SOURCE: "Short Stories as Examples," in Jean-Paul Sartre: A Literary and Political Study, The Macmillan Company, 1960, pp. 22-41.

[Here, Thody provides a general overview of each of the short stories collected in The Wall, focusing on how they serve as illustrations of "Sartre's favourite philosophical ideas."]

Before the publication of The Diary of Antoine Roquentin in June 1938, Sartre had already been introduced to the French literary world by the appearance of two of his short stories in review form. In July 1937 the Nouvelle Revue Française published 'Le Mur' ('The Wall') and in January 1938 Mesures published 'La Chambre' ('The Room'). According to Marc Beigbeder [in L'Homme Sartre] this was arranged by Sartre's publisher, Gaston Gallimard, in order to see what chance there was of a favourable reception for The Diary of Antoine Roquentin. He was, apparently, surprised at the success which Sartre's first novel secured. It was well received by several of the leading critics—including Edmond Jaloux in the conservative Nouvelles Littéraires—and has remained one of Sartre's most successful works. It has been reprinted in the popular Édition Pourpre series, and in 1950 was included in the list of the twelve best novels of the half-century, chosen by a jury of well-known French literary figures. In England it has been less well-received—the Times Literary Supplement [March 23, 1949] said it was 'pretentious'—and at the moment of writing it is out of print in the English edition. While this may be due to the difficulty of translating Sartre's prose into English of comparable force, it is also due to English impatience with near-heroes of the Roquentin type and to a general lack of sympathy for their problems. The English translation of Sartre's short stories, published in French in 1939 under the title of Le Mur and translated as Intimacy, is, however, still in print and has clearly been more popular than The Diary of Antoine Roquentin. It is quite natural that this should be so, since these stories have plenty of human interest in addition to a rather lubricious character which should endear them to less intellectual readers. After all, Punch [July 12, 1949] did describe them as 'leaving Lady Chatterley's Lover asleep at the post', which one would have expected to be a guarantee of good sales. They are also, like The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, published in a popular paper-backed edition in France.

There are five stories in the volume, each of which illustrates one of Sartre's favourite philosophical ideas. The title story, 'The Wall', refutes Heidegger's idea that man can live towards his own death and thus humanize it. The second, 'The Room', illustrates the impossibility for the sane mind to enter deliberately into the world of madness. The third, 'Herostratus', explores the extreme confines of anti-humanism; the fourth, 'Intimité' ('Intimacy'), is a study of the idea of bad faith; and the fifth, 'L'Enfance d'un Chef' ('The Childhood of a Leader'), exposes the way in which the human mind can escape from the feeling of its own superfluousness into the comforting world of Rights. Although different in tone and technique, the five stories are linked together by Sartre's own personal vision and his extremely acute awareness of the physical details of human existence. In the same way as this served in The Diary of Antoine Roquentin to exploit his own obsessions, so here it is used slightly more objectively to insist upon the closeness in man of the link between mind and body. The general unpleasantness of existence still constitutes the basic reality for all Sartre's characters, although it is less insistently present than in The Diary of Antoine Roquentin. What Sartre does do in his stories is show what different reactions there are to this unpleasantness and to the other problems of human existence.

The hero of the first story, 'The Wall', is a Spanish Republican who has been taken prisoner by the Fascists in the civil war. Together with Tom Steinbock, an Irishman from the International Brigade, and a young Spaniard called Juan Mirbal—unjustly imprisoned, because he has played no part in politics—Pablo Ibbieta is condemned to death. He remains awake through the night before his execution, sitting in an ice-cold cellar where the sweat pours off him in his terror, watched by a sadistically curious Belgian doctor. In the morning, having realized that the inevitability of death makes everything unimportant, he decides to play a trick on his captors. He sends them on a wild-goose chase in search of one of his friends whose hiding-place he had previously refused to reveal. With supreme irony, his gesture of sterile defiance saves his life. Ramon Gris, his friend, had left his cousin's house because of a quarrel, and gone to hide in the cemetery, exactly in the place where Ibbieta had told the Fascists to search. He is shot while resisting arrest, and the story ends with Pablo sitting on the ground, laughing until he cries at the absurdity of chance.

The plot of the story, and the description of Pablo's reaction to the idea of his own death, provide a double refutation of the idea that man can control and decide the significance of his own mortality. Because he knows he is going to die, Pablo assumes that he can have no further effect upon the course of events in the world around him. He is wrong, and the story is an ironical illustration of the idea that man can never count on anything at all except his own actions. More important, however, is Sartre's description of man's physical reactions in the face of death. Tom, Pablo's companion, talks and talks in an attempt to grasp the incomprehensible, until Pablo points out that he is urinating in his trousers through sheer terror. Pablo sweats profusely, but needs the ironical remarks of the Belgian doctor to become conscious of how he is betraying his own terror. Finally, he realizes that the whole of his past life is meaningless because he will die some day whatever happens. Pablo does his best to face up to death and to remain hard. He refuses the refuge of tears in which the young Spaniard hides, as well as the over-talkativeness of Tom, but cannot really understand what is going to happen. All he sees is that objects change in appearance now that they can no longer be included in any of the projects which he might make. Death cannot be humanized, for man is made in such a way that he must be perpetually tending towards an open future. When this possibility is removed, no course of action is left open to him. Pablo is caught in the trap that, although death takes away all meaning, man cannot live in accordance with this truth. Heidegger is wrong, and no man can live in such a way as to make his death really his own.

In the next story, 'The Room', the atmosphere changes abruptly. We are no longer with the Spanish Republicans with whom Sartre's political sympathies so obviously lie, but with the French middle class whom he observes with considerably less sympathy. 'Madame Darbédat held a piece of Turkish Delight between her fingers. She brought it carefully up to her lips, and held her breath lest the fine dusting of sugar with which it was covered should be blown away. "It's pink," she said to herself. She suddenly bit into its glassy flesh, and a smell of decay filled her mouth. "Strange how illness sharpens our sensations." She began to think of mosques, of obsequious Orientals (she had gone to Algiers for her honeymoon), and a faint smile came to her pale lips: the Turkish Delight was obsequious as well.'

Madame Darbédat's daughter, Eve, insists on continuing to live with her husband Pierre, who is going mad. Madame Darbédat has just learned that her daughter still sleeps with Pierre, and with considerable embarrassment has to point this out to her healthy and rather unperceptive husband. Monsieur Darbédat goes to visit Eve, but finds her strange, uncommunicative, and indifferent to his arguments for sending Pierre to a private nursing-home. He tells her that before three years are out, Pierre will have sunk into complete idiocy, and is surprised to learn that this is something she already knows. Reflecting that the only way to save his daughter would be to remove Pierre by force, he leaves the flat and is happy to be out again in the fresh air, among normal people. He realizes that his daughter is trying to live outside what is human, and reproaches her for it. 'He looked fondly at the passersby; he loved their grave and limpid eyes, and, in this sunlit street, among men, he felt he was safe, as if in the midst of a large family.' Monsieur Darbédat is a normal man—in his confidence that normality is right and proper he is something of a Swine in the Sartrian sense of the word—and cannot understand his daughter's strange ambition to leave the normal world and enter into her husband's mad universe.

The second part of the story is told entirely from Eve's point of view. She is trying to share her husband's feeling for the strangeness of objects, and his belief in the reality of the flying statues which cause him such terror. She cannot do so, for the human mind can no more deliberately escape from its humanity into madness than it can think its own death. At the very moment when Pierre is cowering terrified in his chair, waiting for the flying statues to arrive, Eve hears a slight noise in the corridor outside. Immediately, she realizes that it is the charlady, and remembers that she must give her the money for the gas bill. Although aware of the fact that she can never feel what Pierre feels, she nevertheless knows that she could never live again among normal people. 'They still think that I am one of them. But I couldn't live an hour with them. I need to live down there, with Pierre, on the other side of the wall. But down there, nobody wants me.' Her love for her husband, which is so great that she decides to kill him rather than let him sink into complete madness, is nevertheless not great enough to enable her to share his experiences. The wall between human minds cannot be scaled, and however much Eve may hate the normal world she can never escape from it.

The filiation of ideas and imagery between 'The Room' and Sartre's other work is much closer than it is in 'The Wall'. When Madame Darbédat tastes her Turkish Delight and finds it pink, she is echoing one of Sartre's assertions in Being and Nothingness that 'If I eat a pink cake, its taste is pink'. Eve hates her father because of the image which he has of her husband when he looks at him and judges him. So, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre maintains that when two lovers know they are being observed by a third person it destroys their love. Pierre, in his delirium, speaks of objects which he 'pins down with his look'—a clear case of Sartre exploiting his own fascination with the importance of the look, a subject which he again treats at length in Being and Nothingness. The obsession with objects that seem to acquire a life of their own is something which Pierre shares with Roquentin, and with certain of Sartre's other characters. In both The Diary of Antoine Roquentin and 'The Room' Sartre uses the same image to speak of the human hand, when he compares it to a crab lying on its back. Eve imagines the words which Pierre cannot pronounce correctly coming out of his mouth 'like a soft, whitish substance'—an image often used in Sartre's first novel to indicate indeterminacy and colourless vagueness.

As in The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, Sartre extends his verbal skill beyond the mere description of his own obsessions. He succeeds in creating the claustrophobic atmosphere of the room in which Pierre lives, and the staleness—like that of unchanged water in a vase of flowers—which Eve feels as she thinks of the need to try once again to enter into her husband's world. His own somewhat morbid imagination, together with his acute awareness of the physical details of life—Madame Darbédat dusting the fine powdering of sugar from the pages of her book and being reminded of the sand at Arcachon, the sunlight in the air like 'a blinding dust', Pierre's lips moving like two frightened beasts, the incense and shade in his room forming 'a single element, acrid but soft and padded, as simple and familiar as water, air or fire'—is eminently suited to short stories like 'The Room'. In fact, he so excels at describing the abnormal that it is tempting to see his early work as primarily an attempt to liberate himself from his obsessions, and to neglect the philosophical overtones that each of his stories has. This is particularly true of the next story in the collection, 'Herostratus'.

Its hero, a clerk called Paul Hilbert, develops Roquentin's dislike of humanism and of humanity to the extreme point where it merges into criminal madness. Inspired by the example of Herostratus, who secured immortality by burning down the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, he decides to commit an act which, 'shining like a black diamond', will enable him to leave his own mediocrity and join the ranks of the splendid criminals. He writes two hundred letters, which he sends to two hundred famous 'humanist' writers, telling them that he has so little love for men that he is going to shoot six of them, quite at random, in the street. Or, rather, he is going to shoot five men, keeping the sixth bullet in his revolver for himself.

Hilbert waits in his room, meditating on his plan, and trying to imagine the satisfaction which he will derive from his crime. 'It would take hold of me, would overthrow my too-human ugliness . . . A crime cuts the life of the criminal into two parts. There may be moments when he hopes to go back, but the crime is there, behind you, a glittering mineral barring your way.' Unfortunately for Hilbert, he is not of the stuff of which the magnificent criminals whose photographs he admires in the newspaper are made. He makes a mistake in his plan, shoots three bullets instead of one at his first victim, and then runs in the wrong direction. He had originally intended to go back to his room, wait there quietly savouring his crime until his pursuers arrived, and then kill himself. As a result of his mistakes, however, he is chased into a café, takes refuge in the lavatory, and finally comes out and surrenders. He has not put any of the details of his originally perfect plan into practice. Crime is no escape from the mediocrity of existence, and the beauty which the criminal has when seen from outside is a lie.

There is no doubt that the story is satirical, and that Sartre is showing the anti-humanist attitude to be just as pointless as that of the humanist. Certainly, Hilbert shares with Roquentin his hatred for the humanists who can see in man only a projection of their own false notions of nobility. Like Roquentin, he feels sick at the sight of men eating. Like Roquentin, he despises people who find consolation for their unhappiness in listening to classical music, but carries his scorn to the extent of wanting to shoot them one by one as they come out of the concert hall. He is, however, much more of a puppet than Roquentin, and is used far more objectively in order to illustrate some of Sartre's ideas.

In his sexual habits, for example, Hilbert represents the sadist described in Being and Nothingness. His greatest pleasure, which frequently procures him a spontaneous orgasm, is to watch a prostitute undress and walk about in front of him, while he sits fully clothed in an armchair. The sadist, in Being and Nothingness, tries to dominate The Other by making him realize that his existence is absurd and contingent. He does this by forcing The Other to be completely identified with his body, which the sadist then contemplates as an obscene prison for The Other's mind. The fact that Hilbert remains dressed while the prostitute walks about in all her naked obscenity under the threat of his revolver, is characteristic of the sadist's desire to imprison The Other in the flesh while he himself remains free. The sadist wishes to remain a pure mind which objectively contemplates and judges the imprisonment of The Other in his or her flesh. According to Being and Nothingness, man's relationship with The Other is always one of combat, for each person is perpetually trying to use other people in order to realize his own being. One of the basic means of doing this is sadism. In this respect, Hilbert is merely living out his chosen means of realizing his own existence, and Sartre is describing him with the same objectivity as a doctor would describe a natural physical function. Sartre has often been accused of writing semi-pornographical literature, and he has in general replied with the defence that he is merely describing things as they are. In 1946 [in an interview with Christian Grisoli], for example, he justified the fact that the plot of the first volume of Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) centred round a projected abortion by referring to the statistics which might be used to show that in 1938 there were more abortions than tramway employees [Paru, December 1946, pp. 5-10]. He also maintained that the rather curious sexual relationship between the invalid Charles and his nurse Jacqueline, described in the second volume of The Roads to Freedom, was something of which he had been told at first hand. He has not so far specifically mentioned the incidents in his short stories, but a remark which he made in 1951 was obviously intended to cover the whole of his work. He told Gabriel d'Aubarède [in Le Figaro Littéraire] that: 'If we speak of the body and of its lowest functions, it is because we must not try to forget that the mind goes right down into the body . . . It is not for my own amusement that I talk about these things, but because in my opinion a writer should take hold of man in all aspects of his being.'

Neither his assertion that he is merely describing things as they are nor his claim that there should be no 'forbidden territory' for the modern writer has, however, saved him either from those who liked his work for the wrong reasons or from those who saw in his supposed obscenity a further excuse to attack him. In 1953, for example, the description of Hilbert's visit to the prostitute appeared in an interesting collection edited by René Varin entitled L'Érotisme dans la littérature française, and François Mauriac is said to have referred to Sartre as an excrémentialiste. Nevertheless, there is no gratuitous pornography in his work, since each of the so-called pornographical passages can be linked up with a sincerely held philosophical idea. There is no doubt that, in Being and Nothingness for example, Sartre is completely serious in the extremely pessimistic description which he gives of personal relationships, and in his thesis that sadism is a basic human attitude. If he wishes to translate his ideas from the abstractions of philosphy to the more immediately personal world of the novel or the short story—which he surely has every right to do—he is inevitably led to describe characters like Herostratus. Hilbert's sexual habits form an integral part of his attitude towards life, and fit in both with the hostility he feels for others and with his desire to assert himself by killing. In describing these, Sartre is merely bringing to life a particular philosophical idea. This is also his intention in the last two stories in the collection. 'Intimacy' explores the idea of bad faith which is essential to his moral philosophy, while 'The Childhood of a Leader' is a further presentation of the idea of Rights as a means of escape from man's contingency.

Like 'The Room', 'Intimacy' is written in such a way as to show how the same events appear from the standpoint of two different characters. 'The Room' showed Eve and her husband first of all as seen from the outside by Monsieur Darbédat, and then from the inside by Eve herself. 'Intimacy' is made up of four sections, in which Lulu and Rirette describe Lulu's abortive attempt to leave her husband and go off to the South of France with her lover. The story opens with Lulu's thoughts as she lies in bed—naked because it saves the laundry—thinking about her husband Henri and her lover Pierre, and absent-mindedly pulling with her toe at a hole in the sheet. She would like to stay with her husband, in spite of his pomposity, because he is more or less impotent and because she is not very fond of sex anyway, while Pierre, her lover, annoys her with his constant attempts to dominate her and make her feel sexual pleasure. Rirette, her friend, wants her to leave Henri and feels slightly jealous of her opportunity to do so with such a nice-looking man as Pierre. The second part of the story describes Rirette's thoughts as she waits for Lulu in a café, and her delighted surprise when Lulu eventually turns up and tells her that she has left Henri. He had slapped her cousin Robert, Lulu had tricked him into going out on to the balcony, had then locked him out, and when she let him back in again he had struck her. Lulu has to buy some new clothes for her trip with Pierre, and it seems to Rirette that she deliberately chooses to go shopping in a street where she knows that Henri is bound to see her. Lulu insists that this is not true, but the inevitable happens, and Rirette has to drag Lulu away from her husband by force and bundle her into a taxi. During the struggle, Lulu is 'as soft as a bundle of laundry' and leaves all the decisions to Rirette. The third section takes us back to the inside of Lulu's mind. She is again lying in bed, this time in a rather dubious hotel where Pierre has just spent two hours making love to her, and growing steadily more and more depressed at the idea of going away with him. She slips out of the hotel and goes to see her husband. Weeping with sadness at the thought of leaving him for ever, she nevertheless manages to tell him where she is staying. In the very brief fourth part, we see Rirette's reaction to Pierre's news that Lulu has gone back to her husband. She had left a letter for Pierre telling him how the neighbours had come and told her that Henri was terribly unhappy, and how she had felt unable to leave him. Twice in her letter she repeats that she cannot think how the neighbours got hold of her address. Pierre tells Rirette that it is perhaps just as well after all that Lulu did not come away with him, since his mother was very annoyed that he should be taking a woman to the villa in the South of France. At the failure of her scheme to organize Lulu's life for her, Rirette 'felt herself inexplicably filled with bitter regret'. Lulu, after all, got what she wanted and not what Rirette thought she ought to have. She stayed with her husband—but made the best of both worlds by arranging to meet Pierre at five o'clock that same afternoon.

In spite of the fact that this story is told with perfect mimicry of the expressions and thought-habits of two Parisian shopgirls, it does examine a concept which is at the very basis of Sartre's moral philosophy. Man, he argues, is always free to make whatever decisions he likes and to live his life as he pleases. This does not mean, he hastens to add, that the prisoner can escape or the incurable invalid recover his health simply by deciding to do so, but that they are free to adopt whatever attitude they please towards their captivity or their illness. Moreover, he insists, we are in most cases far freer than we think. Most people try to hide their liberty from themselves because they are afraid of taking the responsibility of choosing their own life. They run away from their freedom by pretending either that their conduct is dictated by preestablished ethical laws—in which Sartre does not believe—or that it is determined by their physical makeup. In 'Intimacy' he is describing the ruses which Lulu adopts to disguise from herself the fact that she and she alone must decide whether to stay with her husband or go off with her lover. What Lulu really wants to do is to stay with her husband and still keep her lover—to have her cake and eat it—but she will not admit this to herself. Neither will she recognize that her dislike of sex is a deliberate choice, and a refuge against the power which she knows that her physical pleasure would give her lover. Instead, she pretends that 'it's medical' and that nothing Pierre can do, even though he may excite her, can in any way change her basic constitution. She hides her fear of letting herself go under the disguise of physical determinism, in the same way as she pretends to Rirette and herself that she did not know who had given the neighbours the address of the hotel at which she was staying with Pierre. She is a perfect illustration of the Sartrian idea of 'bad faith'—the intellectual sleight-of-hand by which we try to hide our freedom and responsibility from ourselves. In fact, she knew quite well that she had managed to whisper the name of the hotel to Henri when she went back to see him, exactly as she knew that if she went shopping in a certain place Henri would see her and try to dissuade her from leaving him.

As an illustrative tale, 'Intimacy' is possibly more successful than 'The Room' or 'Herostratus' because the meaning is more obvious and more easily elucidated. While Lulu is by no means what we like to think of as a normal human being—her sexual tastes are rather odd in their own way—it is possible to recognize her avoidance of responsibility as a very human characteristic. In her ambition to have it both ways, in fact, she is rather like the lady in the cartoon who says to her friend, 'I want to be swept off my feet by someone I can bend to my will.' Once again, however, the vocabulary, images and minor obsessions bear the unmistakable imprint of Sartre's mind. Lulu detests being looked at from behind—an echo of Sartre's preoccupation with The Other as primarily someone who may be looking at one and judging one—and, as we learn from Rirette's judgement on the indecent prominence of her behind, her dislike is justified. 'Intimacy' dismisses the ideals of Romantic love with an even greater luxury of physiological detail than does The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, and seems to share with Sartre's first novel the desire to disgust people with their own existence. Yet it is again wrong to see in 'Intimacy', as Monsieur Varin did, a deliberate example of eroticism. In this story, Sartre is a moralist and a pessimistic realist, in 'Herostratus' a clinical examiner.

The last story in Sartre's collection, 'The Childhood of a Leader', is primarily an essay in social satire, and is the most obviously political of all his pre-war writings. Here he uses the same talent for mimicry which he exploited in 'Intimacy', this time in order to describe the upper bourgeoisie as seen from the inside. The story traces the early life of Lucien Fleurier, through his childish fears of his own unreality, through his adolescent hesitations and experiments in homosexuality and Surrealism, up to the moment when he discovers an escape from all his difficulties in the idea of Rights. 'The Childhood of a Leader' presents a different solution from that proposed at the end of The Diary of Antoine Roquentin to the problem of man's awareness of the absurdity of his existence. Whereas Roquentin faces up to his own nausea and realizes the dishonesty of all attempts to escape from it, Lucien Fleurier takes the easy way out. He can do this because he belongs to a certain class, and because, in becoming a member of the Fascist 'L'Action Française', he is protecting his own interests at the same time as he avoids the uncomfortable awareness of his own superfluousness. Up to his unfortunate decision, however, Lucien illustrates in miniature a number of Sartre's ideas on the nature of the human mind, and seems to be on the point of acquiring Roquentin's lucidity.

At a very early age, Lucien makes the discovery that he is never completely identified with the emotions that he feels. When he cries out 'I love my mummy', and slashes fiercely at a clump of nettles in violent affirmation, he still fails to coincide exactly with the emotion he is pursuing. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre maintains that man can only be conscious of his emotions because he remains distinct from them—because a 'nothingness' which constitutes his self-awareness is perpetually sliding between him and what he feels. If he were totally identified with his anger or his sadness, man would cease to be angry or sad because he would no longer be conscious of anything at all. Since he can never coincide absolutely either with what he is or with what he feels, man is forced to play a part in order to realize himself and make his emotions satisfying. The example which Sartre gives in Being and Nothingness is that of the waiter whose gestures are a little over-precise, whose politeness is exaggerated, and whose whole demeanour is devoted to playing the part of being a café waiter. Man can also escape from his unreality by forcing other people to have a definite idea of him, in whose reality he will then be able to share. Thus Lucien tries to persuade his cousin that he walks in his sleep, in order that he may have an essence and a reality—that of a sleepwalker—which will be 'sanctified' and confirmed by his cousin's knowledge of it. This confirmation of his own existence in the idea which others have of him, will, finally, form part of Lucien's solution, but his first attempt fails because both he and his cousin sleep too well.

Lucien also becomes acutely aware, while still a child, of the difference between himself and physical objects. He is infuriated by the compactness and certainty with which a chestnut tree is a chestnut tree, absolutely and without a shadow of doubt, while he is always a little uncertain whether he is the real Lucien or not. This distinction between man's consciousness, which according to Sartre is what it is not and is not what it is, and physical objects, which are completely what they are, is also one of the main themes of Being and Nothingness. Lucien also feels himself vague and unjustifiable, and realizes one day that 'right through his childish worries and the sleep which followed them' (where he temporarily forgot his uncertainty) 'he had never stopped being embarrassed by his own life, this useless and voluminous present which he had carried in his arms without knowing what to do with it or where to set it down'. His escape comes through his acquaintance, while still at school in Paris, with the anti-semitic ideas of Charles Maurras and 'L'Action Française'. The boy in his class, André Lemordant, who is the most violently anti-semitic, seems to Lucien to have a rock-like solidity and a complete freedom from the inconstant haze which characterizes Lucien's own consciousness of himself. When Lemordant asks Lucien to sign a protest against 'The Yids at the École Normale', he says to him: 'You're French. You have the right to express your opinion.' At that moment, Lucien 'feels himself shot through with a sudden and inexplicable delight' and signs. When he finally takes the plunge and joins 'L'Action Française'—after an incident in which he joins with a number of friends in beating up a solitary Jew in a side-street—he loses all his uncertainty. Henceforth, his problems disappear and he is convinced only of the necessity for him to be just as he is.

At a party to which he is invited by one of his friends, Lucien is introduced to a young man whom he immediately recognizes as a Jew. He turns his back on him, and stalks furiously out of the house. Like Lulu, he disguises his free decision in a deterministic phrase, claiming to his friend, 'It's not my fault, old man, it's too much for me, I can't touch them, I feel that they have scaly hands.' Originally, Lucien had been rather embarrassed by his rudeness, but when he discovers that it had forced his friend to look at him in a particular way, as someone who was anti-semitic and could do nothing about it, he is filled with delight. He has at last achieved his ambition of having his tastes and existence consecrated by another person's recognition that they are predetermined and real. Sitting in a café in the Latin Quarter, Lucien feels infinitely superior to all the poor foreigners around him. He has Rights, he has his place in society and in the world marked out for him, he is a leader among Frenchmen. In the hope of finding in his own features some of the rock-like solidity which he admired in Lemordant, he looks at his reflection in a shop window. 'But the glass only reflected a rather pretty, stubborn, little face, which was not yet sufficiently terrible. "I shall let my moustache grow," he decided.'

The final note of irony drives home the point that someone who, like Lucien, has chosen to live in an inauthentic mode, is constantly dependent on the image of himself which he creates in the eyes of other people. It is perhaps the best ending of any of Sartre's short stories, for it suddenly brings the reader back to what the character whose imaginary life he has been sharing is really like. The satire, as in the visit of Roquentin to the museum in Bouville, is both philosophical and political. Philosophically, Lucien's realization that his Rights are 'something like triangles and circles—so perfect that they do not exist' corresponds to Roquentin's idea that a circle is not absurd because it is not contingent. It can be deduced from first principles, from the rotation of a segment round one of its extremities, and is therefore not infected with the absurdity of things which simply exist for no reason at all. The Rights and circles with which Lucien identifies himself are beyond existence, they are because they have to be, they are not superfluous and inexplicable. Politically, Lucien becomes one of the Swine whom Roquentin detested at Bouville, one of the bourgeois who have a divine right to existence. In his anti-semitism, he becomes a particular kind of Swine, whose more detailed portrait Sartre gave in his Réflexions sur la Question juive (Portrait of the Anti-Semite) in 1946.

The anti-semite is exactly like Lucien. Like him he 'has chosen to be terrible', and people 'are afraid to annoy him'—as they become afraid to annoy Lucien. 'No one knows to what extremities the wildness of his passion will lead him. He knows, however. For this passion is not caused from outside. He is in complete control of it, lets it go just as far as he wants, sometimes giving it its head and sometimes pulling on the reins. He is not afraid of himself; but he reads in the eyes of others a disquieting image of himself, and he makes his actions and words conform to that image. This exterior model frees him from the need to look for his personality within himself; he has chosen to exist completely outside, never to examine himself, and to be nothing but the fear which he inspires in other people. What he runs away from, even more than from Reason, is the intimate awareness of himself.' The whole of Sartre's essay on anti-semitism reads, in fact, like a commentary on 'The Childhood of a Leader'. The anti-semite, like Lucien, 'wants to be a pitiless rock, a ferocious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt: anything but a man'.

This close relationship is important for several reasons. It shows how easily Sartre's political and philosophical ideas intermingle at the level of his basic obsessions, and how his dislike of the bourgeoisie springs from a complex of philosophical and political reasons. The bourgeois, he maintains, thinks he has a right to existence. He also is a person who tends to run away from his indeterminacy, when he does feel it, into the emotional and irrational attitude characterized by Fascism. Sartre's idea, in his Outline of a Theory of the Emotions, that anger is essentially an escape from an over-difficult world here provides another link between his philosophy and his politics. Philosophically, Sartre regards emotion as a means whereby people try to deny their liberty and pretend that they have been 'carried away' by passion. Politically, he prefers people to try to solve problems in a rational way, without what he considers as a semi-magical recourse to emotion. His dislike of the irrational aberrations of anti-semitism and Fascism is consistent with his general world view. Facts about ourselves and about the world—we are unhappy, the world is difficult—must, in his opinion, be faced honestly. 'The Childhood of a Leader' with its satire on Lucien's attempt to identify himself with his anger against the Jews, is both philosophically and politically a cautionary tale.

This link between 'The Childhood of a Leader' and Portrait of the Anti-Semite once again gives a hint of the more optimistic view of man's fate which is implicit in Sartre's early work. If man is an unnecessary being, unjustifiable because he conforms to no pre-established idea, he is also, by virtue of this fact, completely free to choose what he shall become. Although man's first awareness of this liberty is always terrifying—an idea which Sartre develops in The Flies—it is nevertheless his only source of dignity. In refusing their liberty and identifying themselves with their social persona or with their emotions, the Swine in The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, Lucien Fleurier and the anti-semite are, like Lulu, refusing their liberty and their only possible chance of salvation. Sartre does not, either at this or any later stage, say exactly what this salvation is, or how it may be achieved. One can only assume, from hints in his work, that it consists of accepting oneself for what one is, and acting in accordance with one's conscience. In his short stories, as in his novels, Sartre remains disappointingly negative in his final recommendations.

In many ways, this collection of short stories is a more satisfying book than The Diary of Antoine Roquentin. Sartre's novel tends to go on for just a little too long, has little or no plot, and its extensive theorizing seems out of place in what is supposed, after all, to be a work of fiction. Each one of the stories, on the other hand, has a conciseness which comes from being written to illustrate a particular philosophical point. Each has its own particular atmosphere, from the harsh staccato realism of 'The Wall' to the reproduction of a shopgirl's thoughts in 'Intimacy', from the social satire of 'The Childhood of a Leader' to the obsessional and claustrophobic world of 'The Room' and 'Herostratus'.

Sartre's gift for mimicry, which later in his career he will use largely to score points in polemical discussions, is most evident in 'Intimacy'. Rirette, for example, is sitting at the terrace of a café thinking of Lulu's happiness, and repeats to herself: 'Happiness, happiness—a beautiful, grave, moving word, and she thought that if they asked her opinion in the competition for Paris-Soir she would say it was the most beautiful word in the French language. Has anyone thought of suggesting it? They said Energy, Courage, but that's because they're men, they really ought to have had a woman, a woman would have said that, they ought really to have had two prizes, one for men and the first word would have been Honour and one for women and I would have won, I should have said Happiness . . . I'll tell her: "Lulu, you have no right to miss your happiness, your Happiness, Lulu, your Happiness." I think Pierre's very nice myself . . .'

In his description of the childhood and youth of Lucien Fleurier, particularly of his relationship with the homosexual surrealist Bergère, Sartre has a gift for choosing exactly the right detail to satirize the atmosphere of French upper-middle-class life. When Lucien's father goes away to the war in 1914, he soon returns 'because he was a leader and because the General had told him that he would be more useful looking after his factory than staying in the trenches as if he were just anyone'. The description of Madame Fleurier's visit to the priest in charge of Lucien's first school is an excellent example of the way in which Sartre reproduces both the habits of the French upper class and the thought-processes of a child. 'She was sitting on the extreme edge of the green armchair and leaning her ample bosom in the direction of the priest; she was speaking very quickly and had put on her musical voice, as she did when she was angry but did not want to show it. The priest talked much more slowly and the words seemed much longer in his mouth than when other people used them, you would have said that he sucked them a little like barley-sugar before he let them slip out.' Bergère, the surrealist, 'had a pale face and magnificent white hair'. When Lucien was introduced to him, he 'took his hand between his own long, elegant fingers and made Lucien sit down. There was a silence. Bergère looked warmly and tenderly at Lucien: "Are you Disquiet?" he asked in a soft voice.'

There is in Sartre, as there is in François Mauriac, a social satirist who is hidden too early by more ambitious religious and political preoccupations. In the same way as Mauriac gives an extremely amusing picture, especially in his early novels, of the wine aristocracy in Bordeaux, so Sartre, with a wider range, excels at depicting the social atmosphere of particular groups. He is equally at home in describing Paul Hubert's visit to the prostitute as in recreating the tendency to pomposity and self-satisfaction in Monsieur Darbédat. In both cases, the characters climb stairs. 'At the Hôtel Stella there was only one room free, on the fourth floor. We went up. The woman was rather plump, and had to keep stopping to get her breath. I was very much at my ease; I have a dry body, in spite of my stomach, and it would need more than four flights of stairs to make me out of breath. On the landing of the fourth floor she stopped, put her right hand on her heart and breathed very heavily. In her left hand she held the key of the room. "It's a long way up," she said, trying to smile at me.' In contrast, here is the description of Monsieur Darbédat going to visit his daughter. 'He ran lightly up the one hundred and twelve stairs which led to her flat. When he rang the doorbell, he was not even breathing faster than usual. With some satisfaction he recalled the remark of Mademoiselle Dormoy: "At your age, Charles, you're quite simply marvellous." He never felt stronger or more healthy than on Thursdays, especially after these alert ascents.' In both cases Sartre manages to give the whole character of the person he is describing through these touches. It is not only the ideas which his short stories express which make them one of his most interesting works, but also the evidence they give of his acute observation of social behaviour.

The short stories have another superiority over The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, which comes from the effort which Sartre has to make in order to move from one atmosphere to another. The distance between the author and his characters is greater, and there is consequently less temptation to criticize the extreme subjectivism of the experience presented. Of course, the characters in Intimacy share many of Sartre's quite personal minor obsessions—that of being looked at, in particular—and all have something of Roquentin's horror of physical existence. Lucien Fleurier detests the 'mucous-like intimacy of the flesh' and Pablo Ibbieta feels that he is 'tied to his body as to an enormous insect'. While Sartre's power of describing physical sensations is equally effective in both books, one nevertheless feels a greater detachment in the short stories, and a more conscious control of the material. Indeed, Sartre's mastery of the different styles used in the book is so great that one is left with the problem of why he limited himself to publishing only five short stories. The varieties of human relationships described in Being and Nothingness would provide material for a dozen or more stories of a similar type, each of which would contribute towards bringing Sartre's philosophical ideas more fully to life. Why, since 1939, has he refrained from writing in a medium in which he was once so successful?

The answer is partly, of course, that an artist is often wise not to try the same trick twice. The danger for Sartre, if he had continued to write short stories, would have been to fall into an automatic exploitation of this medium. More important than this, however, is the evolution of his thought in the late nineteen-thirties, which had already led him, before the outbreak of war, to write the first volume of Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom), and to think up the idea of the second. An article in the weekly review Marianne in 1938, written by a journalist who had apparently been recently in touch with Sartre [Claudine Chonez, "Jean-Paul Sartre: Romancier Philosophe," Marianne, November 23, 1938], mentions his plan to take Roquentin away from his wholly personal life at Bouville and plunge him into the all-embracing world of modern political and social reality created by the Munich crisis. Elsewhere [in an interview with Olivier Todd, BBC Third Programme, Listener, June 6, 1957], Sartre has spoken of his realization in 1938 and 1939 that the men of his generation had mistakenly lived their lives with the idea that peace would continue. When war revealed itself as inevitable, they discovered that they had been cheated, and that their lives up to that moment had all been based on wrong assumptions. This experience led Sartre away from the personal world of The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, and inspired him with the desire to write works which would express a more general social reality. There was also another reason for the change in his literary activity between 1939 and 1943, the date at which his first specifically committed work, The Flies, was performed.

In an interview published in Le Figaro Littéraire in 1951, Sartre spoke of the decisive influence which the period of captivity as a prisoner of war had exercised over his development. Before the war, he said, he had not been particularly interested in political questions. His early career had, in fact, been dominated by primarily academic preoccupations. He was born in Paris in 1905, entered the École Normale Supérieure, the most select and intellectual of all French educational institutions, at the age of nineteen, and after his military service became a teacher of philosophy. Except for the academic year 1933-4, which he spent in Berlin, he taught until the outbreak of war: at Le Havre, which probably served as the model for Bouville, at Laon, and, from 1937 onwards, at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris. In 1939 he was called up, and was taken prisoner by the Germans on 21 June 1940. It was while he was behind barbed wire, he says, that he discovered the true nature of liberty, and decided to become 'a militant democratic writer'. It was also in the prison camp, from which he was released in 1941 and allowed to resume his teaching in Paris, that he discovered his vocation for the theatre. A short play, the first he had ever written, which was performed in front of his fellow-prisoners one Christmas, showed him the immense potentialities of the theatre in speaking directly to men of their own problems. In view of the political implications already noted in his first novel and short stories, it is doubtful if the break in his political development was quite as absolute as this interview might suggest. Nevertheless, there is a distinct change in intention if not in atmosphere between the books written before 1941 and those published after his release from the prison camp and after the liberation of France in 1944. The medium of the full-scale novel, as well as that of the theatre, seemed to provide him with the ideal opportunity to express the more optimistic side of his philosophy. He had already written, in his criticism of François Mauriac in 1939, that the novel was concerned first of all with the problem of freedom, the philosophical and political value which he cherished above all others.