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A spurned Nobel Prize calls the world's attention
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to a lonely philosophy of despair
Dr. Nommn Alcork. a pacifist
,,/,)'sin'si. 5/(111<15 <II," U,kr O"",do
iN floe 10 "((I11""i", lois 1'/"" far ""'{lU.
"Man can counl on no one but himself: he is alone. abandoned on earlh
in the midst of his infinite responsibilities. without help, with no other
aim than the one he selS himself. " ';Ih no olher destiny than Ihe one
he forges for himself on this earth:' Thi s is the philosophy of existen-
tialism, as set down by S;mrc, a 59-year-old Frenchman who
recently astonished the world by turning down the Nobel I' rizc for
Literature. The picture above is an accidenwl but Slriking symbol of
SanTe's beliefs. The scientist on the icc noc not only looks as poig-
nantly alxlndoncd as M. Sarcre says all men arc. but just by being in
this odd situation he shows that he has commiued himsclf- as Sanrc
So."lys all men are obligcd to do if thcy He to cscape a mcaningless lifc.
Existcntialism. as propoundcd by Sanre. who is introduced on thc
next pagc. is a philosophy ba>cd on despair- somber. dcmanding and
godless. O"cr the past two dcrades il has brought about radical changcs
in Western thought Westcrn socicty. Although it is subtle and elu-
sivc, its man ifestations can casil y be seen around us-as the phow-
graphs on pages 90- 93 show. It s mood is felt and expressed by>corcs
of today's Icnding writers- somc of whom arc ponrayed on p<lgcs 94-95.
And its perplcxitics again and again prompt people 10 ask: What i s
im'mial ism'! A dctailed 10 this qucstion is givcn on pages96-110.
CONTI NUED 87
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Sartre, the walleyed little man who
To those who know Jean-Paul Sar-
tre. hi s refusal of the Nobel Prize
-with its $53,000 award- was no
surprise. " I don' t align myself with
anybody else's descriptions of me,"
he told L IFE just before the prize.
"Peopic can think of me as a gen-
ius, a pornographer, a Communist.
a bourgeois, however they like.
Myself. I think of other things."
Sarlre, who is resigned to being
walleyed and short, has for years
acted on his thoughts--as befits
any existentialist - with bravado.
He quit teaching philosophy to
JOin the Resistance movement in
World War II , and was once a Ger-
man captive. After the war- when
the portrait below of him on the
Pont des Arts was taken- he out-
spokenlychampioned Marxism but
never joined the Communist party
and was appalled by the Hungari-
an revolution. For hi s anticolo-
nialist views on Algeria. his Paris
home was bombed in 1961. Always
he kept on writing: plays. novels,
stories and essays and, JUSt now,
an autobiography. The Words,
which is selling phenomenally ev-
erywhere. (The U.S. edition is pub-
lished by George Braziller,)
Sarlre's exclusive interview with
LIFE began in his apartment, on
the Left Bank in Paris. and con-
tinued wi th a visit to Simone de
Beauvoir. She is Sartre's lifelong
companion (by a deliberate pact
they have nOt married) and is
herself a brilliant writer- The Sec-
ond Sex, The Mandarins . Some
of his other remarks to LlFI;'s Ru-
dolph Chelminski and Jane How-
ard, together with some selections
from The Words. are offered here.
"Ailihe dislinclions a wriur
loy his readers /0
p,e.ssU,ellholl do nOljudge desirable.
It's nol Ihe Jame lhing if
I sigll ktill-Paul Sari"
or Jean-Paul Sari", "'inner
oflhe Nobt-I Prize."
"I"'as prepared al all eadyage
10 regard uochiJ/g as a prlf'sl"ood (JIrd
lileral"", as a passion.
Booh 1I'f'r" my birds {JI/d my ""SIS.
my "auSl!hold my bam IIIrd
my coulliryside and Ihe library "'OJ
Ihe WQfId Mllghl In a mirror.'!'! ;
"My holies are made of lemher IIl1d
cllrdboard. my parchmem-sJ,:iI/lled
/lnh smf'lIs of glue ami mushrooms.
1 sil ill Ih,ough 1)0 pollllds
l"artJlllfhly aleoy. I
am ",OOrll. I at last becomf' a ,,/role
fflOlI.lhillkitlg. tolking. singing.
IhulUiering, a mon II'M osstrlJ himself
"'il" Ihe peremplory inf'rlia of
mollf'r. Halldslake medo,,'n,
spread me/lol OJIIM lable. smoolh
me ami somnimes moke me
"111m 1101. as has bun MIid. u
pessimist: 10m a persoll ... ha
{a make peaple nlO" lucid "is-IH'iJ
Ihemse/"eJ. {/lid it il for thil lhal
l am disliktd. 1 frighlen peaple,
I would say IhOllhe majorilyofpeople
ha,'e alll'oys been afraid la think.
Slendhlll, in his lime. ""Ole
'all good reol(ming ilojfensi>'e'-
Ihal iJ JliII "ery much IrUf.
"I see 110 rNISOII "'hy the family UJ
such should 1101 cOlI/inut. allholllfh
"'''el''er or 'IO{ lhe parenll are
married hOJ lillie Imporltlllce 10
"f'1I in "'''al .. now consider
rf'lordtd parliollS of the globe,
II"it,k Ihal illihe future falhf'rs
will nal be so lnconleslably dominalll
lwr "'(Jmfll SO /lntqlwlos Ih"y hal'"
bu". The imporlalll Ihil'8 is Ihol
Ihe relOlianshlp bt-Iween Ihe porelllS
omllhe childrell '101 sufff" . '!'!


,



figured it all out, says:
(I frighten people'
is 110 gO(ul fOIIl<", 11",(s tire
rill ... Do,,', 10)' Ih,' blu",,. 011 "'ell bill 011
Ihe oo",{ o[pat"mily. is
rolll'''. To begn cltildr./I. 1I1J1ltillg
bellu; 10 haw Ihl>!, H'/I<I( illi"IIily' !'
iil ll my molhe"3 qel "-"s" {O-IIwtlliI
child. Mila huh-" Ihllllll", ",hus,
mort' gl<lud. crispit', {IS a n'S''!1 of
slUyilrg illlh" o\'m/ung,r. ! '
" , hun, lUll "" eIlQm",//s differellce
btl"'utl Simo,,<' de B .. ullovir' . "",lillY
gellulltiQII "'heu , .... W"'t' 5111c/"/IIS
""d Ihe 1O-year....,lds of IO;/oy. IV ..
"'ere sOJI ollli ullomsrhms, ",,,"I<
"II{/II"Jedt/ed: roda,' 'hq 'Ir" milch
mort' or",,,,/ for lIft' I/I{III M'" ",,-rt',
Thq ore milch mort' Op<'11 ,,"'/I/W),
know many thillgs "'f' did I/(J/,"
''' w,. 11m'" lost uligioll, bill w" ,,"'.,.
gained hll",o"ism, TI,,. it/",,{ ""W
i.< {o liberale om//o IIdp mUlllcipdll'
nllJllkiml, wilh ,II .. ,eslIlI lIun "'0"
beconlt's ,mill' all "bsa/Ille for """,. "
"f "dmire rhe ... iII fa "'e/rame 1.',eq,IIilll!
- rhe s'"pid "iolell("e of dum("e.
Ille mello("illg orde, of eu"St's SIIdd"lIly
tII,masked. If 0111.' like . slIrprises.
OIW milS' 1." '1.'11 like ,I", m,e 1/(lshes
"'hieh ,e"eol,o ,lie d""ol<'es II""
Ihr furlll is "0' mmle for
h Ne.w ill my lif<' 110 ... / girell Oil
on"', M'il/WIII ""'g/,illg .... illtoll/
",,,killg olilers 1''''KIt. /1 is bu,,,,.,,
/ om 110' ("oll."",ed M'i,II r/,,, ("0"1",,
of power: I .. ."s ""'/lIIICh, ob<'diellt"<'."
.'Oe GOllile is ray "'If: / "m
"ery sho". Nei,h", ill h<'ig'" II", ill UIlY
o,her respt"C1 "" "'e sho,e
""yrllillg wllmerer ill romlllOlI. "
,., do,,', mimi If my felf"'" me"
forgel o/Jour me ,II .. day "fler I (1m
hllri"d. As 10llg as rhey', .. olire 1"11
1,,""11 Ihem. 1I111"IIII .. d. impt"rap'ibie.
preselll ill erer), one of IIIemjllsl
"s ,h .. hilliolls of'/<'(u/ wllo /ire W, k IlO"'1I
10 me IIl1d "'I",m I p,es"rI'" from
mmiili/mi"" <If<' presem ill me."
CONTI NUED 89
It finds an eternal absurdity
I
Ll'fr, Times Square, NO"cmMr 22, 1963 Alx,,'(>, Q boy ill a Pimburgh Slrl'r/ Bela",. ",,, , iSIS "'''Oil}: some m",,,,,,il'$

In death
To SaTire, death is an overpower-
ing absurdity. The bitter contm
diction is that while man has a
duty to shape hi s own life and the
world around him. he is constant-
ly threatened by death. which Sar-
Ire calls a "cancellat ion always
possible of what I can be."
The tragic cancellation. on Nov.
22. 1963, of what one man could
have been was a drdmalic illus-
tration of Sartre's thesis. The pho-
tognlpher (opfmsilf' {!liKe) empha-
sized the existentialist overtones of
absurdity by picturing the out-
rageous news against the stricken
billboard face of a model whose
anguish stemmed not from ever-
present death but the ever-present
threat of the common cold. Many
people, Sartre says. unaware of
the omnipresence of death, main-
tain an inauthentic aUi l udc 10-
ward it like the little boy with the
cap piSIOI, to whom it is somc sort
of joke. Or like the young couple
in the Mexican catacombs. who
pup.;ue their preoccupations obliv-
ious of death all around them.
They see nothing untimely in it.
But Sarlre says that death, except
in the case of suicides and mad-
men. is always untimely and there-
fore existentially absurd. It does
not give a life its meaning- it de-
prives it of any meaning whatever.
It sees a lonely world of the alienated
;\ long ... it h I hc conceptS of the ab-
surdity in life and death. the C\j,
lentiaiisl concept ",hich has had
the most po"crful influence on
postwar and wnlers Ihal
of "alienation:' This means mon:
lhan si mple CSIr'..lngcmcnl from
others. The alienated person c\-
periences himself as an outsider.
r .. thcr tllan as the center of his
0"" and the originator
of his 0"" actions. In II sense
he is eSlmngcd from himself. and
he is ccrwinly cSlrllngcd from any
God.
This estrangement is
in contemporary art and li lcrmurc
as an o,crwhclming loneliness. II
may be the loneliness of the in-
dividual " 'ho. consciously or un
consciously. made an c\;Slcntial
iSI gesture in Ie(wing Ihal might y.
imllldible shout on Ihe plain (righll
"ith no object for his alTection
but the sky.
It may be thc solitudc. the more
terrifyi ng because it is in the midst
of multitude. of the \loman (QI"
pt)sill' pagl') caught by Ihe pho-
togl1lphcr clutching a doll a chi ld
had givcn her to hold. Shc stands
tllere liS II symbol of peoplc so es-
tr.mged from life tll:u they can
hold only an imi tation of it.
Or il may be the aloneness of
the m:m below. sep.lrnt cd. wi ll fully
and witll absurd elabor'JlcllcSS. not
merely from hi s fc ll ow man bUI
from a fellow man not evcn there.
-.

WordJ ill salld ,m Colorado drlul
WI1ITE
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WilmilrglOll, H.C. wtlJhroom RighI, OIl Q SlrUI (II Nl' .... )'ork CII)"
,
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,







-
It shapes
the mood
0/ a whole
generation
a/writers
Since the war. Western literature
has had a pronounced existential
ist strain. although few writers c.x-
plicitly identify themselves as Sar-
Ireans. or c\"cn existentialists. In
Europe. authors like Ducrrenmatl
(The Visit) and Nathalie Sarrautc
(The Golden Fruils) grapple with
absurdity and the anguish of mor-
tal man isolated from his fellows
and himself. Samuel Beckett iso-
lat es his characters by cocooning
them in jugs and ashcans. or. as
he does wilh Bert Lahr in Wait-
ing for GOdOf (righl). olTering an
absurd temptation: a carrot. lon-
csco changes his characters into
animals in Rllinoreros. Genet
scrdmbles the identities of his by
means of masks and grotesque
costumes.
John Updike said that no lan-
guage is so unexistcntial as Eng-
1" sll. Yet Updike. whom Sartre
greatly admires. lias increasingly
dealt with alienated heroes. as in
Rabbil. Rutl . Other American
writers attack the hypocrisies of
Western morality. Heller'sdubious
hero of CUid. 12. Yossarian. hope-
lessly sane in an insane world.
makes a monstrous war look like
an old Marx Brothers film. Oon-
leavy's Gitlger Mati pushes his
pregnant wife dowlI the stairs and
makes this savagery seem hilari
..
JOHN UPDI KE
J.D. SALl t"GER
TENt"ESSEE WILLI AMS
ous. Southern. who says he " digs
Sartre the most:' un masks sc-x ual
mores in Candy by wi ldly embrac-
ing and violating them. deadpan.
In The Naked Lutlch. William
Burroughs inverts values to deride
our ideas of criminality. John Os-
borne. in Look Bark in Anger.
lambaste s the bourgeoisie; so
does Mailer in The Deer Park. The
nonheroes of Bellow in IIrr:Qg
and Malamud in The AssiJ(alll
are classic misfits. In Salinger's
novels it is youth that is alienated;
in Baldwins. his entire raox. Albee
derides U.S. values by usi ng an
emasculated. adopted son to sym-
bolize them in The American
Dream. Tennessee Williams made
" of Blanche Ou Bois in A Slreel-
car Nalllf'li Desire an alienated
heroine who turned to prostitution
bc<:ause she couldn't relate 10 any-
one bUI a stranger. Gelber in his
novel On Ice created an apothegm
that might have come from Sartre
himself: " It'sa random universe."
t"ORMAN MAILER JA MES IIALDWtN
JOSEPH HELLER SAUL IIELLOII
EDWARD ALII EE ANI) HtS 'AMEIII C"N DREAM'
BERNARO MAL"MUD
J"CK GELBE R
J. P. DO:-':lEAVY
IlI: RT LAII R IN IIECKl,"T"S 'WAITING FOR GODOT'
I. UCt.'IIC IO ... t:SCO
\I I LUA \1 II URROUCItS
TF.RRY SOlJTltF.R'"
JOUN OSBORNE
JEAN GENET
NATllALIF. SARRAUTt:
CONTI NU( D 9S
Its shy champion flees fame
tried to a'old the pn:ss
after he 1M Nobtl Pria:.
oot a sharp-eyed pholOllmpher found
him and he fl ashed an ITin.
CONTI NUED
I na 1946 portrait Sartre is seen
with the two dominant women in his
life, Simone de Beauvoir
and his mother, now 82.
SARTRE TRAVELS A TORTUOUS ROAD TOWARD HIS NEW MORALITY
Today he works surrounded by books
in an apartment in Montparnassc.
with Mme. Sartre down the block and
Mme. de Beauvoir not far away.
Dealing with Earthly Hells
by FRANK KAPPLER
A ll men liveenvclopcd in whale
lines." wrote Herman Melville.
"All are born with halters round
their but it is only when
caught in the swift. sudden turn of
death . thai mortals realize the si-
lent. subt le. ever-present peri ls of
life .... "
"We have lost lauch so much
that occasionally we cannot help
feeling a sort of disgust with 'real
life.' " observed Fyodor Dostoev-
sky, "and that is why we areso an-
gry when people remind us of it:'
Hamlet had a dilTerent prob-
lem: " To be or not to be." he
asked. " That is the question." And
for Lord Greystoke. Edgar Rice
Burroughs' jungle hero. the com-
plexities of human relationships
were summed up in a single, per-
plexing concept: "You Jane, me
Tarzan. "
Whatever else the above quota-
tions may have in common, the
unifying thread that cau<;cs them
to be anthologized here is existen-
tialism. Advertently or otherwise.
all arc manifestations of existen-
tial thought. Exi stentiali sm has
been around for a long time. and
many people have been waiting
for it to make up its mind about
what it really is. or just hoping it
would go away. The possibility
that it will do either is remOte-
especially now that its most vocal
contemporary apostle. Jean- Paul
"
Sartre, has published the lirst vol-
ume of his long-awaited autobiog-
raphy and created a literary furor
by spurning the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
It was Sartre, with his novels
and especiall y his plays. helped
by the novels of his then-close
friend Albert Camus. who after
World War I[ channeled what had
been pri mari ly a preoccupation
of phi losophers into what is to-
day the mainstream of artistic cre-
ation. Sartre took the turgid soul-
searching of the modern German
philosophers and gave it a French
lucidity: Camus took from the
Czech novelist Franz Kafka and
the Russian Dostoevsky their ali-
enated heroes. helpless in an ab-
surd world. and etched them with a
Gallic economy of line. These were
the two who first caught the at -
tention of the avant-garde. BUI
hard on the heels of the avant-
garde always come the populariz-
ers. and now. like it or not. we
arc aU consumers of
ism. buying it in aU kinds of pack-
ages- novels with faceless char-
acters. plays without exits. nou-
veUe vague films, whose common
perceptible message we already
know: human existence is absurd.
h has been written about endless-
ly. but the philosophers' verbiage
is written in code. and so a con-
sumers' guide is not amiss.
Much of the popular confusion
about the nature of existentialism
stems from its wide variety. Sar-
trc's is the check-rated brand. but
it is only one of many_ Even exis-
tentialists differ about what it
means to be an existentialist. but
on one thing they aTe generally in
agreement : they hate to define it.
It is a rare book on existentialism
that does not start out by teUing
the reader that. if he a
definition, he's got another thin k
coming. An excellent new guide to
existential thought. TIll' Worlds of
Exis/f'ntialism by Professor Mau-
rice Friedman of Sarah Lawrence
CoUege. wastes no time setting
the reader straight on this point.
It s opening words arc: .. 'Give me
a one-sentence definition of exis-
tentialism: This statement is of-
ten more a ritual defense against
the insecurity aroused by not be-
ing au courant than a genuine de-
sire ror knowledge."
W th somewhat less asperity.
Dr. Friedman goes on 10 explain
that existentialism is not a single
movement within philosophy but
a Stream welling up from under-
ground sources and converging
and diverging: not a philosophy
but a mood. embracing a number
of dispar3te philosophies whose
differences are more basic than the
general feeling which unites them.
When it comes to the areas on
whiCh most existentialists agree.
Webster'S New Coll egiate Diction-
ary. at least. is unequivocal. [t de-
fines existentialism as "I. Phi/o.<_
---------
An introspective humanism or
theory of man which expresses the
individuars intense awareness of
his contingency Ithat is. existing
as an individual human bei ng. de-
pendent on others for existence,
menaced by death and dependent
on oneself for shaping the course
and quality of one's life] and free-
dom: a theory which states ttlat
the existence of the individual pre-
cedes his essence. Specif.: a . phi/a-
sophiral exislentia/ism, a theory
whiCh stresses the individuars re-
sponsi bility for making hi msel f
what he is. b, Chris/Ian f'xis/en-
liaiism. a theory which Slresses the
subjective aspects of the human
person considered as a creature of
God .... "
This is a good sta rt ing point. It
isn't complete, but many omitted
elements are things over which ex-
istentialists disagree. Before dis-
secti ng existentialism. a few def-
initions of the key words in the
existenti a I lexicon arc in order. The
distinction between eXiSleilCe and
essence is not merely a semantic
innovation of existentialists: it has
long been part of the language of
philosophy. Existence. which is nOt
the passive continuance in being
of common implies some-
thing active, an emergence from
passiveness. (" Don't j ust he there
---do something! Ex/sI!")
Essence is the name fo r the com-
mon nature of all members of one
species. Traditionally it has been
assumed that Ihis nat ure is ready-
CONTINUED
i
I
"'
The price of awareness
is often despair
SARTRE
CONTINUED
made and unalterable. By contraSt
the various forms of existentialism
argue that man exists only insofar
as he shapes his own existence and
thus confers an essence upon it
by his own conscious choice-the
choice that Hamlet wrestled with
so eloqucmly. From this idea fol-
lows Sartre's famous formula,
which not all existentialists accept :
"Existence precedes essence:'
The rest of SaTIre's philosophy
can besummarized (oversimpli lied,
of course) as follows: Man comes
into a totally opaque, undifferenti
ated, meaningless universe, By the
power orhis mysterious conscious-
ness, which Sartre calls neanl, man
makes of the universe a habitable
world. Whatever meaning and val-
ue t he world has comes from his
existenlial choice. These choices
differ from one man to another.
Each lives in his own world, or,
as Sartre also says, each creates
his own situation. Frequently this
existential choice is buried in a
lower level of consciousness. But
to become truly alive one must be-
come aware of oneself as an ',\"'-
that is, a true exis/enlial subject,
who must bear alone the responsi-
bili ty for his own situation.
h is dreadful to choose
overawes the e:>;istential subject.
For the man who is clearly con
scious of the necessity he is under
10 choose his own world will suf-
fer a sense of absurdity and often
despai r. What values is he to
choose? Systems of philosophy. re-
ligious faith, bourgeois morality
are often merely e:>;cuses for evad-
ing one's liberty, or duty, to deter-
mine values for oneself. They can
be inducements to the ultimate
sin, maul'aise Joi (bad fai th). One
who lives in maumiseJoi leads an
Inau/heMic existence, and there
just isn't anything worse than that.
It is possible to emerge, Sartre
holds, from this miserable state of
indetennination by engagement,
committing oneself by a resolute
act of free choice to a positive part
in human affairs. This leads to an
awareness of the freedom of oth-
ers, and this commitment in turn
provides a shape for one's own
existence and a common. inte-
grating purpose for humanity.
Toward what end, SaTIre has so
far not made up his mind. Whcn
he broached the idea of salvation
by f'ngagemf'nI in 1946 in L"Exis*
If'nlialismf' est un humanismI',
many saw it as an optimistic twist
in Sartre's pessimistic philosophy,
and the humanists, who place their
faith in man and not in God,
started to welcome him aboard.
But Same waved them off. He in-
sisted God was dead, but he reo
fused to substitute man for Him.
He refused 10 go beyond what he
had said earlier, that "man is the
being who aspires to be God." It
is only in this latter sense that he
would accept the humanist label .
In the sense that existentialism
is not a system but a mood of phi
losophy, a reaction against the
Existentialism's most eloquent
novelist, Albert Camus, won No-
bel Prize in died inanauto-
mobile accident three years later.
static and the abstract in of
the dynamic and the concrete, it
has been on the scene
Heraclitus (500 B.C.) took issue
with Parmenides' assertion that
only The Unchanging One is real.
and insisted that al1 was flux. He
cited the bow and the lyre as e:l:am-
pies of the harmony of opposites.
Scholars have found intimations
of existentialist thought in the Old
Testament Psalms, and one con-
temporary critic argues that when
Jesus said, "Ye are the salt of the
earth: but if the salt have lost his
savor, wherewith shall it be
salted?"' he was really expressing
the existential theme of {'ngage-
menl, or authentic inauthentic
existence. thi s kind of lati-
tude, existentialism can be proven
to had more fathers than the
atom bomb.
lust when did modern e:l:isten-
tiali sm itself emerge from the ne-
ant? There arc any number of
places to start, beginning with the
Luther-dn gnostic Jacob Boehme
( 1575- 1624), the first European
phi losopher to worry much about
existence as an abyss of nothing-
CONTINUED
The elegance of Thayer McNeil elegantly staled by;;,
.. lorsheim
" ' .
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He is equipped
to trigger revolution
SARTRE
CONTI NUED
ness. Traces of his thinking can be
found among taler philosophers
from Niet:uche to Paul Till ich. The
French genius Rene Descartes
( 1596--1650), as every college f resh-
man knows, is the author of the
famous " 1 think. therefore 1 am:'
and the true fathe r of modern phi
losophy. As such. he may also be
the father of existentialism. If so.
he is the sort of fat ller against
wll om offspri ng rebel, for ever
si nce. one of tile favor ite pastimes
of tlli nkers like Dos-
toc:vs ki and Camus has been to
rewrite Descartes' theories accord-
ing 10 their own lights.
But Descartes is a true forefa-
ther of Sartre if only for tile fact
that he was a pllilosopher willi a
lilerary styk. In a field where lan-
guage is characterized more by
profundity than clarity. where sen-
tencelong German nouns stretch
to the horizon ""ith scarcely an ac
live verb in sight. the essays of the
bri ll iant Frenchman stand o ut li ke
beacons in their lucidi ty.
Another Frenchman. Blaise Pas-
cal ( 1623- 62). also pre-echoes Sar-
tre with his reflections on the mis-
ery and grandeur of man. born
a terrified "thinki ng Te(:d," and
tOTn bet""een the contradictions of
existence that the moderns catc-
gorize as the absurdit y of life. But
the ort hodox, textbook precursor
of modern exi stentialism was the
Dan ish theologian Soren Kicrke-
gaard ( 1813- 55). a lonel y. hunch-
backed writer who denounced the
establi shed church and rejected
much of the then-popular doc-
trines of Ger man ideali sm-io
which thought and ideas. rather
than things perceived through the
senses. were held to constit ute re-
ality. He buil t a philosophy based
in part on the idea of permanent
cleavage between faith and rea-
son. This was an existential ism
which still had room for a God
whom Sart re later expelled. but
which started the great pendulum-
swi ng toward the modem concepts
of the abs urd.
Ki<:rkeg1lard spent his life think-
ing existent ially and converting re-
markably few to his ideas. But
when it oomcs to the absurdity of
existence. war is a great oonvincer;
and it was at the end of World
War J that two German philoso-
phers, Karl Jaspers and Martin
Hei deggcr. took up Kierkcgaard' s
ideas. elaborated and systematized
them. By the 1930s. Kierkegaard's
thi nking made new impact on
French intellectuals who. like Sar-
tre. were nauseated by the static
pre Munich hypocrisy of the Eu-
ropean middle class. Afler World
War II . with the human condi tion
more precarious than ever, wi th
humanity facing the mushroom-
shaped ultimate absurdi ty, exis-
tentiali sm and our ti me came to-
gether in Jean- Paul
T o understand Jean- Paul Su
tre," novelist-critic Iris Murdoch
has said. "is to understand some
thi ng impor tunt about the present
timc. As philosopher. as politician
and as novelist Same is profound-
ly and self-consciously contempo-
rary; he has the style of the age:'
As a philosopher Sartre has been
obsessed with probing the nature
of being and reality. and wrestl ing
with the mysteries of perception
( Is the color f see when we say
"red" the same color you see?).
Fell' pwple who are nOI journey-
man philosophers and lor maso-
chists can get through his 194)
eE/f'(' f"1 If" Niom ( /king Qnd
Nolhing"f"ss), beside whose ont o-
logical semantics the chestnut
about angels dancing on the head
of 3 pin seems like a simple, sensi-
ble question . A S a political theori st
he has been naive and inconsistent.
On the one hand his need for f"1!'
gagl'lUtl!l had led him to espouse
Communist causes. On the other
hand his di staste for what Miss
Murdoch call s thc Marxists' " theo-
logical view of the Di alect ic," and
his fierce intellectual independence
have made him pull back.
It is as a writer that all his selves
political being and
together: a
writer. moreover, equipped to tr ig-
ger revolution. For unli ke his
teachers. he possesses a scintillal-
i ng litera ry style and a sense of hu-
mor. Unlike Kierkegaard, he has
always had a sympat hetic audi-
ence: of all people. the French are
the mOSt disposed to read any.
thing, if it is brill iantly expressed.
And Hnally. in Sartre thTe(: great
modem streams of thought Howed
together: Marxism, existentialism
and phenomenol ogy- a distinctly
ZOth Cent ury and highly technical
movement "' hieh allempl5 to ap-
prchend I he Irue essences of things.
Saved by hi s Gallic skepticism
from "buying" the whole of any
of them. he di stilled from each a
vital ingredient: from the Marx-
ians the passion for (IClion, from
Kierkcg.1ard the image of an-
guished man isolated in a mean
ingless world. from the phenom-
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ONES
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An anti-hero learns
there is no past
SARTRE
CONTJNUEO
enologists the compulsion to define
"human reality" and conscious-
ness. The distillate he flavored with
two SanTian ingredients, sardonic
humor and a proround sympathy
for the anguished. ridiculous in
dividual man.
Not all of Sartre's writing is
equally incisive. His plays have
communicated better than his nov-
els his idea of man's frcedom-
and necessity-to decide what he
wants to do and to do it, what-
ever the consequences, as in us
M ( The Flies) which he based
on the Orestes legend. In Huis Clos
(No Exit) he probes the baffling
relationship of self to 01 hers: three
charactersconfi ned to Hell grad ual-
Iy learn that what is infernal is sim-
ply other people- and ultimately
oneself. In La Mains Sules (Dirt)'
Hands. produced in the United
States in 1948 as Red GIMes) he
dealt with the self-defeating short-
sightedness of the Communists'
belief that ends juslify means.
As a novelist he is didactic. us-
ing his novels as platforms for his
mctaphysics. and his usually lucid
style glows fitfully from the depths
of the gray, gluey mass that Sartre
loves to describe as the very imagc
of the unawakened, uncommitted
human consciousness.
In his first novel (1938), La Nau
set: (Nau;'eu). which was translated
into English as The Diury of An-
lOine Roquenlin, Sartre sloshes
I hrough t his same ul igi nous ground
in the person of Antoine Roquen-
tin, a Iypical Sartrian hero, fasci- .
nating but totally untouching. In
the course of the book, Roquen-
tin, a writer, is overcome as he
thaI things, objects. events
which he has always before been
able to classify and categorize no
longer make any sense to him. The
things that surround him are sim
ply there, grotesque, huge, stub-
born- and meaningless. In a pic-
lure gallery he studies the faces
of the bourgeoisie. These people
clearly don't think their existence
unjuslified; surrounded by their
status symbols, they appear to be
convinced they are necessary to the
uni verse and have a right to be
al ive. Things get worse. Roq uentin
feels totally alienated from the
most familiar surroundings. He
stares at a seat in a st reetcar. . . I
murmur: 'Irs a seat: as a sort of
exorcism. But the word remains
on my lips; it refuses to go and rest
upon the thing .... Things are de-
livered from their names . .. it
seems crazy to cal! them seats or say
anything whatever about them, "
Roquent;n realizes that he had
before thought of things in
terms of classes and kinds; now
what he sees in front of him is a
particular. exi sting, disconnect ed
thing. That's not all. He discovers
there no such things as inci -
dents or ad ventures. An incident is
a story, which one can tell later,
complete with its conclusion. One

I n a chilling 1944 dl1lma. No
xil. Same showed that hell is
the suffering thai people inflkt
upon each other and themselves.
can live a story or leU it. but not
both at once. When one is li ving
an event, the future, which gives it
shape and meaning, is not already
there. (Thornton Wilder haunting-
ly illustrated this same phenom'.:-
non in Our To"",,. in which
dead Emily. choosing a significant
day to relive. finds that on the day
itself she was so unaware of i!s
significance thaI she was barel y
conscious of the event s
around her, And contempora ry
playwrights illustrate it uncen-
sciously by failing to write a tel!i,!g
play about the revolution in LJ. ::' .
racial relations l:Je(;ause, while con
scious of it, they are inside il and
cannot yet see it whole, from out-
side.)
Suddenly Roquent in realizes
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" .
Jean Genet's rich,
full life of crime
SARTRE
COHl lNUEO
that his lifc cannot be what he
wanted. a succession of moments
followi ng one another inevitably.
li kc a tife read in a book. All at
once it is clear; the past docs not
exist. There are tatters and traces.
likc thc t rails of subatomic parti
cles in a cloud chamber. wi th noth
ing behind them.
He has discovered that every-
thing in the world. induding hi m-
self, is contingent- dependent on
others, but also dependent on his
own efforts to give life meaning.
Finall y Roquent in decides that if
only he can create something. a
novel perhaps. hiscreativity would
mean commitment. and commit-
ment would mean engagemf'lll. His
existence would acquire meani ng.
and perhaps he woul d evcn be able
10 sce his own past without disgust.
Thus ends La Nausee. the most
apt ly named novel of our time.
Al most everybody accepted Ro-
quentin as Sanre himself and de-
manded to know whether Ro-
q ue nt in's hope of s a l va t ion
th roug h artistic crea t ion eve r
proved founded. Sanre said he'd
answer that part icular question in
lat er works. Jt was to be 26 years
before he got around to it.
In the int ervening period. Sa rtre
mainl y concerned himsel f with try-
ing to go beyond mere discussion
of personal sal vat ion through art
and li terature. He want ed, as Iris
Murdoch put it . " to eonne<: t, in a
great equation, literature. mean-
ing, truth and democracy." Aware
that words may disguise or j ustify
viol ence. he wanted to find a mid-
dle way between the petrifacti on
of language and its deteriorat ion
into meaninglessness. between the
mau"aise /oi of the oourgeois and
spiritual chaos. between the black-
and-white standards ofooth Com
muni sm and capitali sm on the one
hand, and poli tical cynicism on
the other.
"The functi on ofa writer: ' Sar
tre wrote in Whal is Lirerature?,
"is to call a spade a spade, lfwords
are skk. it is up to us to cure them.
... I distrust the incommuni ca-
ble: it is the source of all violence."
Language had been getting sick
long before Sartre's time. The ac-
cent on subjectivity that followed
Kierkegaard made more people
than ever aware that all things
do not look the same to al l peo-
ple. First, the traditional painter's
world of spatiall y defined, self-
contained figures was shattered by
impressionism, which became the
"
new '"realis m. " a new way of truth-
fully capt uring the look of the
world right now. at this instant.
Writers didn' t respond to the
new ideas of perception so quickly.
When they did. it was the poets.
who are most inti matelyconcerned
with words and their connotation s.
""iho showed a reaction first. The
del i berate obscurity of Be<:kell and
lonesco. of Lasl Year al Marien-
bad and started with the sym-
bolists Rimbaud and Mall armc.
In the wake of Rimbaud and
Mallarmc came the most savage
attack of all on meani ng, surreal.-
ism. born (naturall y) after World
War I, animated by a hatred of
bourgeois society, and dedicated to
turning meaning upside down by
identi fying reality with the dream.
S artre. 13 at war's end. gf'ew up
in the shadow of surrealism. He
shared the surrealist s' hatred of the
bourgeoi sie and thei r deli ght in
upending bourgeoi s val ues, Sar-
Ire' s method was to sub:; titute for
the litemry hero an anti-hero of
heroic proportions.
He pull ed off a tour de. force in
this department when, in [952. in
Saint Gl'nrl: Comedil'lJ 1'1 Marlyr, . '
he canonized l ean Genet. the oon-
tempomry French poet and pl ay- :
wright who used hi s life of crime
and degeneracy as a spri ngboard
to lit erary fame. Sart re lauded Ge-
net for choosing the exi stence of
thief. traitor, pederast and por-
nographer. I n an earl ier essay, Sar-
tre had pol ished off Baudelaire for
made, when he was only 7
years old. an admirable
tial choice. anti social solitude, and
then spoi ling it all by feeling guilt
and thus showing that he accept ed
tile bourgeois Catholi c moral ity of
those around him.
Genet was a perfect anti-hero.
A bastard, he was sent from an
orphanage to be brought up in
Morvan by peasant foster parents.
(Sartre envied Genet hi s bastardy
and referred to himself as an "hon-
orary bastard" ; Sart re'S father, al-
though ma rried to hi s mother, died 1
almost immediately after Jean
Paul was OOrn .) Naturall y, being
deprived. Genet pilfered things.
When he was found out. people
call ed him a thief. When he heard
that " vert iginous word; ' Sartre
says, Genet de<: ided to be what
he was said to be and, gloriously
free of guilt feelings, lived a life
of crime and every kind of what
the {Wl il bourgeois considers vile-
ness. Genet's crimes and debauch-
eries and sojourns in pri sons and
CONTINUED
- --- - --- - . + '
,
'," ".' .. .. '_ "", i
.)1 ';'" .r., .... ... , '" .... II
Being existential
is very hard work
Puff

you
need not
inhale
, , to enjoy
SARTRE

reformatories he transcended by
making them the mltleria! of lit-
erature.
To eap thc irony, of course. as
the critic Maurice Cranston has
observed, Genet. t he persecuted
scapegoat, having tormented the
bourgeoisie as It thief. and then
more efft!Ctively as a talented poet
and author. communicating \0
t hem all too well hi s
desires and the thrill of his crim-
inal life. has become a literary ce-
lebrity. Freed from prison because
of hi s literary achievements (ViI't
la FraM't'!) and made prosperous
by them, Genet no longer has any
need for steali ng. He has bome
known for his gent ility and gener-
osity. the typical bourgeois.
T he ironies of Ihe bourgeois reb-
el are not limited 10 Genel, Equat-
ing Sanre's savagely antibourgeois
values with his own mode of exisl-
enee has been a paradox both
to the beatniks who tried to dig
his philosophy after 1944 and to
the tourists who came 10 gape at
I n .lean Genet's The B/uch.
a prime example of existential
theater, Negro actor; don while
masks in a symboli<:: display of
the of mcial cruelty.
him in St. Germain and later at
the beatniks in Village.
The ringing, marvelously nega-
ti,"e apothegms (,' Man is a useless
passion:' "Ufe is meaningless:'
" The bourgeoi sie an: swine")
inevi tabl y aroused the young, the
di spossessed, and the disoontented,
and conjun:d up visions around
the Lions clubs of a picturesque
nonconformist advocating moral
anarchy in the streets and bed-
rooms of 51. Gennain. The Iruth
about Sartn: comes as quite a
blow 10 adolescenl nihilists. He
lurns out to be a stern moralist,
speaking and .... -ri l ing in beaut iful-
ly articulated sentences. Whi le he
happily that life is misera-
ble, he pleads above all for respon-
si bililY and malurity. He opincs
that virtue is possible, even though
diflkult. And I'ngagl!IIIl!nI , il devel
ops, means Ihal with resolute ef-
fOTllhe world can be changed for
the better.
SaTIre's personal life, moreover,
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Is the greengrocer
the modern saint?
SARTRE
CONTINUED
contrasts nicely wi th what he rec-
ommends for others. A quietly
weB-dressed middle-aged man, he
is a retired teacher who lives next
door to his mother in an elevator
apartment. You can't get much
more bourgeois than that. And the
pact that he made wit h Simone
de Beauvoir)O yeal"li ago. flouting
bourgeois matrimony and permit
ting what they callcd "'contingent
loves" (but al the same time mak-
ing no provision for divorce) has
proved, as one observer put it,
"more binding than a stack of
marriage licenses."
Worst of all for Sanrc's existen-
tialist image, of course, is hi s pros-
perity. H is books sell Ii ke crepes su-
zelle (when Le.f Mars came out in
French early this year it headed the
best-seller list for months) and his
occasional lectures draw crowds
which could be duplicated in the
Uni ted Slates only by the Beatles.
But Sanre has clearly learned to
bear what one critic calls "'the in-
dignit ies of success."' Anot her crit-
ic, Melvin Maddocks, asks how
the post- Bohemi an anist, "'suffer-
ing acceptance instead of rejec-
tion,"' will relat e 10 this new hum-
ble, even overadoring, audience.
Not like Truman Capote. pre-
ciously defiant in his hammock.
Maddocks ventures. Nor like bel-
licose Norman Mailer. No, Mad-
docks thinks the hipster may "'turn
out to be in the likeness of the late
Wallace Stevens, poet and insur-
ance executive, sitting behind a
vice president's polished desk at
the Accident and Indemnity Com-
pany of Hartford." '
One thinks, says Maddocks, of
Kierkegaard's suggest ion that the
Christian saint, the " knight of
faith." ' may not be the holy her-
mit in the desert nor the monk in
his conspicuous hair shirt. but Ihe
greengrocer down the street.
Or a retired teacher wi th a rest-
less pen.
II is no mere happenstance that
the fil"lit volume of Sanre's auto-
biography should be titled The
Words. In the beginning, was The
Word--and for this pampered
only child. whose father died when
he was a baby and was replaced by
books, there was linle clse that
mallered. Words were read to him
by his mother. boomed at him by
his language teacher grandfather,
wrinen and recited by him to audi-
ences of ooh-ing and ah-i ng adults.
Words were the first preoccupation
of the child who was father to the
sardonic philosophers of St. Ger-
main, and this latest work is a
Freudian analysis of his love affair
with them as well as a word-por-
trait of the psyche of the most pre-
cocious lillIe boy within memory.
What is noteworthy about TIle
Words is that it recants much of
Sartre's earlier writing- and in the
process answers, obliquely, his
own 26-year-old question about
the possibility of through
literary creation. What is glorious
is that Sart re is at the peak of
his style- terse. pungent . sardonic,
writing with a pen so sharp that it
showers effortlessly the philosoph-
ical and literary attitudes of the
bourgeoisie from which he sprang.
and an eye so penetr.ating that it
sees through even himself.
it became known that
Sanre was working on his autobi-
ography, there was much conjec-
lUre about how many volumes he
would require to get to age 5. But
in this 255-page volume he carries
his life to a point several years be-
yond his early novel-writing st!!SC
(which was his 8th year). "Unlike
Roquentin. his fictional creation
who morosely concluded the past
didn't even exist, Sanre is exqui-
sitely able ex posl [aclo to recon-
st ruct these early years with such
insight and total recall that one
thought does indeed follow an-
other almost with the inevitability
of the notes of a familiar tune,
creating the impression that the
whole thing is being written con-
temporaneously by a frighteningly
gifted child--which may not be
far from the truth.
The deat h of Sartre's fathe r
meant. among other things. that
when he turned to books. they were
the literature of an earlier gener-
ati on, the works venerated by his
grandfat her. So important was this
literature to that generation that
the boy was overwhelmed by the
idea that li terary creation was the
route to salvation. ("One writes
for one's neighbors or for God. I
dedded \0 write for God with the
purpose of saving my neighbors.")
Today he takes a dim view of
the idea of salvation through crea-
tion. He regards his former pose as
a sort of selfish idealism in which
he set himself apart from the hu-
man condition by describing it and
dwelt upon the meaninglessness
and absurdity of other lives in or-
der to pump meaning and necessity
into his own. '" [ was Roquentin: I
used him to show, without compla-
cency, the te){ture of my life. At the
CONTINUED
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Ultimately, he may
be called religious
SARTRE
CONTINUEO
same time I was I , the eiec::l. chron-
icler of Hell .... I was a prisoner
of that obvious contradiction, but
I did nol see il. I saw the world
through it. Fake to the marrow of
my bones and hoodwinked. I joy-
fully wrote about OUf unhappy
state ....
" J have changed ... illusion
has been smashed \0 bits: martyr-
dom, salvation and immortality
are falling \0 pie<;cs; the edifice is
going to rack and ruin: I collared
the Holy Ghost in Ihe cellar and
threw him Olll; athei sm is II cruel
and long-range affair: I lhink I've
carried it through."
After Us Mots was published in
France, there was a great brouha-
ha about how much of his previ-
ous work he was rejecting. At that
time he told an interviewer: "What
J wrote about thi s in LeJ /IIo/ s has
been misunderstood. There is no
book of mine that J reject. That
does not mean that J find them all
good. What I regreued in LA Nau
sle was not having put myself
completely into the thing. J re-
mained outside my hero's disease,
protected by my neurosis which,
through writing. gave me happi-
ness .... J have always been happy.
Even if I had been more honest
wi t h regard to myself at that mo-
ment. I should still have written
LA Naush . What I lacked was a
sense of reality. J have changed
since. I have slowly learned to ex-
perience reality. J have seen chi l-
dren dying of hunger. Against a
dying child, Lo Naus/e carries no
weight. "
K ierkegaard started out by de-
nouncing his church and wound
up in the text books as the expo-
nent of "Christian existentialism,"
as against Sartre's "atheistic exis-
tentialism". Today, Sanre stands
in danger of the same fate. He
would hate to hear his anguish for
man called love. Won.e, of coun.e.
is to hear his phi losophy called
humanism-or, worst of all , reli-
gion. But the very hean of hi s s0-
cial philosophy, to choose free-
dom for oneself is to choose free-
dom for all mankind, is only a
hairsbreadth (though a few mil-
lion words) away from the Golden
Rule. Having thrown t he Holy
Ghost out of t he cellar, having
found there is no God and no life
after death, and having nonetheless
opted for an engagement for the
common benefit of mankind, he
may now suffer the supreme indig-
nity of being told: "You in t he
most real sense are truly religious."
I n the till">e_honored manner of
Parisian writc!"$, SaTtre takcs his
ease at a sidewalk cafe Bear his
left-bank llpartmcnt and Sl:rib-
bles new IIIN3 in his notebook.