Books: Existentialist Purgatory

THE AGE OF REASON (397 pp.)—Jean-Paul Sartre—translated by Eric Sutton —Knopf ($3).

What is existentialism? As far as most Americans are concerned, it is the latest incomprehensible fashion from France. U.S. audiences now have a thorough chance to sample the brew that has been boiling furiously in Europe’s intellectual teapots. The pontiff and leading practitioner of existentialism is France’s stubby (5 ft.), scholarly Jean-Paul Sartre. His Age of Reason is a dolorous, idea-clotted novel full of moldy characters and philosophic yawpings about life. It is sure to win its author some critical praise. It is not likely to earn his fashion many wearers.

Like Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée (Nausea), and his plays (TIME, Dec. 9), The Age of Reason is an attempt to translate philosophy into fiction. The Age of Reason is the first volume of a trilogy which will chart the salvation of contemporary man. In this first installment, however, nobody is saved; the characters are condemned, instead, to simmer in their own existentialist juices—a form of Sartrian purgatory from which they all will presumably be able to free themselves in the other two books.

Spinach v. Gin. Americans who wonder what existentialism is about will find a simplified translation in the comic strip Popeye, whose “I am what I am!” is existentialism stripped of its dialectical jargon. Like Popeye, the hero of The Age of Reason keeps low company, often talks in unprintable expletives, believes supremely in his own powers of action. But Popeye grows strong on spinach; Sartre’s characters in The Age of Reason feed on a pasty mixture of atheism and bad gin. The diet symbolizes existentialism’s greatest weakness: the futility of attempting moral regeneration through a philosophy which denies religion or any ethical code.

The story concerns the efforts of a philosophy teacher to raise money for an abortion. Filling himself with cheap liquor, the young man duns his family and friends, finally steals the money from a nightclub singer, only to be told that his mistress has decided to marry another man and have the baby. The setting is Paris in 1938. The characters are kleptomaniacs, homosexuals, heroin addicts, trollops, beachcombers of the Left Bank. They exchange mistresses, money, and a spiritual malaise which the author believes to be at the root of Europe’s despair. Most of all, they share a common paralysis of will power in the face of impending disaster. Their lives, Sartre writes, “had … a kind of insistent futility, a smell of dust and violets.”

Free to Be a Fool. It is only after the hero has sampled the conventional attitudes of Bohemia that he realizes their inadequacy and achieves absolution by embracing “the age of reason” (i.e., an understanding of his own self-dependence). Writhing in an existentialist trance, he proclaims the Sartrian gospel: “… It is by my agency that everything must happen.” The author sums up: “Even if he let himself be carried off in helplessness and in despair … he would have chosen his own damnation: he was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good nor Evil unless he brought them into being. He was alone . . . without assistance and without excuse, condemned to decide without support from any quarter, condemned forever to be free.”

The Age of Reason frequently attempts to shock the reader with pointless vulgarity (“. . .a faint, sour reek of vomit came from her delicate mouth. Mathieu inhaled it ecstatically”). Existentialists may deny that such scenes are introduced for sensationalism’s sake, but they have not explained why it is necessary to expound their doctrine solely from a worm’s eye view of life. What one of the characters calls “the freemasonry of the urinal” will seem, to many readers, an accurate description of Sartre’s own books.

Act to Be Free. As prophet of this bleak philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre, 42, enjoys more prestige in despairing Europe than any other writer of the postwar generation. Fashionable groups in conquered France took up existentialism; now defeated Germany is reportedly infested with it. Existentialists trace themselves back to Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, but they also owe a debt to Nazi Philosopher Martin Heidegger. Pope Pius XII has branded their ideas a “philosophy of disaster.”

“Man is free to act, but he must act to be free,” is Sartre’s rallying cry. Sartre himself played an active role in the French underground after his release from a German prison camp. His play, Les Mouches (The Flies), produced during the occupation, was an eloquent plea for freedom cloaked in a classic Greek legend. Sartre also found time to write a 700-page theoretical treatise, L’Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness).

Before the war, he and his disciples were a carefree lot who did the Montmartre nightclubs, collected U.S. hot jazz records and the novels of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell and John Dos Passes, lived in the dingy, Left Bank Hotel de la Louisiane. Until recently, Sartre did most of his writing at a table in the Café de Flore. Since he became a celebrity, he works in the plushier Pont-Royal bar, where only well-heeled existentialists can afford to interrupt him.