Jean-Paul Sartre, a very short, very cheerful Parisian, lectured at the Carnegie Chamber Music Hall last week 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 appearances, even unofficial ones in literary cafés, often precipitate free-for-alls.
The lecture, which we attended, was about new tendencies in the French theatre and was delivered under the auspices of View, a local intellectual review edited by a young man named Charles Henri Ford. Mr. Ford, who introduced us to M. Sartre after Sartre had answered the last polite question from the audience, said that he would describe View as avant-garde if that didn’t sound so old-fashioned. “We are for all advanced points of view,” he said. “Advanced Catholic, advanced Anarchist, advanced Leftist. And we are Surrealist, of course, but advanced Surrealist.”
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 clientele,” he said, “so it is easy to keep out of fights. Also, the hotels have the very good custom of throwing out the guests after a sojourn of three or five days. I prefer three. If one takes the precaution of leaving no forwarding address, it is impossible for anybody interested in literature to find one. So one never risks being bored. One is free to promenade oneself in the streets but relieved of the necessity of conversation. 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 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. 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. He arrived in December and was planning to leave for home soon after we talked to him. “I had to lecture,” he told us. “It was the price I paid for the privilege of disappearing between performances. But I have liked lectures better than factories.”
As for Existentialism, a doctrine which he first adumbrated in the seven hundred pages of “L’Etre et le 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:
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. ♦
