The 40s: The Story of a Decade (82 page)

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And now how does
The Age of Reason
point the morals of Existentialist principles? Well, if you already know something of the subject, you will recognize some of its concepts turning up in the reflections of the hero as he walks drearily through the streets of Paris. And the conflict of classes is there: a seceder from the bourgeoisie, we see him revolving in a lonely orbit but experiencing gravitational pulls from a successful lawyer brother who represents the bourgeoisie, an old friend who has become a Communist and represents the proletariat, and a young girl of Russian émigré parents who represents the old nobility. It is not, however, this central character, so far as this volume takes him, who “engages himself” by a choice: his choices are all of the negative kind. It is the sexual invert Daniel, a neurotic and disconcerting personality, who, exercising his free will, resists his suicidal impulses and performs, unexpectedly and for devious reasons, a responsible and morally positive act. Here the difficult “situation” is a matter not of social class but of biological dislocation; and the triumph of Daniel’s decision is to be measured by the gravity of his handicap.

Yet it is difficult to see how this story can have been very profoundly affected by Sartre’s Existentialist theory. In such a production of his as his play
The Flies
, the dramatist turns academic and rather destroys the illusion by making the characters argue his doctrine; but this novel might perfectly have been written if Sartre had never worked up Existentialism. It differs from the picture of life presented by the embittered French Naturalists after the French defeat of 1871, whose characters were invariably
seen as caught in traps of heredity and circumstance and rarely allowed to escape—though Sartre’s mood, as in his play
No Exit
, is sometimes quite close to theirs. But this book does not essentially differ from the novels of other post-Naturalistic writers such as Malraux, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, for whom the international socialist movement has opened a door to hope and provided a stimulus to action that were unknown to such a Frenchman as Maupassant or to the Americans who paralleled his pessimism. In Sartre, as in these other writers, you have a study of the mixture in man’s nature of moral strength and weakness, and a conviction that, though the individual may not win the stakes he is playing for, his effort will not be lost.

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Since
Partisan Review
has published, also, in the same series as Mr. Barrett’s pamphlet a translation of one of Sartre’s long articles, “Portrait of the Anti-Semite,” one should say something about his activity as a journalist. These essays which he contributes to his
Temps Modernes
seem to me among the most interesting work of their kind that has appeared during the current slump in serious periodical writing. In this field, Sartre can be compared only with George Orwell in England; we have nobody so good over here. Mr. Barrett, in an article on Sartre, has complained that he ignores, in his “Portrait,” the Freudian springs of anti-Semitism. It is true that he makes no attempt to explain this phenomenon historically in its political and social connections; but he does pursue with merciless insight at least one of the psychological factors involved: the need of small, frustrated people to fake up some inalienable warrant for considering themselves superior to somebody. Sartre’s whole essay, in fact, pretends to be nothing else than an elaborate development of this theme. It is no scientific inquiry but an exercise in classical irony, which might almost have been written, we reflect, by one of the more mordant eighteenth-century Encyclopedists.
The Age of Reason
of Sartre’s novel is the intellectual maturity of the hero, but the phrase recalls also a period with which Sartre has a good deal in common. In these enormous and solid editorials that mix comment on current affairs with a philosophy which, whatever its deficiencies, is always clearly and firmly expressed, we are surprised and reassured to find ourselves chewing on something which we might have feared the French had lost. For it is Sartre’s great strength in his time that he is quite free from the Parisian chichi of the interval between the wars. If Existentialism has become,
like Surrealism, something of a
mouvement à exporter
, no one has probed so shrewdly as Sartre, in one of his articles in
Les Temps Modernes
, the recent attempts of the French to distract the attention of the world from their political and military discredit by exploiting the glory of their writers, or pointed out so boldly the abuses to which this practice may lead. If he sometimes has the air of pontificating, it is probably always difficult for a French literary man to resist becoming a
chef d’école.
And Sartre, bourgeois and provincial, has succeeded in preserving for the French qualities which they very much need and which it is cheering to see still flourish: an industry, an outspokenness, and a common sense which are the virtues of a prosaic intelligence and a canny and practical character. This does not, perhaps, necessarily make him a top-flight writer, but, in these articles of
Les Temps Modernes
, it does provide some very satisfactory reading.

LOUISE BOGAN

NOVEMBER 30, 1946 (ON ROBERT LOWELL)

R
eligious conversion, in the case of two modern poets writing in English—T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden—brought an atmosphere of peace and relief from tension into their work. But Robert Lowell, a young American who has forsaken his New England Calvinist tradition for the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church, exhibits no great joy and radiance in the forty-odd poems now published under the title
Lord Weary’s Castle
(Harcourt, Brace). A tremendous struggle is still going on in Lowell’s difficult and harsh writings, and nothing is resolved. These poems bring to mind the crucial seventeenth-century battle between two kinds of religious faith, or, in fact, the battle between the human will and any sort of faith at all. They are often at what might be called a high pitch of baroque intensity. They do not have the sweetness of the later
English “metaphysical” writers; Lowell faces the facts of modern materialism more with the uncompromising tone and temper of the Jacobean dramatists, Webster and Tourneur, or of Donne, who (to quote Professor Grierson), “concluding that the world, physical and moral, was dissolving in corruptions which human reason could not cure, took refuge in the ark of the Church.” (Lowell, it is clear, has not taken refuge anywhere.) He also bears some relationship to Herman Melville, the American with Puritan hellfire in his bones. The more timid reader would do well to remember these forerunners, and the conditions that fostered them, when confronted with young Lowell’s fierce indignation.

Lowell’s technical competence is remarkable, and this book shows a definite advance over the rather stiff and crusty style of his first volume,
Land of Unlikeness
, published in 1944 by the Cummington Press. This competence shows most clearly in his “imitations” and arrangements of the work of others, which he hesitates to call direct translations. “The Ghost” (after Sextus Propertius), “The Fens” (after Cobbett), and the poems derived from Valéry, Rimbaud, and Rilke reveal a new flexibility and directness. These poems might well be read first, since they show the poet’s control of both matter and manner. The impact of the other poems in the book is often so shocking and overwhelming, because of the violent, tightly packed, and allusive style and the frequent effects of nightmare horror, that his control may seem dubious. The extraordinary evocation of the sea’s relentlessness and the terror of death at sea, in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” (an elegy to a drowned merchant seaman), is equalled in dreadfulness by the grisly emblems of “At the Indian Killer’s Grave,” a poem wherein successive layers of spiritual and social decomposition in the Massachusetts Bay Colony come to light through a descent into the King’s Chapel Burying Ground in Boston. Lowell, again in the seventeenth-century way, continually dwells upon scenes of death and burial. He is at his best when he mingles factual detail with imaginative symbol; his facts are always closely observed, down to every last glass-tiered factory and every dingy suburban tree. To Lowell, man is clearly evil and a descendant of Cain, and Abel is the eternal forgotten victim, hustled away from sight and consciousness. And the modern world cannot reward its servants; no worthy pay is received by the good mason who built “Lord Wearie’s castle.” (The old ballad from which the book’s title is taken runs: “It’s Lambkin was a mason good As ever built wi’ stane: He built Lord Wearie’s castle But payment gat he nane.”) These are the themes that run through this grim collection. Lowell does
not state them so much as present himself in the act of experiencing their weight. It is impossible to read his poems without sharing his desperation. Lowell may be the first of that postwar generation which will write in dead earnest, not content with providing merely a slick superficiality but attempting to find a basis for a working faith, in spite of secretive Nature and in defiance of the frivolous concepts of a gross and complacent society. Or he may simply remain a solitary figure. Certainly his gifts are of a special kind.

GEORGE ORWELL