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

  59 ‘A first draft’: William Barrett, ‘Talent and Career of Jean-Paul Sartre’, Partisan Review, 13 (1946), 237–46, this 244.

  60 ‘Nothingness’: BN, 48. ‘Air-pocket’: Gabriel Marcel, ‘Existence and Human Freedom’, in The Philosophy of Existence, 61.

  61 Absence of Pierre: BN, 33–4.

  62 Non-being of 200 francs: BN, 35.

  63 No cream: the joke is online at http://​www.​workjoke.​com/​philosophers-​jokes.​html.

  64 ‘I am nothing’: BN, 48.

  65 Vertigo: BN, 53, 56.

  66 Gambler: BN, 56–7.

  67 Alarm clock: BN, 61–2.

  68 ‘So many guard rails’: BN, 63.

  69 Waiter: BN, 82.

  70 ‘The Queer Feet’: Chesterton, ‘The Queer Feet’, in The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown (Oxford & NY: OUP, 1988), 64–83.

  71 ‘Lucien can’t stand Jews’: Sartre, ‘The Childhood of a Leader’, in Intimacy, 130–220, this 216.

  72 Bad faith to portray oneself as passive creation: BN, 503.

  73 ‘I have never had a great love’: Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 48.

  74 Facticity: BN, 501.

  75 Extreme situations: BN, 574.

  76 ‘About freedom’: Beauvoir, Adieux, 184.

  77 Too much of an essayist: Hayman, Writing Against, 198, quoting review in Paris-Soir (15 June 1943).

  78 Why not just rest now?: Beauvoir, ‘Pyrrhus and Cineas’, in Philosophical Writings, 77–150, this 90.

  79 Child and lovers: ibid., 97–8.

  80 Tingling: POL, 579.

  81 ‘The world and the future’: POL, 598. For preceding events: 595–6.

  82 Camus on executions: Camus, ‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’, 24–43.

  83 Tough decisions: Beauvoir, ‘An Eye for an Eye’, in Philosophical Writings, 237–60, esp. 257–8. On the Brasillach trial, see Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

  84 ‘The war really divided’: Sartre, ‘Self-Portrait at Seventy’, in Sartre in the Seventies (Situations X), 3–92, this 48.

  85 Ethics: BN, 645, and Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, tr. D. Pellauer (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) (Cahiers pour une morale, 1983).

  86 ‘We are in the world’: Merleau-Ponty, ‘The War Has Taken Place’, in Sense and Non-Sense, 139–52, this 147.

  87 Authors must live up to their power: Sartre, What Is Literature? and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 184. For an account of how Sartre became a powerful public intellectual in this era, see Patrick Baert, The Existentialist Moment (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).

  88 ‘I must answer that!’: FOC, 56.

  89 Les Temps modernes title from Chaplin: FOC, 22. On seeing it twice and loving it: POL, 244.

  90 Merleau-Ponty at Les Temps modernes: Vian, Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 141.

  91 Roads of Freedom, vol. 4: fragments were published in Les Temps modernes in 1949, then collected with unpublished manuscript pages to make a fourth volume, La dernière chance. On Sartre’s claim that the final volume would have solved the enigma of freedom: Michel Contat, ‘General Introduction for Roads of Freedom’, in Sartre, The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV, 177–97, esp. 193, citing Contat’s interview with Sartre, L’Express (17 Sept. 1959). Contat’s introduction (195) also cites an unpublished 1974 interview in which Sartre said that Beauvoir’s The Mandarins was ‘the real ending of Roads of Freedom as I envisaged it as of 1950, but with another point of view’.

  92 Gray in Italy: J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: reflections on men in battle (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 19–22, (originally published in 1959).

  93 ‘Hardly a day’: Marcel, ‘Testimony and Existentialism’, in The Philosophy of Existence, 67–76, this 67 (‘Underground’ reconverted to ‘Métro’).

  94 ‘Enormous tenderness’: FOC, 93.

  95 Vian’s manual: Vian, Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

  96 ‘The only one of the philosophers’: ibid., 141. Dancing and philosophising: Gréco, Je suis faite comme ça, 98–9.

  97 ‘Marseillaise existentialiste’: Gréco, Jujube, 129; see also Cazalis, Les mémoires d’une Anne, 125.

  98 ‘Over the Rainbow’: Gréco, Je suis faite comme ça, 73.

  99 McCoy: Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, originally published in 1935, was translated as On achève bien les chevaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).

  100 Dos Passos: Sartre, ‘On John Dos Passos and 1919’, in Critical Essays (Situations I), 13–31, this 30. See also his essay ‘American Novelists in French Eyes’, Atlantic Monthly (Aug. 1946), and Beauvoir’s ‘An American Renaissance in France’, in her ‘The Useless Mouths’ and Other Literary Writings, 107–12. Also see Richard Lehan, A Dangerous Crossing: French literary existentialism and the modern American novel (Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press; London & Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons, 1973).

  101 Vian and copycat crime: James Sallis, ‘Introduction’, Vian, I Spit on Your Graves, v–vi.

  102 Sartre on US mechanisation and workers: Sartre, ‘A Sadness Composed of Fatigue and Boredom Weighs on American Factory Workers’, in We Have Only This Life to Live: the selected essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939–1975, eds Ronald Aronson & Adrian Van den Hoven (New York: NYRB, 2013), 108. Originally published in Combat (12 June 1945). It later emerged that the FBI watched the journalists closely too, looking for Communist sympathies or troublemaking tendencies. See Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 242–3.

  103 Sartre never shut up: Lionel Abel, ‘Sartre Remembered’, in Robert Wilcocks (ed.), Critical Essays on Jean-Paul Sartre (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), 13–33, this 15.

  104 Camus on travelling: for an example, see Camus, ‘Death in the Soul’, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 40–51, describing a disoriented stay in Prague.

  105 ‘The morning fruit juices’, and Camel: Camus, ‘The Rains of New York’, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 182–6, this 184.

  106 ‘A European wants to say’, and lack of anguish: Camus, American Journals, 42–3.

  107 Beauvoir posting letters, buying stamps: Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 25. For an American audience to see themselves through a stranger’s eyes, she also published ‘An Existentialist Looks at Americans’, New York Times Magazine (25 May 1947), reprinted in Philosophical Writings, 299–316.

  108 ‘Thrillings’ and ‘laffmovies’: Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 36, 214.

  109 ‘Was abundance’: FOC, 25.

  110 ‘Untouchables’ and ‘unseeables’: Sartre, ‘Return from the United States’ (tr. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting), in Gordon (ed.), Existence in Black, 83–9, this 84 (originally published in Le Figaro, 16 June 1945).

  111 Beauvoir in Harlem: Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 1999, 44–5.

  112 Gréco and Davis: Gréco, Je suis faite comme ça, 135.

  113 ‘How those French boys and girls’: Michel Fabre, Richard Wright: books and writers (Jackson & London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 141 (quoting journal, 5 Aug. 1947). See also Cotkin, Existential America, 162.

  114 Visa difficulties: Rowley, Richard Wright, 328–9; ‘The knobs’: 336.

  115 ‘Women swooned’: ‘Existentialism’, Time (28 Jan. 1946), 16–17; ‘the prettiest Existentialist’: New Yorker, 23 (22 Feb. 1947), 19–20. For American reception of existentialism in this era generally, see Fulton, Apostles of Sartre, and Cotkin, Existential America, especially 105–33.

  116 Partisan Review: Partisan Review, 13 (1946). See Cotkin, Existential America, 109, and Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 271.

  117 New Republic: Jean Wahl, ‘Existentialism: a preface’, New Republic (1 Oct. 1945), 442–4.

  118 ‘Thingness of Things’: Paul F. Jennings, ‘Thingness of Things’, Spectator (23 April 1948), and New York Times Magazine (13 June 1948). See Cotkin, Existential America, 102–3.

  119 ‘Grim reminders’ and ‘banal and meaningless’: William Barrett, ‘Talent
and Career of Jean-Paul Sartre’, Partisan Review, 13 (1946), 237–46, this 244. See Cotkin, Existential America, 120–23.

  120 ‘Crisis in French taste’: F. W. Dupee, ‘An International Episode’, Partisan Review, 13 (1946), 259–63, this 263.

  121 Gloomy image of existentialists: see, for example, Bernard Frizell, ‘Existentialism: post-war Paris enthrones a bleak philosophy of pessimism’, Life (7 June 1946); and John Lackey Brown, ‘Paris, 1946: its three war philosophies’, New York Times (1 Sept. 1946). See Fulton, Apostles of Sartre, 29.

  122 Wright on existentialism as optimistic: Rowley, Richard Wright, 246, 326–7.

  123 Arendt’s articles: Arendt, ‘French Existentialism’ and ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’, both in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 163–87, 188–93. Original versions published in Partisan Review, 13 (1) (1946) and Nation, 162 (23 Feb. 1946) respectively. See also Walter Kaufmann, ‘The Reception of Existentialism in the United States’, Salmagundi, 10–11, double issue on ‘The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals’ (Fall 1969–Winter 1970).

  Chapter 8: Devastation

  1 Nomads: Spender, [etc], ‘Rhineland Journal’, New Selected Journals, 34 (July 1945) (ori-ginally published in Horizon, Dec. 1945). On German devastation, also see Victor Sebestyén, 1946: the making of the modern world (London: Macmillan, 2014), especially 38 for homelessness figures.

  2 Well over twelve million ethnic Germans: around 12.5 to 13.5 million Germans were expelled from or intimidated into leaving other European countries: see Werner Sollors, The Temptation of Despair: tales of the 1940s (Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2014), 119; for Europe generally, see Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the aftermath of World War II (London: Viking, 2012).

  3 Lost eyes and ‘a delicate smile’: Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, 193–5, this 194, translating Max Kommerell’s account of visit in 1941. See same source, 45, on Heidegger’s feeling misunderstood generally.

  4 Fritz Heidegger: Safranski, Martin Heidegger, 8. Bietingen: Ott, Heidegger, 371.

  5 Cave: Heidegger, Letters to his Wife, 188 (Martin to Elfride Heidegger, 15 April 1945).

  6 Wildenstein: for this whole episode, see Ott, Heidegger, 302–5. For works on Hölderlin, see Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry.

  7 ‘As we were marching’ and following quotes: Heidegger, ‘Evening Conversation: in a prisoner of war camp in Russia, between a younger and an older man’, in Country Path Conversations, 132–60, this 132–3.

  8 Verwüstung and Wüste: ibid., 136.

  9 ‘Everything remains overseeable’: ibid., 138–9.

  10 Wait: ibid., 140.

  11 Manuscript pick-up drive: this whole account is from Towarnicki, ‘Le Chemin de Zähringen’, 87–90, with Towarnicki’s transcription and translation of the Sophocles chorus, 91–4.

  12 Breakdown: Safranski, Martin Heidegger, 351. For dates, see Heidegger, Letters to his Wife, 191 (first letter dated 17 Feb. 1946). He had visitors, including his former teacher Conrad Gröber, who found him in a withdrawn state, and Towarnicki (Towarnicki, À la rencontre de Heidegger, 197n.) He was looked after by the psychiatrist Viktor Emil Freiherr von Gebsattel and others.

  13 Sons: Heidegger, Letters to his Wife, 194 (Martin to Elfride Heidegger, 15 March 1946; see also ed.’s note by Gertrude Heidegger, 191). For Jörg still being away in 1949, see Heidegger & Jaspers, The Heidegger–Jaspers Correspondence, 165 (Heidegger to Jaspers, 5 July 1949).

  14 ‘His living conditions’: Schimanski, ‘Foreword’, in Heidegger, Existence and Being, 2nd edn (London: Vision, 1956), 9–11.

  15 Challenging and storing: Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 3–35, this 12–15.

  16 ‘Places the seed’: ibid., 15.

  17 ‘Everything is ordered’, and deinos: ibid., 16–17.

  18 Losing ability to stand as object: ibid., 17.

  19 ‘In the midst of objectlessness’: ibid., 27.

  20 ‘Human resources’: ibid., 18.

  21 ‘But where danger is’: ibid., 28. He is quoting Hölderlin’s hymn ‘Patmos’: ‘Wo aber Gafahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.’ For the full poem, see Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, tr. M. Hamburger, ed. J. Adler (London: Penguin, 1998), 230–31.

  22 ‘Belongingness’: Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 3–35, this 32.

  23 Heisenberg: Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, 75.

  24 ‘What seems easier’ and ‘rest upon itself’: Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 15–88, this 31. This work was drafted in 1935 and 1937, and published in 1950 in his collection Holzwege.

  25 ‘Poetically, man dwells’: Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, 213–65, this 260. The lines come from a late poem by Hölderlin, ‘In lovely blue’ (‘In lieblicher Blaue’), in Hymns and Fragments, tr. R. Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 248–53.

  26 ‘Clearing’: Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 219.

  27 ‘A way for the cosmos’: Cosmos (written by C. Sagan, A. Druyan & S. Soter, first broadcast on PBS, 1980), episode 1: ‘The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean’.

  28 ‘The landscape thinks itself in me’: Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, in Sense and Non-Sense, 9–25, this 17.

  29 Heidegger’s anti-humanism and its later influence: see, among others, R. Wolin, ‘National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks’, Jewish Review of Books (6 January 2014); Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy; Karsten Harries, ‘The Antinomy of Being: Heidegger’s critique of humanism’, in Crowell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, 178–98; Mikel Dufrenne, Pour l’homme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968); and L. Ferry & A. Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties, tr. M. H. S. Cartani (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).

  30 Shoes: Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 15–88, this 33–4.

  31 Whose shoes: Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Still Life as a Personal Object: a note on Heidegger and Van Gogh’ (1968), and ‘Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh’ (1994) in his Theory and Philosophy of Art (New York: G. Braziller, 1994), 135–42, 143–51. See esp. 136–8, on the shoes being Van Gogh’s own, and 145, citing fellow student François Gauzi’s account of Van Gogh buying old shoes at a Paris flea market — ‘the shoes of a carter but clean and freshly polished. They were fancy shoes. He put them on, one rainy afternoon, and went out for a walk along the fortifications. Spotted with mud, they became interesting.’ Schapiro also cites Heidegger’s own marginal note of uncertainty on a 1960 edn of his own essay (150). For more, see Lesley Chamberlain, A Shoe Story: Van Gogh, the philosophers and the West (Chelmsford: Harbour, 2014), esp. 102–28.

  32 ‘Standing there’: Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 15–88, this 42. For more on architecture, see Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, ibid., 145–61; and Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  33 ‘A different thinking’: Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 12.

  34 ‘House of Being’: Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, 213–65, this 259, 262.

  35 ‘Came onto the way of thinking’: Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, 156.

  36 ‘Babbling’ and ‘Nobody is likely’: Arendt & Jaspers, Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 142 (Arendt to Jaspers, 29 Sept. 1949).

  37 ‘Is this really the way?’: Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger, ‘An Exchange of Letters’, in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 152–64, this 161 (Marcuse to Heidegger, 28 Aug. 1947, tr. Wolin). See also Wolin, Heidegger’s Children, 134–72.

  38 ‘To former students’, ‘your letter’, and ‘in the most loathsome way’: ibid., 163 (Heidegger to Marcuse, 20 Jan. 1948,
tr. Wolin).

  39 ‘Dismissed from the duty’ and ‘commandment’: Jacques Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Silence: excerpts from a talk given on 5 February 1988’, in Neske & Kettering (eds), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 145–8, this 147–8.

  40 Holocaust compared to expulsion of Germans: Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger, ‘An Exchange of Letters’, in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 152–64, this 163 (Heidegger to Marcuse, 20 Jan. 1948, tr. Wolin).

  41 ‘Outside of the dimension’: ibid., 164 (Marcuse to Heidegger, 12 May 1948, tr. Wolin).

  42 Jasperses’ names on list: Mark W. Clark, Beyond Catastrophe: German intellectuals and cultural renewal after World War II, 1945–1955 (Lanham, MD & Oxford: Lexington, 2006), 52.

  43 Jaspers to Switzerland: ibid., 72.

  44 ‘Heidegger’s mode of thinking’: Ott, Heidegger, 32, quoting Jaspers’ report on Heidegger, 22 Dec. 1945.

  45 ‘How am I guilty?’: Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, 63.

  46 ‘If it happens’: ibid., 71.

  47 Relearning communication: ibid., 19.

  48 Language a bridge: Heidegger & Jaspers, The Heidegger–Jaspers Correspondence, 169 (Jaspers to Heidegger, 6 Aug. 1949). The texts sent probably included Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’, which contains the phrase ‘the house of Being’.

  49 ‘Advent’ or appropriation (Ereignis): Heidegger & Jaspers, The Heidegger–Jaspers Correspondence, 190 (Heidegger to Jaspers, 8 April 1950). Ereignis was one of Heidegger’s pet notions of this period. See e.g. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 5–6; Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

  50 ‘Pure dreaming’: Heidegger & Jaspers, The Heidegger–Jaspers Correspondence, 197 (Jaspers to Heidegger, 24 July 1952).

  51 ‘Dreaming boy’: ibid., 186 (Jaspers to Heidegger, 19 March 1950).

  52 ‘When discussion begins’: Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, 65–6, citing Stroomann’s Aus meinem roten Notizbuch. Stroomann, who remained a friend of Heidegger, later specialised in ‘manager sickness’. See Josef Müller-Marein, ‘Der Arzt von Bühlerhöhe’, Die Zeit (18 April 1957).