SPRING BOOKS 2

Agonies of Thought

By FRANCIS HOPE

LT A pens& console de tout."Penser, c'est souf Hr.' The dividing line between Cham- fort's judgment and Flaubert's is also one be- tween the fashionable and the unfashionable self-estimation of intellectuals. In the last fifty years, the unpleasantness of self-awareness, or awareness in any of its forms, has been the main theme of those who both preach and prac- tise it. Condemned to a tragic perception of his own futility, blinded by a terrible lucidity which he cannot renounce, the thinker of our time—finish the sentence for yourself.

Or, if you can't, you will find Mr. Brombert's book* a complete primer. Ranging from Zola to Sartre, with a glance at the anti-intellectual reaction of the Fifties, Mr. Brombert traces the ancestry of Mathieu Delarue and Antoine Roquentin, through Malraux's talkative adven- turers, to Guilloux's Cripure in Le Sang Noir, Martin du Gard's Jean Barois, Anatole France's JerOme Coignard, Bourget's Adrien Sixte in Le Disciple, and Valles' Jacques Vingtgras; further back still, he provides them with a historical background as well as a literary family tree, in the emergent hordes of the black-coated insti- tuteurs who were the lay apostolate of the Third Republic; and in the Dreyfus case, where the intellectuals first came to see themselves as a coherent class, despised and insecure, but en- dowed with a mission to speak for others.

The early sections of this book are detailed and intelligent criticism. In Mr. Brombert's own words, although 'I have tried to situate the in- tellectual hero in a broad context, I have remained concerned, in each case, with the unique literary quality of the works discussed.' When he is working close to his text, he is a serious and scholarly expositor. But when be lifts up his head to survey the broad context, he seems to suffer from an unilluminating reverence for his material: he will take any-

thing seriously provided that it is said seriously enough. On the suggestion, in Arrival and De- parture, that a desire for social martyrdom can be a form of filial guilt, he has this to say:

Without indulging in the facile oversimpli- fications to which such a literary psycho- analysis can lead, one must not take Koestler's basic insight too lightly.

Again, there is something which I suspect in the tone of the following:

The emphasis on the future [by Luce in lean Barois] is none the less symptomatic of a general tendency of our time to think along the lines of Hegelian dialectics and apply to History the logic of becoming.

It is not with impunity that our century, echoing the cry of Nietzsche, has proclaimed the bankruptcy of Christian beliefs. Since God is in exile, who remains to give an account of human destiny?

It is not just that these sentences are pompously * THE INTELLECTUAL HERO. Studies in the French

Novel, 1880-1955. By Victor Brombert. (Faber, 25s ) expressed: they also carry a name-dropping flavour which makes me wonder what Mr.

Brombert's reactions would be if he were dumped down in a totally uncharted literary landscape, with only his own critical judgment to sort out pretension from performance.

This uncritical erudition is most obvious in Mr. Brombert's treatment of the final intellec-

tual product in Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. If one were to pick up all the stones which he has left lying around in these pages, one could bombard them both heavily, but one would have to do so for oneself. There is, for example, the inconsistency between Sartre's choice of an intellectual's life in fact and his denigration of it in fiction—an inconsistency which neither claims of honesty nor pleas of masochism can quite resolve. To complain that writing is no substitute for action (as both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir frequently do) is no substitute for action or for writing. Mr. Brombert has obvi- ously not missed this obvious point, but he does not appear to set much store by it. He quotes the devastating remark from Les Noyers d' Altenburg: 'Intellectuals are like women, my dear! soldiers make them dream' only as an interesting piece of evidence on Malraux's opinions, not as a judgment in its own right: and throws off a passing reference to Sartre's - solipsistic malady which goads him on to seek

political action (or dream of it!) as an ethical therapy.

What might be genuine criticism is wafted away in the breezy exclamation mark.

Again, he points out Sartre's attraction to- wards impossible situations; but not the trompe- rceil logic by which these limiting cases are in- vested with a universality which they do not possess. Mr. Nigel Dennis complained of Les Sequestres d'Altona that Sartre took a small pea of thought and then covered it with a vast pile of mattresses; it would be nice to find Mr. Brombert being either so irreverent or so neat about the sterile Cartesian structures which tower over such foundations as 'Everyone is responsible to everybody for , everything' (the epigraph to Le Sang des Autres, taken from . Dostoievsky) or 'Existence is guilt.' Everyone is a scoob' or 'Existence is nerts' would be no easier to disprove, and as useful to declaim.

One should not perhaps go so far (as Mr. Brombert might put it himself) as Mr. Kingsley Amis, who got through the first five pages of Les Mandarins ('in the bath,' or so he claimed to the Oxford English Club) but then gave up in sheer boredom. But it is easier than not to lose patience with the intellectuals' habit of blaming their own misfortunes on their own privileged but terrible status. The intelligent ascribe to the stupid, as the rich ascribe to the poor, a fictitious simple contentment, and the aspiration to change places rings hollow both times. Attributing their isolation from others to precisely the same factors as those which make them spokesmen for others, the profes- sional intellectuals of the Left start from a shaky position, imperfectly shored up by their asso- ciate and inferior membership of the prole- tariat: to add to this a myth of instinctive solidarity which the proletariat cannot lose and the intellectual cannot gain is a piece of very special pleading indeed. It was Simone Weil—

hardly an unintellectual woman—who broke down when hearing of the famine in China, and whom Simone de Beauvoir envied for 'a heart that could beat across the entire world.' The intellectuals cannot fulfil their claims to be a race apart, even by proclaiming themselves a race of failures.

Mr. Brombert takes this point up in an appendix on Camus' story `Le Renegat,' the missionary who ends by accepting enthusiastic- ally the religion of hatred and evil whose ad- herents he set out to convert. This allegory of the self-destructively self-destructive arguments the existentialist intellectuals put forward is very clearly explained, but the question is left open. So is that of the 'Existentialist clichés, Marxist dialectics, and a pompous philosophi- cal jargon about anguish, absurdity, and man's condition' which are suddenly admitted to cor-

rupt large areas of 'intellectual literature'; and so, in spite of the author's original intentions, is

that of the 'unique literary quality' of Sartre's and de Beauvoir's works, or the technical skill with which they have expressed their philo- sophical ideas in fiction (I do not go the whole way with Mr. Amis and would rate quality and skill very high). These things are touched

on, but not at any length: again and again Mr.

Brombert returns to the intellectual hero's contention that his misery is in some sense his central achievement. Even here, he does not

question the very dubious logic by which refus- ing to despair at problems which are by their nature insoluble is equated with complacency towards social conditions which can be changed ('Happiness is a bourgeois illusion').

Mr. Brombert may wish to define the issues— in which he succeeds perfectly—leaving it to others to take sides. Or he may share the neutrality of Bernanos's Abbe Cenabre:

'Intelligence can penetrate everything, just as light can penetrate everything . . . but it is incapable of moving, of embracing. It is a sterile contemplation.'

But this neutrality is less logical than it seems: seeing is not doing, but it is preferable to being blind; one can still choose, or be grate- ful for, light instead of darkness. To set thought against action ensures an impossible situation; to prefer impossible situations is not necessarily the hallmark of an `authentic,' honest,"tragic' or 'dignified' life. There is still a sense in which the works of Shakespeare are worth more than a pair of boots, and it is neither treason to the bootless nor flying in the face of the suffering of the world to say so.