The Prophet of Nevertheless

"My present notoriety annoys me," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre puckishly last year. "I've lost the chance of dying un known." That became even more of a certainty last week when the Swedish Academy bestowed on him the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature -an honor he didn't want. Unless he changes his mind, which is unlikely, he will be the first winner to turn down the world's loftiest literary honor.* Since, as the Swedish Academy pointed out, the award stands whether the recipient formally accepts it or not, Sartre is in the most enviable position for a rebellious intellectual: he can have his prize and sneer at it too.

"I have always declined official distinctions," said Sartre, explaining that a writer who accepts an honor risks institutionalization and puts his reader un der unfair pressures: "It's not the same thing if I sign 'Jean-Paul Sartre' or if I sign 'Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner.' ",. Displaying his long on-and-off Communist sympathies, he 'went on to complain that the Nobel seemed to be reserved only for Westerners or dissident Eastern-bloc writers.

Faith Without Belief As with most Nobel awards, it came to a man whose career is past its peak. Sartre at 59 re mains an authentic hero for French intellectuals, including those who most despise him, and he is one of the few 20th century philosophers whose names^ are at least vaguely known to the public. His drama and fiction (No Exit, Nausea, The Roads to Freedom) are deservedly remembered, his formal philosophical works are read only by specialists and masochists.

He was perhaps at his most turgid and absurd in the long, confused eulogy of Jean Genet's scabrous Our Lady of the Flowers; Sartre described the book as an epic of masturbation, and Genet described Sartre in some of his favorite four-letter words. But Sartre has lately found a fresher vein; in his autobiographical The Words (TIME, Oct. 9) he reminisces simply and compellingly about his unhappy childhood, from which he eventually escaped into literature as others escape into religion, business, or the Foreign Legion.

Above all, it is his version of existentialism, a philosophical air-raid shelter that he erected for Europe's disillusioned intellectuals after World War II, that seems rather outdated today. It is essentially a conjuring trick-a preachment of faith without belief, of free will to no purpose. "Atheism is a cruel and long-range affair," Sartre has said. Always faithful in this affair, never publicly flirting with hope or grace (as did his fellow existentialist and fellow Nobel winner Albert Camus), Sartre takes atheism to its grim limits. Man as he sees him is alone in an absurd and meaningless universe.

Why Write? Nevertheless (if there is a single word that sums up existentialism, it is "nevertheless"), man must commit himself to causes, must bear responsibility for his acts. Only half accepting Marx and Freud, Sartre rejected both psychology and history as predetermining man's fate; man is completely free to choose between good and evil, which is an awesome burden-particularly since Sartre is never helpful enough to define the terms. But most of his characters were usually obsessed by evil.

Logicians or theologians can demolish this position, but that does not change the fact that there is a certain grandeur in it. What is less grand is Sartre's endless posturing. After having been an almost demonic writer all his life, Sartre recently seemed to reject literature itself when he said, "I ha^ seen children dying of hunger. Over against the dying child, fa novel] cannot act as a counterweight." To which Critic Claude Simon answered impatiently, "When have corpses and books ever been weighed on the same scale? Why write at all, why publish?"

Nevertheless, Sartre will continue writing and publishing. Nevertheless, he will complain about the uselessness of it. Nevertheless, the French would not have it any other way, for he has become a kind of national institution. During the bitter war with the Algerian rebels, he joined other French intellectuals in publicly urging Frenchmen not to take up arms. Many others were jailed for it but not Sartre. When a French Cabinet minister asked him why not, President Charles de Gaulle simply shook his head and said, "Sartre is also France."

*Russian Novelist Boris Pasternak first accepted, then was pressured by the Soviet government into refusing the 1958 award.

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