THE WALL (270 pp.) — Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Lloyd Alexander —New Directions ($7.50).
Jean-Paul Sartre, the high priest of the gloomy Gallic cult of existentialism, has been buffeted about recently. First, the Vatican put his works on the Index. More recently, the Russians have been after him. In the U.S., he has reached a precarious state of respectability; his earlier works are being reissued.
He was a young (38), unknown French professor of philosophy in 1943 when he published Being and Nothingness, a 700-page look at modern man’s predicament. So well did he echo the prevailing French despair that he became a Parisian hero, quit his teaching job and unleashed a flood of controversial writing that included novels, short stories, plays, essays and off-the-cuff journalism. Almost all of it has been a clinical, repetitious elaboration of his grim teaching: wretched man comes into this rotten world through no fault of his own. The concept of God, argues Sartre, is an irrational delusion. To find happiness, each man must act to free himself from the brutalities of his environment; but, awful paradox, he cannot act until he is free.
Planted Ironies. The Wall, now published in an expensive limited edition, is a volume of Sartre’s short stories written in 1939. His earlier writing turns out to have been an uncompromising preview of his latter-day pessimism. The characters are chiefly miserable neurotics beset by sexual frustrations, their personal despair compounded by life’s (or Sartre’s) carefully planted ironies.
In the title story, a Spanish Loyalist, prisoner of the fascists, is offered his life if he tells where a Loyalist leader is hiding. In the cemetery, he answers contemptuously—naming the most unlikely place he can think of. That is just where the fascists find their man. Intimacy is the story of a frigid wife who leaves her dull, impotent husband to goaway with a lover, changes her mind in a burst of muddled pity for her husband and returns to a loveless marriage.
The hero of Erostratus expresses his morbid hatred of his fellows through a completely senseless murder. The longest and most ambitious story is The Childhood of a Leader. This is Sartre’s cold dissection of a French industrialist’s son, showing how his social and sexual inadequacies led him to the assuagements of anti-Semitism and a superpatriotism.
Sartre’s style is a thin, derivative brew of Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos and simplified Joyce. It is hard to feel sorry for his gallery of modern misfits, even hard to remember them, probably because he has simply wrenched them out of life’s context to illustrate his philosophy of despair. His stories have the effect of leaving the reader temporarily as debilitated as his characters. The feeling doesn’t last long. A glance at any familiar living face dissipates it.
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