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

  Sartre was aware that odd personal impulses underlay his interest in violence. He traced it to his childhood experience of bullying, and his decision to take on the bullies’ aggression as part of himself. Talking about it with Beauvoir in 1974, he said that he had never forgotten the violence he had learned at the school in La Rochelle. He even thought it had influenced his tendency to put friendships on the line: ‘I’ve never had tender relationships with my friends since then.’ One suspects it also fed his desire for extremism in all things.

  In the case of anti-colonial violence, or violence against whites, Sartre’s own people were implicitly on the receiving end, but this only made him applaud it more. There was satisfaction to be had in reversing viewpoints and picturing himself standing in the gale of someone else’s righteous rage. Beauvoir similarly celebrated news of uprisings against France’s colonising forces around the word, feeling elated about anti-colonial attacks in Indochina in the 1950s. It was a matter of political conviction, of course, but her response seems more visceral than intellectual. This was a complex emotional state for someone whose own country had been occupied and oppressed just ten years earlier. Indeed, when the Algerian War began in 1954, she observed herself feeling just as disturbed by the sight of French uniforms in public as she had by German ones — except that now she shared the culpability herself. ‘I’m French,’ she would say to herself, and feel as though she were confessing to a deformity.

  The years in which Algeria was fighting for self-determination, 1954 to 1962, were traumatic ones, bringing appalling suffering. The bloodshed found its way to Paris, as pro-independence demonstrators were killed in the heart of the city. French torture and executions of civilians in Algeria caused widespread dismay. Camus’ loyalties were with his mother, but he opposed the authorities’ abuses too. Sartre and Beauvoir were more single-minded in their support of the Algerian liberation movement; they campaigned actively, and both wrote eloquent contributions to books by and about tortured Algerians. Sartre wrote in his foreword to Henri Alleg’s The Question: ‘Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner’ — an allusion to Camus’ earlier essay ‘Neither Victims Nor Executioners’. Had Sartre and Beauvoir not already fallen out with Camus, they might have done so now over the Algerian situation.

  We could accuse Sartre and Beauvoir of cheering on the violence from the safety of the sidelines, but this time their position was not safe at all. Just as in 1947, Sartre received death threats. In October 1960, 10,000 French army veterans marched in an anti-independence demonstration shouting, among other slogans, ‘Shoot Sartre!’ When he signed an illegal petition urging French soldiers to disobey orders that they disagreed with, he faced prosecution and prison, until President Charles de Gaulle allegedly ruled this out with the remark, ‘One does not imprison Voltaire.’ Finally, on 7 January 1962, someone took the incitements to murder seriously. At 42 rue Bonaparte, where Sartre lived with his mother, a bomb was planted in the apartment above theirs. The explosion damaged both storeys and tore off the apartment doors; it was only by good luck that no one was injured. Camus had feared for his mother in Algeria, but it was Sartre’s mother who now faced danger. He moved to a new apartment at 222 boulevard Raspail, renting a separate one for his mother nearby. Sartre was now closer to where Beauvoir lived, and further away from his old, well-known haunts in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, making him harder to find.

  Sartre did not let the attack stop his campaigning: he and Beauvoir continued to speak at demonstrations, write articles, and give evidence in support of those accused of terrorist activity. According to Claude Lanzmann, they would get up in the middle of the night to make desperate phone calls seeking reprieve for Algerians due to be executed. In 1964, Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature, saying that he did not want to compromise his independence and that he deplored the committee’s tendency to offer the prize only to Western writers or to anti-Communist émigrés, rather than to revolutionary writers from the developing world.

  In effect, when offered the prize, Sartre had mentally consulted the ‘least favoured’, rather as Heidegger had sought the wisdom of the Todtnauberg ‘peasant’ next door when offered the Berlin job in 1934. In Heidegger’s story, his neighbour silently shook his head. In Sartre’s mind, the least favoured similarly gave him the authoritative head-shake: no. But Heidegger’s refusal was all about retreat and resignation from worldly complexities. Sartre’s was a response to the demands of unjustly treated human beings — and it tied him more closely than ever to the lives of others.

  Long before Sartre, others had written about the role of the ‘gaze’ in racism. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois had reflected in The Souls of Black Folk on black people’s ‘double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’. Later black American writers also explored the Hegelian battle for control of perspectives. In 1953, James Baldwin described visiting a Swiss hamlet where no one had seen a black person before, and where they gawped at him in amazement. He reflected that, in theory, he ought to feel as early white explorers did in African villages, accepting the stares as tribute to his marvellousness. Like the explorers, he was more widely travelled and sophisticated than the locals. Yet he could not feel that way; instead he felt humiliated and ill at ease.

  As a black gay man, Baldwin had been through years of double marginalisation in the United States, where racial divisions were institutionalised and homosexuality was illegal. (The first state to decriminalise it was Illinois, in 1962.) He made his home for years in France — and there he joined his fellow novelist Richard Wright, who was now well settled in Paris.

  After his discovery of and meetings with the existentialists in the 1940s, Wright had become more Francophile and more existentialist than ever. In 1952 he finished his existentialist novel The Outsider, the story of a troubled man named Cross Damon who flees to start a new life after he is confused with another man who dies in a subway crash. The white authorities are unable to tell one black man from another; Damon takes advantage of their error to flee a lawsuit for getting an underage girl pregnant. He then gets into worse difficulties, committing murders to conceal his identity. He also becomes involved with Communists, as Wright himself had. Having reinvented himself, Damon feels a great freedom, but also a dizzying responsibility to decide the meaning of his life. The story ends badly, as Damon is hunted down for his crimes and killed; in his dying moments, he says that he did it all to be free and to find out what he is worth. ‘We’re different from what we seem … Maybe worse, maybe better, but certainly different … We’re strangers to ourselves.’

  Wright applies the philosophies of Sartre and Camus to the black American experience. The result is an interesting book, yet it also had some weaknesses and could have benefited from editorial help to bring out its ideas more powerfully. Instead, Wright got an editor and an agent who preferred to relieve the book of ideas altogether, rather as happened with the English-language translation of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. The publishing world expected something simple and raw from an author like Wright, not an intellectual reworking of the likes of Nausea and The Stranger. Reluctantly, he revised his work to trim down the philosophy. While he was doing this painful job, a new novel arrived in the post: Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. It too told of an alienated black man making a journey from invisibility to authenticity. Invisible Man had a lighter touch than Wright’s novel, and contained no French philosophy. It sold better and won the National Book Award.

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  Wright wrote generously to Ellison, praising his work and inviting him to Paris — to which Ellison commented rudely, ‘I am getting a little sick of American Negroes running over for a few weeks and coming back insisting that it’s paradise.’ He thought Wright had harmed himself by moving abroad: he had spoiled the freedom of his writing by seeking freedom in real life. Wright got thi
s sort of remark a lot: his editor, Edward Aswell, thought he had won peace as an individual but lost literary momentum. Even James Baldwin wrote ‘Richard was able, at last, to live in Paris exactly as he would have lived, had he been a white man, here, in America. This may seem desirable, but I wonder if it is.’

  I wonder something different: why did Wright’s Parisian existence attract such condemnation? Baldwin himself lived in France, and Ralph Ellison used a Prix de Rome fellowship to move to Italy for two years after the success of Invisible Man — although he did miss America, and returned to it. White writers moved abroad all the time; no one told them they would lose their ability to write if they did so. Wright believed his freedom was essential to him, to get perspective: ‘I need to live free if I am to expand.’ It seems a reasonable claim. The real objection, I suspect, was not that Richard Wright moved to France but that he wrote about French ideas.

  True, Wright wrote no more novels after this. (Neither did Ellison.) He did write books of travel and reportage, notably The Color Curtain, about the great Bandung conference of developing countries in April 1955, and White Man, Listen!, in 1957, dedicated to westernised individuals in Asia, Africa and the West Indies — those ‘lonely outsiders who exist precariously on the clifflike margins of many cultures’. His sympathy for the existential misfit never declined; it merely migrated to non-fiction.

  On 19 September 1956, Wright spoke at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne. There, he was the only speaker to draw attention to the almost total absence of women in the debate. He pointed out how close the congress’ key topics were to those Simone de Beauvoir had explored in The Second Sex: power struggles, the alienated gaze, self-consciousness, and the construction of oppressive myths. Feminist and anti-racist campaigners also shared the existentialist commitment to action: the ‘can-do’ belief that the status quo could be understood in intellectual terms, but should not be accepted in life.

  The Second Sex had meanwhile been having ever more powerful effects on women around the world. The makers of a 1989 television programme and book called Daughters of de Beauvoir collected stories from women whose lives were changed by reading her work during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. These were women such as Angie Pegg, a housewife in a small Essex town who picked up The Second Sex at random in a bookshop, and read it until four in the morning. She plunged first into the chapter on how housework isolates women from the world, then went back to read the rest. Until that moment, Pegg had thought she was the only one to feel disconnected from life because of the way she spent her days; Beauvoir made her realise that she was not — and showed her why she felt that way. It was another of those life-changing book discoveries, like Sartre’s or Levinas’ when they read Husserl. By the morning, Pegg had decided on a change of direction in her life. She abandoned her mop and duster and went to university to study philosophy.

  As well as The Second Sex, many women took inspiration from Beauvoir’s four volumes of autobiography, which started in 1958 with The Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and continued until All Said and Done, in 1972. Margaret Walters, growing up in Australia, was thrilled by the confident tone and content of these books. They told the epic story of one woman seeking freedom — and finding it. Women living in traditional marriages were especially intrigued by Beauvoir’s account of her open relationship with Sartre and other lovers. Kate Millett, who became an eminent feminist herself, remembered thinking: ‘There she is in Paris, living this life. She’s the brave, independent spirit, she’s writ large what I would like to be, here in Podunk.’ She also admired Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s joint political commitment. ‘What both of them represented was the adventure of trying to lead an ethical life, trying to live according to a radical ethical politics, which isn’t just the leftist bible — you have to invent situation ethics all the time. And that’s an adventure.’

  Simone de Beauvoir led women to make such drastic changes in their lives during these decades that, inevitably, some felt they had thrown away too much. One of the interviewees, Joyce Goodfellow, described abandoning her marriage and walking out on a steady but dull job. She ended up as a totally free woman — and a single mother, who struggled for years with poverty and solitude. ‘What you read really does influence your life,’ she said wryly.

  What you read influences your life: the story of existentialism as it spread around the world in the fifties and sixties bears this out more than any other modern philosophy. By feeding feminism, gay rights, the breaking down of class barriers, and the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, it helped to change the basis of our existence today in fundamental ways. At the same time, many were inspired to head off in search of more personal forms of liberation. Sartre had called for a new existentialist psychotherapy, and this was established by the 1950s, with therapists seeking to treat patients as individuals struggling with questions of meaning and choice rather than as mere sets of symptoms. The Swiss psychiatrists Medard Boss and Ludwig Binswanger developed ‘Daseinanalysis’, based on Heidegger’s ideas; later Sartre’s ideas became more influential in the US and Britain. Rollo May and Irvin Yalom worked in an overtly existentialist framework, and similar ideas guided ‘anti-psychiatrists’ such as R. D. Laing as well as the ‘logotherapist’ Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in a Nazi concentration camp had led him to conclude that the human need for meaning was almost as vital as that for food or sleep.

  These movements drew energy from a more general desire for meaning and self-realisation among the young, especially in America. After the war, many people had settled into as peaceful a life as they could manage, recognising the value of a steady job and a house in the suburbs with greenery and fresh air. Some veterans found it hard to adjust, but many wanted only to enjoy what was good in the world. Their children grew up with the benefits of this, but then, entering adolescence, wondered whether there was more to life than mowing the lawn and waving to the neighbours. They revolted against the narrow-minded political order of Cold War America, with its blend of comfort and paranoia. When they read J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, they decided that, like its hero Holden Caulfield, the one thing they did not want to be was phony.

  There followed a decade or so when literature, theatre and cinema were all abuzz with what we might call ‘authenticity dramas’. They range from the Beat writers, with their riffs on restlessness or addiction, to films of generational disaffection such as Rebel Without a Cause (1955), or, in France, Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960). Existentialism was sometimes acknowledged, if only ironically. Marcel Carné’s 1958 film Les tricheurs (‘The cheaters’, translated as Youthful Sinners) was a fable in which two young Left Bank nihilists are so hip and polyamorous that they fail to notice they are falling in love and ought to have chosen a bourgeois marriage instead. In Funny Face (1957), Audrey Hepburn’s character goes into a Parisian nightclub in search of a famous philosopher, becomes carried away by the music, and does a wild existentialist dance. But she too is safely married off — to an ageing Fred Astaire.

  Other films and novels maintained a harder edge, refusing to settle for the old ways. A minor masterpiece of this perod is Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Its hero, a war veteran, struggles to fit into his suburban environment and a corporate job in which he is supposed to work long hours on tasks that make no sense. In the end, he lights out for a more authentic way of life, rejecting security. The title became something of a catchphrase, especially after the book was made into a film starring Gregory Peck. As Sloan Wilson recalled, executives began wearing (identical) sports clothes to work instead of grey suits — just to prove that they, unlike all the other conformists, were free and authentic individuals.

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  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four of 1949 had made a key connection between conformist culture and technological control; other writers now picked up on this theme. David Karp’s little-known 1953 novel One is s
et in a society that enforces complete psychological uniformity. The hero is arrested after the state detects signs of individualism in him so subtle that even he hadn’t noticed them. He is gently but forcibly re-educated — a soothing, medicalised process rather than a confrontational one, and all the more terrifying for that.

  Other dramas also linked the fear of technology with the fear that humans might be reduced to antlike creatures of no power or worth. In an earlier Heidegger chapter, I mentioned one of my favourite films, The Incredible Shrinking Man of 1957 — which is a techno-horror as well as an existential drama. It begins when the hero is exposed to a cloud of radioactive fallout at sea. Back home, he begins to dwindle, losing size and dignity until he is the size of a dust speck. He cannot stop it happening, although he uses all the tools and devices at his disposal to survive, and ends as a tiny figure in the grass, looking out at the immensity of the universe. Other 1950s films similarly linked the twin Heideggerian terrors of lost authenticity and uncanny technology — including some, like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), that are more often read simply as expressions of Cold War anti-Communism. In movies such as Godzilla and Them! (both 1954), squid, leeches, scorpions, crabs, radioactive ants and other nightmare creatures pour out of a devastated, violated earth to take revenge. It is intriguing to read Heidegger’s lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ with its talk of the ‘monstrous’ and ‘terrible’ in man, the violation of the earth, and the stripping of resources, while musing on the fact that the published version came out in the same year as Godzilla.

  Along with the fiction came a new kind of non-fiction from a new breed: the sociologist, psychologist or philosopher as existentialist rebel. David Riesman led the way with his study of modern alienation, The Lonely Crowd, in 1950. A flurry in 1956 included Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, William Whyte’s Organization Man and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. The most dramatic work of existentialist non-fiction was written a little later by a member of the old guard: Hannah Arendt. Her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem, begun as a New Yorker article and developed into a book, concerned the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the Holocaust. Having attended the trial and observed his curiously blank responses, Arendt interpreted him as the ultimate Man in the Grey Suit. For her, he was a mindless bureaucrat so in thrall to the Heideggerian ‘they’ that he had lost all human individuality and responsibility, a phenomenon which she characterised as ‘the banality of evil’. Her interpretation was controversial, as were other aspects of the book, but it fascinated an audience that was now in a moral panic, not about extreme beliefs, but about the very opposite: faceless, mindless conformism. Partly in response to Arendt’s work, researchers such as Stanley Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo perfected experiments exploring just how far people would go in obeying orders. The results were alarming: almost everyone, it seemed, was willing to inflict torture if a sufficiently authoritative figure commanded it.