Sartre as Anti-Hero
WOODCOCK, GEORGE
Sartre as Anti-Hero THE WORDS By Jean-Paul Sartre George Braziller. 255 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Paradox of Oscar Wilde," "The Writer and Politics," etc. "I...
...He presents an ironic record of his childhood in which, as in his novels, the heroic illusion is avoided...
...With this pretentious, camera-proud man Sartre deals with all the harshness of the child who sees his grandfather as a bearded Olympian and afterward discovers that he is an unadmirable human being...
...Or he can stare inward, concerned only with the spectacle of himself as the leading actor, with the world narrowed to his stage and other men merely the supporting figures in this one-man drama...
...Growing to maturity is a gradual shedding of the false character we assume through vanity...
...All the qualities one had sensed in de Beauvoir's other writings took definite shape in her Memoirs...
...these are the hypocrites...
...It reaches no farther than Sartre's 10th year, but it ends with his career assured...
...A little later God looked at him in the bathroom— "I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands"—but never returned...
...there are the impoverished, incompetent tutors and the fusty schools from which Sartre is withdrawn angrily by his indignant grandfather when he is given poor marks...
...When I began to read The Words I wondered how it would compare with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography, which I had disliked intensely...
...Some continue to do so all their lives, even after they have found themselves out...
...At the age of five Sartre began to see death...
...Sartre is thorough in his comic exposure of both, but in the process he is clearly teaching an existentialist lesson—that in childhood and youth it is inevitable that we should mold ourselves on others and live by plagiarism...
...I began my life as I shall no doubt end it, amidst books,' says Sartre in The Words, his first volume of autobiography...
...For the pattern is so stylized, the characters are so heightened and simplified, the experiences are so obviously selected to a single end, that it becomes a creation rather than a chronicle, and stands in that borderland where true autobiography and autobiographical fiction come together...
...Sartre lives the sheltered life of an only child, surrounded by three adoring adults...
...But I soon found that the personal relationship between the two writers, and their fellowship in existentialism, did not mean that they would look back in the same way on childhoods that in some respects were very similar...
...More important were the furtive visits with his mother to the early cinemas, where the pianist attacked the overture to Fingal's Cave as the light flickered like rain over the screen...
...In the process he achieves a curious and effective blend of selfabsorption and self-detachment...
...If we can judge from The Words, Sartre tends toward the latter extreme...
...there was no need to mock her since she never pretended to be anyone but herself...
...There are two possible attitudes for the autobiographer...
...What he saw in the cinema and what he read in the countless blood-and-thunder novelettes which his mother conspired with him to buy became the substance of Sartre's fantasy life, created his juvenile self-image, and set him, through plagiarism, on the path of a writing career...
...Once we met it on the Quai Voltaire...
...The Words is the narrative of a writer's genesis...
...And at least his relationship with his mother—that other child—is told with a great deal of tenderness...
...It was an old lady, tall and mad, dressed in black...
...Yet it is not the orgy of narcissistic emotionalism one might expect from such an approach...
...The Words opens with an almost traditional prologue, describing the genealogy of an Alsatian family, which in one generation produced the celebrated Albert Schweitzer, and in the next his cousin's son, Jean-Paul Sartre...
...Sartre was the child of an obscure naval officer "who was already wasting away with the fevers of Cochin-China, made the acquaintance of Anne Marie Schweitzer, took possession of the big, forlorn girl, married her, begot a child in quick time, me, and sought refuge in death...
...There is not much more to it than that, and yet the 250 pages which Sartre spends in the telling do not seem too much, because he is engaged in an extraordinary examination of a child's mind as it develops out of imitation toward originality...
...Sartre carefully and capably avoids these pitfalls...
...Fielding claims that affectation proceeds from one of two causes, vanity which "puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause," and hypocrisy which "sets us on an endeavor to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues...
...Perhaps it is even one of his best novels...
...The Words is not all mockery...
...With his widowed mother, Sartre went to live in the Paris apartment of his grandfather Charles Schweitzer, Albert's uncle, a petty man-of-letters and professional Alsatian refugee...
...as Sartre remarks, in the brief pages of epilogue to The Words, in later years "I came to think systematically against myself, to the extent of measuring the obvious truth of an idea by the pleasure it caused me...
...he is the subject, but he is also the ruthless observer...
...she took herself with the absorbed and morbid seriousness that is fatal in any autobiography, and so what seemed intended as a self-justification became an unintentional revelation of appalling self-pity...
...Now it is Sartre himself who becomes the anti-hero, living in a world of his own juvenile pretenses, and coming, by a procession of self-delusions, steadily nearer to the truth about himself which, I imagine Sartre would claim, is the only truth a man can fully know...
...There are experiences which Sartre relates with some nostalgia (though one is struck by the extent to which he remembers his experience as cerebral rather than physical, revealing a flaw that may explain the shortcomings of his novels...
...The events that form the basic pattern of Words are few enough, and in themselves commonplace...
...She muttered as I passed: 'I'll put that child in my pocket.' Another time it assumed the form of an excavation...
...Yet it is in imitation of this literary fraud that Sartre begins to read and find the fascination of words, and then to write and feel their intoxication...
...Sartre reveals with laughter the ridiculous nature of his own juvenile self...
...The approach is essentially comic...
...He can look outward from the room of his mind, seeing his past within the world that has made him as he helped to make it...
...The Words is one of Sartre's best books...
...He writes as "a man who can't think of his old ways without laughter...
...There are the parties for his grandfather's German pupils and the annual scampers out of Paris to the country in high summer...
...In fact, The Words might be quoted as an almost perfect example of Fielding's definition of "the true Ridiculous" whose only source is affectation...
...In The Words the child JeanPaul plays the part of vanity, and the other principal character, Charles Schweitzer, that of hypocrisy...
Vol. 47 • October 1964 • No. 21
