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, Beauvoir, Camus and Koestler had previously become good friends, debating political topics in high spirits during convivial, drunken evenings. During one of their wild nights out at an émigré Russian nightclub around 1946, the question of friendship and political commitment came up. Could you be friends with someone if you disagreed with them politically? Camus said you could. Koestler said no: ‘Impossible! Impossible!’ In a sentimental buzz of vodka, Beauvoir took Camus’ side: ‘It is possible; and we are the proof of it at this very moment, since, despite all our dissensions, we are so happy to be together.’ Cheered by this warm thought, they boozed on happily until after dawn, although Sartre still had to prepare a lecture for the next day on, of all things, the theme of ‘The Writer’s Responsibility’. They all thought this was hilarious. At dawn, they left each other in exuberant spirits. And Sartre did somehow get the lecture written in time, on almost no sleep.

  During another late-night carousal in 1947, however, the friendship question came up again, and this time the mood was less good-humoured. Koestler clinched his side of it by throwing a glass at Sartre’s head — not least because he got the idea, probably rightly, that Sartre was flirting with his wife Mamaine. (Koestler was known as an unscrupulous seducer himself, and an aggressive one to say the least.) As they all stumbled outside, Camus tried to calm Koestler by laying a hand on his shoulder. Koestler flailed out at him, and Camus hit him back. Sartre and Beauvoir dragged them apart and hustled Camus off to his car, leaving Koestler and Mamaine on the street. All the way home, Camus wept and draped himself on the steering wheel, weaving over the road: ‘He was my friend! And he hit me!’

  Sartre and Beauvoir eventually came to agree with Koestler about one thing: it was not possible to be friends with someone who held opposed political views. ‘When people’s opinions are so different,’ said Sartre, ‘how can they even go to a film together?’ In 1950, Koestler mentioned to Stephen Spender that he’d bumped into Sartre and Beauvoir after a long gap and had suggested they have lunch. They responded with an awkward silence, and then Beauvoir said (according to Spender’s second-hand version), ‘Koestler, you know that we disagree. There no longer seems any point in our meeting.’ She crossed her forearms in a big X, and said, ‘We are croisés comme ça about everything.’

  This time it was Koestler who protested, ‘Yes, but surely we can remain friends just the same.’

  To this, she responded with phenomenology. ‘As a philosopher, you must realise that each of us when he looks at a morceau de sucre [sugar lump] sees an entirely different object. Our morceaux de sucre are now so different that there’s no point in our meeting any longer.’

  It’s a saddening image: sweet confections on a table; philosophers peering at them from different sides. To each of them, the sugar presents itself differently. It catches the light from one side, but not from the other. To one, it looks bright and sparkly; to another, grey and matte. To one, it means a delicious addition to coffee. To another, it means the historical evils of slavery in the sugar trade. And the conclusion? That there is no point in even talking about it. This is a strange distortion of the phenomenological theme. The X of political cross-purposes also makes a nasty twist on Merleau-Ponty’s all-reconciling ‘chiasm’ figure. The whole knotted mess ends in silence — and that in turn recalls the silence that descended over Marcuse and Heidegger around the same time, when Marcuse concluded that no dialogue was possible given the immensity of their difference.

  The debate about friendship is really a variant of the debate about what sacrifices might be worth making for Communism. In both cases, you have to weigh abstract values against what is personal, individual and immediate. You have to decide what matters most: the person in front of you now, or the effects your choices might have on an un defined population of future people. Each of our thinkers resolved this conundrum differently — and sometimes the same person reached different conclusions at different times.

  Sartre was the least consistent of them all, both on the Soviet question and on the question of friendship, for he did sometimes expect people to be loyal to him despite political differences. In October 1947, he expected loyalty from his old schoolmate Raymond Aron, but did not get it, and was so angry that he broke off contact completely.

  That year was a difficult one for France — which was probably also why the Koestler quarrel had become so heated. The country was ruled by a centrist coalition government, but this had come under attack both from the Communist left and from the right-wing Rassemblement du peuple français, led by the wartime head of the French forces in exile, General Charles de Gaulle. Sartre felt that the Gaullist party had become almost fascist in style, indulging in mass rallies and whipping up a personality cult around the leader. But Aron, who had been with the Free French in London and knew de Gaulle well, had much more sympathy for his approach and had moved well to the right of Sartre.

  The autumn saw a growing crisis, as the Gaullists’ marches and the Communist Party’s strikes and demonstrations (actively supported by the Soviet Union) both threatened the stability of the middle. People began to worry that there would be a civil war and even a revolution. Some found this prospect exciting. In a note to Merleau-Ponty, Sonia Brownell wrote that she’d just had lunch with some French writers in London who could not stop gabbling about the battles they intended to fight on Paris’ streets, and the best way of making petrol bombs.

  With this crisis at its height, Aron chaired a radio debate pitting Sartre, as a representative of the left, against a gang of Gaullists — who laid into him ferociously on air. Aron stayed out of it, and Sartre was dismayed at Aron’s letting them gang up on him without attempting to support his old friend. Looking back on the incident, Aron claimed that he did not feel entitled to take sides since he was the chair of the discussion. Sartre suspected that the real reason was Aron’s own Gaullist sympathies. For years, the two men did not speak.

  Aron may not have realised how personally threatened Sartre felt during this period. He received menacing letters, one containing a picture of himself smeared with excrement. One night he heard that a gang of army officers was roaming the Left Bank looking for him; he sought refuge with friends and did not return to his well-known address above the Bar Napoléon for several days. This would not be the last time his outspoken political views put him in danger.

  In truth, at this stage, Sartre was simultaneously opposed to the Gaullists and still critical of the Soviet Union; he thus drew the anger of both sides. French Communists had long disapproved of existentialism as a philosophy because of its insistence on personal freedom. A 1946 pamphlet by the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre had summed up existentialism as ‘a dreary, flabby mixture’ leading to too much dangerous ‘open-mindedness’. People were free, Sartre said — but Lefebvre demanded to know, ‘what would a man who every morning chose between fascism and anti-fascism represent?’ How can such a person be considered better than someone ‘who had chosen, once and for all, the fight against fascism, or who had not even had to choose?’ Lefebvre’s point sounds reasonable until you think about what it implies. The party demanded the kind of commitment that means never having to think again, and this Sartre could not support — yet. Later, he tied himself in knots trying to resolve the conflict between his support for revolutionary politics and his basic existentialist principles, which ran counter to it.

  In February 1948, he tried resolving the conundrum by joining a breakaway party, the Rassemblement démocratique revolutionnaire (RDR) or Revolutionary Democratic Assembly, which aimed at a nonaligned socialism. The party did not accomplish much except to make things more complicated, and Sartre resigned after a year and a half.

  Meanwhile, in April 1948, he got himself into even more trouble with his new play called, naturally, Dirty Hands. This showed party members in Illyria, a fictional small country reminiscent of post-war Hungary, making moral compromises with their ideals and trying to come to terms with their prospects as they wait for a S
oviet-style takeover. The Communists were not amused. The Soviet cultural commissar Alexander Fadayev called Sartre ‘a hyena with a fountain pen’ and Sartre went out of favour in all the Soviet bloc countries. The Czech writer Ivan Klíma, then a college student, listened to his teachers attacking Sartre for his ‘decay and moral degeneration’ — which immediately made Klíma desperate to read him.

  Sartre was now under attack from all sides, politically confused, and overworking himself more than ever in an attempt to make it all add up. Much of his stress was self-inflicted, yet he was not prepared to make his life easier by simply keeping quiet occasionally. Beauvoir too was under strain from work, political tension and a personal crisis: she was trying to decide how to manage her long-distance relationship with Nelson Algren, who was not happy coming second to Sartre and wanted her to move to America. She and Sartre both tried to stave off their exhaustion with pills. Sartre became ever more addicted to his favourite drug Corydrane, a combined amphetamine and painkiller. Beauvoir took orthedrine for anxiety attacks, but it only made them worse. By the time she and Sartre set off for a Scandinavian holiday in the summer of 1948, she was suffering hallucinations in which birds swooped down at her and hands pulled her upwards by her hair. The calm of the northern forests helped her more than the pills did. She and Sartre saw beautiful things there: ‘dwarf forests, earth the colour of amethysts planted with tiny trees red as coral and yellow as gold’. Beauvoir’s pleasure in life gradually returned. But Sartre remained a tormented soul for the next few years.

  On 29 August 1949, after years of espionage and development, the Soviet Union exploded an atom bomb. From now on, the threat of annihilation would be mutual. A few months later, on 1 October, Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China and allied it with the Soviet Union, so that now two Communist superpowers faced the West. The fear level increased. American schoolchildren were put through drills in which they responded to a bomb warning by diving under desks with their hands covering their heads. The government poured money into further research, and on January 1950 announced that they were working on a much bigger weapon, the hydrogen or H-bomb.

  That year, war broke out on the Korean peninsula, with both China and the Soviet Union backing the North against the US in the South. The consequences seemed incalculable: would the Bomb go off? Would the war spread to Europe? Would the Russians occupy France as the Germans had done? This last idea came remarkably quickly to French minds, which may seem odd when the war was on the other side of the world, but it reflected the still-recent memories of the last Occupation, and the alarming and unpredictable nature of the new conflict.

  Camus asked Sartre if he’d thought about what would happen to him personally if the Russians invaded. Perhaps the ‘hyena with a fountain pen’ would not be allowed to have the last laugh. Sartre turned the question back on the questioner: what would Camus do? Oh, said Camus, he would do what he did during the German Occupation — meaning he would join the Resistance. Sartre responded piously that he could never fight against the proletariat. Camus pressed his point: ‘You must leave. If you stay it won’t be only your life they’ll take, but your honour as well. They’ll cart you off to a camp and you’ll die. Then they’ll say you’re still alive, and they’ll use your name to preach resignation and submission and treason; and people will believe them.’

  Over dinner with Jacques-Laurent Bost, Olga Kosakiewicz and Richard Wright — the latter now living in Paris — Beauvoir and Sartre again discussed the subject: ‘how to get away, where, when?’ Nelson Algren had written offering to help them get into the United States, but they did not want this. If they had to leave France, it should be for a neutral country. Perhaps, Beauvoir wrote, they would go to Brazil, where the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig had found refuge during the last war. But Zweig had committed suicide there, unable to endure exile. And this time it would be to flee socialism! How could this be happening?

  Merleau-Ponty likewise feared the worst for France should there be war, yet he too did not want to run away from Communists. Sartre noted that he now seemed exceptionally light-hearted — ‘with that boyish air which I always knew him to assume when matters threatened to turn serious’. If the invasion came, joked Merleau-Ponty, he would go and become an elevator boy in New York.

  Merleau-Ponty was more disturbed by events than he showed, and not just from personal fear. While the Korean conflict was building, he and Sartre had bumped into each other on holiday in Saint-Raphaël on the Côte d’Azur. They were happy to see one another, but then argued all day, first as they walked along the seafront, then on the terrace of a café, and then at the station where Sartre awaited his train. They had to thrash out a coherent editorial position on Korea for Les Temps modernes. But Merleau-Ponty had come to feel they should not fire off instant opinions on situations they did not understand. Sartre disagreed. If war is imminent, how can you keep silent? Merleau-Ponty took a gloomy view: ‘Because brute force will decide the outcome. Why speak to what has no ears?’

  The underlying disagreement was about more than editorial policy; it was about how far one should take one’s belief in Communism. Merleau-Ponty had been shocked by North Korea’s invasion of the South, and thought it showed the Communist world to be just as greedy as the capitalist world and just as inclined to use ideology as a veil. He had also been disturbed by the increasing publicity about Soviet camps. This represented a major change of perspective for the man who, until recently, had been the most pro-Communist of them all. Conversely, the once-wary Sartre was becoming more inclined to give Communist countries the benefit of the doubt.

  No Soviet invasion of France came out of the Korean conflict, but the war, which continued until 1953, did change the global political landscape and spread a mood of paranoia and anxiety as the Cold War settled in. During these years, Merleau-Ponty continued to develop his doubts, while Sartre climbed off the fence. What really radicalised him was a bizarre event in France.

  One evening, on 28 May 1952, a police road unit waved down the current leader of the French Communist Party, Jacques Duclos, and searched his car. Finding a revolver, a radio and a pair of pigeons in a basket, they arrested him, claiming that the birds were carrier pigeons intended for taking messages to his Soviet masters. Duclos replied that the pigeons were dead, and thus unsuitable for use as carriers. He had been taking them to his wife to cook for dinner. The police said that the birds were still warm and not yet stiff, and that Duclos could have hastily smothered them. They locked him up in a holding cell.

  The next day, an autopsy was conducted on the pigeons, searching for microfilm hidden inside their persons. There followed a hearing at which three pigeon experts were brought in to give an opinion on the birds’ ages, which they estimated at twenty-six and thirty-five days respectively, and on their exact breed — which they pointedly said they could not identify ‘because the number and variety of known pigeon types, and the many cross-breeds that have been and still are being created by amateur breeders, makes identification difficult’. The experts concluded, however, that the pigeons were probably of the common domestic type found everywhere, and showed no signs of being bred to carry messages. All the same, Duclos was kept in prison for a month before being released. A huge campaign was mounted to support him, and the Communist poet Louis Aragon wrote a poem about the ‘pigeon plot’.

  This absurd affair seemed to Sartre the culmination of years of harassment and provocation of Communists in France. As he wrote later, ‘after ten years of ruminating, I had come to the breaking point’. The pigeon plot drove him to make a commitment. As he wrote, ‘In the language of the Church, this was my conversion.’

  Perhaps, in the language of Heideggerianism, it was his Kehre — a ‘turn’ which required every point of Sartre’s thought to be reconsidered according to new priorities. While Heidegger’s turn had led him away from resoluteness into ‘letting-be’, Sartre’s now led him to become more resolute, more engagé, more public, and less willing to compr
omise. Feeling at once that he had to ‘write or suffocate’, he wrote at top speed and produced the first part of a long essay called The Communists and Peace. He wrote it with rage in his heart, he said later — but also with Corydrane in his blood. Barely stopping for sleep, he produced pages of justifications and arguments in favour of the Soviet state, and published the result in Les Temps modernes in July 1952. A few months later, he followed it with another intemperate outburst, this time attacking his friend Albert Camus.

  A confrontation with Camus had been building for a while. It was almost inevitable, considering how different their views had become. In 1951, Camus published an extended essay, The Rebel, in which he laid out a theory of rebellion and political activism that was very different from the Communist-approved one.

  For Marxists, human beings are destined to progress through predefined stages of history towards a final socialist paradise. The road will be long, but we are bound to get there, and all will be perfect when we do. Camus disagreed on two counts: he did not think that history led to a single inevitable destination, and he did not think there was such a thing as perfection. As long as we have human societies, we will have rebellions. Each time a revolution overturns the ills of a society, a new status quo is created, which then develops its own excesses and injustices. Each generation has a fresh duty to revolt against these, and this will be the case forever.

  Moreover, for Camus, true rebellion does not mean reaching towards an ecstatic vision of a shining city on a hill. It means setting a limit on some very real present state of affairs that has become unacceptable. For example, a slave who has been ordered around all his life suddenly decides he will take no more, and draws a line, saying ‘so far but no further’. Rebellion is a reining in of tyranny. As rebels keep countering new tyrannies, a balance is created: a state of moderation that must be tirelessly renewed and maintained.