Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Jean Genet – Saint Genet in Sartre’s biography – introduced himself one day in 1944 to the philosopher and his consort as they sat at the Café Flore. He had a shaven head and a broken nose, ‘but his eyes knew how to smile, and his mouth could express the astonishment of childhood.’44 His appearance owed not a little to his upbringing in reformatories, prisons, and brothels, where he had been a male prostitute. Genet’s future reputation would lie in his brilliance with words and his provocative plots, but he was of interest to the existentialists because as an aggressive homosexual and a criminal he occupied two prisons (psychological as well as physical), and in living on the edge, in boundary situations, he at least stood the chance of being more alive, more authentic, than others. He was also of interest to de Beauvoir because, being homosexual and having been forced to play ‘female’ roles in prison (on one occasion he was a ‘bride’ in a prison ménage), Genet’s views about sex and gender were quite unlike anyone else’s. Genet certainly lived life to the full in his way, even going so far as to desecrate a church to see what God would do about it. ‘And the miracle happened. There was no miracle. God had been debunked. God was hollow.’45

  In a series of novels and plays Genet regaled his public with life as it really was among the ‘queers’ and criminals he knew, the vicious sexual hierarchies within prisons, the baroque sexual practices and inverted codes of behaviour (calling someone ‘a cocksucker’ was enough to get one murdered).46 But Genet instinctively grasped that low life, on the edge of violence, the boundary situation par excellence, evoked not only a prurient interest on the part of the bourgeois but deeper feelings too. It opened a longing for something, whether it was latent masochism or latent homosexuality or a sneaking lust for violence – whatever it was, the very popularity of Genet’s work showed up the inadequacies of bourgeois life much more than any analysis by Sartre or the others. Our Lady of the Flowers (1946) was written while Genet was in Mettray prison and details the petty but all-important victories and defeats in a closed world of natural and unnatural homosexuals. The Maids (1948) is ostensibly about two maids who conspire to murder their mistress; however, Genet’s insistence that all the roles are played by young men underlines the play’s real agenda, the nature of sexuality and its relation to our bodies. By the same token, in The Blacks (1958) his requirement that some of the white roles be played by blacks, and that one white person must always be in the audience for any performance, further underlined Genet’s point that life is about feeling (even if that feeling is shame or embarrassment) rather than ‘just’ about thought.47 As an erstwhile criminal, he knew what Sartre didn’t appear to grasp: that a rebel is not necessarily a revolutionary, and that the difference between them is, at times, critical.

  Samuel Beckett’s most important creative period overlapped with those of Camus and Genet, and in this time he completed Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape. It should be noted, however, that both Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape received their world premieres in London. By then, Paris was slipping. Born in 1906, Beckett was the son of well-to-do Protestants who lived at Foxrock, near Dublin. As Isaiah Berlin watched the October Revolution in Petrograd, so Beckett watched the Easter Rebellion from the hills outside the Irish capital.48 He attended Trinity College, Dublin, like James Joyce, and after a spell at teaching he travelled all over Europe.49 He met the author of Ulysses in Paris, becoming a friend and helping defend the older man’s later work (Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake).50 Beckett settled first in London, however, after his father died and left him an annuity. In 1934 he began analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, with Wilfred Bion, by which time he was writing short stories, poems, and criticism.51 In 1937 he moved back to Paris, where he eventually had his novel Murphy published, by Routledge, after it had been rejected by forty-two houses. During the war he distinguished himself in the resistance, winning two medals. But he also spent a long time in hiding (with the novelist Nathalie Sarraute) in Vichy France, which, as several critics have remarked, gave him an extended experience in waiting. (When he came back, Nancy Cunard thought he had the look of ‘an Aztec eagle about him.’)52 Beckett was by now thoroughly immersed in French culture – he was an expert on Proust, mixed in the circle around Transition magazine, imbibed the work of the symbolist poets, and could not help but be affected by Sartre’s existentialism. All of Beckett’s major plays were written in French and then translated back into English, mostly by him but occasionally with help.53 As the critic Andrew Kennedy has said, this experience with ‘language pains’ surely helped his writing.

  Beckett wrote his most famous work, Waiting for Godot, in less than four months, starting in early October 1948 and finishing the following January. It was, however, another four years before it was performed, at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris. Despite mixed reviews, and his friends having to ‘corral’ people into attending, it was worth the wait, for Godot has become one of the most discussed plays of the century, loved and loathed in equal measure, at least to begin with, though as time has gone by its stature has, if anything, grown.54 It is a spare, sparse play; its two main characters (there are five in all) occupy a stage that is bare save for a solitary tree.55 The two central figures are usually referred to as literary tramps, and they are often cast wearing bowler hats, though the stage directions do not call for this. The play is notable for its long periods of silence, its repetitions of dialogue (when dialogue occurs), its lurches between metaphysical speculation and banal cliché, the near-repetitions of the action, such as it is, in the two halves of the play, and the final nonappearance of the eponymous Godot. In its unique form, its references to itself, and the demands it makes on the audience, it is one of the last throws of modernism. It was cleverly summed up by one critic, who wrote, ‘Nothing happens, twice!’56 This is true enough on the surface, but a travesty nonetheless. As with all the masterpieces of modernism, Godot’s form is integral to the play, and to the experience of the work; no summary can hope to do it justice. It is a post-waste Land play, a post-O’Neill play, post-Joyce, post-Sartre, post-Proust, post-Freud, post-Heisenberg, and post-Rutherford. You can find as many twentieth-century influences as you care to look for – which is where its richness lies. Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps, are waiting for Godot. We don’t know why they are waiting, where they are waiting, how long they have been waiting, or how long they expect to wait. The act of waiting, the silences and the repetitions, conspire to bring the question of time to the fore – and of course in bewildering and intriguing the audience, who must also wait through these silences and repetitions, Godot provides an experience to be had nowhere else, causing the audience to think. (The play’s French title is En attendant Godot; ‘attending,’ as in paying attention to, amplifies waiting.) In some respects, Godot is the reverse of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust made something out of nothing; Beckett is making nothing out of something, but the result is the same, to force the audience to consider what nothing and something are, and how they differ (and recalls Wolfgang Pauli’s question from the 1920s – why is there something rather than nothing?).57

  Both acts are interrupted by the arrival, first, of Lucky and Pozzo, and of the Boy. The first two are a sort of vaudeville act, the former deaf and the latter dumb.58 The Boy is a messenger from Mr Godot, but he has no message, recalling Kafka’s Castle. There is much else, of course – a lot of cursing, a hat-passing routine, comic miming, problems with boots and bodily functions. But the play is essentially about emptiness, silence, and meaning. One is reminded of the physicists’ analogous scale when illustrating the atom – that the nucleus (which nonetheless has most of the mass), is no more than a grain of sand at the centre of an electron shell-structure the size of an opera house. This is not only bleak, Beckett is saying; communication is not only fatuous, futile, and absurd, but it is also comic. All we are left with is either cliché or speculation so removed from any reality that we can never know if it has any meaning – shades of Wittgenstein. Though Beck
ett loved Chaplin, his message is the very opposite; there is nothing heroic about Vladimir or Estragon, their comedy evokes no identification on our part. It is, it is intended to be, terrifying. Beckett is breaking down all categories. Vladimir and Estragon occupy space-time; in the early French editions Pozzo and Lucky are described as ‘les comiques staliniens’; the play is about humanity – the universe – running down, losing energy, cooling; the characters have, as the existentialists said, been thrown into the world without purpose or essence, only feeling.59 They must wait, with patience, because they have no idea what will come, or even if it will come, save death of course. Vladimir and Estragon do stay together, the play’s one positive, optimistic note, till they reach the superb culmination – as an example of the playwright’s art, it can hardly be bettered. Vladimir cries, ‘We have kept our appointment, and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?’

  The important point with Beckett, as with O’Neill and Eliot, is to experience the work. For he was no cynic, and the only satisfactory way to conclude writing about him is to quote him. His endings are better than anyone else’s. The end of Godot reads as follows:

  Vladimir: Well, shall we go?

  Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

  [They do not move.]

  Or we can end by quoting Beckett’s letter to fellow playwright Harold Pinter: ‘If you insist on finding form [for my plays] I’ll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That’s the kind of form my work has.’

  For Beckett at midcentury, the speculations of Sartre were pointless; they were simply statements of the obvious. Science had produced a cold, empty, dark world in which, as more details were grasped, the bigger picture drained away, if only because words were no longer enough to account for what we know, or think we know. Dignity has almost disappeared in Godot, and humour survives ironically only by grim effort, and uncertainly at best. Comforting though it is, Beckett can see no point to dignity. As for humour … well, the best that can be said is – it helps the waiting.

  Beckett and Genet both came from outside the French mainland, but it was Paris that provided the stage for their triumphs. The position of the third great playwright of those years, Eugène Ionesco, was slightly different. Ionesco was of Romanian background, grew up in France, spent several years in Romania, during the Soviet occupation, and then returned to Paris, where his first play, The Bald Prima Donna, was produced in 1950. Others followed in rapid succession, including The Chairs (1955), The Stroller in the Air (1956), How to Get Rid of It (1958), The Killer (1959) and Rhinoceros (1959). One of the biographies of Beckett was given the subtitle ‘The Last Modernist,’ but the title could have applied equally to Ionesco, for he was in some ways the perfect amalgam of Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Freud, Alfred Jarry, Kafka, Heidegger, and the Dada/surrealists. Ionesco admitted that many of his ideas for plays came from his dreams.60 His main aim, he said, certainly in his earlier plays, was to convey the astonishment he felt simply at existing, at why there is something rather than nothing. Not far behind came his concern with language, his dissatisfaction at our reliance on cliché and, more profoundly, the sheer inadequacy of language when portraying reality. Not far behind this came his obsession with psychology, in particular the new group psychology of the modern world of mass civilisation in great cities, how that affected our ideas of solitude and what separated humanity from animality.

  In The Bald Prima Donna it is as if the figures in a de Chirico landscape are speaking, virtual automatons who show no emotion, whose words come out in a monotone.61 Ionesco’s purpose here is to show the magic of genuine language, to draw our attention to what it is and how it is produced. In The Stroller in the Air, one of his plays based on a dream (of flying), the main character can see, from his vantage point, into the lives of others. This oneway sharing, however, which offers great comic possibilities, is in the end tragic, for as a result of his unique vantage point the stroller experiences a greater solitude than anyone else. In The Chairs, chairs are brought on to the stage at a rapid pace, to create a situation that words simply fad to describe, and the audience therefore has to work out the situation for itself, find its own words. Finally, in Rhinoceros, the characters gradually metamorphose into animals, exchanging an individual human psychology for something more ‘primitive,’ more group-centred, all the time provoking us to ask how great this divide really is.62

  Ionesco was very attuned to the achievements of science, the psychology of Freud and Jung in particular, but biology too. It instilled in him his own brand of pessimism. ‘I wonder if art hasn’t reached a dead-end,’ he said in 1970. ‘If indeed in its present form, it hasn’t already reached its end. Once, writers and poets were venerated as seers and prophets. They had a certain intuition, a sharper sensitivity than their contemporaries, better still, they discovered things and their imaginations went beyond the discoveries even of science itself, to things science would only establish twenty-five or fifty years later. In the relation to the psychology in his time, Proust was a precursor…. But for some time now, science and the psychology of the subconscious have been making enormous progress, whereas the empirical revelations of writers have been making very little. In these conditions, can literature still be considered as a means to knowledge?’ And he added, ‘Telstar [the television satellite] in itself is an amazing achievement. But it’s used to bring us a play by Terence Rattigan. Similarly, the cinema is more interesting as an achievement than the films that are shown in its theatres.’63

  These observations by Ionesco were no less timely than his plays. Paris in the 1950s saw the last great throw of modernism, the last time high culture could be said to dominate any major civilisation. As we shall see in chapters 25 and 26, a seismic change in the structure of intellectual life was beginning to make itself felt.

  24

  DAUGHTERS AND LOVERS

  ‘La famille Sartre’ was the name given to the group of writers and intellectuals around the philosopher/novelist/playwright. This was not without irony, certainly so far as his chief companion, Simone de Beauvoir, was concerned, for by the late 1940s their ménage was fairly complicated. The couple had met in 1929, at the Lycée Janson de Sadly, where de Beauvoir took courses to become a trainee teacher (together with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss). She easily attracted attention to herself by virtue of her exceptional cleverness, so that she was eventually accepted into the elite intellectual bande at the school, led by Sartre. This began the long-term and somewhat unusual relationship between these two – unusual in that no sooner had they begun their affair than Sartre told de Beauvoir that he was not attracted to her in bed. This was less than flattering, but she adjusted to the situation and always considered herself his main companion, even to the extent of helping him to procure other lovers, as well as acting as his chief spokesperson after he developed his theory of existentiadsm.1 For his part, Sartre was generous, supporting de Beauvoir financially (as he did several others) when his early novels and plays proved successful. There was no secret about their relationship, and de Beauvoir did not lack admirers. She became the object of a powerful lesbian passion from the writer Violette le Duc.2

  Sartre and de Beauvoir were always irked by the fact that the world viewed them as existentialists – and only as existentialists. But on occasion it paid off. In spring 1947, de Beauvoir left France for America for a coast-to-coast lecture tour where she was billed as ‘France’s No. 2 existentialist.’ While in Chicago she met Nelson Algren, a writer who insisted on showing her what he called ‘the real America’ beyond the obvious tourist traps. They became lovers immediately (they only had two days together), and she had, she later admitted, achieved her ‘first complete orgasm’ (at the age of thirty-nine).3 With him, she said, she learned ‘how truly passionate love could be between men and women.’ Despite her dislike of America
(a feeling she shared with Sartre), she considered not returning to France. As it was, when she did return, it was as a different woman. Until then she had been rather frumpy (Sartre called her ‘Castor,’ meaning Beaver, and others called her La Grande Sartreuse). But she was not unattractive, and the experience with Algren reinforced that. At that stage nothing she had written could be called memorable (articles in Les Temps modernes and All Men Are Mortal), but she returned to France with something different in mind that had nothing to do with existentialism. The idea wasn’t original to her; it had first been suggested for her by Colette Audry, a longstanding friend who had taught at the same school as de Beauvoir, in Rouen.4 Audry was always threatening to write the book herself but knew her friend would do a better job.5 Audry’s idea was a book that investigated the situation of women in the postwar world, and after years of prevarication de Beauvoir seems to have been precipitated into the project by two factors. One was her visit to America, which had shown her the similarities – and very great differences – between women in the United States and in Europe, especially France. The second reason was her experience with Algren, which highlighted her own curious position vis-à-vis Sartre. She was in a stable relationship; they were viewed by all their friends and colleagues as ‘a couple’ (‘La Grande Sartreuse’ was very revealing); yet they weren’t married, didn’t have sex, and she was supported by him financially. This ‘marginal’ position, which distanced her from the situation ‘normal’ women found themselves in, gave de Beauvoir a vantage point that, she felt, would help her write about her sex with objectivity and sympathy. ‘One day I wanted to explain myself to myself. I began to reflect all about myself and it struck me with a sort of surprise that the first thing I had to say was “I am a woman.” ‘At the same time, she was reflecting something more general: 1947 was the year women got the vote in France, and her book appeared at almost exactly the time Alfred Kinsey produced his first report on sex in the human male. No doubt the war had something to do with the changed conditions between men and women. De Beauvoir began her research in October 1946 and finished in June 1949, spending four months in America in 1947.6 She then went back to la famille Sartre, the work a one-off, at a distance from her other offerings and, in a sense, from her. Years later a critic said that she understood the feminine condition because she herself had escaped it, and she agreed with him.7