REVIEWS

...Everything within me," he writes in Being and Nothingness, "demands God and that I cannot forget...

...Father King's book ably demonstrates the extent to which this is true...

...He spent a commonplace and uneventful youth in Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, and in the years between school and the army was lay assistant to a vicar in Reading, Berlitz teacher of English in Bordeaux and tutor to wealthy children in the Pyrenees...

...Like a stone it is structured, determined, objective...

...In October 1917 his molten feelings cooled and hardened into the iron truths of his great poems, "Disabled" and "Duke et Decorum Est...

...He has no doubt modified his position in a number of ways and of late has been far more concerned with politics than ontology...

...If there were a God he would be for Sartre perfect in the sense that he would combine in his being a boundless freedom together with the structure of a determined substance and man would be made in his image...

...Father King overrules this kind of objection when he says: "Sartre has been widely known as an atheist but perhaps today he could be better understood as a religious prophet preaching a process theology...

...This dualism is inexorable...

...Just after these poems he formulated his artistic credo: "I think every poem, and every figure of speech should be a matter of experience...

...Compare, for example, the theme of perfection in the two writers...

...It has for Sartre the status of an ontological law...

...Consciousness is, in one of Sartre's more striking metaphors, a "nothingness"- i.e...

...It might also be looked upon as a variation upon the todo y nada theme found in mystical writings where reality is conceived as a dialectic between emptiness and fullness...

...By the end of 1917 he could justly boast: "I go out of this year a Poet, my dear Mother, as which I did not enter it...

...This is the key to his social activism and evidence that for him there is always some slim hope of an exit...

...Rivers and the inspiring influence of his courageous fellow-patient, Sassoon, who introduced him to Yeats' poetry and corrected his work, propelled Owen toward self-revelation...

...Stall-worthy convincingly concludes that Owen "wrote more eloquently than the other poets of the tragedy of boys killed in battle, because he felt that tragedy more acutely...

...The very next day, while still asleep, he "was blown in the air right away from the bank," was shell-shocked and sent to recover in Cralglockhart hospital, near Edinburgh, where he spent the four most formative months of his life...

...What I meant was that the two writers are broadly akin in the themes they deal with and not dissimilar in style and intent...

...that which can never coincide with the thing-like...

...Sartre's dualism is what marks out the parameters of his anthropology- the endless frustrations of the self in its attempts to find definition and rest, always doomed efforts of a free consciousness to find coincidence with the objects of its desire...

...This does not seem to me to be true...

...To be man means to reach toward being God...

...It might be objected here that Sartre parodies and reverses the spiritual tradition rather than instance it because for him God is impossible whereas in the tradition God was a veritable answer to the dilemmas of existence...

...my roots sucked up its juices and I changed them into sap...

...But the transforming power of grace plays an analogous role in his scheme...

...and so forth...

...I mention the above as a preface to a review of Father King's book because I know of no work which confirms what was for me originally not much more than an impression with a great wealth of detail and persuasive reasoning...

...Father King does not say this explicitly but it seems to follow from some of the things he does say...

...He was in France when the war broke out, and passed his time "reading the Newspapers in an armchair in a shady garden" and vaguely planning to join the Italian Army or the Artists' Rifles...

...It is, in addition, an excellent compendium of Sartre's general philosophical stance...

...In The Words Sartre wrote: "I grew like a weed on the compost of Catholicity...

...A number of the audience were puzzled by the analogy and some thought it mistaken...

...Images are often more important than arguments and this seems to me especially true in Sartre's case...

...Augustine's multiple descriptions of the God reality are summed up in his famous "our hearts are restless until they rest in thee...

...My subject is War, and the pity of War...

...He is easy to refute from this or that point of view (and has been so refuted dozens of times) but at the risk of missing his aesthetic thrust...

...Father King rightly notes that dualisms of this sort have their precedent in the religious idea of a fall...

...As early as Being and Nothingness he could say that freedom is identical with acting...

...Man is saved (and after 1950 Sartre uses the term salvation) through his creative efforts in history...

...REVIEWS THE LAST AUGUSTINIAN BERNARD MURCHLAND Sartre and the Sacred THOMAS M. KING U. of Chicago Press, $8.95 In a lecture some time ago I referred to Sartre as "the last of the Augustin-ians...

...For Owen struck the sophisticated Siegfried Sassoon, when they first met in August 1917, as "a rather ordinary young man, perceptibly provincial...

...The great German offensives of the spring had failed and the enemy had just withdrawn from the Chateau Thierry salient...

...From this hell upon earth there is no escape save through the grace of the savior Christ...

...While I did not have anything like a tight case, I pointed out three thematic parallels which seemed to me to be basic in both...

...When he first arrived he wrote: "There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France, and I am in perfect spirits...

...it appears as a pure spontaneity, confronting a world of things which is inertness...

...Critics sometimes point out that the later Sartre has tempered the rigidity of his original categories to the requirements of realpolitik...

...In October Owen gallantly captured a German machine gun and scores of prisoners, and was awarded the Military Cross...

...Like Walt Whitman at the Civil War hospital, Owen was fascinated by the horrors of suffering and violent death, and like T.E...

...This would be to do him the greatest injustice that can befall an imaginative writer: viz., to miss the point of his metaphors...

...By exercizing our freedom we define ourselves and make history, thus contributing to the eventual kingdom of Freedom...

...rather the tradition in question is primarily that of the West, especially in its Catholic manifestations...

...In any event, he makes clear that Sartre is important in the final analysis because he is mythically rich...

...The first half of this sympathetic and valuable biography leads to Owen's enlistment in October 1915 and inevitably includes many trivial and rather dull details, mainly from his letters and the autobiography of his younger brother and editor, Harold...

...And while that tradition is many things Father King would no doubt agree that the Augustinian strain is most helpful in elucidating Sartre's work...

...Stallworthy, on the basis of a mutilated letter, speculates that Owen was forced to leave the vicarage after smuggling a young boy into his room and states that the resulting furor nearly caused a nervous breakdown...

...Though Owen was strongly influenced by Keats and had a precocious awareness of his poetic vocation, his early poems are surprisingly feeble...

...On November 4th, one week before the armistice, he was killed during the desperate battle on the Sambre Canal, where four Victoria Crosses were won before sunrise, and joined Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas as poet-victims of the Great War.Thomas as poet-victims of the Great War...

...for him there is no coincidence of opposites as there was for the majority of the mystics...

...Sartre is surely the most imagistic of philosophers since Nietzsche...

...Sartre states this ideal variously as the coincidence of objectivity and subjectivity, of consciousness and substance or, in his most technical terms, of bsing-in-itself and being-for-itself...

...Stallworthy is particularly good on the relation of Owen's personal combat experience, which charred his senses and forced him into sudden maturity between January and June 1917, and the general-and hopeless-strategy of the Somme war...

...The last half of the book, on the war years, is of course far more interesting...

...Like a wind it is ever blowing beyond itself seeking rest in the substantiality of things but never finding it...

...This dualism of two distinct modes of being-the in-itself and the for-itself -is reminiscent of the Augustinian dualism of two cities...

...Nothing is more instructive than reading the Confessions side by side with, say, Nausee...

...Being in-itself is what it is...

...Likewise Sartre...

...In the first place, the two are haunted by an ideal of perfection...

...I do not wish to disagree with this although I would be more inclined to say that Sartre is most traditional in his emphasis upon the dark pole, the "atheistic" moment in the dynamic of faith when God does not exist...

...And, thirdly, there is a common sense of the self in its alienation and dramatic quest for identity...

...Owen shed his romantic illusions rather slowly...

...Even Sartre cannot outdo Augustine in cataloguing the miseries of this frustration...

...The intense stress of war and shock, followed by a period of reflection under the kindly care of Dr...

...Father King states his claim succinctly: "I have come to believe that much of Sartre's thought can be understood only in the context of the spiritual tradition he endlessly renounces" with the result that his writings have "an overriding theological character...

...Lawrence he carried photographs of the dead and mutilated and showed them to friends...

...After his discharge from Craiglockhart he rejoined his regiment in Scarborough, shifted to Ripon, and arrived for his second campaign in northeast France in September 1918...

...in the manner of Renan or H. F. Alexander, he seems to be looking forward to a god who is coming to be...

...Two, a radical dualism permeates their work...

...for him the drama of the self's quest is finally futile-"man is a useless passion"-whereas the tradition postulated a positive outcome of the battle between good and evil...

...Never, he writes, "could my consciousness be a thing, because its way of being in itself is precisely to be for itself...

...The loss of faith is a valid as well as a common dimension of religious experience...

...In October 1916, before the Somme, Owen wrote two poems that expressed shocking realism in a luxuriant context and revealed his "latent or suppressed homosexuality": To me was that Smile, Faint as a wan, worn myth, Faint and exceeding small On a boy's murdered mouth...

...Thou didst set me face to face with myself, that I might behold how foul I was, how crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous...

...Does not Sartre twist whatever he has gleaned from the tradition to his own atheistic ends at every turn...

...Father King observes: "It is this contradictory ideal that rests at the heart of man...

...and after he went over the top in April he still expressed sacrificial sentiments worthy of Kipling or even of Tennyson: "There was an extraordinary exultation in the act of slowly walking forward, showing ourselves openly...

...The for-itself on the other hand is never what it is...

...Having fallen from an original perfection man now strives "for the great return when the original Pleroma will be reachieved...

...The for-itself is the distinctively human realm of consciousness which is nee, undetermined, projective...

...It would not do to press the religious implications of Sartre's thought too far but they are illuminating...

...Haunted by the impossible synthesis, man is always aware of his own imperfection...

...The Poetry is the pity...

...The emphasis on corporate salvation, a new freedom, brotherhood, historical commitment and the like bear more than a coincidental resemblance to the Christian idea of redemption...

...Sartre, of course, does not speak of grace...

...Augustine stressed the irreconcilable character of the two states...

...He thus speaks more directly to the contemporary experience than do many more official spokesmen of the tradition...

...His concern is not specifically with Augustine...

...Nor was Owen himself destined to escape what he called "the yawn of death's jaws...

...Jon Stallworthy, himself a considerable poet and experienced soldier, provides a sensitive reading of the poems, emphasizes Owen's development and shows how he evolved from the derivative: A thousand suppliants stand around thy throne, Stricken with love for thee, O Poesy, to the confident and charactertistic: Under the mud where long ago they fell Mixed with the sour sharp odour of the shell...

...Still, it is the same Sartre- striving mightily to effect the realm of freedom from the realm of necessity...

...Man is fundamentally the desire to be God...

...His philosophy rests upon an enduring dialectic of experience and is expressed with great dramatic force...

...Sartre, for his part, defines man as the desire to be God...

...Wilfred Owen JON STALLWORTHY Oxford U. Press, $17.50 JEFFREY MEYERS Wilfred Owen, the finest English war poet, was born in 1893 in the Welsh marches, the eldest son of a minor railway official and a refined, puritanical mother...