BOOKS AND WRITERS
ARTRE seems a curious example of a writer who provokes fashionable reactions. It is fashionable to like and also to dislike him. Seemingly one has either to " see through " him, r to be entirely convinced by him. Yet to me it seems that even f one does not agree with his conclusions, he has the immense dvantage of a point of view from which he observes a good many hings sharply and clearly. Sartre is ultimately perhaps a journalist la high order who has plunged himself in the events of our time, bserving and noting a great many things, and who seeks to draw onclusions from these observations. He is best when he is nalysing rather abstract situations, which he has experienced in very personal way, or when he is making bold and broad eneralisations, which subtler and acuter critics might well hesitate make. He is at his weakest when he offers us his conclusions, in e form of a plan of action, conceived in terms of journalism, that to say on the assumption that the really important events are a kind which are reported in the newspapers, and that action eans intervening effectively among them. Thus to him the roblerr. of a contemporary writer is not just to find isolated readers ut to find a public who, as a result of his books, " transform their xigencies into material and timely demands." He thinks that the ture of contemporary books depends on the results of contem- rary conflicts, and that therefore the writers must try to influence ose conflicts. " The posthumous fate of our works will depend either upon our talents nor our efforts, but upon the results of
lure conflicts. In the event of a Soviet victory, we will be passed ver in silence until we die a second time ; in the event of an merican victory, the best of us will be put into the jars of literary istory and won't be taken out again."
These statements will seem highly questionable to most people, nd will make many others furious. They are not exactly half- uths, but half-true ; that is to say they are true of a good deal f contemporary writing, even of some which today seems most gnificant ; particularly of that kind of writing by Richard Wright, rthur Koestler and some American novelists, which Sartre seems ost attached to. Yet I suspect that people resent such things ing said partly not for good reasons but because they outrage e secret hope of everyone interested in literature that the writer ays for stakes of immortality. Yet the fact is that only for an finitesimal number of writers is there any question of even the ost comparative immortality. Therefore there is something to be id for discussing literature as though immortality were not in estion and the survival of a book depended on the survival of a rticular type of reader for whom such a book was written. Such point of view at least contests a current theory that the writer has relationship with his reader. It points out that the majority of erary works only exist so long as there are readers who share social environment, a background of education and certain values ith the writer. This explains why certain works—such as those
the fin de siecle—which had an extraordinary importance for eir contemporaries, seem to have so little significance for us today.
draws attention to the fact that most writers have a stake in the nditions which produce Teaders who can enjoy their works, and is puts the writer in a responsible relatioriship to his work ; sponsible not just to his reader but also to himself, for if his ders live in conditions which cannot endure, his work will not rvive. This means also that the writer, as a literary artist, is con- rned with the values on which the whole structure of surrounding iety is based.
There are, it seems to me, writers who escape these temporal ligations—notably, the greatest poets. But all the greatest do not ape them, and it is awareness of this which causes the uneasiness most contemporary writers. At the back of their minds there the question: " May not the assumption that I have a reader mg in such and such circumstances, enjoying such and such ()tint of leisure, believing such and such things, prove false ? ay not the whole world of my imagination be swept away or lure, even within the space of ten years, the interest of a history which hardly interests anybody, the faded period charm of an old photograph ? "
Beyond such anxieties there lie nobler—if not the very noblest —preoccupations. For instance—and this is a theme to which Sartre returns again and again--7there is the question of freedom. Is the idea of freedom just an illusion haunting the works of writers surviving from a phase of bourgeois liberalism, to be replaced by an authoritarian kind of literature in which the writer simply interprets and illustrates the ideas of the political and ideological leaders of the society ? Or is freedom the basic condition without which creative literature is not possible ? Here again many people experience a kind of fury that such questions should be raised at all: and yet half the Western world has been engaged for a good many years in a debate about them, and freedom—that is, the free- dom of the creative writer—so far from its being a thing taken for granted has to be vigorously defended.
The main purpose of M. Sartre's book* is the defence—largely by defining it—of the writer's freedom. In a very fine passage, he writes: " Raskolnikov ... would only be a shadow, without the mix- ture of repulsion and friendship which I feel for him and which makes him live. But, by a reversal which is the characteristic of the imaginary object, it is not his behaviour which excites my indignation or esteem, but my indignation and esteem which give consistency and objectivity to his behaviour. Thus, the reader's feelings are never dominated by the object, and as no external reality can condition them, they have their permanent source in freedom ; that is, they are all generous— for I call a feeling generous which has its origin and its end in freedom. Thus, reading is an exercise in generosity, and what the writer requires of the reader is not the application of an abstract freedom but the gift of his whole person, with his passions, his prepossessions, his sympathies, his sexual tempera- ment, and his scale of values. Only this person will give himself generously ; freedom goes through and through him and comes to transform the darkest masses of his sensibility. And as activity has rendered itself passive for it better to create the object, vice versa, passiveness becomes an act : the man who is reading has raised himself to the highest degree."
A fellow reviewer—Mr. Geoffrey Gorer, who has the mysterious aura of authority attaching to an anthropologist—dismisses the book that contains this passage as " pompous," " verbose " and " grimly humourless." I do not pretend to understand either M. Sartre or anthropology at all completely: 'yet to me it seems that the attempt seriously to define our freedom is the most important task of Western thought today.
M. Sartre's book is concerned with the bases of literary operations —the relationship of writer with reader, the " engagement " of the writer in politics—rather than with the greatest heights of achieve- ment. For Sartre it seems that " the human condition " is man's social conditioning at a particular moment in history. This gives rise to the question: " What proportion of each man's condition is really taken up by his social environment ? " The answer is, I think, that part is indeed conditioned by society, and many people —including the majority of writers—do not get beyond this, which creates all their attitudes for them. But just as society does not fill the whole world, and still less the whole universe, and just as the time in which one lives does not fill the whole of history and still less the whole of time, so there are incalculable areas of time and space which are free of social conditioning. The great writers belong to their time but also tower above it into these free areas which—for want of a better name—we call nature. They com- municate by means of the instrumentality of their experience among men of their time within their own time, through these unconditioned areas. Nevertheless no one should underestimate the struggle to make conditions such that men of superior genius may be free to get outside them. What we are in danger of is a time-bound society which deliberately seeks to condition with its authority the whole of
* What is Literature ? By Jean-Pahl Sartre. (Methuen. 12s. 6d.)
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