It is true also that the writing of the book shows few of the traditional traits that we have been used to in French fiction. It tells the story with a “functional” efficiency, but it is colorless, relaxed, rather flat. It loses little in the English translation, not merely because the translator knows his business, but because Sartre’s style does not put upon him any very severe strain. The conversation is mainly conducted in a monotonous colloquialism of catchwords, where some expression like “C’est marrant” does duty for as many emotions as our own ever-recurring “terrific”; and for this Mr. Eric Sutton has been able to find a ready equivalent in a jargon basically British with a liberal admixture of Americanisms. (In only one important respect has Mr. Sutton departed from Sartre’s text. The reader should be warned that Daniel, in the third chapter from the end, has decided to castrate himself, not, as the translation seems to suggest, to commit suicide by cutting his throat.)
Of Sartre’s imaginative work, I have read, besides this novel, only his plays and a few of his short stories. On this showing, I get the impression of a talent rather like that of John Steinbeck. Like Steinbeck, Sartre is a writer of undeniably exceptional gifts: on the one hand, a fluent inventor, who can always make something interesting happen, and, on the other, a serious student of life, with a good deal of public spirit. Yet he somehow does not seem quite first-rate. A play of Sartre’s, for example, such as his recent The Unburied Dead—which is, I suppose, his best play—affects me rather like The Grapes of Wrath. Here he has exploited with both cleverness and conviction the ordeal of the French Resistance, as Steinbeck has done that of the sharecroppers; but what you get are a virtuosity of realism and a rhetoric of moral passion which make you feel not merely that the fiction is a dramatic heightening of life but that the literary fantasy takes place on a plane which does not have any real connection with the actual human experience which it is pretending to represent.
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I have approached The Age of Reason purposely from the point of view of its merits as a novel without reference to the Existentialist philosophy of which Sartre is one of the principal exponents and which the story is supposed to embody. But, with the publication, also, of a translation of a lecture of Sartre’s called “Existentialism” (Philosophical Library) and a pamphlet called “What Is Existentialism?,” by William Barrett (Partisan Review), this demands consideration, too. It should, however, be said that neither of these discussions of the subject provides for the ordinary person the best possible key to Sartre’s ideas. The Barrett essay, though very able, is mainly an exposition of the ideas of Martin Heidegger, a contemporary German philosopher, from whom Sartre took some of his prime assumptions, and it presupposes on the part of the reader a certain familiarity with the technical language of philosophy. The Sartre lecture has the special object of defending Existentialism against charges which have been brought against it by the Communists, so that it emphasizes certain aspects of the theory without attempting to state its fundamental principles. It would have been well if the publisher had included a translation of the article called “Présentation,” in which Sartre explained his position in the first number of his magazine, Les Temps Modernes (October 1, 1945), and which gives the best popular account I have seen of what this literary school is up to. I can also recommend especially a short summary of the history of Existentialist thought and of its political and social implications—“Existentialism: A New Trend in Philosophy”—contributed by Paul Kecskemeti, a former U.P. foreign correspondent who is also a trained philosopher, to the March, 1947, issue of a magazine called Modern Review (published in New York by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs). This study has the unusual merit of not getting so deeply enmeshed in the metaphysical background of Existentialism that it fails to focus clearly on the picture of mankind on the earth which is the most important thing to grasp in a doctrine which is nothing if not realistic.
What is this picture, then? In Sartre’s version—to skip altogether the structure of philosophical reasoning on which it is made to rest and which Sartre has set forth at length in a book called L’Etre et le Néant—it places man in a world without God (thought not all Existentialists are atheists), in which all the moral values are developed by man himself. Human nature is not permanent and invariable: it is whatever man himself makes it, and it changes from age to age. Man is free, beyond certain limits, to choose what he is to be and do. His life has significance solely in its relation to the lives of others—in his actions or refrainings from action: to use a favorite phrase of Sartre’s, the individual must “engage himself.”
Now, this conception of man’s situation may appear to the non-religious reader, if he has also the “historical” point of view, precisely what he has always assumed, and may cause him to conclude with surprise that he has been an Existentialist without knowing it. To a Marxist, when he has further discovered that Sartre assigns human beings to the categories of the social classes almost as relentlessly as Marx, it will be evident that Sartre has borrowed from Marxism, and he may ask in what way Existentialism is an improvement over Marxism. In a debate between Sartre and a Marxist, a record of which follows the printed lecture, the Marxist actually scores rather heavily. The one advantage, it seems to me, that the doctrine of Sartre has is that it does away with Dialectical Materialism and its disguised theological content. There is for Sartre no dialectical process which will carry you straight to salvation if you get on the proletarian train. He sides with the proletariat, but intellectual or proletarian has to put up his own battle, with the odds looking rather against him. Yet Sartre does insist like a Marxist that every member of modern society belongs to a social class, and that “every one of his feelings, as well as every other form of his psychological life, is revelatory of his social situation.” This molding of the individual by class—and Sartre allows also for the effects of “origin,” “milieu,” nationality, and sexual constitution—produces the limitation on freedom which I mentioned in passing above. One finds oneself in a situation which one did not make for oneself, but, given that situation, one can choose various ways of behaving in it. The bourgeois—with whom Sartre is particularly concerned—can either go along with his class or rebel against it and try to get away from it. The Marxist may inquire how this differs from the classical Marxist formulation that “men make their own history, but…do not choose the circumstances for themselves,” and how Sartre’s practical doctrine of man realizing himself through action differs from Marx’s conception of testing our ideas through action. To the reviewer, the conception of a wholly free will seems as naïve as the contrary conception of a wholly mechanistic determinism, and it is surely hardly less naïve to declare, as Sartre appears to do, that we are determined up to a certain point, but that beyond that we can exercise choice. If Marx and Engels, in exploring these problems, are somewhat less schoolmasterishly clear, they seem to me, in their tentative way, to give a more recognizable picture of what happens when what we take for the will tries to act on what we take for the world, and of the relation between man and his environment.
But the Existentialist philosophy of Sartre is the reflection of a different age from that which stimulated the activist materialism of Marx, and it has the immense advantages of sincerity and human sympathy over the very peculiar version of Marxism, totalitarian and imperialistic, now exported by the Soviet Union. Let us see it in its historical setting. Mr. Kecskemeti has shown in his essay how the neo-Kantian idealism of the pre-1914 period in Germany, which “admirably expressed the average German’s awe in the presence of every kind of expert and official,” had to give way, after the first German defeat, which shook this faith in specialized authority, to an effort to find principles of morality in the study of human conduct itself. So, eventually, the Germans got Heidegger. In the same way, Kecskemeti says, the defeat of the French in 1940 deprived them of all they had leaned on: they had at one stroke lost both their great traditions—the tradition of the French Revolution,
which collapsed with the Third Republic, and the monarchist-Catholic tradition, which, through Pétain, had sold them out to the invaders. It is characteristic of the French that the destruction of French institutions should have seemed to them a catastrophe as complete as the Flood and caused them to evolve a philosophy which assumes that the predicament of the patriotic Frenchmen oppressed by the German occupation represented the situation of all mankind. They felt imperatively the duty to resist, with no certainty of proving effective, and they had, as Albert Camus has said, to formulate for themselves a doctrine which would “reconcile negative thought and the possibility of affirmative action.” Hence the emphasis on the individual—since the Resistance was always an effort of scattered men and women—so different from the emphasis of Marx on the importance of collective action at a time when a great working-class movement was looming and gathering strength. Hence, also, the suffocating atmosphere of corruption, degradation, and depression which is a feature of Sartre’s work and for which the French Communists, hopped up by the Kremlin to the cocksureness of propaganda, are in the habit of showering him with scorn. But such reproaches have no real validity, either artistic or moral: this atmosphere is Sartre’s subject, and he has not allowed it to drug his intelligence or his conscience. This is the climate of the Occupation, and it is, in my opinion, his principal distinction that he has conveyed to us the moral poisoning of a France humiliated and helpless, in which people, brooding guiltily or blaming someone else, squabbled horribly, betrayed one another, or performed acts of desperate heroism. For, says Sartre, though you cannot appeal to God, you have always a margin of freedom: you can submit, you can kill yourself, or you can sell your life dear by resisting. Where this freedom is now to lead Frenchmen since the Germans have been driven out, I do not think that Sartre has yet made clear. Though anti-bourgeois and pro-working-class, he is evidently not an orthodox Communist of the kind who takes his directives from Moscow. One has a little the feeling about him that his basic point of view has been forged, as his material has been supplied, so completely under pressure of the pain and constraint of the collapse and the Occupation that he may never readapt himself to the temper of any new period.
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And now how does The Age of Reason point the morals of Existentialist principles? Well, if you already know something of the subject, you will recognize some of its concepts turning up in the reflections of the hero as he walks drearily through the streets of Paris. And the conflict of classes is there: a seceder from the bourgeoisie, we see him revolving in a lonely orbit but experiencing gravitational pulls from a successful lawyer brother who represents the bourgeoisie, an old friend who has become a Communist and represents the proletariat, and a young girl of Russian émigré parents who represents the old nobility. It is not, however, this central character, so far as this volume takes him, who “engages himself” by a choice: his choices are all of the negative kind. It is the sexual invert Daniel, a neurotic and disconcerting personality, who, exercising his free will, resists his suicidal impulses and performs, unexpectedly and for devious reasons, a responsible and morally positive act. Here the difficult “situation” is a matter not of social class but of biological dislocation; and the triumph of Daniel’s decision is to be measured by the gravity of his handicap.
Yet it is difficult to see how this story can have been very profoundly affected by Sartre’s Existentialist theory. In such a production of his as his play The Flies, the dramatist turns academic and rather destroys the illusion by making the characters argue his doctrine; but this novel might perfectly have been written if Sartre had never worked up Existentialism. It differs from the picture of life presented by the embittered French Naturalists after the French defeat of 1871, whose characters were invariably seen as caught in traps of heredity and circumstance and rarely allowed to escape—though Sartre’s mood, as in his play No Exit, is sometimes quite close to theirs. But this book does not essentially differ from the novels of other post-Naturalistic writers such as Malraux, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, for whom the international socialist movement has opened a door to hope and provided a stimulus to action that were unknown to such a Frenchman as Maupassant or to the Americans who paralleled his pessimism. In Sartre, as in these other writers, you have a study of the mixture in man’s nature of moral strength and weakness, and a conviction that, though the individual may not win the stakes he is playing for, his effort will not be lost.
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Since Partisan Review has published, also, in the same series as Mr. Barrett’s pamphlet a translation of one of Sartre’s long articles, “Portrait of the Anti-Semite,” one should say something about his activity as a journalist. These essays which he contributes to his Temps Modernes seem to me among the most interesting work of their kind that has appeared during the current slump in serious periodical writing. In this field, Sartre can be compared only with George Orwell in England; we have nobody so good over here. Mr. Barrett, in an article on Sartre, has complained that he ignores, in his “Portrait,” the Freudian springs of anti-Semitism. It is true that he makes no attempt to explain this phenomenon historically in its political and social connections; but he does pursue with merciless insight at least one of the psychological factors involved: the need of small, frustrated people to fake up some inalienable warrant for considering themselves superior to somebody. Sartre’s whole essay, in fact, pretends to be nothing else than an elaborate development of this theme. It is no scientific inquiry but an exercise in classical irony, which might almost have been written, we reflect, by one of the more mordant eighteenth-century Encyclopedists. The Age of Reason of Sartre’s novel is the intellectual maturity of the hero, but the phrase recalls also a period with which Sartre has a good deal in common. In these enormous and solid editorials that mix comment on current affairs with a philosophy which, whatever its deficiencies, is always clearly and firmly expressed, we are surprised and reassured to find ourselves chewing on something which we might have feared the French had lost. For it is Sartre’s great strength in his time that he is quite free from the Parisian chichi of the interval between the wars. If Existentialism has become, like Surrealism, something of a mouvement à exporter, no one has probed so shrewdly as Sartre, in one of his articles in Les Temps Modernes, the recent attempts of the French to distract the attention of the world from their political and military discredit by exploiting the glory of their writers, or pointed out so boldly the abuses to which this practice may lead. If he sometimes has the air of pontificating, it is probably always difficult for a French literary man to resist becoming a chef d’école. And Sartre, bourgeois and provincial, has succeeded in preserving for the French qualities which they very much need and which it is cheering to see still flourish: an industry, an outspokenness, and a common sense which are the virtues of a prosaic intelligence and a canny and practical character. This does not, perhaps, necessarily make him a top-flight writer, but, in these articles of Les Temps Modernes, it does provide some very satisfactory reading.
LOUISE BOGAN
NOVEMBER 30, 1946 (ON ROBERT LOWELL)
Religious conversion, in the case of two modern poets writing in English—T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden—brought an atmosphere of peace and relief from tension into their work. But Robert Lowell, a young American who has forsaken his New England Calvinist tradition for the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church, exhibits no great joy and radiance in the forty-odd poems now published under the title Lord Weary’s Castle (Harcourt, Brace). A tremendous struggle is still going on in Lowell’s difficult and harsh writings, and nothing is resolved. These poems bring to mind the crucial seventeenth-century battle between two kinds of religious faith, or, in fact, the battle between the human will and any sort of faith at all. They are often at what might be called a high pitch of baroque intensity. They do not have the sweetness of the later English “metaphysical” writers; Lowell faces the facts of modern materialism more with the uncompromising tone and temper of the Jacobean drama
tists, Webster and Tourneur, or of Donne, who (to quote Professor Grierson), “concluding that the world, physical and moral, was dissolving in corruptions which human reason could not cure, took refuge in the ark of the Church.” (Lowell, it is clear, has not taken refuge anywhere.) He also bears some relationship to Herman Melville, the American with Puritan hellfire in his bones. The more timid reader would do well to remember these forerunners, and the conditions that fostered them, when confronted with young Lowell’s fierce indignation.
Lowell’s technical competence is remarkable, and this book shows a definite advance over the rather stiff and crusty style of his first volume, Land of Unlikeness, published in 1944 by the Cummington Press. This competence shows most clearly in his “imitations” and arrangements of the work of others, which he hesitates to call direct translations. “The Ghost” (after Sextus Propertius), “The Fens” (after Cobbett), and the poems derived from Valéry, Rimbaud, and Rilke reveal a new flexibility and directness. These poems might well be read first, since they show the poet’s control of both matter and manner. The impact of the other poems in the book is often so shocking and overwhelming, because of the violent, tightly packed, and allusive style and the frequent effects of nightmare horror, that his control may seem dubious. The extraordinary evocation of the sea’s relentlessness and the terror of death at sea, in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” (an elegy to a drowned merchant seaman), is equalled in dreadfulness by the grisly emblems of “At the Indian Killer’s Grave,” a poem wherein successive layers of spiritual and social decomposition in the Massachusetts Bay Colony come to light through a descent into the King’s Chapel Burying Ground in Boston. Lowell, again in the seventeenth-century way, continually dwells upon scenes of death and burial. He is at his best when he mingles factual detail with imaginative symbol; his facts are always closely observed, down to every last glass-tiered factory and every dingy suburban tree. To Lowell, man is clearly evil and a descendant of Cain, and Abel is the eternal forgotten victim, hustled away from sight and consciousness. And the modern world cannot reward its servants; no worthy pay is received by the good mason who built “Lord Wearie’s castle.” (The old ballad from which the book’s title is taken runs: “It’s Lambkin was a mason good As ever built wi’ stane: He built Lord Wearie’s castle But payment gat he nane.”) These are the themes that run through this grim collection. Lowell does not state them so much as present himself in the act of experiencing their weight. It is impossible to read his poems without sharing his desperation. Lowell may be the first of that postwar generation which will write in dead earnest, not content with providing merely a slick superficiality but attempting to find a basis for a working faith, in spite of secretive Nature and in defiance of the frivolous concepts of a gross and complacent society. Or he may simply remain a solitary figure. Certainly his gifts are of a special kind.
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