Books in Brief: The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre

The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre: November 1939-March 1940, translated by Quintin Hoare (Pantheon, 366 pp., $17.95)

Some philosophers use their diaries as more or less disposable sketch pads, paper cups in which to catch a brainstorm’s quick shower. But the five surviving notebooks kept by Jean-Paul Sartre during the early months of the Second World War resemble a finished treatise as often as they do a collection of jottings. “This brings us to the origin of the symbol, about which I’ll speak tomorrow,” he writes on February 23, 1940. Indeed, after being called up from the reserves to do meteorological work, he views the notebooks as a means of “continuing to live publicly,” rather than as an opportunity to cherish a privacy diminished by military routine. Sartre admits to “a horror of private diaries,” conceding that his own has “no intimacy.” It is a chilly and self-justifying affair, the book of a man already speaking to his future biographers. He will give only elusive mention to “an event in my personal life of no interest here” before proceeding to another elaboration of theory. The daily texture of life— usually the greatest appeal of a diary —is fingered only fitfully. “For our landlady, who is afraid of the air raids, the meaning of the weather has been reversed. She opens her shutters and smiles at the rain, just as she once used to smile at the sunshine.” Even in wartime there is more in heaven and earth than in philosophy, but Sartre is bent toward abstraction, not observation. Sartre views these months of the “Phony War” as a kind of laboratory provided by government grant, a time and place wherein he

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Thomas Mallon

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The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre: November 1939-March 1940, translated by Quintin Hoare (Pantheon, 366 pp., $17.95)

Some philosophers use their diaries as more or less disposable sketch pads, paper cups in which to catch a brainstorm’s quick shower. But the five surviving notebooks kept by Jean-Paul Sartre during the early months of the Second World War resemble a finished treatise as often as they do a collection of jottings. “This brings us to the origin of the symbol, about which I’ll speak tomorrow,” he writes on February 23, 1940. Indeed, after being called up from the reserves to do meteorological work, he views the notebooks as a means of “continuing to live publicly,” rather than as an opportunity to cherish a privacy diminished by military routine. Sartre admits to “a horror of private diaries,” conceding that his own has “no intimacy.” It is a chilly and self-justifying affair, the book of a man already speaking to his future biographers. He will give only elusive mention to “an event in my personal life of no interest here” before proceeding to another elaboration of theory. The daily texture of life— usually the greatest appeal of a diary —is fingered only fitfully. “For our landlady, who is afraid of the air raids, the meaning of the weather has been reversed. She opens her shutters and smiles at the rain, just as she once used to smile at the sunshine.” Even in wartime there is more in heaven and earth than in philosophy, but Sartre is bent toward abstraction, not observation. Sartre views these months of the “Phony War” as a kind of laboratory provided by government grant, a time and place wherein he