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

  Not all polemics against inauthenticity were so carefully thought out. The novelist Norman Mailer — the only major American author to identify explicitly as an existentialist — devoted his 1957 essay ‘The White Negro’ to a figure whom he lauded as:

  the American existentialist — the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled … if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself.

  Mailer apparently decided to put this into practice. Having announced a plan to run for mayor of New York City on an ‘existentialist’ ticket in 1960, he had to give it up after drunkenly stabbing his wife Adele at the party to launch the campaign. He ran for mayor again in 1969, but not as an existentialist. His grasp of the philosophical theory never seemed more than superficial. When the marginally better-informed English writer Colin Wilson asked Mailer what existentialism meant to him, he reportedly waved his hand and said, ‘Oh, kinda playing things by ear.’ His biographer Mary V. Dearborn has suggested that his knowledge of the subject derived, not from the as-yet-untranslated Being and Nothingness as he liked to pretend, but from a Broadway production of No Exit combined with a hasty reading of Irrational Man, a popular guide published in 1950 by William Barrett — the philosophy professor who had earlier written about Sartre for the Partisan Review.

  William Barrett’s book was good and very influential; it followed another bestselling work edited by Walter Kaufmann in 1956, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. This collected excerpts from Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus, along with ‘parables’ by Franz Kafka and an editor’s introduction which defined existentialism as a series of ‘revolts against traditional philosophy’, by writers sharing a ‘perfervid individualism’. Both Kaufmann’s book and Barrett’s were bestsellers, and fed curiosity about the original texts, now at last appearing in translation. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex came out in English in 1953. The Myth of Sisyphus appeared in 1955, joining earlier translations of Camus’ novels. In 1956 came the big one: Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes and showing Sartre at his monumental best. Barnes followed it with books comparing existentialist thought to other traditions, including Zen Buddhism — another fashion of the era. She also presented a television series in 1961, Self-Encounter: a study in existentialism, explaining philosophical ideas with help from mini-performances of excerpts from existentialist plays. It was a great idea — although Barnes’ memoirs relate that the series was marked by a tragic incident. In one of the dramas, an actor played a doctor who reflected on the theme of death. The day after filming, the actor saw a kitten stuck up a telephone pole, and climbed up to rescue it. He touched a live wire, and was killed.

  Existentialism was all the rage in the United States by now, while on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain had been proceeding more cautiously. Professional philosophers in both countries had long since been put off by the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap, a German émigré based in the US, who had written a 1932 paper mocking such Heideggerian phrases as ‘the nothing nothings’ (das Nichts nichtet). His attack drew a line between ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy that still exists today. Non-professional readers were not concerned about this, and found existentalism stimulating — but in England, they also had other cultural obstacles to overcome. As pointed out by Iris Murdoch, the country’s first populariser of the topic, the English were used to ideas that emerged from a world in which ‘people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus’, whereas the existentialists came from a world in which people commit great sins, fall in love, and join the Communist Party. As the 1950s went on, however, English youngsters found that sin and politics could indeed be more fun than cakes.

  Iris Murdoch encouraged them. She herself had been thrilled by her first encounter with Sartre, when she was working for the refugee organisation UNRRA in Brussels in 1945. She heard him lecture in the city, had him sign her copy of L’être et le néant, and wrote to a friend, ‘The excitement — I remember nothing like it since the days of discovering Keats & Shelley & Coleridge when I was very young.’ Later she would mostly abandon existentialism, but for now she did much to publicise it. She gave talks, wrote the first book about Sartre in 1953, added existentialist flourishes to her own first novel, Under the Net, and even set her own example by indulging in free love with bisexual abandon.

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  Iris Murdoch’s academic career in Oxford and her patrician tones (she always spoke of ‘phlossofeh’ and ‘litch-cha’) limited her appeal at a time when traditional English social structures were being undermined from below by Angry Young Men with cheeky attitudes and regional accents. It was hard for pretentious Parisians to compete — until a very different English existentialist exploded onto the scene in 1956, that year of existentialist wonders.

  His name was Colin Wilson; he came from Leicester in the Midlands, and had not been to university. His book was named The Outsider, in homage to Camus’ L’étranger, and it took readers on a wild ride through alienated stranger or ‘outsider’ types in modern literature, from Dostoevsky, H. G. Wells, T. E. Lawrence and the outpourings of the disturbed dancer Vaslav Nijinsky to Sartre’s Roquentin and Camus’ Meursault. The sources were eclectic, the tone bold, the ideas big, the challenge to traditional academia unmistakable. The British book trade was taken by storm.

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  It helped that Wilson himself was a publicist’s dream. Not yet twenty-five years old, he looked gorgeous, with abundant hair falling over one brow, a firm jaw, pouting lips and a chunky existentialist turtleneck. His background was gritty, although he had fled Leicester early on to mix with the poets and beatniks of 1950s London. He spent one penniless summer in 1954 sleeping on Hampstead Heath in a small tent with two sleeping bags, cycling down every day to the library of the British Museum to leave his backpack in the cloakroom and work on a novel in the round Reading Room. That winter, he rented a room in New Cross and passed a lonely Christmas Day reading Camus’ The Stranger. Impressed by Meursault’s life of ‘smoking, making love and lounging in the sun’, he decided to write a book about the ‘outsiders’ of modern life — all those young men brooding in the margins of philosophy and the arts, searching for meaning or else finding meaning in absurdity. When the museum reopened, Wilson ordered piles of books and wrote his manuscript in an inspired rush. He found a publisher in Victor Gollancz, who took Wilson to lunch to celebrate their deal and said (as Wilson recalled it), ‘I think it possible that you may be a man of genius.’ Wilson was delighted: ‘It was a conclusion I had reached years before, but it was pleasant to hear it confirmed.’

  The publishers were even more pleased to hear the Hampstead Heath story, and to promote the irresistible notion of a beautiful young vagrant sleeping under a tree by night and writing under the museum’s venerable dome by day. When journalists ran away with the idea that Wilson had written this book while sleeping rough, no one corrected them, although in fact he was now settled in a flat in Notting Hill. The first print run of 5,000 copies sold out in a few hours. Critics raved. Punch ran a spoof which showed, ‘with frequent quotations from books we have already read, as well as some that have not been written yet’, how Lewis Carroll’s Alice turns from an Outsider to an Insider by slipping into the looking-glass world. As she does so, ‘Existentialism changes to Inexistentialism and, in the words of the Swami Oompah, the Ma
ny become More.’

  Then came the backlash. A correspondent wrote to the Times Literary Supplement pointing out eighty-six major errors and 203 minor ones in Wilson’s many quotations. Then the Daily Mail got hold of excerpts from his private journal, including the statement, ‘I am the major literary genius of our century.’ The English public may take an occasional intellectual to its bosom, but it expects genteel self-deprecation in return. What ensued was the unedifying sight of an outsider being firmly reminded of his outsiderhood. Establishment critics booted Wilson back into the wilderness. He fled to a quiet place in the country.

  The Outsider is certainly an eccentric book, revealing hasty and partial readings of its sources. Yet it has flair and conviction, and it had a deep impact on many readers — especially on those who, like Wilson himself, lacked the privileges of a canonical education but were intelligent and newly confident, eager to explore cultural ideas and to question the world. It was a book about outsiders for outsiders. One such reader was my own father, a Midlands boy born in the same year as Wilson and sharing all his curiosity and optimism. He tells me that The Outsider was one of the few sources of light during a drab period in post-war Britain.

  Wilson encouraged his readers to take his writing personally. He called his thinking ‘the new existentialism’, and gave it a life-affirming and even an ecstatic spin. In an autobiography, he revealed that he had once come close to suicide as a teenager, but decided not to go through with it. At the moment of choosing to live, he had an overwhelming experience: ‘I glimpsed the marvellous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons.’ He tried to communicate this sense of the sheer worthwhileness of life in his books, believing that the old existentialists had made an error in assessing life too glumly. In later books, this vision of human possibility led him to a range of subjects united mainly by their total lack of intellectual respectability: murder, the occult, sexuality. These did not help his reputation, but they did bring him readers. He also wrote thrillers and science fiction, although the most appealing of his novels remains his autobiographical Adrift in Soho (1961), which tells of an innocent youth falling in with London bohemians who take him to their parties, saying things like, ‘I can’t be bothered to tell you everybody’s name. Address the men as daddy-o and the women as toots.’

  Wilson lived a long and productive life, and never gave up writing even when publishers joined reviewers in withdrawing their favour. He became an angry ageing man, ranting against anyone who dared to doubt him — people such as Humphrey Carpenter, who visited him while researching a book on the Angry Young Men. To a more sympathetic interviewer, Brad Spurgeon, Wilson claimed that Carpenter had fallen asleep on the sofa while he was talking about phenomenology. This seems impossible; how could anyone fall asleep during a discussion of phenomenology?

  The story of Colin Wilson is a cautionary one. If you subtract the youthful vanity and the flawed social skills, you are left with the potential plight of anyone whose passion for ideas leads them to write in too great a rush of excitement about what they love. With his chutzpah, his Kierkegaardian awkwardness, and his ‘perfervid individualism’, Colin Wilson perhaps captures the spirit of late-1950s existentialist rebellion better than anyone.

  One of the few reviewers to show a certain sympathy to Wilson after the Outsider blow-up was Iris Murdoch, who considered him an ass yet wrote in the Manchester Guardian that she preferred Wilson’s ‘rashness’ to the pedantic ‘dryness’ of more established philosophers. She too had a tendency to write in a generous spillage of words and ideas. In 1961, she wrote a kind of manifesto, ‘Against Dryness’, in which she urged writers to abandon the ‘small myths, toys, crystals’ of beautiful writing that had been fashionable, and to return to the real writer’s task, which is to explore how we can be free and behave well in a complicated world, amid the rich ‘density’ of life.

  Even when existentialists reached too far, wrote too much, revised too little, made grandiose claims, or otherwise disgraced themselves, it must be said that they remained in touch with the density of life, and that they asked the important questions. Give me that any day, and keep the tasteful miniatures for the mantelpiece.

  By the 1960s, university teachers were aware of a change. The Heideggerian J. Glenn Gray, who taught philosophy at Colorado College, wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine in May 1965 called ‘Salvation on the Campus: why existentialism is capturing the students’. He had noticed that recent students seemed more fascinated than ever by any philosopher who represented rebellion and authenticity, such as Socrates, who died for his intellectual freedom. They loved the existentialists, and especially Sartre’s idea of bad faith. ‘I’m sick of my own pretending,’ exclaimed a student one day. The best of them were also the most likely to drop out; they would vanish in search of a more meaningful path. It worried Gray, especially when one bright young man refused all help in applying to graduate school and simply wandered off, to be last heard of drifting around the country living by casual labour.

  Gray had no problem understanding the urge for freedom and for something ‘real’: it was he who had predicted, in the Italian village during the war, that old philosophies would offer little to the post-war world and that everything must be reinvented. Yet, when people acted on this idea almost a generation later, his impulse to celebrate was overwhelmed by concern for their future.

  Gray was one of the first to note how a popularised brand of existentialism fed into the growing counterculture. It added its terminology and transformative energy to the great social change that ensued in coming years, with the rise of student radicals, travelling hippies, the draft refusers of the Vietnam War, and all those who threw themselves into mind-expanding drugs and a free-for-all spirit of sexual experimentation. A vast and hopeful idealism pervaded these lifestyles: these people were not ‘dry’, Iris Murdoch might have said. Whether they slipped volumes of Camus, Beauvoir or Sartre into their pockets or not, they adopted the double Sartrean commitment: to personal freedom, and to political activism. When the student protesters occupying the Sorbonne in May 1968 cheered Sartre (alongside a few cheeky catcalls, admittedly), this was what they were acknowledging.

  The student demonstrations, strikes, occupations, love-ins and be-ins of the 1960s constitute an extended historical moment to which one might point and say that existentialism had done its job. Liberation had arrived; existentialism could retire. Indeed, new philosophers were already on the scene, reacting against existentialism’s personalised style of thought. New novelists turned against its literary aesthetic too: Alain Robbe-Grillet, in his 1964 manifesto Pour un nouveau roman (For a New Novel), dismissed Sartre and Camus as having too much of the ‘human’ in them. In 1966 Michel Foucault predicted that ‘man’, being a relatively recent invention, might soon be ‘erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ — an image that recalls Lévi-Strauss’ call for studies that would ‘dissolve man’. Later, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard dismissed Sartrean philosophy as a historical curiosity, like the classic 1950s films whose old-fashioned psychological dramas and clear characterisation ‘express marvellously well the — already banal — post-Romantic death throes of subjectivity’. No one needs this kind of ‘existential garb’ any more, Baudrillard wrote. ‘Who cares about freedom, bad faith, and authenticity today?’

  Ah, but there were people who cared about these things, and they were found above all in the places where freedom and authenticity were under threat. One such place was Czechoslovakia in and after 1968. While Parisian students were treating Sartre as a venerable relic, young Czechs and Slovaks were reading him as though his works had just peeled off the press. This was during the ‘Prague Spring’, a period when Alexander Dubek’s government tried to move towards a more liberal and open version of Communism. Just as in Hungary twelve years earlier, Soviet tanks and troops put a stop to the experiment. It was this act that led Sartre and Beauvoir definitively to reject the S
oviet model — only to praise people like Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot instead.

  Even after the tanks rolled in, two of Sartre’s most provocative plays continued into production in Prague: Dirty Hands and The Flies, both of which were anti-authoritarian. The Prague Flies was the latest startling reinvention of Sartre’s parable of freedom and activism. Having begun as a story of wartime France in 1943, and found a new audience in Germany in 1948, it now seemed all too relevant to the citizens of post-invasion Czechoslovakia.

  ‘Is he passé?’ asked the Czech novelist Milan Kundera of Sartre in 1968. ‘I have heard it said in France.’ Here in Prague, he went on, Sartre had far more to offer than writers such as Robbe-Grillet, with his view of literature and thought as mere games. Another dissident, the playwright Václav Havel, observed that writers’ words still had weight and value in Czechoslovakia: they were measured in people’s lives, whereas in the West they had no substance, being too easy. Philip Roth also observed, after a later visit to Prague, that in the West ‘everything goes and nothing matters’, while in Czechoslovakia ‘nothing goes and everything matters’. Sartrean existentialism was precisely a philosophy of mattering: he called on his readers to take decisions as though the whole future of humanity depended upon what they did.