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

  In all these 1940s novels, stories and essays, the dominant mood was not so much one of post-traumatic exhaustion as of excitement. The world had fallen to pieces, but for that very reason almost anything could now be done with it. It made for a thrilling and frightening mixture — which was just the combination of emotions that characterised the first wave of post-war existentialism in general.

  It was a combination engendered in places far from Paris too. In a 1959 study of war experiences, the American Heideggerian scholar J. Glenn Gray recalled travelling through the Italian countryside with his unit towards the end of the war there. One evening he stopped to exchange a few words in broken Italian with an elderly man smoking a pipe outside a hut. The encounter saddened Gray, since this traditional world and its age-old calm seemed about to be lost forever. Yet along with the premonition of loss he felt exhilaration and a sense of promise. Whatever happened next, Gray thought that evening, one thing was certain: the philosophers he had studied in college could have little to offer the post-war world. It would be a new reality, so new philosophers would be needed.

  And here they were.

  Thus began existentialism’s year of marvels and mania, with all the wild experimentation we sneakily previewed in Chapter 1. Sartre’s rousing lecture in October 1945 ended in mayhem and a big news story. Talk of his philosophy spread through Paris, and beyond. In 1946, Gabriel Marcel wrote, ‘Hardly a day goes by without my being asked what is existentialism.’ He added, ‘Usually it is a society lady who asks for this information, but tomorrow it may be my charwoman or the ticket-collector on the Métro.’ Every fashionable person wanted to learn about it, every Establishment institution fretted about it, and almost every journalist seemed to be using it to make a living.

  Sartre’s friend Boris Vian spoofed the craze in his 1947 novel L’écume des jours, translated as Froth on the Daydream or Mood Indigo. This surreal and playful romance includes, as a side character, a famous philosopher called Jean-Sol Partre. When Partre gives a lecture, he arrives on an elephant and mounts a throne, accompanied by his consort the Countess de Mauvoir. An extraordinary radiance emanates from his slender body. The audience is so enraptured that his words are drowned out by the cheering, and at the end the hall collapses in rubble from pressure of numbers. Partre watches, delighted to see everyone committing themselves with such engagement. The real Simone de Beauvoir enjoyed Vian’s satire, and called it a work of ‘enormous tenderness’.

  The trumpet-playing Vian was the leader of the festive element of the existentialist scene, which found its home in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of the Left Bank. He had already pioneered the trend for hosting jazz parties in private apartments towards the end of the Occupation, with curfew-dodging youngsters known as ‘zazous’ — who avoided the banned hours by simply not going home until the next day. With the war over, Vian played in the new cellar clubs. He also mixed bizarre cocktails behind their bars, and fired off amusing, sensationalist or surrealistic novels according to mood. Later he wrote a Saint-Germain-des-Prés ‘manual’, giving maps, descriptions and pen portraits of the exotic cavern-dwelling ‘troglodytes’ to be found in it.

  (Illustrations Credit 7.3)

  In the cellars and bars, philosophers often went literally arm in arm with jazz stars, dancing the night away. Merleau-Ponty was especially popular among habitués of the Left Bank, being known for his good cheer and flirtatious charm. He was, Vian observed, ‘the only one of the philosophers who will actually invite a girl out onto the dance floor’. When Merleau-Ponty took Juliette Gréco dancing, he would also, at her request, teach her a little philosophy as they gyrated round the floor.

  Sartre and Beauvoir danced too, when they managed to evade the new hangers-on and journalists in the better-known haunts. They loved jazz. Sartre wrote the lyrics for one of Juliette Gréco’s most successful songs, ‘La rue des Blancs-Manteaux’. Another song sung by Gréco, a ‘Marseillaise existentialiste’, had lyrics jointly penned by Merleau-Ponty, Boris Vian and Anne-Marie Cazalis. This told the sorry but well-rhymed tale of someone who was too poor to get credit at the Flore, too free despite reading Merleau-Ponty, and who always ended up stuck in the same disaster, notwithstanding Jean-Paul Sartre.

  The existentialist culture of the late 1940s seemed very Parisian to anyone looking in from the outside, but it was also driven by a love, or at least a fascination, for all things American. Paris itself was still full of Americans, including servicemen left behind from the Liberation forces as well as new arrivals. Few young Parisians could resist American clothes, American films or American music. The fact that all of this had been banned by the Occupation authorities added to its appeal — and the ‘zazous’ had been secretly dancing to American jazz for months. The importance of American music for a whole generation is summed up in a story told by Juliette Gréco. She had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, held in a cell, and then, to her surprise, freed again. She walked eight miles home through wintry streets in a thin cotton dress, and as she walked, she defiantly sang an American song at the top of her voice: ‘Over the Rainbow’.

  To go with the jazz, blues and ragtime after the war, people sought out American clothes, readily available in flea markets; there was a particular craze for plaid shirts and jackets. If your twenty-first-century time machine could take you back to a Parisian jazz club immediately after the war, you would not find yourself in a sea of existentialist black; you would be more likely to think you’d walked into a lumberjacks’ hoedown. An impression of the effect can be had from Jacques Becker’s film Rendezvous de juillet, released in 1949, which features an exuberant dance scene in the Lorientais club: as Claude Luter’s band plays on the cramped stage, the check-shirted crowd leaps around on the dance floor. The sleek black turtleneck arrived afterwards — and when Americans in turn adopted that fashion, few realised they were returning a sartorial compliment.

  In the cinemas, meanwhile, people devoured American crime movies and, from the bouquinistes along the Seine, they bought American fiction. The most popular writers were the hardest-boiled ones: James M. Cain, Dashiel Hammett and Horace McCoy, whose despairing Depression-era novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? came out in French from Gallimard in 1946. Camus had emulated the style of American noir novels in The Stranger, and Sartre and Beauvoir were also fans. They loved non-genre American authors too: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos — who was, according to Sartre, the greatest writer of the era. Many American books were translated by French publishers: ‘traduit de l’americain’ became a favourite phrase on covers. Not all books that looked like translations were the real thing, however. A book called I Spit on Your Graves, ostensibly by ‘Vernon Sullivan’ and translated by Boris Vian, was by Vian himself. Written on a kind of dare, it was a violent, sensationalist story about a black man who kills two white women to avenge the lynching of his brother, but is hunted down and eventually shot dead by the police. Vian made money from it, but got into trouble the following year when a man in Montparnasse strangled his girlfriend and shot himself, leaving a copy of the novel by his bed with the description of a strangling circled in ink in case anyone failed to notice the similarity.

  Americans, able to visit Paris as tourists for the first time in five years, fell in love with the city all over again as they had in the 1920s. They sat in the Flore and Deux Magots, and ventured down the cellar stairs into nightclubs. They listened to the talk of l’existentialisme and les existentialistes, and passed it on to their friends back home. Cultured New Yorkers began to court the real existentialists: one by one, Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus were all invited to cross the Atlantic for visits and lecture tours. They all accepted.

  The first to go was Sartre, in mid-January 1945: at Camus’ suggestion, he joined a delegation of invited French journalists, representing Combat and Le Figaro. (This was why he was away for the Brasillach trial.) He travelled around for two months, meeting countless people, of whom one, Dolorès Vanetti, became
a long-term lover. His poor English prevented him from talking as freely as he usually liked to, but he watched carefully and took notes, then wrote articles on his return. He focused on socialist questions, such as the matter of how American workers coped with the high-speed automation of American factories. At the time, few thought of technological appliances, consumerism or automated production techniques as widespread features of modern life: rather, they were considered distinctively American, and this added to the country’s glamorous but alarming image in many European minds. Can one actually live with all that technology? What does it do to a person? Sartre observed with surprise that US workers seemed cheerful, despite being cogs in a Chaplinesque industrial machine driven to go constantly faster and faster by their bosses. The whole of America seemed to be such a machine, and Sartre wondered whether it could possibly go on like that.

  He returned for further visits in the late 1940s, and became more comfortable communicating with people, although his English remained limited. By Sartre’s third visit, in 1948, Lionel Abel — who met him at a Partisan Review evening — was amazed at his loquacity in a language he barely knew: there was little Sartre could say, yet he never shut up.

  Albert Camus was the next to go, touring the US from March to May 1946. He travelled more nervously than Sartre, aware of being a stranger and troubled by the constant small difficulties of figuring out how things worked and what one was supposed to do. His unease made him a good observer of differences. He noted:

  the morning fruit juices, the national Scotch and soda … the anti-Semitism and the love of animals — this last extending from the gorillas in the Bronx Zoo to the protozoa of the Museum of Natural History — the funeral parlors where death and the dead are made up at top speed (‘Die, and leave the rest to us’), the barber shops where you can get a shave at three in the morning …

  He was especially impressed by the billboard in Times Square where a giant GI puffed real smoke from a Camel cigarette. The only place that seemed comforting in its familiarity was New York’s Bowery district, then a derelict zone of cheap bars and run-down hotels, with the elevated railway line running through it at second-storey level, casting everything below into deep shadow. ‘A European wants to say: “Finally, reality.” ’ Like Sartre watching the workers, Camus was attracted and repelled. Above all, he could not understand the apparent lack of anguish in America. Nothing was properly tragic.

  In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir made her journey. Unlike Sartre, she already spoke and read English; like Camus, she was astounded at the bizarre devices and inventions. She kept a diary in which she boggled at such phenomena as the way letters were posted in her hotel: next to the elevator on each floor was a tiny chute into which you dropped your envelope so that it fluttered down to a box at the bottom. The first time she saw the white things flashing by, she took them for hallucinations. Next she went to a newsagent and tried to work out how to buy stamps from the machines, but the coins confused her. She made many friends, however, and after coming to grips with New York she set out on a country-wide lecture tour with diversions to visit jazz clubs, and cinemas where she saw ‘thrillings’ and ‘laffmovies’. While in Chicago, she met Nelson Algren, a tough-guy novelist who wrote about addicts and prostitutes and the seamy side of American life. They began an affair and she fell in love; they would remain lovers for three years, although they were able to meet only at long intervals in the US or France.

  Her response to America was the now usual mixture of wariness and bliss. She was seduced: America ‘was abundance, and infinite horizons; it was a crazy magic lantern of legendary images’. It was the future — or at least one possible version of the future. A rival version was offered by the Soviet Union, which also attracted her. But the United States was undoubtedly the stronger, at the moment. It was more confident; it was wealthy, and it had the Bomb.

  One element of American life unequivocally horrified Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus: its racial inequalities, and not only in the South. After his first trip, Sartre wrote in Le Figaro of how black ‘untouchables’ and ‘unseeables’ haunted the streets, never meeting your gaze; it was as if they saw no one, and you were not supposed to see them either. A later visit inspired him to write a play about US racism, The Respectful Prostitute, based on a real-life case in which two black men were convicted of raping two white prostitutes and executed, despite an insufficiency of evidence against them. Beauvoir was also shocked by her encounters, or rather the lack of them, since the two worlds rarely mixed. She walked up to Harlem by herself, defying white New Yorkers’ nervous warnings that it could be dangerous for her. Other French visitors also refused to get used to the separation of spheres that seemed natural to many white Americans. When Juliette Gréco had an affair with the jazz musician Miles Davis in 1949 and visited him in New York, he had to warn her that they should not go round together as openly as they did in Paris. People would call her ‘a black man’s prostitute’, and her career would be ruined.

  Conversely, many black Americans who found themselves in Paris after the war appreciated the experience of being treated with basic human respect. They were more than respected; they were often idolised, as French youngsters so loved black American music and culture. Some decided to stay on, and a few were drawn to existentialism, finding much to recognise in its philosophy of freedom.

  The great example of this was Richard Wright, who had made his name in the US with the novels Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). While still in New York he met both Sartre and Camus, and he and his wife became particularly good friends with Simone de Beauvoir, who stayed with them in 1947. He wrote in his journal that year, ‘How those French boys and girls think and write; nothing like it exists anywhere on earth today. How keenly they feel the human plight.’ In return, his French visitors loved his gritty, semi-autobiographical writing about life as a black man growing up in America. Camus arranged to have his books translated for Gallimard; Sartre commissioned him to write for Les Temps modernes. Wright managed, with difficulty, to get a visa to visit France himself, and was instantly converted. Just as the details of America had amazed the French, the peculiarities of Paris delighted Wright: ‘The knobs were in the center of the doors!’ He arranged further sojourns, and eventually settled in the city.

  Even though the Europeans were puzzled by American ways, they loved being received so warmly: the US was (and still is) a tremendously hospitable country for new ideas, and for potential celebrities too. The year after Sartre’s photo appeared in Time magazine with the caption ‘Women swooned’, Beauvoir was hailed in the New Yorker as ‘the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw’. Articles on existentialism appeared in newspapers and cultural periodicals: the New York Post, the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Partisan Review — favourite reading of intellectuals — which published essays on Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, with translated excerpts from their works. The French exile Jean Wahl wrote ‘Existentialism: A Preface’ for the New Republic in October 1945. Along with the primers and prefaces came some gentle satire. In 1948, the New York Times Magazine reprinted an existentialist spoof by Paul F. Jennings from the British weekly the Spectator, called ‘Thingness of Things’. It described a philosophy of ‘resistentialism’ propounded by one Pierre-Marie Ventre, dedicated to undersanding why things resist and frustrate human beings at every turn, as when they trip us up underfoot, or decline to be found when lost. Ventre’s slogan is ‘Les choses sont contre nous’ — ‘Things are against us’.

  One thing about the existentialists seriously bothered American intellectuals, and that was their low taste in American culture — their love of jazz and blues, their interest in the sleazy murders of the Deep South, and their fondness for potboilers about hitmen and psychopaths. Even their more elevated choices in American fiction were suspect, since cultured Americans were less inclined to appreciate their own modern novelists than the filigree meanderings of Proust — whom Sartre abhorred. William Barrett, an early existentialist populariser, wrote i
n the Partisan Review that Sartre’s novels stood as ‘grim reminders that one cannot read Steinbeck and Dos Passos as great novelists with impunity’. All such books, with their ‘banal and meaningless conversations, characters wandering in and out, bars and dance-halls’, were a bad influence. In the same issue, the critic F. W. Dupee concluded that the French taste for Faulkner was less a compliment to American literature than an indication of some terrible ‘crisis in French taste and reason’.

  A divergence also emerged in the American and French ways of thinking about existentialism. For the French in the 1940s, it tended to be seen as new, jazzy, sexy and daring. For Americans, it evoked grimy cafés and shadowy Parisian streets: it meant old Europe. Thus, while the French press portrayed existentialists as rebellious youths with outrageous sex lives, Americans often saw them as pale, pessimistic souls, haunted by dread, despair and anxiety à la Kierkegaard. This image stuck. Even now, especially in the English-speaking world, the word ‘existentialist’ brings to mind a noir figure staring into the bottom of an espresso cup, too depressed and anguished even to flick through the pages of a dog-eared L’être et le néant. One of the few to challenge this image early on was Richard Wright, who, after first meeting the existentialists, wrote to his friend Gertrude Stein that he could not understand why Americans insisted on seeing it as a gloomy philosophy: to him it meant optimism and freedom.

  American readers in these early years had very little original material to go on if they wanted to judge existentialism for themselves, and if they did not read French. Only a few fragments of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s work had so far been translated, and these did not include either Nausea, first translated by Lloyd Alexander as The Diary of Antoine Roquentin in 1949, or Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes in 1956.