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

  Camus’ vision of endless self-moderating rebellion is appealing — but it was rightly seen as an attack on Soviet Communism and its fellow travellers. Sartre knew that it was directed partly against himself, and he could not forgive Camus for playing into the hands of the right at a delicate historical moment. The book clearly called for a review in Les Temps modernes. Sartre hesitated to rip his old friend to pieces, so he delegated the task to his young colleague Francis Jeanson — who ripped Camus to pieces, damning the The Rebel as an apology for capitalism. Camus defended himself in a seventeen-page letter to the editor, meaning Sartre, although he did not name him. He accused Jeanson of misrepresenting his argument, and added, ‘I am beginning to become a little tired of seeing myself … receive endless lessons in effectiveness from critics who have never done anything more than turn their armchair in history’s direction.’

  This dig prompted Sartre to write his own response after all. It turned into an ad hominem tirade that was overemotional even by his own recent standards. That’s it, said Sartre; their friendship was over. Of course he would miss Camus, especially the old Camus that he remembered from wartime Resistance days. But now that his friend had become a counter-revolutionary, no reconciliation was possible. Again, nothing could trump politics.

  Camus never published a reply to Sartre’s reply, although he did draft one. Again, the rest was silence. Well, not exactly, because ever since this famous quarrel occurred, a little industry of books and articles has flourished, analysing the confrontation to its last punctuation mark. It has come to be seen as a quarrel that defines a whole age and an intellectual milieu. It is often mythologised as a drama in which Sartre, a ‘dreaming boy’ chasing an impossible fantasy, meets his comeuppance in the form of a clear-sighted moral hero who also happens to be cooler and wiser and better-looking: Camus.

  This makes a good story, but I think there are subtler ways to think about it, and that it helps if we make the effort to understand Sartre’s motivation, and to ask why he reacted so intemperately. Pressurised about politics for years, taunted as a decadent bourgeois, Sartre had undergone a conversion experience which had made him see the whole world in a new light. He considered it his duty to renounce personal feeling for Camus. Individual sentiment was a self-indulgence, and must be transcended. Just like Heidegger in his Being and Time period, Sartre thought the important thing was to be resolute at all costs: to grasp what must be done, and do it. In the Algerian War, Camus would choose his mother over justice, but Sartre decided that it was not right to choose his friend if his friend was betraying the working class. Beauvoir, charmed though she had been by Camus in the past, took the same line: The Rebel was a deliberate gift to their enemies at a crucial point in history, and it could not be allowed to pass.

  Camus was disturbed by the quarrel, which occurred at a difficult period for him. His personal life was soon to get worse, with marriage difficulties, writer’s block, and the horror of war in his Algerian homeland. In 1956 his crisis would find expression in a novella, The Fall, whose hero is a ‘judge-penitent’: a former trial judge who has decided to sit in judgement on himself. In an Amsterdam bar, over several evenings, the judge relates his life to an unnamed narrator, culminating in a shocking story. One night in Paris, he saw a woman throw herself off a bridge, yet failed to jump in and save her. He cannot forgive himself. The judge acknowledges his sins, but on the other hand he seems to feel that this gives him moral authority to point out the sins of others. As he tells his interlocutor, and implicitly also us, his readers, ‘The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.’ There is a lot of Camus in this remark.

  Sartre and Beauvoir were not penitents like the protagonist of The Fall, but they were aware of stern eyes looking back at them from the future. ‘We feel that we are being judged by the masked men who will succeed us’, wrote Sartre in 1952, adding, ‘our age will be an object for those future eyes whose gaze haunts us’. Beauvoir wrote in her last volume of memoirs that she had once felt superior to earlier writers because, by definition, she knew more history than they did. Then the obvious truth dawned: her generation too would one day be judged by future criteria. She saw that her contemporaries would suffer what historian E. P. Thompson later called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.

  Sartre still believed, however, that one must call the shots as one sees them at the time. If you fence-sit just because you are scared to make an error, then you are definitely making one. As Kierkegaard had said:

  It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it.

  There would never be a point of stillness and contemplation. For Sartre, in politics as in everything, the correct direction was always onwards — even if that onward road led you round U-turns, and even if you went too fast to be fully in control.

  Sartre upset another old friend through his actions with Les Temps modernes in 1952: he printed his first Communists and Peace article without showing it to his co-editor Merleau-Ponty. This was a breach of manners which Sartre knew might cause offence. He also knew that Merleau-Ponty might object to the article or suggest toning it down, and in his passion Sartre could not bear any such delay.

  By this time, Merleau-Ponty had moved closer to Camus’ position, but with the major difference that he had once put his faith in the socialist utopia. Camus had never shared the ‘dream’, but Merleau-Ponty knew what it meant to be a believer. This made Merleau-Ponty an insightful critic after giving it up, but it did not make him any more able to save his relationship with Sartre.

  The tension between the two men grew through 1952 and into early 1953. On 15 January that year, Sartre attended the Collège de France to hear Merleau-Ponty’s inaugural lecture in his new role as its head. Merleau-Ponty used the lecture, among other things, to remind philosophers to remain vigilant about public affairs, and to be alert to ambiguities. Afterwards, Sartre failed to speak the conventional words of warm congratulation. According to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre said ‘in a glacially cold tone’ that the lecture was ‘amusing’, and added, waving at the collège with its Establishment air, ‘I hope that you are going to subvert all this a little.’ Sartre himself had refused all similar honours offered to him and would continue to do so — to the point that, a decade later, he would turn down the Nobel Prize. He always felt that Merleau-Ponty was too willing to become a cosy insider.

  Merleau-Ponty had accepted the Collège de France role without a qualm, and was now hurt by Sartre’s attitude. He let it pass, but that summer their disagreement blew up in letters while Sartre was on holiday in a sweltering Rome. Afterwards Sartre realised that the heat may have gone to his head. Also, as usual, he had been working too hard and obsessing about the future of humanity.

  Sartre began by writing to tell Merleau-Ponty that a person who was no longer ‘engaged’ politically should not expect to criticise those who were. You are right, Merleau-Ponty replied. Indeed, he has now decided never again to issue hasty responses to events as they occur. After Korea, he has concluded that one needs a longer perspective to understand history. He no longer wishes to ‘become engaged on every event, as if it were a test of morality’ — a tendency which he describes as bad faith. This was a provocative thing to say to Sartre, of all people. Merleau-Ponty also complained about Sartre’s cold treatment of him after the lecture, which was still rankling.

  Sartre replied on 29 July, ‘for God’s sake, don’t interpret my intonations or physiognomies as you do, that is, wholly askew and emotionally’. As to his tone, he now says, touchingly and plausibly, ‘If I appeared glacially cold, it’s because I always have a kind of timidity about congratulating people. I don’t know how to do it, and I’m aware of this. It’s certai
nly a character trait, and I admit it to you.’

  This should have mollified Merleau-Ponty, but there was still an offensive tone in Sartre’s letters, and the roots of their disagreement were profound. As usual, Merleau-Ponty smiled things off after Sartre’s return, which annoyed Sartre even more. As Sartre himself admitted, his own tendency was to argue a question to the end, until he had either convinced the other person or the other had convinced him. Merleau-Ponty, instead, ‘found his security in a multiplicity of perspectives, seeing in them the different facets of being’. How infuriating!

  In reality, Merleau-Ponty too was disturbed by the quarrel. His daughter Marianne remembers hearing her parents discussing Sartre for hours. Also, he had to decide what to do about Les Temps modernes. For a long time he had done much of the actual work there, writing unsigned editorials and making sure each issue came out on time. But Sartre was the figurehead, and no one could work at Les Temps modernes without getting on with its star. As Sartre remembered it, Merleau-Ponty began turning up ever later to editorial meetings, and muttering asides instead of openly taking part in discussion. Sartre challenged him to say what he was thinking; Merleau-Ponty preferred not to.

  By the end of 1953, Les Temps modernes was ready to explode — and then came the spark. They had taken on a strongly pro-Soviet piece, and Merleau-Ponty wrote an editorial remark to preface it, pointing out that the views it expressed were not those of Les Temps modernes. Seeing the text before publication, Sartre cut the remark without telling Merleau-Ponty.

  When Merleau-Ponty realised this, he and Sartre had a long, strained telephone conversation. Sartre recalled it later; Marianne Merleau-Ponty also remembers overhearing it. After two hours on the phone, her father hung up, turned to her mother, and said, ‘Alors, c’est fini’ — ‘Well, that’s the end of it.’ He probably meant that he had ended his involvement in Les Temps modernes, but it could equally be taken as referring to the end of the friendship. Afterwards, the two men spoke from time to time, and Merleau-Ponty would courteously say, ‘I’ll call you.’ But, said Sartre, he never did.

  The crisis with Sartre coincided with a greater trauma in Merleau-Ponty’s life: his mother died in December 1953. Having grown up without a father, and being obliged to defend her against gossip, he had become exceptionally close to her. As Sartre recognised later, she had been the source of the happy childhood that had made such a difference in Merleau-Ponty’s life; her death meant losing his connection to that golden age. Shortly afterwards, recalled Sartre, Merleau-Ponty met Beauvoir and said to her, ‘casually, with that sad gaiety which masked his most sincere moments: “But I am more than half dead.” ’ The break with Sartre was less significant than this bereavement, but it came at a bad time, and robbed him of the routine and the sense of mission that Les Temps modernes had brought to his life.

  Sartre too may have been more upset by the break than he revealed. He overreacted, alleging that Merleau-Ponty’s entire history at Les Temps modernes had been treacherous. He thought his co-editor had kept his profile low deliberately, not putting his name on the masthead so as to avoid committing himself to any definite perspective. Merleau-Ponty was as much in command as himself, but remained ‘light and free as air’, grumbled Sartre. If he did not like something he could walk away. In general, Merleau-Ponty resolved conflicts by seeking ‘a living accord’ rather than by exerting authority in a straightforward way. These seem strange complaints, but rather typical ones to hear about Merleau-Ponty, who was so amiable, and so damned elusive.

  In 1955, Merleau-Ponty laid out his final rejection of Communist ideology in a book called Adventures of the Dialectic. This combined critiques of Georg Lukács and other Marxist theorists with a long chapter, ‘Sartre and Ultrabolshevism’, which took Sartre’s recent political writings to task for their inconsistencies and lack of practicality. Beauvoir waded in with an essay attacking Merleau-Ponty, arguing that he had misunderstood aspects of Sartre’s thought. Her old friendship with him had now also disappeared. But the combined ire of Sartre and Beauvoir was nothing compared to the torrent of real Communist hatred that descended on Merleau-Ponty’s head from the party faithful in response to his book. A group of Communist intellectuals organised a meeting on 29 November 1955 entirely dedicated to anti-Merleau-Ponty speeches. It was attended by students, and featured denunciations by Henri Lefebvre and others. These were all collected and published in 1956, under a title playing on his own: Mésaventures de l’anti-marxisme: les malheurs de M. Merleau-Ponty.

  Shortly after this, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre found themselves thrown together at a Venice writers’ conference organised by the European Cultural Society — the same one at which Sartre told Spender that he would endure unjust imprisonment to save the Communist state. The conference brought together writers from both sides of the Iron Curtain to debate recent developments in the Soviet Union — which was now entering a post-Stalin ‘thaw’ period under Khrushchev — and also the question of a writer’s duty to be politically committed. This was the very subject over which Merleau-Ponty and Sartre had fallen out. Thinking they would be pleased to see each other, the organisers placed them side by side on the podium. Sartre blanched when he saw the name card next to his, but it was all right: ‘Someone was speaking, he came in behind me, on tiptoe, lightly touched my shoulder and when I turned around, he smiled at me.’ They had other relaxed moments during the conference too: Sartre remembered them exchanging amused looks about an English delegate — very likely Spender, who was inclined to make irreverent remarks about littérature engagée. But a single smile of complicity could not revive a friendship.

  Both philosophers had now moved far beyond the positions they had adopted in 1945 and 1946, when they shared similar views on the need to get dirty and make ‘difficult’ decisions with other people’s lives. They had crossed paths, and parted in opposite directions — another X. Sartre went through a period of doubt, then emerged from it radicalised and prepared to risk his life for the ideal state. Merleau-Ponty went deeply into Communist ideology, then gave it up in favour of a conviction that human life could never be forced to fit the lineaments of an ideal. He had, as he put it, woken up. When Communist ‘nostalgia’ is exorcised, he said, ‘one leaves behind reveries and everything becomes interesting and new again’. In the Collège de France lecture, too, he spoke of philosophers as the people who are wakeful while others sleep.

  Of course, Sartre thought he was the one who was awake. He later summed up their disagreement by saying, ‘I thought that while I was being faithful to his thought of 1945 [i.e. Merleau-Ponty’s Communist period], he was abandoning it. He thought he was remaining true to himself and I betraying him.’

  Not only is this a remarkably fair-minded portrayal of what divided them, but it resonates with echoes of an earlier, quite different schism: the one that occurred between Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in the late 1920s. They too each thought they were sailing into new and more exciting territory, leaving the other behind, lost, misled or becalmed.

  During these dramas, Beauvoir kept notes with her usual spirit of tireless observation and reflection. In 1954, she turned the notes into The Mandarins, an epic novel tracing events and emotions from the end of the war and the fear of the Bomb to the discussions of Soviet camps and trials, the pros and cons of political commitment, the love affairs and the fights. She adjusted a few details, sometimes making her friends seem wiser and more prescient than they were, but it all grew into a hefty and surprisingly enjoyable portrait of an era and a milieu. It won the Goncourt Prize. With the royalties from increased sales, she bought an apartment on the rue Victor Schoelcher near the Montparnasse cemetery. This meant that she now lived quite a way from Sartre, who continued to live with his mother above the Bar Napoléon. But she strolled along to the Saint-Germain-des-Près district most days, probably favouring the leafy route through the Jardin du Luxembourg, so as to see friends and to work side by side with Sartre as they always had.

  A new love
r moved in with her to the Montparnasse apartment, Claude Lanzmann. She had been won over by his passionate beliefs and his strong sense of who he was: she wrote that, to define himself, ‘he said first of all: I’m a Jew’. Sartre had once criticised this kind of firm identity statement as an act of bad faith, since it implied presenting oneself as a fixed self rather than as a free consciousness. In truth, she and Sartre always had a weakness for people with uncompromising identities and attitudes. Lanzmann was in a permanent state of rage about what the Jews had suffered, wrote Beauvoir admiringly. He once told her, ‘I want to kill, all the time.’ He experienced his feelings physically — as she did. He would weep or vomit out of sheer anger. By contrast to the planetary figure of Sartre at the height of his fame, it must have been refreshing. It certainly made a contrast with her former friend Merleau-Ponty, who, with every rise in the pressure level, seemed only to smile more wryly and make more quips.

  In a notebook entry written around 1954 after rereading old diaries, Sartre calmly listed recent quarrels and divergences: complete breaks with Koestler, Aron and several others, a relationship with Camus that meant speaking only briefly while ‘avoiding essential subjects’, and the split with Merleau-Ponty. (He added a diagram showing how several of them had also fallen out with each other.) He noted elsewhere that it did not bother him to lose friendships: ‘A thing is dead — that’s all.’ Yet he would write generous obituary pieces a few years later for both Camus and Merleau-Ponty. Remembering Camus, he wrote wistfully of how they would laugh together: ‘there was a side of him that smacked of the little Algerian tough guy, very much a hooligan, very funny.’ He added: ‘He was probably the last good friend I had.’

  When it came to Raymond Aron, Sartre nursed a more lasting resentment, perhaps because they had been closer in schooldays and yet had gone on to diverge more starkly over politics. In 1955, Aron published The Opium of the Intellectuals, a direct attack on Sartre and his allies, accusing them of being ‘merciless towards the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines’. Sartre took revenge in May 1968, when Aron opposed the student rebellions: he accused Aron of being unfit to teach.