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

  Very late in life, during an event in aid of refugees from Vietnam in the late 1970s, Sartre and Aron met and shook hands while photographers clicked away, excited at capturing what they took to be a major reconciliation. By this time, however, Sartre was ill and rather dazed, losing his vision and much of his hearing. Either because of this, or as a deliberate snub, Sartre did not reply in kind when Aron greeted him with their old term of endearment, ‘Bonjour, mon petit camarade.’ He responded only, ‘Bonjour.’

  One famous remark has come to be associated with Aron and Sartre, although it was not spoken by either one of them. In 1976, during an interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy, Aron opined that leftist intellectuals hated him not because he had pointed out the true nature of Communism, but because he had never shared their belief in it in the first place. Lévy replied, ‘What do you think? Is it better, in that case, to be Sartre or Aron? Sartre the mistaken victor, or Aron defeated but correct?’ Aron gave no clear answer. But the question was remembered, and converted into a simple and sentimental maxim: that it is better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.

  During the 1950s, determined to give his time and energy to any cause he thought needed him, Sartre overstretched himself alarmingly. This led to some of his most foolish and reprehensible moments, as when he travelled to the Soviet Union at the invitation of an organisation of Russian writers in May 1954, and afterwards published a series of articles suggesting, for example, that Soviet citizens did not travel because they had no desire to do so and were too busy building Communism. Later, he claimed that, having come home in a state of exhaustion, he had delegated the writing to his secretary, Jean Cau.

  Cau did recall of this period that Sartre’s fear of underproducing often drove him over the edge. ‘There’s no time!’ he would cry. One by one, he gave up his greatest pleasures: the cinema, theatre, novels. He wanted only to write, write, write. This was when he convinced himself that literary quality control was bourgeois self-indulgence; only the cause mattered, and it was a sin to revise or even to reread. He filled sheets with ink while Beauvoir, a painstaking reviser herself, watched nervously. Sartre churned out essays, talks, philosophical works — occasionally with help from Cau, but mostly alone. His bibliographers Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka calculated that, over his entire life, he averaged twenty pages a day, and that was of completed work, not drafts. (By this stage, there were no drafts.) In Ireland too John Huston had been amazed each morning at breakfast to find that Sartre had been up for hours and had already written some twenty-five new pages of his Freud script. Sartre’s biographer Annie Cohen-Solal used engine-room and turbine metaphors to describe his production from the late 1940s onwards, while Olivier Wickers wrote of his treating sleep as a military necessity: a bivouac, or the pit stop one must give a machine to keep it working.

  (Illustrations Credit 11.1)

  Meanwhile, he continued overdosing on Corydrane. The recommended intake was one or two pills daily, but Sartre got through a whole tube. He combined it with heavy drinking, and even enjoyed the way the combination scrambled his brains: ‘I liked having confused, vaguely questioning ideas that then fell apart.’ Often, at the end of a day, he took downers to help him pass out. He did cut down on the Corydrane when writing something ‘literary’, because he knew it led to too much ‘facility’, as he put it. Writing a new scene for his Roads of Freedom series, for example, he found that every street his character Mathieu walked down generated a mass of fresh metaphors. When he mentioned this to Beauvoir in an interview, she added, with (one imagines) a shudder, ‘I remember. It was dreadful.’ The fatal ‘facility’ had already become evident in a 1951 notebook he kept in Italy, of which he said to Beauvoir in 1974 that there were some twenty pages ‘about the plashing sound that gondolas make’. Of course, this could just be diligent phenomenology.

  Very little of the overproduction came from either authorial vanity or from need of money. His Freud screenplay, taken on to pay a bill, was a rare exception. Mostly it came from his love of commitment and his desire to help friends by promoting their writing or campaigns. This generosity of purpose is an easily forgotten fact about Sartre. He expected himself to do something at every moment: to be engaged and active even when he had no time to think things through. More circumspect types stopped for reflection, but Sartre thought that was a bourgeois luxury too.

  Merleau-Ponty once said in an interview that there was a simple fact about Sartre that few people know and that did not often come across in his books. It was this: ‘il est bon’. He is good. His ‘goodness’ was his fatal flaw: it led him to overwork, and more significantly it was what led him to believe that he must reconcile his existentialism with Marxism in the first place. That was an impossible and destructive task: the two just were incompatible. But Sartre thought the oppressed classes of the world required it from him.

  Many years later, in an interview just before Sartre’s death, his young assistant Benny Lévy challenged him — quite aggressively — to say who exactly it was that vanished when the pro-Soviet apologist in Sartre finally disappeared. Who died, he asked? ‘A sinister scoundrel, a dimwit, a sucker, or a basically good person?’

  Sartre answered, mildly, ‘I’d say, a person who’s not bad.’

  Whatever goodness there had been in defending Soviet Communism earlier in the 1950s, it became harder to see in October and November 1956.

  When Stalin died, the talk of a ‘thaw’ in the Soviet Union’s policies had encouraged reformers in Hungary’s Communist government to introduce a few signs of personal and political freedom. Demonstrators took to the streets demanding more. In response, the Soviet Union sent soldiers, and battles broke out around Budapest; the rebels seized the city’s radio station and called on Hungarians to resist. An apparent truce held for a while, but on 1 November Russian tanks rolled across the border from Ukraine and lumbered on into Budapest. Tank troops demolished buildings where people were hiding. They fired on railway stations and public squares, and threatened to destroy the city’s Parliament buildings. On Sunday 4 November, at noon, the radio rebels surrendered with their final broadcast: ‘We are now going off the air. Vive l’Europe! Vive la Hongrie!’ The rebellion was defeated.

  For Communist sympathisers in the West, this demonstration of brute Soviet power was a great shock. Many tore up their Communist Party cards, and even the remaining believers wrung their hands and wondered how to incorporate the new development into their vision. Sartre and Beauvoir were among those most confused. In January 1957, they produced a special issue of Les Temps modernes condemning the Soviet action and giving space to many Hungarian writers to write about the events — but in private they continued to feel uneasy, and they disliked the way the right seized on the invasion to promote their own ideology.

  Very soon after the Hungarian uprising, Sartre began to write a new work of vast extent, the Critique of Dialectical Reason. It was an attempt to create something on the scale of Being and Nothingness, but built around his new social thinking and the ideal of political commitment. Instead of emphasing consciousness, nothingness and freedom, he now brought everything back to concrete situations and the principle of concerted action in the world. Beauvoir considered the Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre’s ultimate response to the catastrophe of 1956. As if merging Marxism with existentialism were not acrobatic enough, he was now trying to adapt the result to a situation in which the Soviet Union had proved itself untrustworthy. As Sartre himself put it in 1975, ‘The Critique is a Marxist work written against the Communists.’ It could also be seen as an existentialist work written against the old, unpoliticised existentialism.

  The book was formidably difficult to bring off. Sartre published the first volume, Theory of Practical Ensembles, in 1960; that alone reached nearly 400,000 words. The second volume — surprise! — was never finished. He made extensive notes but could not get it into shape. These notes were published posthumously in 1985.

  By the time of giving up on the
second volume, Sartre’s attention had already turned away from the Soviet Union and towards new battles. He took an interest in Mao’s China. He also began to see himself as an intellectual pioneer, not of Communism, but of a more radical rebellion — one that fit much better with the existentialist way of life.

  12

  THE EYES OF THE LEAST FAVOURED

  In which we meet revolutionaries, outsiders and seekers after authenticity.

  If a lot of people with incompatible interests all claim that right is on their side, how do you decide between them? In a paragraph of the final part of The Communists and Peace, Sartre had sketched the outline of a bold solution: why not decide every situation by asking how it looks to ‘the eyes of the least favoured’, or to ‘those treated the most unjustly’? You just need to work out who is most oppressed and disadvantaged in the situation, and then adopt their version of events as the right one. Their view can be considered the criterion for truth itself: the way of establishing ‘man and society as they truly are’. If something is not true in the eyes of the least favoured, says Sartre, then it is not true.

  As an idea, this is astoundingly simple and refreshing. At a stroke, it wipes out the weasely cant indulged in by the advantaged — all those convenient claims that the poor ‘deserve’ their fate, or that the rich are entitled to the disproportionate wealth that accumulates upon them, or that inequality and suffering should be accepted as inevitable parts of life. For Sartre, if the poor and disadvantaged do not believe such arguments, they are wrong arguments. This is similar to what one might call the Genet Principle: that the underdog is always right. From now on, like Jean Genet, Sartre submits himself joyfully to the alienated, downtrodden, thwarted and excluded. He tries to adopt the gaze of the outsider, turned against the privileged caste — even when that caste includes himself.

  No one could say that this is easy to do, and not only because (as Beauvoir had pointed out in The Second Sex) borrowing someone else’s perspective puts a strain on the psyche. Anyone who tries to do it also runs into a mass of logical and conceptual problems. Disagreements inevitably ensue about who exactly is least favoured at any moment. Each time an underdog becomes an overdog, everything has to be recalculated. Constant monitoring of roles is required — and who is to do the monitoring?

  As Merleau-Ponty pointed out in his ‘Sartre and Ultrabolshevism’, Sartre himself did not stick to his own principle. Confronted with the gaze of those unfavoured in Stalin’s prisons, he managed for a long time to take no account of their accusing eyes, giving reasons why they could be disregarded. But perhaps the ‘gaze’ idea was never intended to make consistent sense. Just as with Levinas’ or Weil’s ethical philosophies, in which the demands made on us by the gaze of the Other are theoretically infinite in extent, an ideal does not become any less inspiring just because it is impossible to stick to.

  Sartre’s ‘eyes of the least favoured’ idea is as radical as Levinas’ Other-directed ethics, and more radical than Communism. Communists believe that only the party can decide what is right. To turn morality over to a mass of human eyes and personal perspectives is to invite chaos and lose the possibility of a real revolution. Sartre ignored the party line and revealed himself to be just as much of an old maverick as ever. He could not be a proper Marxist even when he was trying.

  His new approach appealed more to activists who did not want to join any party but who were active in new-style liberation movements, especially the protests of the 1950s and 1960s against racism, sexism, social exclusion, poverty and colonialism. Sartre threw his weight behind these struggles, and did what he could to help — mostly with his favourite weapon, the pen. Writing forewords for younger authors’ polemics gave him new subjects to be engagé about, and allowed him to feel that his philosophy was truly achieving something, a feeling that had eluded him after the Soviet project curdled.

  As long ago as 1948, he had written an essay called ‘Black Orpheus’, originally published as the preface to Léopold Senghor’s Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry. Sartre there described how poetry by black and postcolonial writers often reversed the fixing, judging ‘gaze’ of their oppressors. From now on, he said, white Europeans can no longer coolly assess and master the world. Instead, ‘these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind’. (Sartre was still polishing his metaphors in those days.)

  In 1957, he introduced Albert Memmi’s double work Portrait du colonisé and Portrait du colonisateur (translated as The Colonizer and the Colonized), which analysed the ‘myths’ of colonialism in the same way that Beauvoir had analysed the myths of femininity in The Second Sex. After this, Sartre wrote an even more influential foreword to an epoch-defining 1961 work of anti-colonialism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

  Fanon was a messianic thinker and an intellectual who had been influenced by existentialism himself, and who devoted his short life to questions of race, independence and revolutionary violence. Born in Martinique, of mixed African and European descent, he studied philosophy in Lyons — with Merleau-Ponty among others, although Fanon did not warm to Merleau-Ponty’s calm style. When he published his own first book in 1952, it was impassioned rather than calm, but it was also highly phenomenological: Black Skin, White Masks explored the ‘lived experience’ of black people cast into a role of Other in a white-dominated world.

  Next, Fanon moved to Algeria and became active in the independence movement, but was expelled for this in 1956 and went to live in Tunisia. While there, he was diagnosed with leukaemia. He had treatment in the Soviet Union, and gained a brief remission, but was once again gravely ill in 1961 when he began work on The Wretched of the Earth. Feverish and weak, he travelled to Rome, and was there introduced to Beauvoir and Sartre by Claude Lanzmann.

  Sartre fell for Fanon immediately, and was delighted to write a foreword for The Wretched of the Earth. He already liked Fanon’s work, and he liked him even better in person. Lanzmann later commented that he had never seen Sartre so captivated by a man as at that meeting. The four of them talked through lunch, then all through the afternoon, then all evening, until 2 a.m., when Beauvoir finally insisted that Sartre needed to sleep. Fanon was offended: ‘I don’t like people who hoard their resources.’ He kept Lanzmann up until eight the next morning.

  By this time, Fanon had only a few months to live. In his last weeks, he was flown to the United States to get the best available treatment, a trip arranged (surprisingly) by a CIA agent with whom he had become friends, Ollie Iselin. But nothing could be done, and he died in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961, aged thirty-six. The Wretched of the Earth came out just afterwards, with the foreword by Sartre.

  Beauvoir recalled Fanon saying in Rome, ‘We have claims on you’ — just the sort of thing they loved to hear. That burning intensity, and the willingness to make demands and to assign guilt if necessary, was what had attracted Beauvoir to Lanzmann. Now it thrilled Sartre too. Perhaps it took them back to their war years: a time when everything mattered. Sartre certainly embraced Fanon’s militant arguments, which in this book included the notion that anti-imperial revolution must inevitably be violent, not just because violence was effective (though that was one reason) but because it helped the colonised to shake off the paralysis of oppression and forge a new shared identity. Without glorifying violence, Fanon considered it essential to political change; he had little sympathy for Gandhi’s idea of of non-violent resistence as a source of power. In his contribution, Sartre endorsed Fanon’s view so enthusiastically that he outdid the original, shifting the emphasis so as to praise violence for its own sake. Sartre seemed to see the violence of the oppressed as a Nietzschean act of self-creation. Like Fanon, he also contrasted it with the hidden brutality of colonialism. And, as in ‘Black Orpheus’, he invited his readers (presumed white) to imagine the gaze of the oppressed turned against them, strip
ping away their bourgeois hypocrisy and revealing them as monsters of greed and self-interest.

  Sartre’s foreword to The Wretched of the Earth provides a snapshot of what was at once most odious and most admirable about him in these militant years. His fetishising of violence is shocking, yet there is still something to be admired in his willingness to engage with the predicament of the marginalised and oppressed in such a radical way. Indeed, Sartre had by now become so used to taking radical stances that he hardly knew any longer how to be moderate. As his friend Olivier Todd commented, Sartre’s beliefs changed, but his extremism never did. Sartre agreed. Asked in 1975 to name his worst failing, he replied, ‘Naturally in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another. But at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.’

  Being radical meant upsetting people, and this could include other radicals. Frantz Fanon’s widow Josie Fanon was among those to turn against Sartre: she disliked the fact that he also supported Zionism during this period, which she felt made him an enemy to most Algerians. Sartre’s ability to engage with both causes speaks for his generous intentions. Yet it also shows another paradox in his ‘least favoured’ principle. More than one group can be considered unfavoured by history, so what happens if their claims are incompatible? Sartre’s praise of violence held a worse paradox too: who could be less ‘favoured’ than the victim of any violent attack, regardless of its motivation or context?