Paul Nizan: The Conspiracy

A game — that great ‘Dostoievskyan’ plot hatched by Rosenthal, the only traces of which will be two incomplete and in any case totally uninteresting files at the back of a drawer. A feverish, angry game, an abortive conspiracy, that manufactured love which Rosenthal entertains for his sister-in-law. From calling it a game, moreover, it is but one short step to calling it play-acting: they lie to themselves because they know they are running no risk; they strive in vain to frighten themselves, in vain — or almost — to deceive themselves. I can just imagine the great, dumb sincerity of labour and physical suffering and hunger that Nizan would counterpose to their endless talk. Bernard Rosenthal — who from anger and sloth has performed the irreparable actions of suicide — will in fact know no other reality than the agony of death. The agony of death alone will show him — but too late — that ‘he had missed love. . that. . he no longer even loved Catherine and he was going to die cheated’. Yet those young people have the semblance of good intentions: they want to live, to love, to rebuild a world that is tottering. But it is at the very heart of these good intentions that the abstract, self-assured frivolity lies which cuts them off from the world and from themselves: ‘their politics is still based only upon metaphors and shouts’. For youth is the age of resentment. Not of the great anger of men who suffer: these young people define themselves in relation to their families; they ‘tended to confuse capitalism with important people’; they expect to find ‘a world destined for great metamorphoses’, but what they want above all is to give their parents a bit of trouble. The young man is a product of the bourgeois family, his economic situation and his world-view are shaped exclusively by the family.

These young people are not all bad men. But Nizan shows very clearly how only through revolution can one leave this age, which Comte called ‘metaphysical’. Youth does not bear its solution within it: it must collapse and be rent apart. Either it is the young man who dies, like Rosenthal, or he is fated by his family inferiority complex like Pluvinage to drag out a perpetual, wretched adolescence. There is a breakdown of youth for Nizan as there is a breakdown of childhood for Freud: the pages in which he shows us Laforgue’s painful initiation to man’s estate are among the finest in the book.

I do not think Nizan wanted to write a novel. His young people are not novelish: they do not do much, they are not very sharply distinguished from one another; at times they seem only an expression, among many others, of their families and their class; at other times, they are the tenuous thread connecting a number of events. But this is intentional: for Nizan, they do not deserve more; later, he will make them into men. Can a communist write a novel? I am not convinced of it: he does not have the right to make himself the accomplice of his characters. But in order to find this book strong and fine, it is enough that on each page you find the obsessive evocation of that unhappy, guilty time of life; it is enough that the book constitutes a hard, true testimony at a time when ‘the Young’ are forming groups and congratulating themselves, when the young man thinks he has rights because he is young, like the taxpayer because he pays his taxes or the father because he has children. It is a pleasure to find, behind these derisory heroes, the bitter and sombre personality of Nizan — the man who does not forgive his youth — and his fine style, taut and casual: his long Cartesian sentences, which sink in the middle as though no longer able to sustain themselves, but all at once spring up again to finish high in the air; and those rhetorical transports which suddenly come to a halt, giving way to a terse and icy verdict. Not a novelist’s style, sly and hidden: a style for combat, a weapon.

Jean-Paul Sartre

November 1938

— Well, said Rosenthal, we might name the journal Civil War . .

— Why not? said Laforgue. It’s not a bad title, and it says what we mean all right. Are you sure it hasn’t already been taken?

— Civil war’s an idea that must be in the public domain, said Rosenthal. It’s not something you could copyright.

It was a July evening, at that hour after dusk when the sweat dries on your skin and all the dust of the day has finally settled like the ash from a spent conflagration. A broad expanse of sky stretched above the gardens, which were merely a small enclosure of parched trees and sickly grass, but which nonetheless, there amid the stone hills of Paris, gave as much pleasure as a meadow.

In the apartments of Rue Claude-Bernard, which Laforgue and his friends sometimes spied on for hours as though they harboured important secrets, people were beginning to get ready for the night. A bare arm or shoulder could vaguely be discerned passing in front of a lamp: women were undressing, but they were too far away for one to be able to make out whether they were beautiful. They were not. Actually they were middle-aged ladies, removing corsets, girdles and suspender-belts like pieces of armour. The younger female inmates of these dwellings — those whose songs would sometimes well forth from the recesses of a kitchen — slept in garrets where they could not be seen.

Loudspeakers spewed forth from their maws in a confused babble strains of music, speeches, lessons, advertisements; every now and then you could hear the screech of a bus at the stop in Rue des Feuillantines; yet there were moments when a kind of vast, marine silence swirled lazily over the reefs of the city.

Rosenthal was speaking. He always spoke a lot, since he had the voice of a prophet and thought its timbre gave him powers of persuasion. His companions, as they listened to him, contemplated the raspberry shimmer of Paris above their heads; but they were thinking confusedly about the women readying themselves for bed and addressing mechanical words to their husbands and lovers — or, perhaps, phrases overflowing with hatred, passion or obscenity.

They were five young men, all at that awkward age between twenty and twenty-four. The future awaiting them was blurred, like a desert filled with mirages, pitfalls and vast lonely spaces. On that particular evening, they gave it little thought: they were merely longing for the advent of the summer vacation and for the examinations to be over.

— All right then, said Laforgue, we’ll manage to publish this journal next term, since philanthropists can be found naive enough to entrust us with funds they’ll not see again. We’ll publish it, and after a certain time it will fold. .

— Of course, said Rosenthal. Is any one of you so depraved as to imagine we’re working for eternity?

— Journals always fold, said Bloyé. That’s a simple empirical fact.

— If I knew, Rosenthal continued, that any undertaking of mine would involve me for life and pursue me like some kind of ball-and-chain or faithful dog, I’d sooner go and jump in the river. To know what you’re going to be is to live like the dead. Just imagine us forty years from now, with ugly ageing mugs, editing an aged Civil War like Xavier Léon and his Revue de Métaphysique ! A splendid life would be one in which architects built houses for the pleasure of knocking them down and writers wrote books only in order to burn them. You’d have to be pure enough, or brave enough, not to require things to last. .

— You’d have to be freed entirely, said Laforgue, from the fear of death.

— Cut out the romanticism, said Bloyé, and the metaphysical anguish. We’re making plans for a journal, and we’re having high-faluting discussions because we haven’t got either women or money — there’s nothing to get excited about. Anyway, one has to do things, and we’re doing them. It won’t always be journals.

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