From the Abyss

TROUBLED SLEEP (421 pp.)--Jean-Paul Sartre--Knopf ($3.50).

June 15, 1940--4 p.m. France had fallen. Down the main street of a country town staggered a drunken rout of French soldiery, bawling the self-disgust of their nation in a savagely gross song. "Tant qu'il y aura de la merde dans le pot," it went, "c,a puera dans la chambre" (When the pot's full, no wonder the room stinks).

In this scene and with these words, Novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, biggest postwar noise in France, declares the text of Volume III in his long existential sermon, the four-volume novel called The Roads to Freedom. Sartre's richly rewarded purpose is to trace the stink of defeat to its sources in the French soul and, before he is through, to demonstrate the uses of existentialism as a spiritual disinfectant--or at least deodorant.

Freedom? The first two volumes, The Age of Reason and The Reprieve, took a rough sample of prewar French society--a painter, a Communist, a professor, a prostitute, a homosexual, a student, and so on--and presented episodes of their case histories in the months before the war. Volume III, Troubled Sleep, carries the same characters through the first few weeks after the fall of France.

The mild schoolteacher, watching the light of France die in the eyes of his friends, is seized with a vague wish to die too, and he does, but not until he has gone gun-crazy in a church tower, and shot half a dozen Germans. The cold-eyed homosexual sways through Paris streets, glorying in the death of the social order: "Anything goes!" he cries, and picks up a blond young deserter. The Communist, penned in a freight car with his fellow Frenchmen, smiles grimly as their train rumbles toward a German prison camp: he looks for good fishing in the troubled waters of their discontent.

The actions, with their actors, arise throughout France at a sudden random, like bubbles in a boiling liquid, and with as little apparent interrelation. At first, the bubbles are exciting to watch, they come so fast. Soon one bubble begins to seem pretty much like another, for to Sartre, who is less novelist than cut-rate philosopher, it is ideas, not people, that light the doubtful way along the human road. And to Sartre it is the truth as well as the fact that for France the road to freedom led through the abyss of defeat and despair.

Or Not? In Troubled Sleep, Sartre's characters get to know the bottom of the abyss very well. The news of Volume III of his tetralogy is that some of Sartre's Frenchmen are beginning to see a way out. Says one of them, a Christian: "Let us abandon the idea that our defeat was the effect of chance . . . When a man believes he is the innocent victim of a catastrophe and sits wringing his hands, unable to understand what has happened to him, is it not good news for him to be told that he is expiating his own fault?" Meanwhile, the Communist is busy preaching the Communist way out, whether it leads to freedom or not. The presumptive existentialist, however, keeps his own counsel. For Volume III, he affects to go along with the Communist: "I've nothing to lose," he murmurs. "A fellow has to do something, eh?"

What Author Sartre himself considers the way out is not clear from these novels; his Road to Freedom will reach its goal in Volume IV. By that time Sartre, no Stalinist himself, may be able to make clear whether he has anything better to offer than Communism and suicide.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.