Speaking in 1975 Sartre was in no doubt as to the personal significance of the war years: ‘The clearest thing about my life is that there was a break which means that there are two almost entirely separate moments … before the war, and after.’1 Most people who lived through World War II understandably saw it as a break dividing their life into a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, but Sartre is claiming that the schism was so radical that the later Sartre hardly recognized himself in the earlier one.
Objectively, the change could not have been more brutal: from the cultural capital of the world, he is suddenly transported to a succession of sleepy Alsatian villages: Marmoutier, Brumath, Morsbronn, Bouxwiller. Transported also in time, back to a past that was ‘his’ although he had never personally experienced it: the region was the home of his maternal family, the Schweitzers. Having surrounded himself in Paris with a coterie of admiring female friends and lovers, he now found himself in the most aggressive of male environments. In effect, Sartre had spent his life to that point immersed in various elites – whether as a trainee member of the elite (at the ENS), as an educator of the future elite (at the lycée) or as a producer of entertainments for the elite (chez Gallimard). Now, he was simply Sartre, infantryman second-class attached to the meteorological corps. He found himself forced to coexist with men from quite different social backgrounds and horizons: an employee of the French telephone company, a Parisian Jew who worked in the rag-trade, and a provincial schoolteacher.
As we saw, Mathieu Delarue – the hero of the novel that Sartre was working on at this moment – initially experiences his ‘call-up’ as a somewhat unpleasant nomination, but at least it saves him from total anonymity: ‘Here we go, I’m starting to become interesting.’2 Sartre, however, had already begun to ‘make a name for himself’ in the literary and artistic circles of pre-war Paris. Little surprise, then, that his trajectory is the opposite of Mathieu’s: he finds himself plunged back into anonymity: initially, at least, nobody knows who he is – his life is worth no more or less than that of the comrades he calls his ‘acolytes’. Dispensable, replaceable, interchangeable: he becomes just anyone. The experience of belonging to a mass – anathema to the elitist Sartre of the pre-war period – will later be identified by Sartre as one of the most important discoveries of his life.
By all accounts, Sartre and his acolytes were not overburdened by military duties; their work consisted in releasing a balloon twice a day, observing its flight, and performing a few simple calculations to obtain wind speed and direction. The rest of the day they were free. Sartre employed this leisure to good effect: he continued to do precisely what he always had done – namely, to read and to write, enormously. Whereas most soldiers might write to their loved ones to send them razor-blades, chocolate or tobacco, Sartre demanded books (and the odd pouch of tobacco, admittedly). He read everything from Heidegger to second-rate detective novels; everything from Pepys’s diary to those of Gide, Dabit and Renard. He read histories of World War I and analyses of the rise of Nazism, as though attempting, finally, to understand how he came to be where he was. He read philosophy and biographies (one of his long-standing fascinations). He read history and novels. He often read for twelve hours a day until his one good eye ‘flickered and went out’ (a childhood illness had left Sartre virtually blind in his right eye since the age of four). And he wrote. To reflect on the sheer volume of writing that Sartre produced during the nine months of the Phoney War is to be confronted with an essential truth: he was a machine for the production of text. The daily letters that he wrote to Beauvoir alone fill 500 pages of the Lettres au Castor. He wrote and rewrote drafts of the thick novel that would see the light of day in 1945 as L’Age de raison. Above all, he produced a war diary; the 1995 expanded edition of this diary is 600 pages long – and it contains only six of the fifteen notebooks that he filled during this short period of ostensible ‘inactivity’! With the possible exception of the amphetamine-fuelled hyperactivity of 1958–59, when he wrote the Critique de la raison dialectique, these nine months must have been the most intensively literary of Sartre’s whole life. He wrote as if his life depended on it, and, in more ways than one, it did.
Of all Sartre’s posthumous publications, the Carnets are probably the most surprising and the most valuable for students of his work; because of the manner and circumstances in which they were produced, they take us to the very heart of his relation to writing. Nowhere else does one grasp so forcefully what writing meant to Sartre. When we read a diarist we witness the transformation and the ‘recycling’ of the quotidian; we are aware that external events are being transformed by a certain sensibility, for example, or by a vision conditioned by class, or even by the pathology of the diarist. All of these are present in the diaries, but the primary filter through which the world is ‘processed’ and transformed is that of the intellect. To read the war diaries is to understand what it is to be an intellectual – in the special sense of ‘one who relates to the world primarily through intellection’ (as opposed to sensibility, physicality etc.). It is a truism to say that everything is grist to the writer’s mill, but we are rarely given a glimpse of how that mill functions. What is immediately striking about the diaries is the heteroclite nature of the subject matter: they contain lengthy discussions of the books, newspapers and reviews that Sartre is reading; reflections on the progress of his novel; descriptions of his physical surroundings; often hilarious portraits of his ‘acolytes’ and their words and deeds; analyses of the ‘military mentality’, anguished speculation on what his girlfriend(s) back in Paris might be getting up to; a first, fragmented, autobiographical sketch; an early attempt at ‘existential psychoanalysis’; many pages of dense philosophical analysis. And all of this is woven into the weft and warp of the everyday absurdities of life as a soldier in this ‘Kafkaesque war’.
His oft-repeated claim that the war had ‘changed’ him, that the experience of comradeship, captivity and occupation had ‘transformed’ him from aloof individualist into activist, would have been accepted as self-evident, had it not been for the posthumous publication of the diaries. Objectively, these claims are unquestionable in any case: one has only to compare what Sartre did and wrote before the war to what he did and wrote after it. But what the diaries do is to allow us to witness the process of change and its vicissitudes; to ask ourselves what changed and what remained the same, and, above all, to reflect on the role played by writing in this self-transformation: the diaries are, at one and the same time, the record of a transformation and the supposed means by which it is brought about. If one examines the various functions that writing performed for Sartre at this moment, one is led into the heart of the artist’s relation to his medium.
Like most conscripts, Sartre’s first reaction to the situation was a feeling of disorientation and loss of autonomy. Not surprising, then, that the first function of the daily practice of writing was to help the writer gain his bearings, or ‘reorientate’ himself and reassert his illusory independence. At a moment when the ‘outside’ (other people, the possibility of death, the military hierarchy, the intentions of the enemy) was oppressively important and threatened to overwhelm or invade the ‘inside’, writing was a means of reasserting the prerogatives of interiority. It is striking in this respect that the first notebook – covering the first six weeks at the front – should be almost entirely devoted to topics such as the ‘world of war’ – as if this act of intellectualization was a means of magically establishing the subject’s control of this world whose first characteristic was, precisely, that it robbed the individual of control and personal identity.
This desire to maintain control is particularly evident where other people are concerned. In order to understand this, one has to remember that these notebooks were anything but a personal diary. Although Sartre was unsure as to whether they would be fit for a general public, he wrote with a particular public in mind: when completed, they were taken or sent back to Beauvoir, who then circulated them amongst the intimate group of the ‘family’ – primarily Bost, Olga and Wanda. Knowing precisely who would read them doubtless enabled Sartre to calculate their effect. In this respect they were similar to the many letters he wrote to Beauvoir, Wanda, and others. Before September 1939 he had held court amidst a coterie of female friends, controlling this network and the flow of information within it with cynical efficiency. Now he is removed to a distance of several hundred kilometres and placed uncomfortably at the end of a somewhat aleatory line of communication. Writing now became the only means of maintaining control over what he called his ‘cardinal points’. This particular function of writing is thrown into relief by two incidents which saw him losing control over his interlocutors, then regaining it through the power of his pen.3
The ultimate invasion of the inside by the outside is death itself: ‘[death is] the presence of the outside in the very heart of my self.’4 Even if death was not a probability – given that Sartre was not a front-line soldier – it was at least a possibility, and this forced him to reflect on its meaning. Characteristically, he regards death as the absurd interruption of a narrative. On occasions, this narrative takes the pictorial form of a pre-sketched embroidery cloth just waiting to be filled in (nowadays one would think more of ‘painting by numbers’); at other times this narrative is a journey: ‘I now realize that I set off in life as if I was commencing a long journey, but a journey of a given distance and with a fixed destination. I must arrive at my destination before nightfall.’5 And writing is not simply one of the motifs of the embroidery, or one of the incidents along the way: it is the very form and content of everything. He had thought of his life and his œuvre as being co-extensive with his life – with, admittedly, a slice of ‘non-life’ at the beginning and the end (infancy and senility): ‘I have always conceived of my writings not as isolated productions but as being organised into an œuvre. And this œuvre was contained within the limits of a human life.’6 We can thus arrive at a series of propositions: the daily practice of writing (écriture) produces writings (écrits), and writings produce an œuvre; this œuvre will only be complete if fitted into a ‘normal’ lifespan; therefore, as long as the œuvre is in progress (that is, as long as the writings are being produced by the daily practice of writing) death cannot logically intervene. That is, it is writing that constantly defers the untimely arrival of death. Like a latterday Scheherezade, Sartre talks/writes to stay alive. It is in the light of this that we may understand the terms in which he describes his fanatical attachment to the completion of his journey: ‘I do not wish to feel my tiredness or to stop. My entire will is straining towards the goal. There is no place for lassitude or diversion, I never let myself go, everything is a function of this journey.’7 This was the necessity that drove him to write for up to twelve hours a day during the Phoney War. With death lying in wait, perhaps, just over the horizon, he would have said, like Roquentin: ‘The truth is that I am afraid to let go of my pen.’ Writing is his talisman: ‘I haven’t got time to die … Magically, that provides me with the certainty that I will not die before I have arrived at the end of my journey.’8 The objection that he was simply writing to ‘kill time’ is in fact less an objection than a confirmation. As he writes, he removes himself from real time (in which men live and die): time is converted into space, and that space is measured by the accumulation of letters and words, and phrases and lines, and pages and notebooks … This spatialization of time is discernible on many occasions in the war diaries. On 27 March 1940, for example, he writes, as though wistfully recalling an ancient aberration: ‘It is a long time now since I worried about authenticity or about Nothingness.’9 In fact, a mere two weeks previously he had written a long entry on precisely those subjects, but the two entries are separated from each other by the ‘time’ of 17,000 words of text. As he himself remarks: ‘I have always regarded abundance as a virtue!’10
The characters in Sartre’s 1944 play Huis clos are placed in a hell containing no mirrors, thus condemning them to seek their own image forever in each other’s eyes. The situation is not unlike that of Sartre in the autumn of 1939: deprived of the defining gaze of his faithful entourage, he is surrounded by men who have not yet learned how to see him. He becomes, in a sense, invisible. Predictably, his writings become his mirror. Although the second notebook is missing, we know that in it he began to write a self-portrait at the start of November of that year. This early autobiographical sketch (it continues in the other notebooks) is one of the most original aspects of the Carnets. If the diaries resemble a fabric woven from many different strands, the self-portrait is just one strand amongst many – appearing sometimes on the surface, at other times hidden behind more prominent strands of the narrative, but ever-present. While providing a wealth of ‘factual’ information about the first 34 years of his life, the sketch is not ordered as a chronological narrative: the organization is thematic and episodic, with life-themes being prompted partly by events of the moment, and partly by the philosophical speculations that run through the text. In this way, we learn details about different periods of Sartre’s life by way of illustration of themes such as fame, glory, death, relations with others, sex, friendship, property, ownership, money. This fragmented, thematic approach to life-writing could well have been inspired by Michel Leiris’s L’Age d’homme, which Sartre had just read with interest.11 What it illustrates above all, however, is the inseparability of the various strands of Sartre’s reflections. When he remarks that ‘life and philosophy are henceforth one and the same thing’,12 we are able fully to understand the resonances of that claim.
For those of us who approached Sartre’s life first through Les Mots, only later to discover the Carnets, reading the latter is a disquieting experience. This is not because of the differences in the accounts but because of their uncanny similarity, right down to the level of verbal formulations. In light of this, it is all the more surprising that he gives change as the motivation for keeping his diary:
I abhorred personal diaries and I thought that man is not made to see himself, that he should keep his eyes fixed straight ahead. I have not changed. But I think, on the occasion of some grand circumstance or other, and when one is in the process of changing one’s life, like the snake sloughing off its skin, that one can look at this dead skin, at this brittle image of a snake that one has left behind, and see where one is now.13
The intention is clearly to ‘sum up’, then to move on. The final word on this stock-taking exercise comes some five months later – in March 1940 – and it is not self-indulgent: ‘I have no solidarity with anything, not even with myself; I do not need anybody or anything. This is the character that I have created for myself over the last thirty-four years … I have no liking for this character and I want to change.’14 Curiously, he appears to be further from effecting this change at the end of the diaries than he was at the beginning: they start with ‘I am changing’ and end with ‘I want to change’. In between come numerous affirmations that this change has already occurred. Matters are further complicated by the nature of this ‘character’ that he identifies as ‘me’. The problem takes the form of a logical paradox, or a riddle: ‘what is the creature that is not what it is, and is what it is not?’ The ‘me’ that must change and be left behind is the ‘me’ whose defining characteristic is this very tendency to self-repudiation. As Sartre himself admits, to identify and denounce a character trait is not sufficient, in itself, to change it. Only an idealist could have such faith in the magical-performative value of mere words. All of this raises the question of the possibility of change, or of the relevance of the question ‘what changes and what remains the same?’
The fact remains that an objective change was effected between 1939 and 1945: the ‘abstract man of the plutodemocracies’ emerges as the socially committed intellectual. Underlining once more the interdependence of the various strands running through the Carnets, this theme of change is played out through an extended reflection on a particular philosophical notion. The notion in question is authenticity, but Sartre was always more adept at exposing the inauthentic than he was at defining the authentic. Already in the short story ‘Le mur’ he had engaged with the notion of authenticity in relation to death. Taking issue with Heidegger’s idea of ‘Being-towards-Death’ – the idea that death is our ‘ownmost possibility’, as Heidegger put it – Sartre had suggested in that story that, far from being the culmination towards which our existence is constantly directed, death is rather the irruption of absurdity into the heart of a life: rather than being the final note in a concerto that resolves everything that has gone before, it is more like the roof collapsing on the head of the pianist: one always dies too early, or too late, but never ‘on time’. At this moment (1939–40) Sartre is faced for the first time with the possibility of his own ‘premature’ death. Many of the early entries in the diaries are concerned with the attitude he should strike in the face of this eventuality: stoic detachment or a wailing and gnashing of teeth. But he is in fact more interested in life than in death: ‘life’ defined as the accretion of spent choices, as the network of relations and activities that one builds over time, and that one comes to identify as oneself. The war is a point of rupture, but a rupture that can be positive or negative, depending on the attitude one adopts to it. There is no doubt that Sartre initially hoped that the war would be brief – a mere parenthesis in the midst of his life – and that his life would continue unchanged before too many months. His ‘life’, as he makes clear, is the carapace he had formed for himself: his friends and lovers, his literature and his philosophy, his job, his habits (he was, perhaps surprisingly, a creature of quite rigid habits). But running counter to this is the temptation to throw everything over, to renounce everything and everyone, to smash the mould and recast himself in a different image: ‘I have a real inferiority complex vis-à-vis Gauguin, Van Gogh and Rimbaud, because they were able to lose themselves … I’m more and more sure that, to achieve authenticity, something has to snap.’15 But what? Gauguin had quit his job and abandoned wife and family to pursue his art; Van Gogh had gone mad. But Rimbaud was the most radical: proclaimed a genius while still a teenager, he had stopped writing at the age of twenty and simply turned himself into something else. Sartre was convinced that such decisions could not have been the result of reflection, but must have been taken spontaneously, in a violent revolution of the whole personality. And these are the alternatives that shape his thought in the Carnets: reflection or spontaneity; self-repetition or radical transformation.
A second Heideggerian notion – historicity – comes together with authenticity and helps to bring the choice into focus. To embrace historicity, in Sartre’s case, meant relinquishing the social and political aloofness of the pre-war years. It involved realizing and acting upon a simple observation: no man is an island complete unto himself; our being is irremediably social and historical. So any conversion to authenticity must also involve drawing the consequences of one’s historicity.
As Sartre was well aware, it is one thing to grasp the nature of the transformation that must be wrought, but quite another to bring it about, especially when one is ‘thirty-four years old and cutoff from everything, like an air-plant.’16 In the midst of grappling with his own ‘conversion’, Sartre was also writing the first volume of what would become Les Chemins de la liberté, whose protagonist, Mathieu, is faced with the selfsame dilemma. Stuck in a job that no longer motivates him, trapped in a relationship that is a bourgeois marriage in all but name, losing hair and gaining kilos, Mathieu – like Sartre – does not like the ‘character’ he has created for himself. The siren voices of change are there: should he settle for the bourgeois respectability offered by his brother? Or the life of political commitment that makes his friend Brunet appear so strong and solid? Or perhaps he should kick over the traces and declare his passion for the volatile, unpredictable, and much younger, Ivich? In the end he does nothing. Paralysed by an excess of reflexivity, he will never ‘lose himself’ because he is afraid to close his eyes and take the plunge. The Spanish civil war had passed him by, so had the Popular Front: he remained ‘free for all commitments, but knowing that one must never commit oneself’.17 But what use was his freedom? At the end of the first volume, he reflects bitterly that his freedom has simply been ‘absorbed’ by his life, like ink by blotting-paper.
Meanwhile, Mathieu’s creator seemed to be moving confidently beyond his character’s predicament. In a letter to the editor Brice Parain in February 1940, Sartre is in pugnacious, if individualistic, form: ‘As far as politics are concerned, don’t worry: I will go into that brawl alone, I will follow no one and those who want to follow me will follow me.’18 An entry in the diaries from early March suggests that he still has some way to go, but at least he knew where he should be going: ‘Le Castor [Beauvoir] writes me that true authenticity does not consist in overflowing one’s life on all sides or in standing back from it to judge it, or freeing oneself from it at every moment, but rather in plunging into it and becoming one with it.’19 Authenticity means acting in and on the world and then being one with those acts – not disowning them as having been committed by another ‘me’ who has been left behind, sloughed off like a snake’s skin. He finds an image to describe this tendency of his to avoid responsibility for his actions and to eschew engagement in the real world – he calls it the ‘tower of consciousness’. Indeed, more than a tendency, it is his very character. By mid-March 1940 he is preparing to descend from this tower forever, but this poses a fresh dilemma: if he relinquishes the airy refuge of the tower in order to ground himself in the world (to ‘take root’, as he puts it), will this not involve his becoming bogged-down in the world? Will he not fall into the dreaded ‘spirit of seriousness’: ‘all serious thought is an abdication of man in favour of the world.’20 His answer is a confident ‘no’: ‘As authentic as one might be, one is no less free for all that – freer even than in the hypothesis of the tower – since one is condemned to a freedom without shadows and without excuses.’21 This would-be authenticity, which surely prefigures the commitment of the post-war years, was not without its problems, however.
The most intractable problem concerns writing itself. Authentic commitment requires the individual to remove the safety-net and to put himself at risk in the world: the world outside the individual is a hazardous and unpredictable place, subject to laws that the individual has not created or, even worse, subject to the vagaries of random occurrence; only in the self-created inner world can the individual protect his autonomy and (illusory) omnipotence. Sartre is all too aware that the nature of his investment in writing is in fact a hindrance to the radical conversion to authentic living: ‘Even in the war I fall on my feet because my immediate reflex is to write down what I feel and what I see. If I put myself into question, it is in order to write the results of that self-examination and of course I can see that I am merely dreaming of putting into question my desire to write.’22 When he announces that he is ready to come down from his ivory tower, on the condition that his life remain a ‘game’, the contradiction is more than merely apparent: he is saying that he wants to act henceforth in the real world and continue to be defined by an activity (writing) that is the very negation of reality.
This contradiction is at the heart of an important text published in February 1940. L’Imaginaire, which followed on directly from L’Imagination, was the culmination of work on the nature of the image begun as early as the 1920s, and inspired by Husserlian phenomenology. Sartre argues that consciousness can project itself towards its intentional objects in two fundamental ways: perception and imagination. When I perceive an object, I posit it as real and present; if I imagine it, I am positing it as unreal and absent. Consciousness cannot simultaneously imagine and perceive an object. This radical and contentious theory creates an absolute divorce between the real and the imaginary. Unfortunately, it also drives a wedge between the ethical and the aesthetic: ‘The real is never beautiful … That is why it is stupid to confuse ethics and aesthetics.’23 As Sartre had already suggested in La Nausée, only circles, squares, melodies, works of art etc. have necessity; the real world is governed by contingency and absurdity.
As the Phoney War dragged on through the spring of 1940, Sartre was clearly not yet ready to take this plunge into the ‘heart of existence’, and ‘everything that is most contingent and absurd about it’. Of course, if writing could somehow be considered as action in the world, then the contradiction would be resolved …
In the third volume of Les Chemins de la liberté, the ‘Mathieu cycle’ comes to an end and the ‘Brunet cycle’ begins. Encircled by the rapidly advancing German forces, Mathieu makes an absurd gesture towards freedom by opting to stay and fight with some front-line soldiers atop a bell-tower, in a futile attempt to slow the enemy advance. At the very moment when the tower (clearly an echo of Sartre’s own ‘ivory tower’) collapses under the German mortars, Brunet – the Communist activist – calmly emerges from the cellar where he had been billeted and gives himself up: for him, the struggle was only just beginning. The circumstances of Sartre’s own capture were as anticlimactic as those of Brunet: retreating through Hagenau and Breschwillers, he was taken prisoner without firing a shot in a small village called Padoux, near Epinal. It was 21 June 1940: his thirty-fifth birthday. After spending two months in a holding camp at Baccarat, he was transferred in mid-August to Stalag XIID at Trier in Germany, near the border with Luxembourg. It is during the eight months of the Stalag that Sartre himself situates the break between ‘before’ and ‘after’. In this city of 25,000 men, insulated from the war, with its inescapable promiscuity, its social hierarchies, its cliques and cabals, its everyday currency of schemes and scams, Beauvoir’s words must have come back to Sartre: ‘It is beyond the crowd … that one is alone. Whereas I affirmed my solitude against the crowd.’24 After spending a few weeks in the relative comfort of the infirmary, Sartre’s malingering was uncovered and he was sent to the ‘Artists’ Hut’. But his closest associates – by dint of intellectual affinity, rather than religious leaning – were the chaplains and priests, of whom there were a great many in the camp, many of them highly educated Jesuits. Against all probability, he was happy in this collective existence. Those who had known the morose, aggressive recluse of the Phoney War – always buried in his books – must have been surprised by the change that came over him in the camp. Unlike the Phoney War, this was a black and white world, a world of them and us in which ‘they’ were brutally visible and visibly brutal: the presence of the enemy served both to unite the prisoners and to flatten out the differences that would have been apparent in peace-time: ‘What I liked in the camp was the feeling of being part of the mass. There was a seamless communication, day and night, when we talked to each directly, as equals. That taught me a lot.’25
At Christmas 1940 Sartre had his first experience of how art might function in the service of the masses; he undertook to write, produce and direct, in a mere six weeks, a Nativity play, of all things. In fact, beneath the cover of the Nativity, the play was a call to resistance. The eponymous hero, Bariona, is the leader of a national liberation movement, vowed to throw the Romans out of Judea. The message was clear enough – even if it did go apparently unnoticed by the watching German guards: freedom or death, hope in the face of the most hopeless odds. The importance of the play does not reside in its modest literary merits, but in what Sartre learnt from the experience. This is summed up in a text published after the Liberation, in English: ‘It was then, as I spoke to my comrades across the footlights about their situation as prisoners, seeing them suddenly so remarkably silent and attentive, that I realised what the theatre should be – a great, collective religious phenomenon.’26 Sartre would relive this experience many times over the next twenty years: it was to be his plays – not his novels, his philosophical treatises, or even his journalism – that would bring his ideas directly to the public, in France and all over the world.
So happy was Sartre with the new life he had found in the Stalag, that when the opportunity arose for him to escape, he only did so with a certain reluctance. In March 1941 he was released thanks to a forged medical certificate stating that he was unfit for active service, due to his semi-blindness.
The Sartre who returned to Paris on 12 April 1941 was – outwardly at least – a changed man. Beauvoir was taken aback by the transformation, shocked by the ‘inflexibility of his moralizing attitude’. The ‘unanimous life’ of the Stalag had left a deep mark in him: henceforth, ‘salvation’ was to be sought in action. But what kind of action? Occupied Paris was not the Manichaean world of the Stalag. If Sartre had ‘lost his bearings’ during the Phoney War, then occupied France of spring 1941 was an even more disorientating place. Sartre’s natural milieu – that of the intellectual elite – was shattered and in disarray. Of the writers who had held centre stage in 1939, some had opted for collaboration, some had thrown in their lot with de Gaulle’s Free French, others had subsided into despair or apathy, yet others had simply left on the last boat to the USA. After the Hitler–Stalin pact of 1939, the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) were stuck in a moral no-man’s-land: viscerally hostile to Fascism, but in a position of ‘official’ collaboration with the Nazis. All publications were subject to German or Vichy censorship. But Sartre had returned to Paris in order to act, not to write.
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in a Paris café, 1946–48.
The first manifestation of this desire was the formation, in spring 1941, of a resistance group. The group initially consisted of the ‘family’: Olga, Bost, Wanda, Jean Pouillon (another former pupil from Le Havre) and their closest friends and colleagues. Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s friend from ENS days, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, had already founded a small group of his own, and now the two groups united under a single banner: Socialisme et Liberté (Socialism and Freedom). Made up entirely of teachers, lecturers, students and former pupils, the group had about 50 members. The programme was simple: to resist the Nazis, Vichy and collaboration in all its forms. The action they undertook was, perhaps, the only action that such a group could envisage: they wrote, printed and distributed seditious tracts calling for resistance against the occupier. In the summer of 1941, the group met to take stock of their situation. It was clear that, thus far, their action had been ineffectual. Some members of the group were losing patience and calling for more direct action; others wondered whether the risks they were running were not disproportionate to their achievements. Another problem lay in the difficulty of making contact with other groups. Paranoia was rife – for good reason – and established groups were wary of overtures from outsiders. The Communists, for their part, were spreading the rumour that Sartre had been freed from the Stalag due to the direct intervention of the collaborationist writer Drieu la Rochelle, and that he should be regarded as a German agent. This campaign was due in large part to Sartre’s friendship with Paul Nizan. Nizan had been killed on 23 May 1940, but not before leaving the Party in disgust at the Hitler–Stalin pact: he was now the defenceless object of a PCF smear campaign.
In an attempt to make contacts and extend the activities of the group, Sartre and Beauvoir travelled to the Zone libre in summer 1941. The mission was a disaster. In André Gide, they met with an apathetic old man holed up in his villa on the Côte d’Azur; in André Malraux, they met with an opportunist waiting for the Russian tanks and American planes to win the war. In the event, notwithstanding his own self-aggrandizing account of events, the great maquisard Malraux did not actually enter the Resistance until early 1944.
It was a depressed Sartre that returned to Paris in autumn 1941 to take up a teaching post at the Lycée Condorcet. Socialism and Freedom was in terminal decline; it staggered on until the end of the year before finally being disbanded. Like many other small, short-lived resistance groups of the first year of the occupation, it had foundered due to a lack of organized support, be it Gaullist or Communist. The most significant thing about the group was the programme embodied in its name: a truly collectivist socialism that nevertheless recognized and safeguarded the autonomy of each member of the collective. Sartre would devote the rest of his life to the pursuit of this implausible objective, in a variety of shapes and forms.
Sartre’s first sally beyond the walls of the ‘tower of consciousness’ had resulted in a rebuff and a bloodied nose. It had proved more difficult than he might have imagined to ‘take root’ in the real world. In a characteristic movement, he withdrew to a place of safety. During 1942 he fell back on what he knew: writing. The energy that had failed to find a satisfactory outlet in active resistance appears to have been channelled back into writing. In little more than a year, working mainly in cafés (they, at least, were well-heated), he put the finishing touches to the first volume of Les Chemins de la liberté; commenced the second volume (Le Sursis); wrote a play (Les Mouches) and, astonishingly, wrote in its entirety L’Etre et le néant – the monumental volume on which his reputation as a philosopher is based. Almost by the bye, he also published important essays on Camus, Bataille and Blanchot whilst teaching full-time at the Lycée.
There is no doubt that, to Sartre’s mind, every word he wrote after the failure of Socialism and Liberty was an act of resistance. This is illustrated particularly well by his first commercially performed play, Les Mouches. In an interview given after the Liberation of Paris, Sartre asserted that the play he had really wanted to write would have told the story of ‘the terrorist who, by gunning down Germans in the street, provokes the execution of fifty hostages’.27 Indeed, from the moment in August 1941 when a resistance fighter shot a German officer at Barbès métro station, the Nazi charm offensive was over: in September and October of that year, 100 hostages were murdered in reprisals.
Les Mouches was performed on 3 June 1943 at the Théâtre de la Cité, directed by and starring Charles Dullin. Like Bariona, the play was a form of what was known as ‘contraband’ literature: under the cover of a reworked Greek tragedy, Sartre’s message of resistance was smuggled across the footlights to the audience. Returning to Argos, his birthplace, Oreste finds the throne usurped by Egisthe, who has murdered his father, the king, and taken his mother, Clytemnestre, as his wife. The power behind the throne is Jupiter himself. The Argives are kept in line by an official religion of remorse – devised by Jupiter and enforced by Egisthe. The parallels with Vichy were obvious enough. Since the armistice, Pétain had promoted just such a doctrine: if France had been defeated, it was because she had deserved it; now was the time to show appropriate remorse and guilt for the decadence and degeneracy that had so enfeebled the nation! But the play was far more than a circumstantial piece, limited by its historical context. Its subject is the one that was to become synonymous with Sartre: freedom. In murdering both the usurper and his mother – in defiance of received morality – and revindicating that act as good, Oreste liberates himself for a second time: he had arrived in Argos with an abstract freedom, suffering from an unbearable lightness of being; he departs bearing the guilt of the city on his shoulders. In the Carnets, Sartre had bemoaned his inability to ground himself in the world in a resonant phrase: ‘I would have to be made of clay, instead I am made of wind.’28 Oreste effects the transformation from ‘wind’ to ‘clay’.
In terms of its political interpretation, the play probably raises more questions than it provides answers. Rather than remain and govern Argos as a free democracy, Oreste leaves its citizens to the tender mercies of his now remorseful sister Electre (who had assisted him in the murder) and Jupiter. One assumes that the Argives will simply resume their pattern of passive bad faith under the new old regime. The lack of political realism in Oreste’s act (or was it a mere gesture?) and its idealistic individualism were traits that Oreste doubtless shared with Sartre himself, if this judgement on Socialism and Liberty by a former member is to be trusted:
Right from the start they seemed puerile to me: for example, they never realized how much their empty chatter jeopardized the work done by others … And, although they may have learned certain reasoning techniques at University, I can tell you that when it came to political action they certainly didn’t know how to reason.29
True or not, this opposition between the ineffectual chatter of intellectuals and the ‘real’ work performed by men of action would later be central to all of Sartre’s major plays.
Les Mouches was a commercial failure; playing to poor houses, it was withdrawn after only twenty or so performances. Reviews in the collaborationist press were predictably hostile, although the venom was directed more at the aesthetics of the play than at any political ‘message’ that may have been detected. Nonetheless, Les Mouches brought Sartre back to a certain extent into the public eye, reminding readers of La Nausée and Le Mur that he still existed. Which is more than can be said for L’Etre et le néant when it was published in June 1943. Given the circumstances, it is unsurprising that the volume was noticed only by a handful of specialists. It was, as we will see, ‘rediscovered’ dramatically in 1945. Between 1943 and 1945 it appears to have served a more practical purpose: legend has it that the first edition weighed exactly one kilo, making it ideal for weighing out the rationed potatoes!
From spring 1943, Sartre’s life started to change. He may have withdrawn into his creative shell in 1942, but the result of his vast labours had carried an image of him abroad, and a whole new network of contacts was taking shape without his even being aware of it. Popular flop it may have been, but Les Mouches brought Sartre’s name to the attention of influential strangers. The filmmaker Jean Delannoy commissioned a screenplay from Sartre on the strength of what he had seen in his play; the writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris had written one of the few favourable reviews of the play, in the clandestine Lettres françaises. The sheer fact of being present on so many fronts – novel, short story, philosophy, theatre – served to broadcast Sartre’s name and amplify his reputation. Moreover, in the incestuous circles of the Parisian literati, word of mouth was a formidable means of publicity. The authoritative articles of literary criticism published between 1939 and 1945 – first in the Nouvelle Revue Française, then in Les Lettres Françaises and the Cahiers du Sud – made him into a powerful arbiter of literary taste. They also opened unexpected doors. Sartre’s glowing review of Albert Camus’s debut novel, L’Etranger, led to Camus turning up and introducing himself at the dress rehearsal of Les Mouches in 1943.
As the occupation went from bad to worse − 1942, with its mass deportations of French Jewry, was the blackest year of all – Sartre went from strength to strength. In early 1943 the PCF decided to adopt a policy of inclusivity. Having slandered and denigrated Sartre, they now made overtures to him. With remarkably little bitterness, Sartre agreed to join the clandestine Comité National des Ecrivains (CNE). At the meetings of the CNE that he attended, Sartre enlarged his circle of new contacts still further: Gabriel Marcel, Paul Eluard, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, Alberto Giacometti, François Mauriac (a celebrated Catholic novelist whom Sartre had criticized to devastating effect in an influential essay published in February 1939). From autumn 1943 Sartre and Beauvoir were caught in something resembling a social whirl. With the recent publication of her first novel (L’Invitée), Beauvoir, too, had joined the new literary elite. A famous photograph taken in spring 1944 encapsulates their life in the last year of the occupation. Pablo Picasso had written a short play entitled ‘Le désir attrapé par la queue’ (‘Desire caught by its tail/prick’) and Michel and Zette Leiris decided to stage it in their flat, with their friends taking the leading roles. The snapshot – taken in Picasso’s atelier – of the illustrious cast is eloquent in itself: surrounded, as always, by women, Picasso is the focal point (although he does not deign to look at the camera); Camus, with his dark good looks, is centre stage in the bottom row, confidently facing-down the camera; to his right, Leiris; to his left, Sartre. Sartre, too, is looking into the lens – inasmuch as his squint will permit him to. His position in the photograph – central but somehow also marginal, a part of the group, but apart from it – reflected his position within the artistic and intellectual elite of the moment: simultaneously inside and outside. With the Nazis suffering reversals on all fronts, thoughts were turning to a post-liberation France; Sartre’s position was marked by ambivalence: ‘State socialism and individual freedom are opposed, that much is certain. But there are other forms of socialism …’.30 He was perhaps naïve in the way he envisaged a ‘third way’ that would shun established parties and steer a path between them. However, this rejection of what is, in the name of what could be, is one of the constants of his thought: it had been there in his wholesale rejection of the hegemonic idealist philosophy of the ENS; it is there in L’Etre et le néant, in his theory of a ‘nihilating’ consciousness summoning itself into being in an act of negation of what is; it is there in his rejection of Literature as an institution; it will be there, much later, in his critique of institutionalization in all its forms. It is there, perhaps most tellingly, in his permanent self-critique and his horror of sclerosis and inertia. For Sartre, any meaningful process of construction must commence with a questioning of what already is – simply because it already is.
On 27 May 1944 the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier on the Left Bank was the scene of the literary event of the year: the première of Sartre’s new play, Huis clos. This is perhaps his most perfect play: gone are the verbosity and epic pretensions of Les Mouches, to be replaced by a language and a situation that almost foreshadow Beckett in their economy. Three characters – a man and two women – are condemned to spend eternity together in a very Sartrean hell. Deprived of mirrors, they must rely on each other’s gaze – and words – to maintain or create an image of themselves. Back in the land of the living, they have fallen forever into the public domain; henceforth, the living will decide who they were: Garcin the coward, Inès the lesbian, Estelle the infanticide. In hell, however, there is still everything to play for: to be ‘saved’, each must convince one of the others to see him/her as s/he wishes to be seen. But this is hell, after all, and things have been so arranged as to make this impossible: the characters will spend eternity searching for their own face. ‘Hell is other people’ exclaims Garcin – thus launching the first of many slogans by which a general public would come to ‘know’ Sartre. Anyone who had read L’Etre et le néant at the time would have known, however, that this was not intended as a universal judgement on human relations: the individual who relies too much on other people to know who he is does indeed place himself in a living hell: we must strike a balance between the objective knowledge that the Other possesses of us, and the less substantial subjective comprehension we may have of ourselves.
This particular balance was to prove difficult to maintain in Sartre’s own case. Huis clos made of him something of a star: he was immediately in demand; requests rained down for interviews and texts; commissions and sundry other proposals arrived daily. From this moment on Sartre was constantly in the public eye, but the image of himself that he could glimpse there was not a unified one. He aroused admiration and contempt in equal measure, every plaudit was cancelled out by a brickbat. When he looked into this mirror, he must have seen his image fragmented into a thousand pieces. Like all artists, perhaps, Sartre was in search of his own face. This had been true since the child Poulou had discovered that language was a mirror – as well as being a window onto the world. The celebrity that was about to burst upon Sartre merely served to underline his dilemma.
Two weeks after Huis clos opened, the allies landed in Normandy; two months later they were in Paris. The occupation was at an end and the ‘Sartre years’ were about to begin.