Sartre's second century

174 Chapter Twelve
La Part dufeu and Good Night, and Good Luck 2
The Pleiade edition of Sartre's Theatre complet, published in his
centenary year 2005, includes substantial fragments of a hitherto unknown
and incomplete play, which the editors have titled La Part du feu (The
Devil's Portion)? In this project, Sartre set out to dramatise the true story
of the crisis of conscience suffered by his protagonist, Abraham Feller, a
UN official caught up in the destructive machinations of the communist
witch-hunter, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Set in 1952—the year in which
McCarthy's influence was at its height and Abraham Feller eventually
took his own life—Sartre's play proposed to explore the personal anguish
of this private individual enmeshed in a highly public debacle on the
American political scene.
That exploration was to take the form of Feller recounting his
experiences and concomitant anxieties to a psychotherapist, their dialogue
being interspersed with narrative-developing flashbacks. These interludes
refer in particular to Feller's relationship with his son, who has fallen
under the spell of McCarthy, who is also Feller's brother-in-law and,
therefore, the boy's sinister "Uncle Joe". It becomes clear that Feller's
anguish is at least as much affective and psychological as it is ethical or
political. Seemingly unable to reconcile himself either with his teenage
son or with the moral compromises he had latterly made in his diplomatic
career, Feller would finally commit suicide (as he apparently did, in fact,
along with other victims of McCarthyite persecution). Of the several
striking things about La Part dufeu, I want to consider two in particular:
first, its topicality in the recent period of renaissance for political cinema
in the US; next, its continuity with Sartrean theatrical themes and
techniques.
Drafted and abandoned in 1954, La Part du feu is set in the fervid
atmosphere created by the communist witch-hunt of Senator McCarthy's
chairmanship of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC).
This dark and embarrassing episode in American post-war domestic
politics was most famously satirised by Arthur Miller in his allegory of
Puritanical New England, The Crucible, from January 1953. And this
tragic satire on the literal witch-hunting purgations of supposed evil spirits
was, as it happens, adapted by Sartre in 1955 for the French movie screen
as Les Sorcieres de Salem (The Witches ofSalem)—hitherto, the only hard
2 An earlier draft of this section was given as an invited paper at the 15 th Biennial
Conference of the North American Sartre Society at Fordham University,
Manhattan, New York City, 27-29 October 2006.
3 In Sartre, Theatre complet, 1183-1214.