Two thinkers who squared off over communism

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CAMUS & SARTRE: THE STORY OF A FRIENDSHIP AND THE QUARREL THAT ENDED IT

By Ronald Aronson

University of Chicago Press, $32.50, 291 pages

REVIEWED BY STEPHEN GOODE

Ronald Aronson's detailed telling of the dispute between France's two leading post-World War II intellectuals (and eventual Nobel Prize winners for literature), which brought a nasty end to their friendship, is engaging and well-written. But "Camus & Sartre" has a major flaw, and it is a nearly fatal one.

Mr. Aronson, who is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Wayne State University, unwisely has chosen to give readers portraits of the two men that show them as moral equals, and it's this attempt to be even-handed that falls flat and perhaps does so inevitably.

"I mean to get beyond the Cold War partisanship that has colored, along with so much else, the perception of the Sartre-Camus conflict," Mr. Aronson writes in his prologue. "I intend to describe both adversaries with understanding and sympathy, as well as critically."

These aims sound well-intentioned but they are finally futile. Part of the problem is that the positions the men took -- Camus' intense anti-communism and denunciation of violence, and Sartre's embrace of Marxism and of revolutionary violence -- were so deeply rooted in the Cold War that they can't be understood apart from it.