Pompous, tendentious, superficial and inaccurate, What is Literature? is very far from being one of Sartre's better works. On the last page he ingenuously remarks: 'I have no wish to tell writers of my generation what they ought to do. What right have I to do so, and who has invited my opinion? And I have no taste for literary manifestoes.' Nevertheless, the cavalier dismissal of anyone whose work does not satisfy his criteria—from Molière to Gide, and from the author of The Song of Roland to the Surrealists—gives the work a distinctly sectarian flavour. His identification of good prose with democracy is quite arbitrary—what about Pascal or Bossuet?—and his use of the word 'liberty' is vague in the extreme. To put all English writers safely into clubs and state that America has no middle class are quite delightful, but provide only a passing touch of unconscious humour in a very pompous book. His general thesis that writers often produce good work when they take sides on social issues is acceptable enough. Nevertheless, the number of writers he has to dismiss because they do not do so might perhaps have suggested to a less doctrinaire thinker that something was wrong with his initial premisses. If these premisses had been derived from Sartre's own experience as a practising author they would perhaps have been less arbitrary. At least they would have had some basis in fact, and Geoffrey Gorer's remark that 'literature is what Sartre does' would have been justified. As it is, however, What is Literature? reads far more like an account of what Sartre would like to do than a description of what he has in fact achieved…. In none of the prose works which he has published so far does Sartre fulfil either the aesthetic or the political ambitions of What is Literature?… His essay on Baudelaire is certainly an appeal to men to make the best possible use of liberty in their personal life, but one wonders how many elementary school teachers have had their liberty revealed to them by Saint Genet Comédien et Martyr. This dichotomy between theory and practice in Sartre's work is by no means the result of a lack of technical ability on his part. Indeed, one might say that his versatility is itself an indication of his relative failure to live up to his own idea of what constitutes good literature. His constant experimentation reveals not only his skilful craftsmanship and great intellectual energy but also his basic lack of satisfaction with literature itself. Yet few writers have been able to conquer so large and receptive an audience. Although Sartre's incursions into the realm of film-making have not always been as successful as his plays, it is disappointing that he has not given fuller scope to his ability to use the mass media which are so often represented as the greatest challenge to the modern writer. To do this in a satisfactory manner, however, cleverness alone is not enough. One needs to have something which one wishes to say to a large audience, and this is what Sartre has not very frequently had. Most of his political writing in the nineteen-fifties was addressed to a relatively restricted audience of left-wing intellectuals like himself. If his work as a political essayist and as the director of a primarily political review [Les Temps Modernes] has come nearer to fulfilling the demands of What is Literature? than anything else which he has written, this success has been achieved by the sacrifice of purely aesthetic considerations. (pp. 168-70)