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Paul Nizan
Committed Literature in a Conspiratorial World
By W. D. Redfern PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1972 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06218-1
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 foils under a fencing mask. The same combination of aggressiveness and defensive dissimulation could be seen in his character. One of his more disconcerting tics was his habit, in conversation, of staring at his fingernails for long periods. He and Sartre would tramp around Paris indefatigably. Nizan often vanished for days, according to Sartre, and would be found drunk with strangers. He was unremittingly an extremist; and because he felt the physical weight of his bondage, he was a materialist. Nizan was culturally ahead of Sartre, and introduced him to Irish writers like Shaw and O'Casey and to new American novelists. Simone de Beauvoir says of the two: "They deflated every kind of idealism without pity, they mocked at good souls, noble souls, every kind of soul, and soul states, and inner life." She had caught from Sartre the set way of seeing Nizan exclusively as a negator. According to Daniel Lagache, Nizan, Sartre, Aron, and Lagache himself once projected a scenario based on Jules Renard's Poil de Carotte. Sartre says of this project: "What we must emphasize is the need for tenderness." These young men were not unrelenting iconoclasts all the time.
So far, we have seen Nizan mainly through the eyes of witnesses. His letters to his future wife, Henriette, enable him to speak for himself. In many of them, he apologizes for fits of rude or eccentric moodiness, which possibly stemmed from fighting a campaign against the invasion of love into his life. It is clear that he worked hard at his studies, and also that he relaxed hard. He underwent recurrent depressive states, and was often ill with facial neuralgia, which might have been the cause or the offshoot of his depressions. In one of these states of psychic lowness, he warned Henriette that he might one day enter regular orders. But, to an onlooker, his salvation certainly lay more in Henriette than in any such otherworldly vocation: "You are the best tonic I know" (8 April 1926). He learns to speak of love happily and gratefully: "It's a new and marvelous experience" (April 1927). Most of his letters were written when on holiday. After returning from Aden, his opinion of travel is blase: "All landscapes are interchangeable. ... I can well understand those who seek in travel some form of escape, of purification or intoxication...."; but otherwise he takes the Pascalian view that men move around only because they fear sitting still with themselves (9 July 1927). Earlier, he had oscillated, in the face of new scenery, between aristocratic dismissal and enthusiasm. He said that the South of France is "the one place it is impossible to think of a new epithet for. It's the home of commonplaces" (July 1925). On the other hand, the "intelligent" Italian landscapes delighted him: "They're just right for people who cultivate simultaneously an elegant melancholy and rational pursuits. ... They're too complete, too definitive, and they stop you from looking for secret worlds." The influence of Stendhal is palpable in such pithy judgments: "You know you are mortal, and you have two options: be like Cellini or St. Francis" (Genoa, 1925).
In 1927, he told Henriette that the era of groups was finished. It is time to examine the group to which he occasionally lent himself at the university. Even if the conclusion should be that he never truly belonged to it, an examination of its constituents, its personalities and ambitions, should help to illuminate Nizan himself, if only, in the main, by contrast.
This group was principally composed of Henri Lefebvre, Georges Friedmann, Georges Politzer, Norbert Guterman, and Pierre Morhange, all of whom were later to achieve varying degrees of distinction in diverse fields of intellectual enquiry. They engaged in four publishing ventures: the periodicals Philosophies (March 1924-March 1925), L'Esprit (May 1926-January 1927), La Revue marxiste (February 1929-September 1929), and La Revue de psychologie concrète (two issues in 1929). They were in their early twenties and students of philosophy. A similar age group in England at the same time was also busy erecting verbal barricades for the conflict of the older and the younger generations. But, in Orwell's account, the voice that spoke best to and for them was Housman, who "stood for a bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young." In France at that time there was a similar fashionable fixation on death, and the cultivation of the self-consoling myth of a "sacrificed generation." In truth, of course, the sacrificed ones were their fathers and elder brothers who died in the trenches. But it is the luxury grievance, and not the common grief, that gets into the cultural headlines.
By all literary accounts, in the France of the 1920s, the thoughtful young were busy discarding their superannuated "maîtres à penser" and scouting for replacements. This was the case with both young right-wing traditionalists and wouldbe radicals. Here is a (praising) right-wing view of the group under consideration by J.-P. Maxence (a contributor to Gringoire), who is speaking of the new tendency to extremist thinking by the L'Esprit group: "They are, in the words of Albert Thibaudet, 'scornful and sensual young men.' ... When they see the disintegration of fictional characters, they attack the cult of introspection. ... They condemn en bloc and rather frantically all subjectivists (Barrès, Gide, Rivière, Valéry). ... They want a return to the object. But that involves concentrating on France, and abandoning interior bankruptcy for an external, public bankruptcy. And there again they feel the need to put themselves in the opposition." Like most intellectual groups, this one was far more in agreement on its aversions than on its aspirations.
Philosophies, directed by Morhange, often talked of the need for a new mysticism, of meditations on God, and it published a homage to Unamuno in 1924. The periodical contained no discussion of politics, but favored instead articles on Bergson, Brunschvicg, Lavelle, or fragments from Proust, Max Jacob, Supervieile, or Cocteau. Henri Lefebvre contributed some now unreadable philosophical theory. Some space was taken up with haughty dismissal of other movements of the day, much of it incredibly woolly (e.g., "We believe in the life we have and in the one that will carry us forward"). The group went in for second-degree "gratuitous acts," such as petty thefts, followed by the return or the destruction of the stolen goods so as not to benefit from their possession. Acts like these, indulged in long enough, became addictive, became "necessary acts," like the absurd heroics of Malraux' early heroes. "The mania for testing ourselves had a name amongst us philosophy students. We called it testism." They cultivated violence (mainly verbal or gesticulatory) as a criterion of authenticity. They were, in short, antimilitaristic diehards. It was a very programmatic era, avid for manifestoes. It was almost inevitable that the Surrealists and the Philosophies group would serenade each other.
There were parleys. Much of the time they proceeded like the cultural equivalent of a 1920s demarcation dispute, each side striving to preserve its "originality," its own area and methods of inquiry. Around 1925, the Surrealists so fancied themselves that they could dare to exert "political pressure" on their contemporaries in the name of a more advanced stage of revolution. A farcical meeting took place at the Centrale Surrealiste at which Lefebvre appeared as spokesman for the "philosophes." He was instructed by them to plug the highly improbable line of his group's belief in God. The natural and desired result was a breakdown in communication between the two sides. Another attempt to pool their energies, and to include those of the Trotskyst Clarté group, in a periodical to be called La Guerre civile also failed, though Lefebvre, Guterman, Morhange, and Politzer signed a manifesto, "La Révolution d'abord et toujours," in La Révolution Surréaliste. Breton's apartheid tendencies, of course, helped to ruin any projects of mergers. Nizan appears to have taken no part in any of these approaches. Some time later, in fact, he was to reproach the Surrealists for being excessively preoccupied with purely individual matters and for trying to live in a "timeless world," in short, for being luxury merchants.
L'Esprit replaced Philosophies after the failure of the projected Guerre civile. In L'Esprit, Politzer, later to be a leading Party economic theorist, spoke curiously of "a detour through political economy," and, in general, Marxists were indignant at the call issued by L'Esprit for a new spiritual wisdom. Pierre Naville wrote of "the confusionist tendencies of the L'Esprit group," and of "the incompatibility between Judeo-philosophical jargon and historical materialism." The general tone of the writing in this periodical was abstract, snobbish, and iconoclastic. It published a translation of T. S. Eliot's Wasteland, bits of Hegel and Engels. There was a good deal of unclarified guff about a dynamic new "wisdom," and a stated attempt to "put Christendom on trial." The whole group seemed to be in search of a spiritual or philosophical father figure.
La Revue marxiste, in its short life, was altogether more serious. It was financed by Georges Friedmann (the son of a banker), who joined the party in 1929. The French Communist Party agreed to its publication, and Charles Rappoport was on its editing committee. The cover bore Lenin's phrase: "No revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory." It was in fact the first truly Marxist review in France. Marx's writings were still largely unknown (or ignored) even, or especially, at the Sorbonne. Some of Marx's 1844 texts, as well as his unpublished preface to Engels's Anti-Dühring, appeared in French for the first time in La Revue marxiste. Politzer wrote on Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Nizan on state economic planning. The periodical died, or was killed off, after less than a year. Henri Lefebvre's very incomplete account of this period is ambiguous about whether the review ran into financial trouble after getting mixed up with a stranger claiming to be "a watchdog from Moscow" and to have a foolproof gambling system, or whether Moscow sank the review in order to drown independent Marxist thought in France.
In Lefebvre's prejudiced account the members of the group are characterized in the following terms: Guterman was "perhaps the most subtly intelligent one," nonchalant, skeptical, respected by the others for his crushing irony. Friedmann, a levelheaded scientific mind, also had his mystical side; not content with mocking the contemporary cults of "anxiety" and "availability," he wanted to make people accept "their eternal constituent." Morhange was verbally gifted, rhetorical, Messianic, tending to "talk about his work instead of writing it." Politzer was the most bizarre, outrageous, hectoring. Of Nizan, Lefebvre writes: "Beneath an apparently more abstract intellectuality, and with a darker and more secret inner self which he kept to himself, he became the most politicized member of the group; he never involved himself with it completely."
When Lefebvre describes some of the group's projects and behavior, it is not difficult to see why Nizan kept his distance. Morhange, for instance, caressed the ideal of a "consortium of faith," and envisaged "the advent of a new aristocracy of ardent men, who overcame their disagreements by sharing an extremist outlook." He had another name for these new men: the "subtle brutes." In his prophetic role, he craved the coming of a new syncretism, Judaism purged of some of its traditional elements and amplified by contact with other beliefs. Morhange's scheme attracted at various times young Catholics, Protestants, and scientists. His frenzied, almost inquisitorial belief in God granted him a certain awesome standing with his coevals. Other projects of the group included a manifesto against the Army, and a plan to "return to the soil" by buying a fertile plot of land and a big house to house the "philosophes." Lefebvre began arrangements to buy an island ("The Isle of Wisdom") in the Gulf of Morbihan. But nothing came of this variant on the theme of "the men of good will."
"There was a rather comical contrast between the lack of seriousness and the excessive seriousness with which these young intellectuals planned their activities." It is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that the group was composed not of teenagers but of men well into the age of reason. A study of them reveals what young men of an age and intellectual background similar to Nizan's chose to do with their time and energy. So far we have seen mainly the more laughable aspects of their hopes and exploits. But the group represented also something more serious: a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of thought in the 1920s. All of them were suffering to some degree from what might be called intellectuals' schizophrenia. They were heavily influenced by and violently hostile to their philosophical masters: Blondel, Brunschvicg, and Bergson. The tension generated reveals an attempt to institute a movement of secession, in philosophy, away from the Sorbonne, to create an at first marginal movement of new thought. Lefebvre describes the process in these terms: "Philosophy had just been rebuilt as something violent and vehement, but it was now the product of a collective body and no longer a strictly individual meditation. We were spontaneously trying to disentangle ourselves from a dichotomy or to resolve a contradiction, that between the public and the private thinker." Bergson especially, with his "shapeless philosophy, his ill-defined pseudoconcepts," was the pet aversion of the whole group. Lefebvre and Politzer delighted in playing heavy japes on the "great man" in the Victor Cousin library: Politzer, sitting just opposite him, noisily munching huge ham sandwiches, or letting loose a tortoise christened "Creative Evolution," or reading aloud extracts from his coming anti-Bergson pamphlet, Fin d'une parade philosophique.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Paul Nizan by W. D. Redfern. Copyright © 1972 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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