Cruising on Nothingness

...Other writers, it is true, have won attention by genuine achievement and gone on to sustain and magnify it by utter effrontery...

...Not content to characterize the modern malaise, he acted it out...

...It was an amazing career...

...The temptation with a figure of Sartre's stature is to identify too closely and thus to accept uncritically...

...No intellectual has ever exerted greater influence on politics or let politics exert more influence on the development of his thinking...

...Other writers may have defined our century more lucidly, but none with greater empathy than Sartre: He felt more deeply than he argued, and the virtues and vices of his world entered into the very marrow of his thought...

...The stage forced its disciplines on him, particularly when he was writing plays that both expressed urgent ideas and gave parts to actresses who were his lovers...

...Both Hayman and Orwell are right...

...Oscar Wilde was one, Bernard Shaw another...

...I suspect that The Flies, Dirty Hands and The Condemned of Altona will be read long after his novels—save the firstare forgotten...

...Propelled by a vanity that sought compensation for his short stature and ugliness, and by a mania for words that kept him turning them out well after he had abandoned all pretensions to literary artistry, Sartre created a role for himself that he acted out superbly from the end of World War II until his death in 1980...

...Sartre simultaneously embodied, exposed and criticized the errors of an age transfixed by the spectacle of power, whether wielded by a petty torturer or a dictator...

...There were occasions when Sartre was comradely toward the French Communist Party in spite of Communist acts of inhumanity in Eastern Europe he was certainly aware of, and when he blatantly maintained the doctrine of the ends justifying the means...

...Sartre's unique feat was to maintain an enormous reputation as a writer and intellectual long after his prose had gone limp and his thought had lost its clarity...

...With the exception of his first novel, Nausea, and early stories such as "The Wall," his fiction was prolix as well as didactic, and his subsequent novels, read 30 years later, seem banal, even bathetic...

...Compared with the political records of French contemporaries like André Gide or Albert Camus, his was marred almost from the outset by inconsistency, opportunism, and treachery toward his associates...

...Exemplary, too, is Hayman's critical attitude toward even what he regards as the best of Sartre's works...

...Perhaps the one writer of the 20th century nearest to Sartre in this respect was George Orwell, who remarked to Julian Symons in 1948," I have maintained from the start that Sartre is a bag of wind...

...Most important, Hayman recognizes that we cannot dismiss a man who, for all his faults, all his flip-flops, all his willful blindness to the cruelties of those he temporarily supported, nevertheless remained a vital figure of his day...

...He was like the doctor who inoculates himself with a sickness the better to understand it...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock "If one man towered above the postwar intellectual ferment and made his personal feelings impinge on political history, it was Jean-Paul Sartre," says Ronald Hayman in opening this biography...

...At other times, however, he would denounce Communist misdeeds with quixotic passion (though, on balance, he was always readier to speak out against an atrocity committed by Americans or his fellow French than by the Soviets...

...All the more impressive, then, is Ronald Hayman's virtually complete understanding of his subject without amthing like complete acceptance...

...Luckily for him, Sartre the political celebrity was able to divert attention from what Sartre the philosopher was up to, so his reputation survived the appearance of inept and intellectually perverse works that would have done in a writer with no other claim on the public's attention...

...His Critique of Dialectical Reason and his The Family Idiot, a monstrously rambling and incomplete "Freudian" biography of Gustave Flaubert, rank high among the classic bad books of the 20th century...

...Biographers are in some ways rather like actors, tempted to fit themselves into the character they are recreating...

...He wrote vast, sprawling books, and virtually ceased to revise and condense...

...Sartre acquired a reputation and a following far out of proportion to his actual achievement...

...To write a biography of such a man is not an easy task...

...It was a role he sustained through ideological shifts, personal betrayals, and sheer literary failures that would have doomed most other men to fast oblivion...

...Hence the insights— and the fevers...

...It can be argued—and I do—that from the beginning Sartre was too concerned with what he was saying to care enough about how he said it...

...or maybe he slighted them as a kind of personal rebellion against a literary world he seems to have despised as much as he sought its approval...

...When Orwell reviewed Portrait of the A nti-Semite (the English translation of Réflections sur la question juive), he wrote, "I doubt if it would be possible to pack more nonsense into so short a space...

...One of the extraordinary facts about his career was that the people who applauded his public statements and went to hear him speak at great political rallies did not, for the most part, read what he wrote...

...Putting in plain view the self-conceits, the meannesses, thedisloyalties.hevividlyshows what made Sartre so intolerable a person: One easily appreciates why his friendships with other men all failed, and wonders at the son of tenderness that often entered into his relations with women...

...Indeed, Sartre's prestige has transcended his death, as witness the flowers deposited daily on his Montparnasse grave by Leftist students...

...But Wilde destroyed himself early, and Shaw remained a good literary craftsman almost all his life, notwithstanding his self-advertising postures...

...There is no easy praise, and a good deal of very thoughtful assessment...

...That he carried it off also tells us much about the special character of French culture, in which intellectuals continue to enjoy great respect and can exert formidable influence even when their creative power has ebbed...

...His dramatic output is another matter...

...Toward the end Sartre lost all real sense of form and style...

...In fact, it might be said that he himself, rather than any of his books, was his own most important creation...