Sartre Resartus

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 362, 31 May 1946, Page 23

Sartre Resartus

very cheerful Parisian, lectured at the Carnegie Chamber Music Hall, New York, recently, without provoking a riot or a single refined cry of "Salaud!" or "Fumiste!", the latter, and milder, of which terms means "faker." For M. Sartre, who is at once the foremost French dramatist of the war years and the father of a new and frequently discussed way of looking at the world, known as Existentialism, the decorum of intellectual life here is one of the charms of New York. In Paris his public ap-pearances,-even unofficial ones in literary cafés, often precipitate free-for-alls. The lecture, which we attended (continues The New Yorker), was about new tendencies in the French theatre and was delivered under the auspices of View, a local intellectual review edited by e young man named Charles Henri Ford. Man of Few Words M. Sartre, a rumpled little man who wears tortoise-shell glasses with very large lenses, wound a_ shepherd’s-check scarf about his neck as soon as he stepped down from the lecture platform. He told us at once that he approves of New York without qualification. "Here there are no restaurants of an exclusively intellectual clientéle," he said, "So it ‘s easy to keep out of fights. Alsop the hotels have the very good custom of throwing out the guests after a sojourn of three or five days. I prefer three. [f one takes the precaution of leaving no forwarding address, it.is impossible for anybody interested in literatu:e to find one. So one never risks being bored. One is free to promenade oneself in the streets, but relieved of the necessity of conversion. That is, if one has taken the precaution not to learn spoken English. I have guarded myself well from it, although I read. Two phrases only are’ necessary for a whole evening of English conversation, I have found: ‘Scotch and Soda?’ and ‘Why not?’ By alternating them, it is impossible to make a mistake." We mumbled M. Sartre’s first phrase, he answered with the second, and we went to the nearest-bar and continued our conversation, in French, M. Sartre believes in economy of words inside the theatre as well as out. "The trouble with most plays," he says, "may be expressed in the simple phrase ‘What a lot of words!’ In the French theatre before the war there were too many words, too many characters, too many scenes, The war has perhaps not sufficiently affected the American theatre." A local producer named Oliver Smith, who has taken over the American rights‘ to Sartre’s Paris hit Huis Clos, tentatively translated as No Exit, may ne SARTRE, a very short,

have difficulty finding enough words in it to satisfy an American audience. It runs barely an hour and a-half. That, M. Sartre feels, is M. Smith’s problem. Sartre has made two trips to the United States .since the liberation of France. He had never been here before. He first arrived in January, 1945, with a party of French journalists brought over by the O.W.I. to view and write about the American war effort. "I am not a journalist," he explained, "but I had always wanted to see America." He stayed four months that time, travelling all over the place, and quickly concluded that he would like the country immensely if he were not under the constant necessity of visiting war factories. He does not like factories. Besides, since he was travelling with an escorted official party, he could be found without much trouble and was continually annoyed by literary people. This time he came on a mission for the Service of Cultural Relations of the French Government. As for Existentialism, a doctrine, which he first adumbrated in the seven hundred pages of L’Etre et Ile Néant ("Being and Nothingness") and which has been commented upon in several million words since then, most of them angry, we shall not try to explain it here. One French interpreter of the system says it is the first French philosophy of international class since Descartes, and another inquires, "May it not be, in truth, the hieroglyphic for a Fascism which dares not avow itself?" Sartre would seem to be immune from .the

charge of Fascism, since he was a member of the National Council of the Resistance in France during the occupation. But just to give you an idea of what Existentialism is, like, this is a quote from his novel La Nausée ("Nausea"), written in 1938: Nothing has changed but everything exists differently. I can’t describe it; it is like nausea but it is just the antithesis: finally adventure comes to me and when I ask myself about it, I see that it has come about that I am I and that I am here; it is I who cleave the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel, The last we saw of M. Sartre, he had spotted a taxi a hundred feet away and was cleaving the night to get to it, and he was he and he was there, and there was no doubt about it.