PARIS LETTER
GOD, MAN, AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
The greatest event of the Paris theatrical season, last spring,
was the premiere of Jean-Paul Sartre's new play,
Le Diable et le Bon
Dieu.
Rumors about this work had been circulating all winter. One
of the literary newspapers announced that Sartre had deserted Paris
and St. Germain des Pres for a small village in the country (whose
name was not given)
to
put the finishing touches on
his
play; and
there was a good deal of advance publicity, rather American in quality,
about the tremendous size of the play, the amount of electricity neces–
sary for the lighting, the number of yards of cloth used in making the
costumes, and other winning details of this kind that reminded me
of nothing so much as the build-up for a Cecil
B.
De Mille super-epic.
There were also stories about the disagreements between Sartre and
the
late Louis Jouvet, who staged the play, over cuts that Jouvet (the hard–
boiled professional craftsman) insisted should be made, while Sartre
(the independent artist, flinging his masterpiece in the teeth of an
intransigent public) scorned any compromise. Then the news leaked
out that the play was set in sixteenth-century Germany and that its
protagonist was named Goetz von Berlichingen. Speculation was
im–
mediately rife. Goethe had founded the modem German theater with
his historical drama,
Goetz von Berlichingen.
Had Sartre been in–
fluenced by Goethe?
Not at all, Sartre answered, in an interview run by the weekly
L'Observateur,
a day or so before the play opened. His play had nothing
to do with Goethe's, and
if
it was influenced by anybody, it was not
Goethe but Cervantes; for the latter wrote a play that Jean-Louis
Barrault had once told Sartre about but whose name Sartre couldn't
remember at the time (his memory improved later, and the play is
El Rufian Dichoso).
But why, then, did Sartre give his main character
the same name as Goethe's? Well, after deciding
to
set his play in the
period of the peasant uprisings in Germany, and with a main character
who might make some people think of Goethe's Goetz, Sartre didn't
want it to appear as if he were
avoiding
this comparison; so in order
to make everything clear, he gave his own hero, who
has
nothing to
do with Goethe's, the same name. That, so far as I can make out,
is Sartre's explanation.
