Dirty Hands

Dirty Hands HOEDERER: . . . How you cling to your purity, young man! . . . You intellectuals . . . use it as a pretext . . . to do nothing, to remain motionless, arms at your side, wearing kid gloves. Well, I have dirty hands. Right up to the elbow. I've plunged them in filth and blood.

HUGO: . . . No one can convince me that one should lie to one's comrades.

--Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands)

When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his play about the cynical, power-minded Communist boss who makes a deal with the Fascists because it will serve the ultimate ends of the party, he was an antiCommunist. But when his own left-wing party fell apart, Sartre, the philosopher of the existential, was left in the position of his hero Hugo: pure but ineffectual. Apparently Sartre still yearned to be a man of action. Last week in Vienna, Philosopher Sartre was up to his elbows in the filth if not the blood of Communist politics.

He was the prize catch of the Communist Peoples Congress for Peace. The others were such familiar faces as the Rev. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, Madame Sun Yatsen, Ilya Ehrenburg and Frederic Joliot-Curie. But the congress needed a bigger new star than Sartre to revive public interest in its three-year-old slogans. Even a new Peace Dove by Picasso--soaring now, and plumper than the first one--and a street-sprinting exhibition by Czech Olympic Runner Emil Zatopek failed to draw crowds.

To explain away the half-empty Konzerthaus, the Communists blamed fog, rain and Vienna's lack of taxis, but nothing could conceal the hollowness of the Communist claims to have a peace program, not even the tirade of abuse directed at America. Specimen (by North Korean delegate Madame Kang Yang Sun): U.S. soldiers in Korea knifed out the eyes of Korean children and forced their mothers to eat them, cut open the body of a pregnant woman and extracted the embryo and sliced it before the eyes of the dying mother.

Despite hours of this kind of talk, wildly applauded, Philosopher Sartre had come to the congress because, he said, "representatives of socialist countries tell us precisely that they want peace and that co-existence is possible."

A Vienna theatrical producer who wanted to produce Dirty Hands during the congress was slapped down by Playwright Sartre. To put it on at this moment might embarrass his new friends.

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