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famous break with Sartre and his acolytes, including de Beauvoir. In the
process of disengaging from Sartre's people, who were then ruling the
roost in literary Paris, Camus dourly pointed out that Sa de had been his–
torically the first to raise the banner of "absolute negation"-the first,
that is, "to mount a coherent offensive which fashions the arguments of
libertine thought into a unique and enormous war machine"; and
although it was clear that he took a dim view of "absolute negation,"
the effect of presenting Sade in this manner amounted-in a book
which generally took a sympathetic view of
l'hamme revalte-to
a sort
of consecration which Camus had surely not intended. In short, Sade
had emerged from the shadows; he was a figure to be reckoned with,
like Nietzsche, Lautreamont, and the other "rebels" who would con–
tinue to fascinate Camus even as he distanced himself from the fantasies
and rhetoric of his youth.
At this point, with serious publishers involved and (for all that it is
said to have no odor) smelling money, Sade was becoming something of
a growth industry, and not only in France. In the wake of Algernon
Swinburne and other decadents, the divine Marquis had long been taken
up by the avant-garde across the channel, and in Germany as well. In
the U.S. the famous Grove edition of
Justine and Other Writings
was on
its way, to be published in
1965
with a justificatory preface by Barney
Ross and a dithyrambic foreword by the translators, Seaver and Wain–
house, who hailed the book as "one of our civilization's treasures." Of
course, legal barriers were still formidable, but these (as the more elderly
among us will recall) were triumphantly being stormed in country after
country, with the assent if not at the instigation of the United States
Supreme Court-with the result that practically the entire opus became
available to the general public during the postwar years and Sade finally
received his apotheosis: the prestigious Pleiade edition of
[990-1995,
with a book-length introduction by Michel Delon-and no apologies to
Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Racine, or any of the other
luminaries for which the Pleiade had originally been designed. I cannot
recall that anyone has ever again raised the idea of burning Sade, even
in jest, with the noble exception of Roger Shattuck-of whom more
later. The point of the Pleiade edition,
inter alia,
was simply to recognize
that the hapless descendant of Saint Louis, so cruelly persecuted in his
lifetime, was a precursor, a liberator-a certified Great Man in what
must be the world's most prestigious literary tradition.
Although Sade for obvious reasons has never been a popular writer,
if only because he is so painful to read, sales were considerable from the
outset and interest has been sustained by the historians and, outside the
