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

  96 Turbine: Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 281. Pit stop: Olivier Wickers, Trois aventures extraordinaires de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 23.

  97 Corydrane: FOC, 397; see also Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 373–4.

  98 ‘I liked having confused, vaguely questioning ideas’: Beauvoir, Adieux, 318.

  99 ‘Facility’ and ‘It was dreadful’: ibid., 174.

  100 ‘About the plashing sound’: ibid., 181. He is talking about his notebook entitled ‘La Reine Albemarle’, written 1951–2 based on Italian travels in Oct. 1951: Sartre, La Reine Albemarle, ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). See Sartre, Les Mots, 1,491.

  101 ‘Il est bon’: Merleau-Ponty, interview with Georges Charbonnier (May 1959), in Parcours deux, 235–40, this 236.

  102 ‘A sinister scoundrel’ and ‘I’d say, a person who’s not bad’: Sartre & Lévy, Hope Now, 63.

  103 ‘We are now going off the air’: Janet Flanner, Paris Journal, ed. W. Shawn, 2 vols (New York: Atheneum, 1965–71), I, 329 (4 Nov. 1956). On the Hungarian events, see Victor Sebestyén, Twelve Days: Revolution 1956 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).

  104 Les Temps modernes special issue: Les Temps modernes, 12e année, 131 (Jan. 1957), ‘La révolte de la Hongrie’. On their turmoil: FOC, 373.

  105 Critique as Sartre’s response: FOC, 397.

  106 ‘The Critique is a Marxist work’: Sartre, ‘Self-Portrait at Seventy’, in Sartre in the Seventies (Situations X), 3–92, this 18.

  107 Second volume: Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason II; see Ronald Aronson, Sartre’s Second Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

  Chapter 12: The Eyes of the Least Favoured

  1 ‘Man and society as they truly are’: Sartre, The Communists and Peace, 180, part 3. Originally published in Les Temps modernes, 101 (April 1954). On this, see Bernasconi, How to Read Sartre, 79, using the translation ‘gaze of the least favored’.

  2 Sartre ignored Stalin’s prisons: Merleau-Ponty, ‘Sartre and Ultrabolshevism’, in Adventures of the Dialectic, 95–201, this 154.

  3 Sartre as maverick: see Bernasconi, How to Read Sartre, 79.

  4 ‘These black men’: Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, tr. J. MacCombie (revised), in Bernasconi (ed.), Race, 115–42, this 115. Originally published as a preface to Léopold Senghor (ed.), Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: PUF, 1948), ix–xliv.

  5 Memmi: Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, tr. Howard Greenfeld, with introduction by Sartre translated by Lawrence Hoey (New York: Orion Press, 1965). Translation of Portrait du colonisé précédé du portrait du colonisateur (1957).

  6 Fanon and Merleau-Ponty: FOC, 607.

  7 Black Skin, White Masks: Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, esp. ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’, 89–119. On Sartre and Fanon, see Robert Bernasconi, ‘Racism Is a System: how existentialism became dialectical in Fanon and Sartre’, in Crowell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, 342–60.

  8 ‘I don’t like people’, and account of meeting: FOC, 605–11; see also Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare, 347–8.

  9 Ollie Iselin: Macey, Frantz Fanon, 485.

  10 ‘We have claims’: FOC, 610.

  11 Gaze of oppressed: Sartre, preface to Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 7–26, this 18–21. On Sartre and violence, see Ronald E. Santoni, Sartre on Violence: curiously ambivalent (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).

  12 Sartre’s beliefs changed, but not extremism: Todd, Un fils rebelle, 17.

  13 ‘Naturally in the course of my life’: Sartre, ‘Self-Portrait at Seventy’, in Sartre in the Seventies (Situations X), 3–92, this 65.

  14 Josie Fanon: Macey, Frantz Fanon, 462–3, citing Josie Fanon, ‘À propos de Frantz Fanon, Sartre, le racism et les Arabes’, El Moudjahid (10 June 1967), 6.

  15 ‘I’ve never had tender relationships’: Beauvoir, Adieux, 148.

  16 Beauvoir overjoyed: FOC, 315.

  17 ‘I’m French’: FOC, 397. See also 381–2.

  18 ‘Anybody, at any time’: Sartre, foreword to Henri Alleg, La question (1958), tr. by John Calder as The Question (London: Calder, 1958), 11–28, this 12. Beauvoir wrote about the torture victim Djamila Boupacha, first in Le Monde (3 June 1960) and then in a book co-written with Boupacha’s lawyer Gisèle Halimi: Djamila Boupacha (1962), tr. by Peter Green as Djamila Boupacha: the story of a torture of a young Algerian girl (London: André Deutsch & Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962).

  19 Death threats: FOC, 381; 626–8; David Detmer, Sartre Explained: from bad faith to authenticity (Chicago: Open Court, 2008), 5 (‘Shoot Sartre’), 11 (de Gaulle).

  20 Explosion: Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 451.

  21 Phone calls: Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare, 4.

  22 Rejecting Nobel Prize: ASAD, 52–4, Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 447–8.

  23 ‘Double-consciousness’: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1996), 5. See Ernest Allen Jr., ‘On the Reading of Riddles: rethinking Du Boisian “Double Consciousness” ’, in Gordon (ed.), Existence in Black, 49–68, this 51.

  24 Baldwin in Swiss hamlet: Baldwin, ‘Stranger in the Village’, in The Price of the Ticket, 79–90, this 81–3. Originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1953.

  25 Responsiblity, and ‘We’re different’: Wright, The Outsider, 114–15, 585.

  26 He revised it: restored edn, with notes on editorial history: ibid., esp. 588–92. The notes are by Arnold Rampersad.

  27 ‘I am getting a little sick’: Rowley, Richard Wright, 407 (citing Ellison to Wright, 21 Jan. 1953); on how Ellison thought Wright was damaging himself, also see 409 (citing Ellison interview with A. Geller in 1963, in Graham & Singh [eds], Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 84). On Wright, Ellison and existentialism, see Cotkin, Existential America, 161–83.

  28 Aswell: Rowley, Richard Wright, 472 (citing Ed Aswell to Wright, 24 Jan. 1956).

  29 ‘Richard was able’: James Baldwin, ‘Alas, Poor Richard’, in Nobody Knows My Name: more notes of a native son (London: Penguin, 1991), 149–76, this 174. The essay was originally published in 1961.

  30 ‘I need to live free’: Rowley, Richard Wright, 352, citing a remark of Wright’s quoted by Anaïs Nin in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, IV, 212–14.

  31 ‘Lonely outsiders’: Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! (New York: Doubleday, 1957), dedication. On these works, see Rowley, Richard Wright, 440–91.

  32 First International Congress: Rowley, Richard Wright, 477–80, especially 479. On Wright’s interest in The Second Sex: Cotkin, Existential America, 169; M. Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 2nd edn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 320–21. On how Beauvoir was influenced by Wright, also see Margaret A. Simons, ‘Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and The Second Sex’, in Beauvoir and The Second Sex, 167–84.

  33 Angie Pegg: Forster & Sutton (eds), Daughters of de Beauvoir, 54–9.

  34 Margaret Walters: ibid., 45; also see interview with Jenny Turner, who was also influenced by the autobiographies: 33–4.

  35 Kate Millett: ibid., 28–9.

  36 Joyce Goodfellow: ibid., 103.

  37 Frankl: For more on his life and thought, see Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (London: Rider, 2004; originally published in 1946), and other works.

  38 Sloan Wilson, afterword in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (London: Penguin, 2005), 278.

  39 Squid, leeches, etc.: see Spencer R. Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2012), 106.

  40 Eichmann: Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (originally serialised in the New Yorker (Feb.–March 1963), then published in book form in 1963). For controversies around it, see also Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: the unexamined life of a mass murderer, tr. R. Martin (London: Bodley Head, 2014); Richard Wolin, ‘The Banality of Evil: the demise of a legend’, Jewish Review of Books (Fall 2014); and Seyla Benhabib, ‘Who’s on Trial: Eichmann or Arendt?’,
New York Times: the Stone Blog (21 Sept. 2014). For experiments, see Stanley Milgram, ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67 (4) (Oct. 1963), 371–8, and Obedience to Authority: an experimental view (New York: Harper, 1974); C. Haney, W. C. Banks & P. G. Zimbardo, ‘Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison’, Naval Research Reviews, 9 (1973), 1–17; Phillip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect (New York: Random House, 1971).

  41 ‘The American existentialist’: Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro’, in Advertisements for Myself, 337–58. Originally published in Dissent (1957). For more on Mailer and existentialism, see Cotkin, Existential America, 184–209.

  42 ‘Oh, kinda playing’: Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose, 244.

  43 Mailer’s sources: Mary Dearborn, Mailer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 58–9. The reference is to Barrett, Irrational Man. See Cotkin, Existential America, 185–6.

  44 Several revolts, and ‘perfervid individualism’: both Kaufmann, Existentialism, 11.

  45 Hazel Barnes: Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes, originally published 1956. At the time of writing, another translation is in preparation by Sarah Richmond. Zen: see Barnes, An Existentialist Ethics, 211–77.

  46 Self-Encounter: Barnes, The Story I Tell Myself, 166–8. The drama was adapted from M. Unamuno’s story ‘The Madness of Doctor Montarco’. The TV series Self-Encounter: a study in existentialism (1961) was once thought lost, but Jeffrey Ward Larsen and Erik Sween located a copy in the Library of Congress; another copy is now in the University of Colorado archives. See http://​geopolicraticus.​wordpress.​com/​2010/​11/​03/​documentaries-​worth-​watching/.

  47 Carnap: Rudolf Carnap, ‘The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’ (originally published 1932), in Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, 23–34. Carnap especially picked on the phrase ‘the nothing nothings’ from Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics?

  48 ‘People play cricket’: Murdoch, Sartre, 78–9. On existentialism in the UK, see Martin Woessner, ‘Angst Across the Channel: existentialism in Britain’, in Judaken & Bernasconi (eds), Situating Existentialism, 145–79.

  49 ‘The excitement’: Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 216 (Murdoch to Hal Lidderdale, 6 Nov. 1945). Her encounter: her notebook ‘Notes on a lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre’, (Brussels, Oct. 1945) in Murdoch Archive, University of Kingston, IML 682. Her lectures: see Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 270. She originally intended to do a PhD on Husserl at Cambridge in 1947, but changed to Wittgenstein: see her Heidegger manuscript in Murdoch Archives (KUAS6/5/1/4), 83, and Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 254 (citing a Murdoch interview with Richard Wollheim, 1991).

  50 ‘Smoking, making love’: Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose, 113.

  51 Publication of The Outsider: Carpenter, The Angry Young Men, 107.

  52 ‘I think it possible’ and ‘It was a conclusion’: Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose, 129.

  53 Did not correct them: Spurgeon, Colin Wilson, 66–7.

  54 Print runs: Carpenter, The Angry Young Men, 112.

  55 Alice: Geoffrey Gorer, ‘The Insider, by C*l*n W*ls*n’, Punch (11 July 1956), 33–4. See Carpenter, The Angry Young Men, 168.

  56 TLS letter: Carpenter, The Angry Young Men, 109, citing the Times Literary Supplement (14 Dec. 1956).

  57 ‘I am the major literary genius’: ibid., 169–70.

  58 ‘I glimpsed’: Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose, 3–4.

  59 ‘I can’t be bothered’: Colin Wilson, Adrift in Soho (London: Pan, 1964), 114.

  60 Falling asleep: Spurgeon, Colin Wilson, 36, with more on other writers who angered him with their reviews or profiles: 37–8, 47. The profile by Lynn Barber in the Observer (30 May 2004) makes an interesting read.

  61 ‘Rashness’: Iris Murdoch, review in the Manchester Guardian (25 Oct. 1957). She called him an ass in a letter to Brigid Brophy in 1962: see Murdoch, ed. A. Horner & A. Rowe, Living on Paper: letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015), 222.

  62 ‘Small myths, toys’: Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness,’ in Existentialists and Mystics: writings on philosophy and literature, ed. P. Conradi (London: Penguin, 1999), 287–95, this 292–3.

  63 ‘Salvation on the Campus’: J. Glenn Gray, ‘Salvation on the Campus: why existentialism is capturing the students’, Harper’s Magazine (May 1965), 53–60. On Gray, see Woessner, Heidegger in America, 132–59.

  64 Robbe-Grillet: Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, tr. Richard Howard (NY: Grove, 1965), 64.

  65 ‘Erased’: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), 387. ‘Dissolve man’: Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), 247.

  66 ‘Express’ and ‘Who cares about freedom?’: Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, tr. C. Turner (London: Verso, 2001), 73. See Jack Reynolds and Ashley Woodward, ‘Existentialism and Poststructuralism: some unfashionable observations’, in Felicity Joseph, Jack Reynolds & Ashley Woodward (eds), The Continuum Companion to Existentialism (London: Continuum, 2011), 260–81.

  67 Plays in Prague: ASAD, 358. Dirty Hands was staged in Nov., The Flies in Dec. 1968. See Contat & Rybalka (eds), The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, I, 89.

  68 ‘Is he passé?’: Antonin Liehm, The Politics of Culture (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 146 (interview with Milan Kundera, tr. P. Kussi; originally published 1968).

  69 Words have weight: Havel, Letters to Olga, 306 (10 April 1982).

  70 ‘Everything goes’: Philip Roth, in George Plimpton (ed.) Writers at Work: the Paris Review interviews, 7th series (New York: Penguin, 1988), 267–98, this 296. (Interview by Hermione Lee, originally published in the Paris Review (Summer 1983–Winter 1984).

  71 Becoming the heir: Kohák, Jan Patočka, xi, translating Patočka, ‘Erinnerungen an Husserl’, in Walter Biemel (ed.), Die Welt des Menschen — die Welt der Philosophie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), vii–xix, this xv; Patočka also describes Husserl’s reluctance to share him with Heidegger: x.

  72 Whole evening on a few lines: Shore, ‘Out of the Desert’, 14–15.

  73 Patočka’s sessions: Paul Wilson, introduction to Havel, Letters to Olga, 18, citing Václav Havel, ‘The Last Conversation’ (1977), in Václav Havel o lidskou identitu (Václav Havel on Human Identity), ed. Vilém Priem & Alexander Tomský (London: Rozmluvy, 1984), 198–9.

  74 ‘Solidarity of the shaken’: Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 134–5.

  75 Charter 77: ‘Charter 77 Manifesto’, Telos, 31 (1977), 148–50. Also see Jan Patočka, ‘Political Testament’, Telos, 31 (1977), 151–2. On this, see Kohák, Jan Patočka, 340–47.

  76 Philosophers: Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 2–3.

  77 Regular questioning: Michael Zantovsky, Havel (London: Atlantic Books, 2014), 182.

  78 Havel’s last meeting with Patočka: Paul Wilson, introduction to Havel, Letters to Olga, 18, citing Václav Havel, ‘The Last Conversation’ (1977), in Václav Havel o lidskou identitu (Václav Havel on Human Identity), ed. Vilém Prečan & Alexander Tomský (London: Rozmluvy, 1984), 198–9.

  79 ‘What is needed’: Patočka, ‘Political Testament’, Telos, 31 (1977), 151–2, this 151.

  80 Patočka’s death: Kohák, Jan Patočka, 3; Zantovsky, Havel, 183–4.

  81 Patočka’s funeral: Klíma, My Crazy Century, 350–51.

  82 Patočka’s papers: Shore, ‘Out of the Desert’, 14–15; Chvatík, ‘Geschichte und Vorgeschichte’.

  83 ‘The relentless persecution’: Paul Ricœur, ‘Patočka, Philosopher and Resister’, tr. David J. Parent, Telos, 31 (1977), 152–5, this 155. Originally published in Le Monde (19 March 1977).

  84 Greengrocer: Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, 41–55.

  85 ‘Here and now’: ibid., 99.

  86 ‘Existential revolution’: ibid., 117–18.

  Chapter 13: Having Once Tasted Ph
enomenology

  1 ‘The possibility’: BN, 568.

  2 ‘From elsewhere’: Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death, 91–2.

  3 One cannot have a relationship with death: Beauvoir, Old Age, 492.

  4 ‘It deprives us of phenomenology’: Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 1999), 269.

  5 Camus crash and manuscript: Lottman, Albert Camus, 5.

  6 Beauvoir and death of Camus: FOC, 496–7.

  7 Sartre and death of Camus: Sartre, ‘Albert Camus’, in Situations [IV], 107–12. Originally published in France-Observateur (7 Jan. 1960).

  8 Camus an ethical thinker: ‘Simone de Beauvoir tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intellectual and Feminist’ (1960), audio interview, online at: http://​www.​openculture.​com/​2014/​11/​simone-​de-​beauvoir-​talks-​with-​studs-​terkel-​1960.​html.

  9 Wright’s death and suspicions: Rowley, Richard Wright, 524–5. Bismuth salts: 504.

  10 Wright’s haiku: some are included in Ellen Wright & Michel Fabre (eds), Richard Wright Reader (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 251–4. Others are online: http://​terebess.​hu/​english/​haiku/​wright.​html.

  11 Merleau-Ponty’s death: Ronald Bonan, Apprendre à philosopher avec Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Ellipses, 2010), 12; Gandillac, Le siècle traversé, 372; Emmanuelle Garcia, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty: vie et œuvre’, in Merleau-Ponty, Œuvres, 27–99, this 93.

  12 Sartre on Merleau-Ponty’s death: Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty’, in Situations [IV], 225–326, this 320. Originally published as ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant’, in Les Temps modernes, 17e année, 184–5 (Oct. 1961), 304–76.

  13 Jaspers warning of early death: Gens, Karl Jaspers, 50 (Gertrud Jaspers to Arendt, 10 Jan. 1966).

  14 Heidegger and Gertrud Jaspers telegrams: ibid., 206 (Heidegger to Gertrud Jaspers, 2 March 1969; Gertrud Jaspers to Heidegger, 2 March 1969).

  15 Jaspers on Norderney: Jaspers, ‘Self-Portrait’, 3.

  16 Arendt helping the Heideggers: Woessner, Heidegger in America, 109–11.

  17 Arendt on Heidegger: Arendt, ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’, in Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, 293–303, this 301. Originally published in the New York Review of Books (Oct. 1971).