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

  Meanwhile Sartre, whose meteorological posting turned out to be in Brumath, in Alsace near the German border, found himself with little to do but read and write. Between sending up balloons and peering through binoculars, or sitting in the barracks listening to the pocking sound of his fellow soldiers playing Ping-Pong, he managed to work on his own projects for up to twelve hours a day. He kept his diary, and wrote long daily letters, among them many affectionate outpourings to Simone de Beauvoir — for their letters finally got through, and they were back in contact. He jotted down the notes that would later evolve into Being and Nothingness, and produced the first drafts of his novel sequence Roads of Freedom. The first volume was scribbled out by 31 December 1939, so he immediately started on volume two. ‘If the war goes on at this slow lulling rhythm I’ll have written three novels and 12 philosophical treatises by peacetime’, he told Beauvoir. He begged her to send him books: Cervantes, the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Kafka, Defoe, Kierkegaard, Flaubert, and Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. His interest in the latter was probably sparked by Beauvoir’s tales of her adventures, since, in accordance with their agreement, she told him everything.

  Sartre could have gone along happily like this for years — but the funny war was a joke with a punchline. In May 1940, Germany abruptly overran Holland and Belgium, then attacked France. Fighting on the front, Bost was wounded, and would receive the Croix de guerre. Paul Nizan, Sartre’s old friend and recent holiday companion, was killed near Dunkirk on 23 May, shortly before the great evacuation of Allied troops there. Merleau-Ponty was posted as an infantry officer to Longwy on the front line. He later recalled one long night during which he and his unit listened to the calls for help of a German lieutenant who had been shot and was stuck in the barbed wire: ‘French soldiers, come get a dying man.’ They had orders not to go to him, as the cries could have been a ploy, but the next day they found him dead on the wire. Merleau-Ponty would never forget the sight of ‘the narrow chest which the uniform barely covered in that near-zero cold … the ash-blond hair, the delicate hands’.

  The fighting was brave but brief. With memories of the First World War so fresh, French commanders and politicians favoured an early surrender, avoiding futile loss of life — a rational view, although, like other seemingly rational calculations in the Nazi era, it came at a psychological cost. Raymond Aron’s unit retreated without ever seeing the enemy, and joined groups of civilians fleeing on the roads; being Jewish, he knew the danger he faced from the Germans, and got himself quickly to Britain where he would work throughout the war as a journalist for the Free French forces. Merleau-Ponty was taken prisoner and held for a while in a military hospital at Saint-Yrieix. Sartre too was captured.

  Beauvoir lost contact with him again, and had no more news of him or anyone else for a long time. She too joined the refugee civilians, all fleeing south-west with no clear objective except avoiding what was advancing on them from the north-east. She left with Bianca Bienenfeld’s family in a car filled with people and suitcases. A bicycle strapped to the front blocked the beam of their headlights as the overloaded car inched along in the traffic. Once free of the city, they parted ways. Beauvoir caught a bus to stay with friends in Angers for several weeks. After that, she returned to Paris, as many others did, and for part of the return journey she even got a lift on a German truck.

  She found the city uncannily normal — except that now there were Germans strolling everywhere, some seeming arrogant, others perplexed or abashed. Even half a year later, in January 1941, the diarist Jean Guéhenno was observing, ‘It seems to me I can read their embarrassment on the faces of the occupying forces … They don’t know what to do on the streets of Paris or whom to look at.’ Beauvoir resumed her habit of writing in cafés, but had to get used to the sight of groups of uniformed Nazis enjoying their coffees and cognacs at nearby tables.

  She also set about adjusting to the small frustrations and compromises that became necessary for Parisians. To keep her teaching job at the school, she had to sign a document stating that she was neither a Jew nor a Freemason. It was ‘repugnant’, but she did it. Finding black-market produce or fuel for the coming winter became almost a fulltime occupation as supplies dwindled in the city. Anyone who had friends in the countryside — as she did — would depend gratefully on their sending parcels of fresh food. Sometimes these took too long to arrive, however: the first package Beauvoir received contained a beautifully cooked joint of pork, crawling with maggots. She scraped them off and salvaged what she could. Later she devised ways of washing smelly meat in vinegar, then stewing it for hours with strong herbs. Her room had no heating, so she went to bed wearing ski trousers and a woolly sweater, and sometimes taught her classes in the same outfit. She took to wearing a turban, to save on hairdressers, and found that it suited her. ‘I aimed at simplification in every sphere,’ she wrote in her memoirs.

  One necessary adjustment was learning to put up with the idiotic and moralistic homilies emanating every day from the collaborationist government — reminders to respect God, to honour the principle of the family, to follow traditional virtues. It took her back to the ‘bourgeois’ talk she had so hated in her childhood, but this time backed by a threat of violence. Ah — but perhaps such talk was always backed by hidden threats of violence? She and Sartre later made this belief central to their politics: fine-sounding bourgeois values, for them, were never to be trusted or taken at face value. They may have learned this attitude during the regime of humbug that was Occupied France.

  Beauvoir still did not know whether Sartre was alive. To keep herself calm (and warm) she started going every afternoon, after a morning’s teaching or writing, to the Bibliothèque nationale or the library of the Sorbonne, where she read her way through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The effort of sustained attention was comforting, and so was Hegel’s stately vision of human history progressing through inevitable sequences of thesis, antithesis and synthesis towards sublimation in Absolute Spirit. She would leave the library each afternoon feeling a radiant sense of the rightness of all things — a feeling that lasted for about five minutes before the city’s grubby reality brought it down. It was then that Kierkegaard had more to offer. She read him as well — that awkward, anguished, irreverent anti-Hegelian. Reading both at once must have been disorienting, yet somehow, like just the right combination of uppers and downers, it gave her what she needed. Both philosophies found their way into her gradually evolving novel L’invitée. They would become two key sources for her and for existentialism in general: Kierkegaard with his insistence on freedom and choice, and Hegel with his vision of how history plays out on an epic scale, swallowing up individuals.

  Meanwhile, at Trier in the Rhineland near the Luxembourg border, Sartre was alive and well and imprisoned in a POW camp, Stalag 12D. He too was immersing himself in reading a difficult book: Being and Time. Heidegger’s work had already answered to his need for comfort in 1938. Now, as Sartre read him in a closer and more sustained way, he found him to be the perfect inspiration for a nation in defeat. Heidegger’s philosophy had grown partly out of the humiliation of Germany in 1918; now it spoke to a humiliated France after June 1940. As Sartre read it, he also worked on his own philosophical notes, which were growing into a book. In one of the many brief letters he tried to send Beauvoir, on 22 July 1940, he added as a postscript, ‘I’ve begun to write a metaphysical treatise.’ This would become his greatest work: L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness). The very day he mentioned this, to his relief, he received a backlog of seven letters from Beauvoir. His letters then began reaching her too, and they were back in contact at last. Then Sartre escaped.

  It wasn’t a very swashbuckling escape, but it was simple and it worked. He had been suffering a great deal from his eye problems, thanks to all the reading and writing — which were mostly done one-eyed. Sometimes both eyes were so sore that he tried to write with them closed, his handwriting wandering over the page. But
his eyes gave him his escape route. Pleading the need for treatment, he procured a medical pass to visit an ophthalmologist outside the camp gates. Amazingly, he was then allowed to walk out, showing the pass, and he never went back.

  Sartre’s eyes had in fact saved his life several times over. First they exempted him from front-line combat, then they saved him from forced Nazi labour; now they gave him his ticket out of the Stalag. This blessing came at a cost in the long term: exotropia can cause a degree of tiredness and difficulty in concentrating that may have contributed to his destructive tendency to self-medicate with stimulant drugs and alcohol in later times.

  But now he was free. He headed for Paris, and arrived both pleased with himself and disoriented. For months, he had been stuck with other prisoners all day and all night, and had discovered to his surprise that it was comforting to be so merged in solidarity and sameness with his fellow men. There was no fighting for personal space in the camp. As he wrote later, his own skin was the boundary of the space he had, and even as he slept he could always feel someone’s arm or leg against his own. Yet it did not disturb him: those others were part of himself. He had never found physical proximity easy before, so this was a revelation. Now, coming back to Paris, he found himself putting off the moment of going back to his former haunts:

  On my first night of freedom, a stranger in my native city, not having yet reached my friends of former days, I pushed open the door of a café. Suddenly, I experienced a feeling of fear — or something close to fear. I could not understand how these squat, bulging buildings could conceal such deserts. I was lost; the few drinkers seemed more distant than the stars. Each of them was entitled to a huge section of bench, to a whole marble table … If these men, shimmering comfortably within their tubes of rarefied gas, seemed inaccessible to me, it was because I no longer had the right to place my hand on their shoulder or thigh, or to call one of them ‘fat-head’. I had rejoined bourgeois society.

  It seemed that Sartre would rarely be as relaxed and happy again as he had been as a prisoner of war.

  Beauvoir was briefly jubilant at seeing Sartre, then frankly pissed off by the way he began passing judgement on everything she had been doing to survive. He interrogated her: did she buy things on the black market? ‘A little tea occasionally’, she said. And what of that paper certifying that she was not a Jew or a Freemason? She should not have signed that. To Beauvoir, this only showed how sheltered Sartre’s life had become in the camp. He had enjoyed swearing undying fraternity with his comrades while rubbing up against their thighs and shoulders, but life in Paris was different — not as ‘bourgeois’ as he seemed to imagine, and more psychologically tough. Unusually, Beauvoir sounds critical of Sartre at this point in her memoirs. But he unbent quickly. He proved happy to eat her black-market stews, and he too made the adjustments necessary to get on with life, and even to be published under Nazi censorship.

  On the other hand, he was adamant that he had come back to do something. He assembled a dozen friends into a new Resistance group under the name ‘Socialisme et liberté’ and wrote a manifesto for them. The group spent most of its time writing or discussing manifestos and polemical articles, but even this was dangerous enough. They had a bad scare when one member, Jean Pouillon, lost a briefcase filled with incriminating pamphlets together with the group members’ names and addresses. They all faced arrest, torture, death. Luckily, the person who found the briefcase turned it in to a lost-property office. The incongruity of this — the threat of Gestapo torture coexisting with the decent civic tradition of the lost-property office — captures the strangeness of life under Occupation.

  The group foundered eventually — ‘of not knowing what to do’, wrote Sartre later. But being involved had a positive effect on their morale, as did other attempts at resistance, even those that seemed fey or futile. There was much encouragement to be found in miniature rebellions such as those of Jean Paulhan — one of their group — who left small anti-collaborationist poems signed only with his initials lying around on café tables or post-office counters. Other Parisians made similar gestures: forbidden to fly tricolour flags on Bastille Day, for example, people would find ways of bringing red, white and blue together, perhaps on a colourful scarf, or by wearing a red jacket together with a blue purse and white gloves. It all mattered.

  Merleau-Ponty was now back in Paris too, and he founded a Resistance group called ‘Sous la botte’ (Under the Boot), which then merged with Sartre’s. He married Suzanne Berthe Jolibois towards the end of 1940, and they had a daughter, to whom they gave the patriotic name Marianne — an Occupation baby who was also a sign of hope for the future. He taught at the Lycée Carnot, where, despite his own activities, he urged his students to be cautious. When he found, one day, that they had taken the obligatory portrait of Marshal Pétain down from the wall, he ordered them to put it back, not from any collaborationist sentiment but to protect their safety. Everyday life required constantly negotiating this balance between submission and resistance, as well as between ordinary activity and the extraordinary underlying reality.

  It was even possible to have holidays from the Germans: Beauvoir and Sartre made several cycling trips in the ‘free’ zone of southern France, where the Vichy puppet government was in charge. They sent their bikes over in advance, then sneaked across the border through forests and fields at night with a guide, all clad in dark clothes. After spending a few weeks wheeling around the roads of Provence, and visiting other writers whom they vaguely hoped to coax into working for the Resistance (including André Gide and André Maltraux), they crossed back again, refreshed by the taste of partial freedom. At least there was more food in the south, although they could not afford to buy much of it. Lack of good nutrition made them weak and accident-prone. Sartre once somersaulted over his handlebars, and Beauvoir collided with another bike, falling hard on her face and sustaining a swollen eye and a lost tooth. Weeks later, back in Paris, she squeezed a boil on her chin and felt a hard white nubbin emerge. It was her tooth, which had buried itself in the flesh of her jaw.

  Back in Paris, it was important to stay mindful of how dangerous the occupiers were — something easy to forget if you were not among their direct targets. Sartre wrote of how the Germans ‘gave up their seats to old ladies in the Métro, they showed affection to children and stroked their cheeks’. What’s more, he added, ‘do not go imagining that the French showed them a crushing air of contempt’ — though they did venture small discourtesies when they could, as a way of preserving self-respect. Jean Guéhenno’s diary recorded times when he deliberately failed to give directions on the street to Germans, or gave them rudely, in a way he would never normally do. Merleau-Ponty noted the difficulty he had in overcoming the rules of good manners that he had learned in childhood, but he too forced himself to be rude as a patriotic duty. For someone as naturally affable and well brought up as he, it took a decided effort.

  Jews, and anyone actively suspected of Resistance activity, had a grimmer sense of what the Occupation really meant — but they too could be blithe for too long. When the regulation came in on 29 May 1942 that Jews must wear the yellow star, many of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s Jewish friends ignored it. They also defied the bans on using restaurants, cinemas, libraries and other public places. As each new rule was announced, a few took it as their cue to flee if they could, usually via Spain to Britain or America, but others stayed. It seemed possible to live with the insults and threats — until it wasn’t.

  At the most unexpected times, terrifying holes could open up in the fabric of things. Sartre described it with his usual cinematic sense:

  You would phone a friend one day and the telephone would ring and ring in the empty apartment; you would ring his doorbell and he wouldn’t come to the door; if the concierge broke in, you would find two chairs drawn up together in the hallway with German cigarette ends between the legs.

  It was as if the sidewalks of the city opened occasionally, he wrote, and a tentacled monste
r reached up to drag someone down. The cafés, always filled with familiar faces, also became an index to disappearances. Beauvoir wrote of how two attractive Czech women, regulars at the Café Flore, were suddenly not there one day. They never came back. It was unbearable to see their empty places: ‘it was, precisely, a nothingness’.

  Cafés such as the Flore continued to be a focus for Parisian life. For a start, they were the best places to keep warm, certainly better than the sparse, cheap hotels in which many lived without heating or proper cooking facilities. Even after the war, the American writer James Baldwin would observe in the 1950s, ‘The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafés.’ They also became places to talk, to conspire a little, to keep one’s mind alive. They certainly governed Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s social lives, being the places where they saw ever-increasing circles of new acquaintances: poets, playwrights, journalists, artists like Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, and avant-garde writers such as Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau and Jean Genet. The latter, a former thief and prostitute now gaining fame as a writer, simply marched up to Sartre one day in the Flore and said bonjour. This was one of many relationships forged at wartime café tables.

  They met Albert Camus in a similarly abrupt way, but at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, where he introduced himself one day in 1943 while Sartre’s play The Flies was in rehearsal. He and Sartre already knew a lot about each other: Camus had reviewed Nausea and Sartre had just been writing a piece on Camus’ The Stranger. They immediately got on well. Beauvoir later said that she and Sartre found Camus ‘a simple, cheerful soul’, often funny and bawdy in conversation, and so emotional that he would sit down in the snow in the street at 2 a.m. and pour out his love troubles.