At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

by Sarah Bakewell

  With all these differences, they had a mutual understanding that no outsider seemed able to threaten. When Beauvoir’s biographer Deirdre Bair was talking to her subject’s friends, one of them, Colette Audry, summed it up by saying, ‘Theirs was a new kind of relationship, and I had never seen anything like it. I cannot describe what it was like to be present when those two were together. It was so intense that sometimes it made others who saw it sad not to have it.’

  It was also an extremely long relationship, lasting from 1929 to Sartre’s death in 1980. For fifty years, it was a philosophical demonstration of existentialism in practice, defined by the two principles of freedom and companionship. Lest this sound too earnest, their shared memories, observations and jokes bound them together just as in any long marriage. A typical joke began soon after they met: visiting the zoo, they watched an enormously fat and tragic-looking sea elephant which sighed and raised its eyes to heaven as if in supplication while the keeper stuffed its mouth with fish. From then on, every time Sartre looked glum, Beauvoir would remind him of the sea elephant. He would roll up his eyes and heave comical sighs, and they would both feel better.

  In later years, Sartre became more remote as his work took him away from their private duo, but he remained Beauvoir’s constant reference point; someone she could lose herself in when she needed to. She knew she had a tendency to do this: it had happened with Elisabeth Le Coin in her schooldays, and she had tried it with Merleau-Ponty but been frustrated when his smiling and ironical manner deflected her. With Sartre, she could easily play at losing herself, without actually losing her real-world freedom as a woman or as a writer.

  That was the most important element: it was a writers’ relationship. Both Beauvoir and Sartre were compulsive communicators. They kept diaries, they wrote letters; they told each other every detail of their days. It is overwhelming even to think about the quantity of written and spoken words that flowed between them for half of the twentieth century. Sartre was always the first to read Beauvoir’s work, the person whose criticism she trusted and who pushed her to write more. If he caught her being lazy, he would berate her: ‘But Castor, why have you stopped thinking, why aren’t you working? I thought you wanted to write? You don’t want to become a housewife, do you?’

  As the emotional dramas came and went, work remained the constant. Work! Work in cafés, work while travelling, work at home. Any time they were in the same city, they worked together, whatever else was going on in their lives. After Sartre moved into a proper apartment (with his mother) in 1946, at 42 rue Bonaparte, Beauvoir met him there every day so they could spend the morning or afternoon sitting side by side, at two desks, working. In a 1967 documentary made for Canadian TV, you can see them there, both smoking furiously, with no sound but the scratching of a pen. Beauvoir is writing in an exercise book, Sartre is reading over a manuscript. I find myself imagining this as a kind of endlessly looped video memorial. Perhaps it could have been installed on their shared grave in the Montparnasse cemetery. It’s spooky to imagine them writing away there, all night, when the cemetery is closed, and all day as the visitors pass — but it would suit them better than a white grave, or any still image.

  6

  I DON’T WANT TO EAT MY MANUSCRIPTS

  In which there occur a crisis, two heroic rescues, and the outbreak of war.

  As titles go, that of Husserl’s last unfinished work The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is not as arresting as Nausea. But the word at its head, ‘crisis’, perfectly sums up mid-1930s Europe. Mussolini’s Fascists had been in power in Italy for over a decade, since 1922. In the Soviet Union, following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin had manoeuvred himself into a position of control by 1929 and spent the 1930s starving, torturing, imprisoning and executing people in vast numbers. Hitler, having consolidated his first election victories in 1933, made his expansionist ambitions increasingly clear. In 1936, civil war broke out in Spain between the left-wing Republicans and the fascist Nationalists led by General Franco. Everything seemed to be conspiring to divide Europeans and lead them into another war. This was a prospect greatly feared, especially in France, where the First World War had killed around 1.4 million French soldiers in the trenches alone. The country itself was literally scarred by war, since so much of it had been fought on French soil, and no one wanted to see it happen again.

  France did have some far-right organisations — Action française and the newer, more radical Croix-de-Feu or Iron Cross movement — but the general mood of pacifism kept their influence limited. The novelist Roger Martin du Gard voiced a common feeling when he wrote to a friend in September 1936, ‘Anything rather than war! Anything!… Even Fascism in Spain! And don’t push me, for I would say: yes … and “even Fascism in France!” ’ Beauvoir felt similarly, and said to Sartre, ‘Surely France at war would be worse than France under the Nazis?’ But Sartre, who had seen the Nazis at close hand, disagreed. As usual, his imagination supplied lurid details: ‘I have no wish to be made to eat my manuscripts. I don’t want Nizan to have his eyes gouged out with teaspoons.’

  By 1938, few dared hope for a reprieve. Hitler annexed Austria that March. In September he turned his attention to the strongly German Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia, which included Husserl’s homeland of Moravia. The British and French leaders Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier agreed to his initial demands, and the Czechs had little choice but to accept. Hitler took this as encouragement to go further, so on 22 September he demanded the right to a full military occupation that would effectively open the doors to the rest of Czechoslovakia. There followed what became known as the Munich Crisis: a week during which people listened to their radios and read newspapers, fearing the announcement of war literally at any hour.

  For a young existentialist of the individualist kind, war was the ultimate affront. It threatened to sweep away all those personal thoughts and concerns like toys from a table. As the English surrealist poet David Gascoyne, then living in Paris in a delicate state of mind, wrote in his journal during that week, ‘What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance.’ Listening to his radio, Gascoyne tried to visualise bombers flying through the sky, and buildings falling. Similar visions of impending disaster haunt George Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air, published the following year: the advertising executive George Bowling walks down his suburban street imagining houses being smashed to the ground by bombs. Everything familiar seems about to disappear; Bowling fears that afterwards there will be only endless tyranny.

  Sartre would try to capture the mood of the crisis in The Reprieve, the second volume of his Roads of Freedom sequence — not published until 1945, but set during the crucial week of 23–30 September 1938. Each of his characters struggles to adjust to the idea that their future may be curtailed and that nothing will be the same again. Sartre slips from one person’s thoughts to another’s, in a stream-of-consciousness method borrowed from the novels of John Dos Passos and Virginia Woolf. The young character Boris (based on Sartre’s former student Jacques-Laurent Bost) calculates how long he is likely to survive in the army when war begins, and thus how many omelettes he can expect to eat before dying. In a crucial moment, as everyone gathers to hear Hitler speak on the radio, Sartre draws back from the scene to show us all of France, then all of Germany, and all of Europe. ‘A hundred million free consciousnesses, each aware of walls, the glowing stump of a cigar, familiar faces, and each constructing its destiny on its own responsibility.’

  Not all the book’s experiments work, but Sartre captures the weird quality of a week in which millions of people were trying to get used to a different way of thinking about their lives — their projects or concerns, as Heidegger would have said. The book also reveals the first signs of a shift in Sartre’s thought. In coming years, he would become ever more interested in the way human beings can be swept up by large-scale historical forces, while still each remaining free and individual
.

  As for Sartre personally, he found the answer for his anxieties of 1938 in, of all things, reading Heidegger. He embarked on the foothills of Being and Time, though he did not ascend the steeper slopes until two years later. Looking back from that later point, he recalled this as a year in which he craved ‘a philosophy that was not just a contemplation but a wisdom, a heroism, a holiness’. He compared it to the period in ancient Greece, after the death of Alexander the Great, when Athenians turned away from the calm reasonings of Aristotelian science towards the more personal and ‘more brutal’ thinking of the Stoics and Epicureans — philosophers ‘who taught them to live’.

  In Freiburg, Husserl was no longer around to witness the events of that autumn, but his widow Malvine was still living in their fine suburban house, guarding his library and his huge Nachlass of manuscripts, papers and unpublished works. Living alone, seventy-eight years old, officially classed as Jewish despite her Protestant faith, she was vulnerable, but for the moment she kept danger away mainly by the sheer force of her defiant personality.

  Earlier that decade, when her husband was still alive but after the Nazi takeover, they had discussed moving his documents to Prague, where it seemed they might be safer. A former student of Husserl, the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, was willing to help arrange this. It did not happen, which was fortunate as the papers would not have been safe at all.

  Prague had grown into something of a centre for phenomenology through the early twentieth century, partly because of Tomáš Masaryk — Czechoslovakia’s president, and the friend who had persuaded Husserl to study with Franz Brentano. He died in 1937, and was spared seeing the disaster that befell his country, but in the meantime he had done much to encourage the development of phenomenology and had helped other former Brentano students to collect their teacher’s papers in a Prague-based archive. In 1938, with the threat of a German invasion, Brentano’s archives were in danger. Phenomenologists could only be relieved that the Husserl collection was not there with them.

  But Freiburg was not safe either. If war came, the city might be among the first to see conflict, being near the French border. Already, Malvine Husserl was at the mercy of the Nazis: if they decided to storm the house she could not do much to protect its contents.

  The situation of Husserl’s Nachlass, and of his widow, attracted the attention of a Belgian philosopher and Franciscan monk named Herman Van Breda. He put together a proposal urging Louvain University’s Institut Supérieur de Philosophie to support transcription of key Freiburg papers — work that could only be done by former assistants able to read Husserl’s shorthand. With Edith Stein having become a Carmelite nun and Heidegger having gone his own way, this mainly meant two men who had been working with Husserl in recent years: Eugen Fink, originally from nearby Konstanz but now based in Freiburg, and Ludwig Landgrebe, currently in Prague.

  Van Breda initially suggested financing the project in situ in Freiburg, but with the prospect of war this looked less advisable. He noted that Malvine Husserl was determined to carry on ‘as if the Nazi regime did not exist and without showing that she was its victim’, which was admirable, but it might not be good for the papers. On 29 August 1938, as the Czech crisis began brewing, Van Breda travelled to Freiburg and met her and Eugen Fink; together they showed him the collection. He marvelled at the sheer visual impact of it: rows of folders containing around 40,000 pages of writings in Husserl’s shorthand, plus another 10,000 typed or handwritten pages transcribed by his assistants, and in the library some 2,700 volumes collected over nearly sixty years and countless article offprints, many covered with Husserl’s pencil notes.

  (Illustrations Credit 6.1)

  Van Breda persuaded Malvine Husserl that something must be done. Returning to Louvain, he had another persuasion job to do: he talked his colleagues into agreeing to transfer and house the collection there, rather than funding a project remotely. This done, he went back to Freiburg, where Ludwig Landgrebe had now also arrived, leaving an unnerving situation in Prague. It was mid-September: it seemed that war might start in weeks or even days.

  The immediate question was how to move the stuff. The manuscripts were more portable than the books, and more of a priority. But it certainly was not safe to drive for the border with thousands of sheets of paper, all written in what looked like an unreadable secret code.

  A better idea was to take them to a Belgian embassy office and thence out of the country in a diplomatic pouch, guaranteeing immunity from interference. But the nearest office with an immunity agreement was in Berlin, a long way off in the wrong direction. Van Breda asked monks at a Franciscan monastery near Freiburg if they could hide the manuscripts or help smuggle them out, but they were reluctant. Then a Benedictine nun stepped in: Sister Adelgundis Jägerschmidt, from a nearby Lioba Sisters convent. She was another former student of phenomenology who had visited Husserl regularly in his last illness, in defiance of the rules against associating with Jews. She now volunteered to take the manuscripts herself to a small house owned by her fellow sisters in Konstanz, near the Swiss border. From there, she said, the nuns could carry the manuscripts bit by bit, in small packages, across to Switzerland.

  It was a nerve-racking plan. If war broke out during the operation, the manuscripts could end up split between the two locations with the borders closed; some might be lost in the middle. The danger to the nuns was also obvious. It seemed the best option available, however, so on 19 September the heroic Sister Adelgundis loaded three heavy suitcases with 40,000 manuscript pages, and set off by train to Konstanz.

  Unfortunately, although the sisters were willing to house the manuscripts temporarily, they considered smuggling them across the border too risky. Adelgundis left the suitcases with them and returned to give Van Breda the bad news.

  He reverted to the idea of taking them to the Belgian embassy in Berlin. That now meant detouring via Konstanz to get them, and this time he went himself. So, on 22 September — the day Chamberlain met Hitler and learned that Hitler had upped his demands on Czech territory — Van Breda travelled to the convent. He collected the suitcases and continued to Berlin on a night train. One can imagine the tension: war looming, three heavy suitcases packed with what looked like coded secrets, a train rattling through a dark night. Arriving in the city on the morning of Friday 23 September, Van Breda entrusted the suitcases to a Franciscan monastery outside the centre, then went to the embassy — to learn that the ambassador was away and no decisions could be taken. The junior officials did agree, however, to look after the cases in the meantime.

  So it was back to the Franciscans, and back to the embassy again with the suitcases. At last, on Saturday 24 September, Van Breda saw them locked away in the embassy safe. He travelled back to Freiburg, then out of Germany to Louvain. He kept with him just a handful of texts, so that the transcription project could start. To his relief, the border guards waved him through without looking at the incomprehensible handwriting.

  A few days later, the European crisis was resolved — temporarily. Benito Mussolini brokered a meeting in Munich on 29 September, attended by Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain. No one from Czechoslovakia was in the room when, in the early hours of 30 September, Daladier and Chamberlain caved in to Hitler’s increased demands. The next day, German forces entered the Sudetenland.

  Chamberlain flew back to Britain triumphant; Daladier flew back to France ashamed and full of dread. Greeted by a cheering crowd as he got off the plane, he reportedly muttered, ‘Les cons!’ — the idiots! — at least that was the story Sartre seems to have heard. Once the initial relief passed, many in both France and Britain doubted that the agreement could last. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were pessimistic; Beauvoir preferred to hope that peace might prevail. The three of them debated the matter at length.

  As a side effect, the peace deal reduced the urgency about getting Husserl’s papers out of Germany. It was not until November 1938 that the bulk of them were transported from Berlin to Louvain. When th
ey arrived, they were installed in the university library, which proudly organised a display. No one could know that in two years’ time the German army would invade Belgium and the documents would be in danger again.

  That November, Van Breda returned to Freiburg. Malvine Husserl had now decided to seek a visa so as to join her son and daughter in the US, but this took a long time, so in the meantime Van Breda arranged for her to move to Belgium. She arrived in Louvain in June 1939, joining Fink and Landgrebe, who had moved there in the spring and were getting to work. With her came a huge cargo: a container of her furniture, the full Husserl library in sixty boxes, her husband’s ashes in an urn, and a portrait of him, which Franz Brentano and his wife Ida von Lieben had jointly painted as an engagement present before the Husserls’ marriage.

  Brentano’s papers — still stored in an archive office in Prague — had meanwhile been through their own adventure. When Hitler moved on from the Sudetenland to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, a group of archivists and scholars gathered most of them and spirited them out of the country on the very last civilian plane to leave. The papers ended up in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and are still there today. The few files left behind were defenestrated through the office window by German soldiers, and mostly lost.