If we can discern in La Chute any specific reference to what we like to pride ourselves on as “the problems of our time,” it would be, I think, in a salutary disgust and in a kind of quietism. To a man living in Algeria it is perhaps more apparent than it is to us that the logical outcome of moral indignation is murder. M. Camus, standing between two proud and bitter communities, whose pride and bitterness he cannot in either case fully share, turns his mind in the direction of humility and peace and therefore, with the culture which is his, to a certain style of Christian conscience. As he is not in fact a Christian it follows that his quietism has at its core a whirl of conflicts. To this we may attribute the richness of La Chute and also the difficulty of following its real thought: particularly the difficulty of being quite sure where irony ends and grim earnest begins. In English literature and particularly in Anglo-Irish literature, we are used to the idea of this boundary being badly marked. But in France, like all other boundaries it has been well defined; an ironic intrusion into a serious passage must be provided with front and rear lights. M. Camus has infringed this article of the code, as well as that which lays down a continuous uncrossable line between left and right. “I am losing the thread of my discourse,” says Clamance, “I have no longer that clarity of mind to which my friends used to be good enough to pay tribute.” Most of M. Camus’s friends will probably agree, but some will count that particular clarity well lost for the cryptic twilight of La Chute.
SARTRE AS A CRITIC
Most critics are neither philosophers nor practising novelists. M. Sartre, who is a professional philosopher as well as an eminent novelist and dramatist, is unusually well equipped, according to formal categories, to be a critic also. And not according to formal categories only, for he has an exceptionally penetrating and energetic mind. The rhythm of his thought is disconcertingly rapid; the density of ideas per square foot of twelve-point text seems higher than in all but the most strenuous of American critics. The very rich are different from us, as Scott Fitzgerald reminded Hemingway. M. Sartre makes us sadly conscious that the very clever, also, are different from us.
We may cheer up, however—as the stupid have always cheered up on observing the silliness of the clever—when we realize that M. Sartre, for all his formidable equipment and natural gifts, makes a rather poor critic. His tendency is, in considering the work of an author—Mauriac, Dos Passos, Giraudoux, Faulkner, Blanchot, Kafka—to make a kind of incision by means of a single acute observation, whether technical or philosophical or both, and then to develop the “consequences” of that observation by carving the work into an independent structure of which the segments correspond to his own preoccupations rather than to the natural grain of the work itself. His is an imperialist criticism which, after an initial daring raid, annexes to itself a spiritual territory and imposes its own laws without regard to the wishes or the customs of the original inhabitants, or the coherence of their society. So, in his essay “François Mauriac and Freedom”—which deals not with M. Mauriac’s work as a whole, but with one unsuccessful novel, La Fin de la nuit, presented as typical—he attacks by demonstrating the sleight of hand which M. Mauriac practises by his use of the third person, in gliding almost imperceptibly from a “Thérèse-subject” (to the interior of whose mind we are admitted) to a “Thérèse-object” on whom the author passes judgment from time to time. This analysis, which is clearly and effectively conducted, is followed by the dogmatic statement:
Fictional beings have their laws, the most rigorous of which is the following: the novelist may be either their witness or their accomplice, but never both at the same time.
From this the conclusion that M. Mauriac is not a novelist follows logically. But it is the second premise which remains questionable. Is there, in fact, a “law” which always forces the novelist to choose between being a witness and an accomplice? Are there not many other distinguished writers who, like Mauriac, have broken this “law” and who must therefore be rejected as pseudo-novelists? Do not most novelists, including M. Sartre, find ways, no doubt often much less crude than those of La Fin de la nuit, of moving in and out of their characters’ minds and also of implying the existence and the judgment of a privileged observer, God, history or the right-thinking man? Such questions are not considered, and we are left with the impression that M. Sartre took intellectual advantage of an opening in a sententious work of M. Mauriac’s decline, in order to upset the elder writer’s authority over the young and to establish as “law” a theory of his own.
The same critic who considers that M. Mauriac is not a novelist at all regards Mr. John Dos Passos as “the greatest writer of our time.” M. Sartre writes with obvious excitement about Mr. Dos Passos—whom, significantly, he compares with French writers, Zola, Proust, Nizan, but never with Joyce—but his excitement is in part the romantic excitement at a discovery useful to him in his own work. He writes of Dos Passos’ characters as existing “behind the looking-glass” but it is apparent that this condition is not always so much the product of the American novelist’s consummate art as of the French critic’s over-ingenious efforts at comprehension. He quotes, for example, a passage from 1919:
Miss Teazle said he showed real feeling for English composition. One Christmas he sent her a little rhyme he made up about the Christ Child and the Three Kings and she declared he had a gift.
On which M. Sartre’s gloss follows:
The narration takes on a slightly stilted manner, and everything that is reported about the hero assumes the solemn quality of a public pronouncement: … “she declared he had a gift.” The sentence is not accompanied by any comment, but acquires a sort of collective resonance. It is a declaration.
Well, I declare! M. Sartre would be scathing indeed about an American critic who might be rash enough to “explain,” on the basis of a misunderstood inflection, a point of style in French. But in general, and not only in dealing with the English language, M. Sartre’s ear seems to be bad; in particular the whole range of effects which we cover with the term “sense of humour” seems to be closed to him, although he handles the weapon of irony efficiently enough. Amateurs of misunderstood pleasantries will delight in his chapter “Jean Giraudoux and the Philosophy of Aristotle,” which presents the spectacle of a playful pedant being pursued, very rightly, by a solemn pedant.
The present collection* contains, as well as critical essays, a number of travel pieces on America and three philosophical essays. The travel pieces resemble the critical essays in their range from the brilliantly perceptive to the merely bumptious. There is a notable picture of a Frenchman turning into an American (“I felt as if I were witnessing an Ovidian metamorphosis. The man’s face was still too expressive. It had retained the slightly irritating mimicry of intelligence which makes a French face recognizable anywhere. But he will soon be a tree or a rock.”) And then, a little later, we have some Pooter-like reflections on the American economy:
The war has certainly taught the Americans that their country was the greatest power in the world. But the period of easy living is over; many economists fear a new depression. Thus, no more skyscrapers are being built. It seems they are too hard to rent [1946].
To philosophers the most interesting essay in the book will no doubt be that on “Cartesian freedom” (here undated). M. Sartre’s tendency to “annex” takes a rather startling form in this essay, since he actually takes over, for his own variety of “humanism,” the Cartesian “freedom of God”:
If he [Descartes] conceived divine freedom as being quite like his own freedom, then it is of his own freedom, such as he would have conceived it without the fetters of Catholicism and dogmatism, that he speaks when he describes the freedom of God. We have here an obvious phenomenon of sublimation and transposition.
Of the final essay, “Materialism and Revolution” (1946), it is necessary to say that it by no means represents M. Sartre’s full thought on these subjects. His rejection of Marxist philosophy is shown here, but his philosophical acce
ptance—indeed virtual deification—of the Communist party (Les Communistes et la paix) is not included. M. Sartre’s very complicated thinking on this matter has been well analysed in M. Merleau-Ponty’s recent work Les Aventures de la dialectique.
* Literary and Philosophical Essays.
A VOCATION
Fiction begets fiction; the novelist is a disgruntled ex-character from a bad novel. There once was a curly-headed little boy, adored by his grandfather and his mother—his father was dead. He was regarded by his elders as “Nature the Redeemer,” as an inspired oracle, a “young knight,” even—in a blue muslin dress, with stars in his hair and wings—a real angel; he played the parts assigned to him, and when he grew up he wrote La Nausée.
The “great event of my life,” Sartre tells us in the first volume of his autobiography,* was his father’s death; “it returned my mother to her chains”—i.e. her parents’ house—“and it gave me my freedom.” One can see why the problems of “freedom” have especially preoccupied Sartre, both as novelist and as philosopher, for the freedom which he feels himself to have been given was a singular one: he had lost a father, but gained a grandfather. Charles Schweitzer—Sartre’s maternal grandfather and uncle of Albert Schweitzer, Sartre’s improbable cousin—was “a nineteenth-century man who, like so many others, including Victor Hugo himself, thought he was Victor Hugo.” He “looked so much like God the Father that he was often taken for Him.” His grandfather sees him in retrospect as “forever between two melodramatic effects, like an alcoholic between two drinks, as the victim of two recently discovered techniques: the art of photography and ‘the art of being a grandfather.’” This second art, as taught by Victor Hugo, was one of indulgence—Sartre’s narrative shows how exacting such indulgence can be. He and his grandfather acted out
a play of a hundred different sketches: flirtations, speedily resolved misunderstandings, good-natured teasings and gentle scoldings, loving resentments, affectionate secrets and passion … I found my part so becoming that I could not drop it.
Grandfather and grandson became “the God of Love with the Father’s beard and the Son’s Sacred Heart.”
Sartre congratulates himself on not having had a father who would have crushed him: an eminent psychoanalyst, he says, found him to have no super-ego. He contrasts his own freedom, travelling alone, with that of his father-burdened contemporaries—“the Aeneases each carrying his Anchises on his shoulders.” It may be doubted whether Aeneas would have found the burden lighter if he had had to carry, instead of his father, his maternal grandfather, Olympian Zeus.
It was Charles Schweitzer, speaking like a father, like “the absentee who had begotten me,” who confirmed the boy Sartre in his choice of writing as a profession, what he calls “the dedicated career of a minor writer.”
Even today when I am in a bad mood I ask myself if I have not used up so many days and nights, covered so many sheets of paper with my ink, dumped onto the market so many books that no one wanted, in the sole and mad hope of pleasing my grandfather. That would be a joke.
The joke is even more uproarious than that, for this atheist has been writing to please God. His family was conformist rather than religious. His grandmother was brought up a Catholic and “only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.” His grandfather, of a Protestant family, “was too much of a performer not to need a Great Spectator but he hardly ever thought about God except at peak moments.” The family as a whole—including apparently Sartre’s mother, whom he loved and whom he does not depict very clearly—was “affected by the slow de-Christianisation which was born in the Voltaire-influenced haute bourgeoisie and took a century to spread to every stratum of society.” This process left strange sediments and these the autobiographer Sartre probes and stirs.
“There might,” he says about God, “have been something between us”; if, for example, Sartre had won the gold medal for his French essay on the Passion, there might have been something. But it was only the silver one, and relations were broken off. It is, he says ironically, “the story of a missed vocation.” Yet he is conscious that irony does not altogether cover the situation, and not at all sure that the vocation was really missed: “I grew up, a rank weed, on the compost-heap of Catholicity; my roots sucked up its juices and from them I made my sap.” He describes how, and in what sense, he lost his faith. One day in 1917, on the way to the lycée, waiting for some friends who were late, he could think of nothing better to do than to think about the Almighty:
He at once tumbled down into the blue sky and vanished without explanation. He does not exist, I said to myself, in polite astonishment, and I thought the matter was settled. In one sense it was, because I have never since had the least temptation to revive him. But the other, the Invisible, the Holy Ghost, he who guaranteed my mandate and dominated my life through great anonymous and sacred forces, he remained.
For much of his life—perhaps for thirty years—the manipulation of words remained for him a mystical, quasi-sacramental activity. If he was writing to please that grandfather who so resembled the God the Father who had vanished without explanation, he was also engaged in an enterprise which had its own magical value. Words—“the little swift black mercenaries”—trapped and held reality for him, the signs caught the object, names took the place of things: “that is belief.” Literature, as he says, was for him a form of prayer; it was also penance: he was writing “in order to be forgiven for being alive.” Writing, in fact, was all the sacraments, all forms of communion, mediation and atonement: the writer was the only true priest.
“Squalid nonsense,” he says now. He insists he has got over it and will explain how, in the later volumes of his autobiography.
My retrospective illusions are in pieces. Martyrdom, salvation, immortality: all are crumbling; the building is falling in ruins. I have caught the Holy Ghost in the cellars and have flung him out of them. Atheism is a cruel, long-term business: I believe I have gone through it to the end. I see clearly, I am free from illusions.
And finally: “I have renounced my vocation, but I have not unfrocked myself. I still write. What else can I do?”
Writing about his childhood Sartre is more penetrating, more alert, more lucid, more honest, and somehow better informed, than most of us would be: that is not, perhaps, saying very much. Words is surprising, neat and witty; we recognize in the Sartre family structure and the child’s illusions about it, one of those odd contraptions, haunted machines, which do produce writers. Yet a feeling of dissatisfaction remains. There is something wrong about the smiling irony, the “detachment,” with which the middle-aged writer analyses the mental processes of the child, and of those around him. It is all a little too jaunty; one is reminded rather often that this autobiographer is after all a writer of fiction. His father, he says, “tried to take refuge in death.” All that seems to be known is that he took some time dying of a tropical fever; that he was trying to die is a novelist’s gloss—it has an autobiographical value but an oblique and probably unintended one. Mother, remaining blank, makes one doubt the writer’s claim that he has succeeded in the formidable task of “deciphering” his early years “beneath the crossings out.” He is “happy”—all too happy—“to subscribe to the judgment” of that “eminent psychoanalyst: I have no Super-Ego.” A man who can claim that he is “free from illusions” is surely too young at heart, too happily involved in the absurdities of living, to achieve the real, unearthly detachment, that state of ceasing to care about anything except remembering and telling, in which Proust gave up the ghost.
Sartre, in short, like the good novelist he is, is lying: brilliantly and to our great entertainment and instruction, and with many touches of truth, but lying. Among all these intricately placed, pivoting mirrors which the novelist turns so dexterously for our amusement, the bloody business of childhood has managed to get itself left out. For all the mannerisms and gestures of “ruthless penetration” in which the book abounds, the writer is tender enough with him
self, and penetrates—deeply, then—only where he wishes to penetrate. For the rest he follows, more consistently than he seems to know, the valuable advice which his grandmother liked to repeat: “Glissez, mortels, n’appuyez pas.” That is why he explains how Sartre became a writer, but not the kind of writer Sartre became.
The truths which Words contains are the general truths of a writer in the tradition of the French aphorists. This is how, in a French middle-class household of the early twentieth century, a boy could come to think that writing was supremely important; this is how the deposit of faith was smuggled on. The process has never, I think, been so well analysed before and Sartre, in analysing it, is helping to clarify the thought of more people than his contemporaries and compatriots. The strange idea that the young Sartre shared with the ageing Yeats, the idea that “Words alone are certain good,” is probably a common heritage of the peoples of the Book, in the widest sense: that is to say of all for whom religious writings have been represented to be of supreme importance. The fading of these quasi-magical ideas, and the diversion elsewhere of talents and energies which would in an earlier period have “entered the priesthood” of literature—like those of Yeats and Joyce—may account for what seems to be a real, and perhaps a permanent, diminution in the scale of literary achievement in our generation. It is several centuries since Maurice Scève asked the pertinent question (I quote from memory):
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