Sartre's friend and sometime rival, Paul Nizan was a prototype of the angry young man. Ideologically a Marxist, politically a Communist, professionally a writer, endowed―Sartre conceded―with a sharper mind and greater literary ability than his own, Nizan diagnosed the ills of French society in the 1930's. His writings, vilified by the Party he left in September 1939, are being rediscovered in France. W. D. Redfern gives now the first full-length appraisal in English of his life and work.
Nizan as a writer and a critical intelligence is seen in Mr. Redfern's analysis of his radical imagination and its deployment in his novels, polemical essays, journalism, and correspondence. His place among his contemporaries is also assessed, Mr. Redfern thus illuminating the political and literary worlds of the philosophical rebels (Berl, Politzer, Friedmann), the Communists and idealists (Aragon, Malraux, Weil) in Paris during the 1920"s and 1930's.
Originally published in 1972.
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Paul Nizan
Committed Literature in a Conspiratorial World
By W. D. RedfernPRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1972 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06218-1Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,
Introduction, 3,
1. Evolution of a Young Thinker, 9,
2. An Alienated Man: Antoine Bloyé, 47,
3. Member of a Working Party, 78,
4. Politics and the Novel: Le Cheval de Troie, 119,
5. A Conspiratorial World: La Conspiration, 151,
6. Breaks and Fidelities, 183,
Conclusion, 216,
Bibliography, 223,
Index, 229,
CHAPTER 1
EVOLUTION OF A YOUNG THINKER
Paul Nizan was born at Tours in 1905, the son of a railway engineer. He attended the lycée at Périgueux before going in 1916 to the Lycée Henri IV in Paris as a day pupil. There, in the "cinquième A 1," he and Sartre met and made friends. Their education was to run parallel until they finished at the École Normale Supérieure in the late 1920s. They moved together in 1922 to Louis-Ie-Grand in order to prepare for entry to the E. N. S. The first entrance of Nizan into Sartre's field of perception was an eerie hallucination: Nizan was the mirror image of another boy who had died a few weeks before. In some ways, Sartre seems never to have recovered from this initial jolt (and it would be wrong to underestimate the importance of superstition in Sartre's mental constitution). The new boy, because of his squint, struck the young Sartre as the "diabolical double" of the dead boy. The portrait he gives of Nizan at that age is highly colored: "Overwhelmed by violent, static emotions, he never shouted out loud but we have seen him go white with anger and stammer. What we took to be gentleness was merely a momentary paralysis. It wasn't so much truth that came from his lips as a sort of cynical objectivity which made us feel uncomfortable, because we weren't used to it. Although he naturally loved his parents, he was the only one amongst us who spoke ironically about them."
Sartre is rather shaky on his dates, and it is unlikely that he is here describing the eleven-year-old boy he first met, but rather the older one, who, at sixteen, proposed that he and Sartre transform themselves into supermen and adopt Gaelic names. However supercharged Sartre's Nizan appears, the emotion that emerges most strongly from his version is that of awe and a certain degree of envy, an emotion Sartre would never grow out of with respect to his friend. Nizan had already read widely and wanted to write. "In other words he was a whole man," Sartre comments, with some self-irony. There was some cause for the envy. Nizan won the history prize in the "philo" class, and he impressed his fellow pupils as being much more gifted than Sartre, who had to sweat over his essays. Nizan, in himself, was probably at that age much more self-doubting than he appeared to Sartre. In a poem he wrote at eighteen, he wondered: "I'm not sure / whether some new thing will arise / from an ordinary act." Reality needs to be improved upon, but by everyday effort, and not by some magical intervention. He was beyond the superman mirage.
He started at the E. N. S. in 1924, the same year as Sartre, Raymond Aron, and Georges Lefranc. He read voraciously: Spinoza, Lenin, Sorel, Croce, Amiel, Stendhal, Zola, Gide. Of average height, he had dark hair and, like Sartre, a strabismus, "but one that turned inward, which was more pleasant to look at." With his cane, monocle, and natty clothes, he was insolently fashion-conscious, a dandy. On the walls of the room he shared with Sartre were two crossed
