As the hours pass, the men are forced to think of their impending death. They literally piss themselves. The youngest worries about the torture stories he’s heard about the Falangists (Spanish Fascists) who hold them prisoner. He wonders how much it will hurt to die. Pablo grows to dislike his fellow inmates. There’s no camaraderie in death. Meanwhile, the Belgian doctor scribbles down their reactions with detachment and objectivity. The wall itself is the wall of the firing squad and the cell. It’s the wall between life and death. It’s also a wall of detachment and objectivity as exhibited by the doctor.

Memories seem unimportant to Pablo now. The woman he loves no longer seems important. Death itself is an aberration, almost impossible to conceive. But psychologically the characters do pass from life to death before the guards come to take them away. However, there is an ironic twist to the ending.

‘The Bedroom’ begins with a woman suffering from some unnamed illness, lying in bed. She and her husband are concerned for their daughter whose husband is descending into some kind of hereditary and degenerative madness. The father wants his son-in-law put in an institution, and goes to see his daughter. She refuses to give up her husband. Not only that, she goes along with her husband’s hallucinations, to the extent that they almost seem real to her too.

‘Herostratus’ has a man who literally looks down on other people by looking down on them from his window. He visits a prostitute and makes her walk around naked, at gunpoint. He decides to go on a killing spree. His escape is all planned, but things don’t turn out as he intended. Like other characters in this collection, he seems cut off from other human beings, and from intimate contact. The gun could be said to be a stand in for a penis. The story is named after the man who burned down the temple of Artemis at Ephesus to immortalise himself.

‘Intimacy’ is a story whose contents belie its title. Lulu and Henri clearly have a problematic marriage. Henri is impotent and Lulu has taken a lover. She plans to run away with this man, encouraged by her friend Rirette. Tricking her husband on to the balcony where she locks him out, there’s a humorous scene where an older couple turn up and Henri and Lulu are forced to act as if everything is a joke. But she still packs her bags later. Again, though, things take a turn at the end.

The strongest story in the book is the last, which is more of a novelette or novella. ‘The Childhood of a Leader’ follows the story of Lucien, the son of a factory owner from his early years where he is pretty and admired by adults, through his boyhood and into young adulthood. From early on, Lucien doesn’t seem to know who he is. But he learns early that his father is a leader, someone the workers look up to. As time goes on, Lucien becomes alienated from his mother. He obsesses over himself, and his complexes. Now well into his teens, he reads Freud, falls in with a boy at school who introduces him to an older man, a surrealist. This man clearly has a sexual interest in Lucien and they go away for a weekend. The whole sexual encounter is a failure for Lucien, but that doesn’t stop him worrying about whether he is now a homosexual. He decides to avoid the surrealist in future and turns his attentions instead to the young maid who now works in his home. But when he has the opportunity to take things further, he backs off.

A friend introduces him to a young woman. Lucien doesn’t actually like her much, but he goes out with her all the same. It takes some time before she gives in to him, but once he’s had his way, he’s already thinking of moving on to someone else, and contemplating meeting a nice girl, ie, someone who doesn’t give herself to men. He’s also fallen in with a new group of friends, right wing, nationalist, anti-Semitic students who call out slogans like “France for the French” and beat up Jews. Lucien discovers a gift for sniffing out Jews, which attracts admiration from those around him. His father approves of his new interests. Lucien joins the movement, beats up a young Jew, and snubs another at a party. By the end, he’s progressed from boy to man. He sees the future ahead of himself: he will be a leader like his father, he’ll become the local mayor, he’ll find a nice virgin who’ll submit to him. He’ll be a leader of France.

What makes this story particularly interesting is that it was written before the war and the occupation. But Lucien already embodies the features of the Vichy fascist and collaborator. And the persecution of Jews takes on a whole new meaning for modern readers. The Holocaust, and the handing over of Jews by the Vichy government loom over this story in a way they wouldn’t have done at the time it was written. Sartre’s story seems to predict what lies ahead.

The story obviously covers a number of years, starting before the First World War. This is the time when young boys were dressed up like girls, which presumably explains Lucien’s brief gender confusion at the outset. Soon enough he’s no longer as pretty and the adults pay less attention to him. As for the workers at his father’s factory, it’s clear that the relationship between employee and employer has changed. The workers are obviously no longer willing to be treated in a paternalistic way. They’ve been politicised. Lucien’s belief at the end of the story that he will be a leader for his workers exhibits a certain naivety, but could also, given his fascist tendencies, mean he intends to come down hard on them. One thing his fascism does give him is a sense of self importance, and this is probably true of others like him.

‘The Childhood of a Leader’ plays out against the last years of the Third Republic. It’s been pointed out that Lucien shares a great deal of his psychology with Sartre himself. Their backgrounds are similar. But Sartre made a different choice, associating himself with the Left. Because Lucien has picked up and discarded different belief systems through the story, there’s reason to think he too could still change. It might not be too late. But the fear is that in the short term, and the short term being Vichy, his fascist tendencies might lead to collaboration with the Holocaust. This is a reading that goes beyond what Sartre probably intended when the story was published in 1939. But the Nazis were already in power in Germany, and the persecution of Jews had been state-sanctioned there for years. This could not have escaped Sartre, nor could the build up of the German war machine. There had already been a near outbreak of War in 1938. Perhaps Sartre knew exactly where the world, and this story, were going after all.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.