BOOKS
639
visible already in
Nausea
but which was most difficult when Sartre
became more "political" after the war. The writer must always write,
and yet for Sartre writing and the function of the intellectual were
always highly suspect. He could never get beyond the idea that liter–
ature is in a profound sense Proustian, always referring back to itself
before it refers to or depicts the world "outside."
What Is Literature?
condemns a whole tradition of French literature; above all modern
poetry, but avant-garde self-referential fiction as well. Even while
Sartre put forward the idea of a necessary "engaged" literature, it
was clear that for him the intellectual, the writer, was somehow
tainted, that his (the intellectual's - but also therefore Sartre's) work
never had the solidity or necessity of the product of manual labor.
Sartre was always quick to condemn himself, along with the others,
for his bad faith as a writer-a writer who could sit back and write
while others fought and died- but the only way to get out of that bad
faith was to analyze it, in other words to write about it. After all,
Sartre had to face up to the truth that he was only an intellectual and
to take responsibility for it. His only weapon against writing was
more writing. The bad faith became worse the more he attempted to
write his way out of it. Reams of paper flew; his public persona con–
tinued to inflate, but the self-analysis (carried out mainly through
the analysis of his doubles, the various writers who were the subjects
of his biographies) only increased in severity. His writing, suppos–
edly directed outward, became the ultimate avant-garde self–
consuming artifact. As he became more famous and devoted himself
more to political, social, and moral questions in his public activities,
his writing became ever more self-obsessed. The public stances and
gestures, rather than being a logical consequence of the positions
taken in the writing, must, in this light, be seen as a desperate an–
tidote to the writing. Sartre was always quick to assent to accusa–
tions of his own bad faith (as he does throughout his autobiography,
The Words)
as a way of staying one step ahead of his critics, but this
victory in the end was hollow.
We can say, then, that Hayman's approach to Sartre's biog–
raphy is perfectly matched by Sartre's life. His life, in fact, was
remarkably consistent. The early Sartre both practiced a hermetic,
self-reflexive, often parodic, writing style and espoused, through
that same writing style and in spite of it , a turn to the outside. The
later Sartre both practiced a turn to an exterior, purely public self,
and espoused, through his writing and in spite of himself, an ever–
exacerbated, inward turning self-analysis. Yet that consistency was
