Existentialist Methuselah

ALL MEN ARE MORTAL (345 pp.)--Simone de Beauvoir-World ($5).

The 14th century conspirators surged into the palace bellowing, "Death to the tyrant!" Count Fosca (the tyrant in question) whipped out his sword and skewered the ringleader. Seconds later, Fosca felt "a sharp pain between my ribs," but instead of dropping down dead, he only spitted another brace of gizzards. Three hundred years later, the same Count Fosca "shot myself in the chest and then in the mouth"; 300 years after that, still going strong, he drew a razor across his throat, but "the lips of the gash [drew] together...only a long pink scar remained."

Novelist de Beauvoir's Count Fosca is immortal--the result of downing a beaker of the elixir of life distilled by an Egyptian alchemist. So when he meets ravishing Regina, a 20th century French actress, Fosca is 700 years old (he still looks thirtyish) and is thoroughly fed up with life.

Life Is Hell. Regina's problem is just the opposite: she goes half crazy every time she thinks that one day death will ring down her curtain. But, reflects Regina, if Fosca cannot die, no more, in a way, can I, because I shall live on in his memory eternally. So Regina becomes Count Fosca's mistress and makes him tell her his life story. It takes ages.

Fosca wanted to unite all Italy in the 15th century. He failed. He took service under Emperor Maximilian (1459-1519) in the hope of uniting Europe. This was a flop, too. As adviser to Spain's Don Carlos (1500-1558), Fosca decided that the New World was the future's best bet; instead, he found it was nothing but an extension of the Old, smirched with the massacres of Indians. When the Age of Reason dawned. Fosca took fresh courage, but found that Revolutionary France was just a rational washout. In the end, Fosca can't imagine why generation after generation of men and women grow up bursting with ambition to change the world and right its wrongs. Fosca thinks he knows that "nothing can be done for man." But the retort he gets from mortal men throughout seven centuries is always much the same, e.g., "I've got to feel that I'm alive--even if I have to die trying," and, "There is... one good: to act according to one's conscience."

Life Is Death. Mortal man's proud answers to Fosca are put in his mouth by France's Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialist Simone de Beauvoir is merely the medium. All good existentialists believe that when they die, they will die altogether: but they argue that precisely because man has no God to look after him, no Heaven to look forward to and no way of escaping death, he is so much the greater, because his hope and courage light the absurd void to which he is condemned. Mortal man, in fact, is forever alive, whereas immortal Count Fosca, who has lost all hope, is really as dead as a doornail. FREEDOM is SLAVERY, said Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four. LIFE is DEATH, say the gloomier among the existentialists.

The quality of Author de Beauvoir's last novel published in the U.S., She Came to Stay (TIME. March 15), must not fool U.S. readers. Far from being an advance on its predecessor, All Men is a regression. It belongs with a whole slew of French postwar novels and short stories whose characters are merely manikins dancing on the ends of brain fibers. Count Fosca's real tragedy is not that he is immortal but that he is run down by Sartre's sedan every time his mother takes him out.

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