Sartre: a Biographical Introduction

160 Pages·1971·15.075 MB·English

by  Philip Thody

A biographical Introduction by Philip Thody
_.
• - -
•
J
I
S a r t r e
a biographical introduction
Philip Thody
Professor of French Literature} University of Leeds
Charles Scribner's Sons
New York
Sartre
a biographical introduction
By the same author:
Albert Camus. A study of his work (1957).
Jean-Paul Sartre. A literary and political study (1960).
Albert Camus IgI3-Ig60 (1961).
Jean Genet. A study of his novels and plays (1968).
Jean Anouilh (1968).
Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1970).
Now in preparation for Leaders of iVIodern Thought:
Aldous Huxley
The cover illustration is based on a picture supplied by The
Camera Press, London
Copyright © 1971 Philip Thody
All rights reben·ed. ~o part of this book
may be reproduced in an\' form without the
permission of Charles Sc~ibner's Sons.
·\-1.72 [c]
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Nunlber -"'-1-46-..,
S8=--: 684-12673-7 (trade cloth) /- / )-
SB:\ 6R4-12674-5 (trade paper SL)
Contents
Part I
Childhood, literature and choice 7
I
2 Adolescence, manhood and philosophy 24
3 La Nausee, five short stories and literary criticism 41
Part IT
4 The theatre, philosophy and popularity 60
5 Commitment, essays and novels 77
6 Plays, politics and villains 87
Partm
7 Communism, plays and Hungary
102
8 Colonialism, violence and tragedy 13
I
9 Literature, students and a conclusion 13
0
Bibliography 143
Notes and references 147
Selective Index 158
To Brian and Beryl Hanvin
Acknowledgments
I should like to thank the staff of the Brotherton Library,
University of Leeds, as well as that of the IVlodern Languages
Library in the same University, for the help they have given me in
preparing this study. Dr HO'ward Evans, of the University of
Leeds, also drew my attention to a number of publications \vhich
I should otherwise have missed. l\1rs Lorraine 'Vinter showed
exemplary care and patience in preparing the typescript for the
press, while IVliss Christine Bernard, of Studio Vista, saved me
from writing as much about Sartre as Sartre did about Genet.
l\1y thanks also go to my fello\v tax-payers in the United
Kingdom. It is their readiness to support the existence of large
provincial universities \vith reasonable staff-student ratios \vhich
has enabled me to 'write this and other studies.
Part
I
Childhood, literature, and choice
I
.
1
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was born in Paris on 21 June
19 5. His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, was a naval officer and
0
son of a country doctor from Perigord; and his mother, Anne
Marie, the only daughter and youngest child of a language
teacher from Alsace, Charles Schweitzer. In 1907, Jean-Baptiste
Sartre died of a fever contracted in CochinChina, and his widow
was left penniless. She consequently returned, at the age of
twenty, 'a tall Ariadne with a child in her arms', to live with her
parents. After four years at Meudon, the family moved to
rue Ie Goff, Paris, and it was there that Sartre grew up. Anne
1.
Marie's position was a very subordinate one - 'Families, of
course, prefer widows to unmarried mothers, but only just',
comments Sartre in his autobiography, Les Mots (1963)* - and
the room which she shared with her son came to be referred to
as belonging to 'the children'.1 The most important person in
the household was Charles Schweitzer, and it is he who is
presented throughout Les Mots as having had the greatest
influence on Sartre's early upbringing and subsequent career.
Yet this career, as a novelist, playwright, literary critic, philos
opher and political thinker, now seems to be one which Sartre
wishes he had never adopted. For this reason, the portrait of
Charles Schweitzer is extremely hostile, and the general account
of Sartre's childhood an apparent rejection of many of the ideas
which he expresses elsewhere in his work.
I t would not have been surprising, given the achievements of
the most famous member of the Schweitzer family, if the
influence which Sartre's grandfather exercised on him had
been in the field of religion. By the time Sartre was born, Albert,
the son of Charles Schweitzer's younger brother Louis,2 had
already embarked on the career \vhich was to make him into one
of the foremost Protestant theologians of his day; and Sartre's own
work exhibits so many features of the Protestant conscience as
exemplified by Albert Schweitzer of Lambarene that it is tempting
to attribute them to a kind of intellectual or spiritual heredity.
Sartre's insistence on personal responsibility, like his extreme
individualism and readiness to espouse unpopular causes, his
refusal of established, authoritarian modes of thought, his
apparent mistrust of the body, his cult of sincerity and persistent
concern for the ethical implications of human behaviour, all
• Unless otherwise stated, all quotations in this chapter are from the
standard Gallimard 1964 text.
SARTRE
8
seem fundamentally Protestant. So, too, for his hostile criti~,
does his tendency to use literature to pre~ch sermons, and ~t
could even be maintained that the very tltles of some of hIS
works - Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (1951), Saint Genet, Comidien
et Martyr (1952) - reflect an obse~sion wit~ theol~g.ical questions
which is very much in the SCh\Veltzer famlly tradltion.
However, in 1945 Sartre defined existentialism as 'the attempt
to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent
atheism' , and his formal position has always been one of total
3
disbelief. The one mention of Christ in his published work
dismisses him in a footnote as an agitator executed by the Romans
for political reasons,4- and it \vould be merely perverse to a~gue th~t
his evident dislike of religion reflects a need for God which he IS
all the more anxious to deny because he feels it so acutely.
Nevertheless, given the character and achievements of Albert
Schweitzer, Sartre's work often seems an inverted image of
everything \vhich his famous second cousin stood for, as well as a
conscious and deliberate challenge to all forms of Christian
belief. 'Bourgeois charity maintains the myth of fraternity', he
wrote in 1945,5 and his insistence that true progress now lies
in the attempt of all the coloured races to liberate themselves by
violence is at the furthest possible remove from Albert Schweitzer's
famous remark that 'The Mrican is my brother. But certainly my
younger brother.'
If Sartre's autobiography is to be believed, the atmosphere of
the Sch\veitzer home in \vhich he grew up was not likely to
predispose anybody towards religious faith. Charles Sch\veitzer
had -married Louise Guillemin, the daughter of a Catholic la\vyer,
and agreed to his children being brought up in the Catholic faith.
'Though an agnostic herself,' writes Sartre in Les Mots, 'Louise
made them Catholic through a hatred of Protestantism', and
Sartre also pointed out in 1951 ho\v the conflict of religious
faiths in the Schweitzer household had already made positive
belief impossible for him before he reached the age of eleven. 6
Moreover, Charles Schweitzer was a man addicted to histrionic
gestures, to the striking of noble attitudes and the transformation
of everyday events into dramas \vhere he played the leading
role. Indeed, Sartre writes in Les Mots:
He looked so much like God the Father that he was often taken
for him. One day, he entered a church through the vestry.
The parish priest \vas warning those who were neither hot nor
cold that the Lord might strike them down: 'God is here!
He is watching you!', he proclaimed. Suddenly, the worship
pers. sa\v, beneath the pulpit, a tall old man \vith a beard,
looking at them. They immediately fled. At other times when
he told the story, my grandfather would say that they threw
CHILDHOOD, LITERATURE AND CHOICE 9
themselves at his feet. He developed a taste for such apparitions.
In September 1914, he appeared in a cinema at Arcachon.
We were in the circle, my mother and I, when he called for
light. Other men around him were his angels, shouting out:
'Victory! Victory!'. God climbed on to the stage and read the
communique of the battle of the Marne.
With a grandfather perpetually playing at being God, while yet
having his dramatic gestures consistently undermined by the
cold, nagging rationalism of his wife, it is not surprising that
Jean-Paul developed little talent for religious faith. Where his
grandfather did influence him was in another field, one which
is analogous to religion and yet involves no faith in God: that of
literature. Les Mots tells the story of how the peculiar situation
in which Sartre found himself as a child predisposed him to
accept this new and attenuated form of religious belief; how this
acceptance governed the whole pattern which his life subsequently
took; and how, by 1963, he had realized that the choice which he
made at the age of eight or so to devote himself to literature was a
mistake. Far from being, like Rousseau's Confessions or the
autobiography of Bertrand Russell, a reasoned defence of the
author's past conduct and present beliefs, it is a violent
denunciation of the atmosphere in which he grew up and the
effect it had on him. '1 hate my childhood, and everything that
survives from it', he writes towards the end of the book, and this
devastating account of the first ten and a quarter years of his life
spares neither himself, his parents nor his class. Not even his
own ideas on liberty, his views on the social responsibility of the
writer, or the tenets of the existentialist philosophy which, in
the late 1930S and early 1940s, he did so much to popularize
and develop, emerge unscathed from what must be one of the
most hostile accounts of his own childhood ever published by an
imaginative \vriter.
. .
11
The most significant event in Sartre's early life was, of course,
the death of his father. Had Jean-Baptiste survived the fever he
had brought back from CochinChina, his son would not have
gro\vn up in the Sch\veitzer household. Anne-Marie Sartre would,
in all probability, have had more children, and Jean-Paul would
not have been a lonely child, with 'neither brother, sister nor
friends', \vho spent most of his time in the imaginary world
provided for him by books. More particularly, Jean-Baptiste
\vould almost certainly have insisted that his son went regularly
to school as soon as he was old enough to do so. He would not,
like Charles Schweitzer, have kept Sartre at home until he was ten
SARTRE
10
and a quarter, effectively cutting him ~ff fro.m normal co~tact \vith
children of his own age, and compelhng him to entertaIn whol~y
adult ideas before he was ready to do so. A theme that recurs In
Sartre's work is that of sequestration, first treated in the short
i?
story (La Chamhre', published 1939 in a coll~ction entitled
Le l'vIur and further developed In two plays: Huts Cios (1944),
where three people are shut up together in a very un-Christian
version of Hell; and Les Sequestres dJAitona (1959~, where the
hero deliberately spends thirteen years in a garret In order not
to see what is happening in the outside world. Wh~n one .reads
Les lVIots with its portrait of a child virtually held pns?ner In the
J
top-floor flat of a building in the Latin qu.arter .of Pans, ~lowed
out only in the afternoons for a \valk WIth hIS mother I~ .the
Luxembourg gardens, it is easy to see where the onglnal
inspiration for this theme might lie. . .
In his o\vn opinion, Charles Sch\veitzer was keepIng hIS
grandson at home from the highest motives. Sartre had taught
himself to read long before he of an age to go to school, and
\Vr8
was clearly something of an infant prodigy. When, on his first
day at school, he \vas placed in the form which his grandfather
considered appropriate and took down the sentence 'Le lapin sauv
age aime Ie thym' (the wild rabbit likes thyme) as 'Ie lapen
c;ovache erne Ie ten', it \vas quite clear to Charles Schweitzer
that his grandson \vas being victimized. Rather than subject him
to what he saw as the humiliation of starting off in the much
lower class suited to his actual attainments, he preferred to keep
Sartre away from school and have him educated 'privately' .
Yet although Charles Schweitzer remained quite convinced that
he \vas acting throughout from the highest motives, the \vay
Sartre tells the story leaves little doubt that his grandfather \vas
inspired by much more selfish considerations. The enthusiastic
\velcome which he had given Anne-Marie's child reflected,
Sartre suggests, the terror \vhich Charles Sch\veitzer felt at his
own approaching death. The existence of his grandson, and his
very presence in his house, seemed at one and the same time a
gift from Heaven and a guarantee against ultimate annihilation.
In choosing to keep Jean-Paul at home four or five years after
t~e normal age a~ \vhich he should have gone to school, securing
hIm what .educatIOn. he could ~y a succession of ill-paid tutors
and occasIonal perIods at prIvately run academies, Charles
S~hweitzer ~vas sacrificing his adored grandson's well-being to
hI~ own vanIty and ~ear of death. In his terror that his grandson
mIght escape from hIS tutelage and transfer his affection else\vhere
he effectively prevented the infant Sartre from becoming ~
normal child .
. Sartre ~i9htly considers his o\vn upbringing to have been
hIghly prIVIleged when compared to that of a \vorking-class