The Pen Is Not the Sword

THE WORDS by Jean-Paul Sartre. 255 pages. George Braziller. $5.

For a quarter-century, French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre has been the symbol of what is best (implacable honesty) and worst (rootless pessimism) about the modern European intellectual. He has been the pre-eminent philosopher of despair. Simultaneously, with his novels and plays he has cast himself as a propagandist on the barricades of social justice--in fact on both sides of the barricades, since despite a markedly Red-leaning political line, he has never joined the Communist Party and has periodically quarreled with it. Living his preachments in private as well as in politics, he has maintained with Simone de Beauvoir the most famous and durable unmarried marriage of modern times. Now, at 59, Sartre has published the first volume of his memoirs. It is wonderfully unlike what might have been expected.

In the years since Sartre wrote his taut and masterful early dramas, his works have become increasingly lengthy, turgid, posturing and difficult. The climax was perhaps Saint Genet, where he tortured a simple preface to another man's work into a labored and debatable treatise of 578 pages--three-quarters the length of the volumes he was introducing. But in his autobiography, Sartre simplifies and shortens. The writing is austere, crisp, even epigrammatic. The result is a warm, albeit desperately sad, account of his childhood and early teens. And far more than most autobiographies, this is an inward-turning book, cutting into the living flesh of the man to expose the origins of his beliefs and behavior. Modern existentialism, it turns out, is rooted in the struggle for sanity of a spoiled and lonely child.

Halfway a Bastard. In all externals, Sartre had an uneventful, thoroughly coddled childhood. His father died two years after his birth in 1905, so his young mother moved back with her parents. There, while she faded back into the role of a dutiful daughter, the child grew up as the darling of all, particularly his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer,* a white-bearded Old Testament patriarch who tyrannized his own children and indulged his grandson.

"Daily life was cloudless," remembers Sartre. Yet looking back, Sartre believes that the lack of a strong father, though superficially a freedom, was really a terrible deprivation to his development. Smothered by his grandfather, without playmates, he never had "the opportunity to become real."

Acts or Gestures? At four, he taught himself to read. "I began my life as I shall no doubt end it: amidst books." They were a tremendous release. He read the classics because he was extravagantly praised for his precocity: "I faked. I would spring to my feet, take down the heavy Corneille. I would hear, behind me, a dazzled voice whisper: 'But it's because he likes Corneille!' I didn't like him." In secret, he would read trashy boys' adventure stories that his mother bought for him by the hundreds. "I owe to those my first encounters with Beauty. When I opened them, I forgot about everything. Was that reading? No, but it was death by ecstasy."

Like all drugs, the lavish praise and the secret ecstasies were dangerous. The "Words" of his title became the only realities, and "as a result of discovering the world through language, for a long time I took language for the world." Worse, as he constantly displayed his precocity, Sartre felt more and more that "I was a fake child. I could feel my acts changing into gestures. Playacting robbed me of the world and of human beings. I saw only roles and props." These are key concepts in existentialism today, though Sartre does not belabor the point.

The Monsters. At eight, in those happy days before TV, Sartre began to write stories of his own, filling copybook after copybook, until "my wrist ached," with wild tales of African jungles and supernatural horrors that made his flesh crawl as he put them down.

These drove his sense of alienation to the edge of madness: "What flowed from my pen at that point--an octopus with eyes of flame, a twenty-ton crustacean, a giant spider that talked--was I myself, a child monster." He also gradually became aware that he was very ugly, "a toad," walleyed, short, "not quite a dwarf."

Only when Sartre was ten was he sent to school, where he found playmates. World War I had started, and its cold realities made his adventure fantasies seem suddenly childish. For several years he was relatively happy. Yet it was too late, for his vocation had already been imposed on him: "the mad enterprise of writing in order to be forgiven for my existence."

That note of despair is the fundamental emotion of the existentialism Sartre was to develop, where God is banished, man is totally responsible for what he does with himself and society, and therefore gets on earth the hell he deserves. Thus man is absurd, but he must grimly act as if he were not. The books and controversies were yet to come; but at the end of this confession, filled with self-loathing though incapable of self-pity, Sartre dryly admits: "For a long time, I took my pen for a sword; I now know we're powerless. No matter." There will be more books. "What else can I do?"

* Also the uncle of Albert Schweitzer, who is therefore Sartre's second cousin.

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