago Press,
$27.50.
It might at first seem that writing a biography of Sartre is
an impossibility, for all the obvious reasons : the vastness of his life,
the complexity of his ideas, the inappropriateness of portraying a life
of the mind through the revelation of personal, often sordid details.
On the simplest level, though, one is forced to admit that this is a
problem that confronts anyone who attempts to write the life of a
thinker. Inevitably, pages devoted to summarizing a book, a
political position, a philosophical stance, will be followed by in–
congruous details that inform us of the kind of drugs the subject was
using , with whom he or she was sleeping, where the vacations were
taken that year, and so on.
It
might make for amusing reading, but
