by John Higgs
There was an urgency and boldness about the stories Hollywood told in this decade. They were unavoidably coloured by the psychological impact of the Second World War. There is little of the sentimentality associated with Hollywood from the 1950s onwards, and little of the whimsy that could be found in the silent era. Instead, stories were marked by a strong sense of purpose. Hollywood continued to produce escapist fantasies, but when filmmakers talked about love and loss, or betrayal or duty, they talked about them plainly and honestly, to an audience with real experience of these states.
Television might have been slowly making its way into American homes, but it could not match Tinseltown for magic. Hollywood offered swashbucklers like Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power and the glamour of Ingrid Bergman or Bette Davis. There was entertainment from Judy Garland and Bob Hope, and Bugs Bunny and Lassie for the children. Hollywood was a place associated with wealth and elegance, with a hedonic sleazy underside. It is no wonder it seduced the world.
Hollywood was also an industry. The ‘Big Five’ major studios were MGM, Twentieth Century Fox, RKO, Paramount and Warner Bros. Each of these owned production facilities, theatre chains, distribution divisions and even the stars themselves. Each studio produced about a film a week. This mix of talent, experience and opportunity meant that the studio system could occasionally rise above art, and produce magic.
Casablanca (1942) is the story of Rick Blaine, a bitter exiled American. Rick owned a nightclub in Morocco which was bright, spacious and stylish, but full of desperate or corrupt clientele. He had to decide if his love for a beautiful former girlfriend was more important than helping an influential Resistance leader escape from the Nazis. It was a story with everything thrown into the mix – love, duty, patriotism, humour, romance, danger, friendship and desire. Each of these ingredients was heightened to the degree that only 1940s Hollywood could manage.
The heart of the film lies in Humphrey Bogart’s career-defining performance as Rick. He plays a broken man, albeit a heavily glamorised one. He is a cynical and isolated anti-hero who repeatedly declares that he sticks his neck out for nobody. He gives his nationality as ‘drunkard’ and only drinks alone. It seems incredible now that the press release announcing the film’s production stated that the role would be played by Ronald Reagan, who was then a popular actor.
The importance of the nihilistic side of Rick to the strength of the story was apparent from the beginning. The producer Hal Wallis sent an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s to a number of writers and filmmakers to gauge their opinion, including the Scottish screenwriter Æneas MacKenzie. Although the play would need extensive work in order to pass the strict moral rules of the censor, MacKenzie recognised ‘an excellent theme’ in the story that focused on the character of Rick. As he explained to Wallis, ‘When people lose faith in their ideals, they are beaten before they begin to fight. That’s what happened to France [in 1940], and it happened to Rick Blaine.’ The final screenplay kept the idea that the character of Rick was a political allegory, but it aligned him more with post-Pearl Harbor America. When Rick tells the Chief of Police that ‘I stick my neck out for nobody’ he is told that this is ‘a wise foreign policy’, but the crime boss in charge of Casablanca’s black market asks him bluntly, ‘My dear Rick, when will you realise that, in this world, isolationism is no longer a practical policy?’
For many people in the middle of the twentieth century, the cynical, faithless character of Rick was someone they could relate to all too well. Anti-heroes with nothing to believe in became increasingly common as the 1940s rolled into the 1950s, as the certainty of purpose, which had characterised the war for the Allied nations, receded into memory. They were particularly prevalent in the works of the Beat writers, such as Scotland’s Alexander Trocchi.
The central character in Trocchi’s 1954 novel Young Adam is a young labourer called Joe Taylor, who worked on a barge on the canals between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Taylor is present when the body of a young woman in a petticoat is fished out of the canal. He keeps quiet about the fact that he knew the girl, that he had seen her trip and fall into the water, and that he did not attempt to save her. He also makes no attempt to help with the investigation into her death. When an innocent man called Daniel Gordon is tried for her murder, Taylor watches the trial from the public gallery. Gordon is found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, but Taylor does not intervene to save him.
As Taylor sees it, why should he get involved? He feels separate and removed from his fellow Scots. What was in it for him, apart from hassle and potential danger? The authorities had already shown a willingness to hang an innocent man for the woman’s death, and if Taylor came forward he had no guarantee that they wouldn’t accuse him of murder. Like Casablanca’s Rick Blaine, Taylor would not ‘stick his neck out’ for another person, even an innocent one whom he had the power to save from the hangman’s noose.
Trocchi was a heroin addict, and what he captured so acutely in this novel was the morality of the junkie subculture. The junkie is separated from wider society by both the illegality of their drug and its isolating effects. Heroin users are not concerned with contributing to the greater good. They see society as something to be worked in order to fund their habits. That outsider lifestyle, separated from the anchors of work, respect and family, carries a heavy emotional cost, but that cost dissolves away under the effects of the drug. While on heroin, the problems of existence evaporate. The individual user becomes a self-contained unit, at peace with both themselves and their separation from others. The heroin subculture is, in many ways, the ultimate expression of individualism. You can understand why Aleister Crowley was so fond of the drug.
Trocchi detailed the junkie lifestyle in his most famous novel, Cain’s Book (1960), which was subject to an obscenity trial in Britain in 1965. This heavily autobiographical story, about an unrepentant homosexual junkie working on a scow on the Hudson River in New York State, describes the relationships between a number of addicts. In this subculture the primacy of each person’s individual need for heroin is understood and the inevitable thefts and betrayals between them are accepted. Their relationships are those of convenience with no expectation of concern or kindness, yet rare moments of tenderness do somehow arise.
Trocchi saw this extreme individualism as a reflection of the wider culture and something that novelists had to confront. ‘Writing which is not ostensibly self-conscious is in a vital way inauthentic for our time,’ he wrote in Cain’s Book. He was aware of how isolating such individualism was. As the novel’s narrator admits, ‘It occurred to me that I was alone. And then it occurred to me how often that thought occurred to me.’ Yet he was insistent that isolated individualism was necessary, and repeatedly defended the junkie lifestyle. ‘It is impertinent, insolent, and presumptuous of any person or group of persons to impose their unexamined moral prohibitions upon me, it is dangerous both to me and, although they are unaware of it, to the imposers,’ he wrote. ‘God knows there are enough natural limits to human knowledge without our suffering willingly those that are enforced upon us by an ignorantly rationalized fear of experience.’
Trocchi’s unrepentant love of heroin, together with his wife Lyn Trocchi’s willingness to prostitute herself to fund both their habits, probably turned more people away from extreme individualism than it converted. Andrew Scott Murray’s 1992 biography of Trocchi is entitled The Making of a Monster. Yet Trocchi’s belief that such a nihilist worldview needed to be faced and accepted came with heavy intellectual backing.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a small, round-faced man with even rounder glasses. He became the postwar icon of the French intelligentsia, typically found smoking in his favourite left-bank Parisian café with his partner, the writer Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre’s fame came through the success of his first novel, Nausea.
The novel was first published in France in 1938. The Second World War broke out the following year and Sartre was drafted into the French army, despite being virtua
lly blind in one eye. He found himself in a German prisoner-of-war camp along with a million and a half other French troops shortly afterwards. It was only after the war that the full extent of his book’s impact became apparent.
When the troops returned home there was a palpable desire to move beyond the horrors of the conflict and for life to return to normality. But what, exactly, was normality? The scientific, artistic and industrial breakthroughs from between the wars had come so thick and fast that nobody had had time to come to terms with them. The political and moral crises caused by the emergence of fascism and communism had been a more pressing concern. It was not until peace arrived that people had time to take stock and re-evaluate where they were. What they found came as something of a shock. The great pre-First World War certainties were clearly no longer viable, but what, exactly, had replaced them? Uncertainty, paradox and irrationality were everywhere. Where was the postwar omphalos, the perspective from which everything made sense? Countless isolated individual perspectives all came to the realisation that there wasn’t one.
Nausea found its audience in a world that had witnessed the use of nuclear weapons against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that book Sartre wrote that ‘Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident.’ The core principle of existentialism is the recognition that life is meaningless, and that the experience of existing in the present moment is all that matters. The rest of Sartre’s philosophy was an attempt to come to terms with this.
Sartre didn’t waste time arguing that there was no God. He understood that most thinking people of the time had already reached that conclusion themselves. At the point when Sartre’s novel found its audience, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, there were few who would point at the world and declare that it was the work of a just and moral god. Sartre’s aim was to explore what it meant to be alive in a godless universe.
Nausea is the story of an isolated academic called Antoine Roquentin. Roquentin lives alone in a hotel room in a small French seaport called Bouville, or ‘Mudtown,’ which Sartre based on Le Havre. He has a small private income which allows him to work on a biography of an obscure historical figure. The book takes the form of Roquentin’s diary, in which he attempts to understand a change in his perception of the world. This shift in perception results in a feeling of sickness, or nausea, which is initially triggered by nothing more than becoming aware of a stone on the beach. Roquentin believes that he has seen past his mental concept of the stone, what he calls the ‘essence’ of things, and encountered the stone as it actually is. It has no purpose or reason to exist, and the fact that it does makes Roquentin nauseous.
Roquentin seeks an escape from the despair of meaninglessness. Many possible escape routes are considered, including education, adventure, inner contemplation, love, town life and the past, but all of these are found to be illusions compared to the sheer overbearing reality of existence. The book allows for the possibility that art offers an escape from existence, but this rare moment of optimism was something that Sartre would himself reject after the war.
For Sartre and for Trocchi, denying the meaninglessness of existence was cowardice. It was necessary to fully confront our situation because, as Sartre saw it, ‘Life begins on the other side of despair.’ He believed that we were both blessed with free will yet cursed with the awareness of the pointlessness of it all, which meant that mankind was ‘condemned to be free’.
Sartre was an admirer of another leading nihilist, the Irish-born author and playwright Samuel Beckett. Sartre published the first half of a short story by Beckett in Les Temps Modernes, a magazine he edited, not realising that the story was incomplete. When the error was discovered, he did not see any point in publishing the second half.
Beckett’s most famous work is his 1953 play Waiting for Godot. It is about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, who are dressed like vagrants but talk like academics, and who spend the entire play waiting for the arrival of a character known as Godot, who doesn’t show up. It was, as the critic Vivian Mercier noted, ‘a play in which nothing happens, yet that keeps audiences glued to their seats. What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, [Beckett] has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.’
The originality of Godot made Beckett famous, but the nihilism it espoused painted him into a corner. Once you’ve said that life is meaningless there is little more you can add. Sartre escaped this problem by attempting to build a grand synthesis between existentialism and Marxism, but Beckett was not interested in searching for a way out of nihilism. He continued to produce bleak and despairing work.
His follow-up to Waiting for Godot was called Endgame. The main character is Hamm, a blind cripple, whose legless parents Nagg and Nell are sitting nearby in dustbins. The final character is Hamm’s adopted son Clov, who has stiff legs which do not allow him to sit down, and which force him to walk in a ridiculous manner. Nothing much happens, but that nothing is relentlessly bleaker and less entertaining than the nothing that happens in Godot. It was as if Beckett had decided to embrace self-parody before anyone else could parody him.
Nevertheless, the literary establishment were very taken by the rise of nihilism and the Nobel Prize for Literature was offered to many of its leading practitioners. Sartre turned the award down, which made ideological sense. Existentialism says that everything is meaningless, not that everything is meaningless except literary awards. The Algerian-born French writer Albert Camus, whose 1942 novel The Stranger was a key text in the growing movement, did accept the prize. In his defence he always claimed that he was an absurdist, not an existentialist. Camus believed that life was absurd, rather than meaningless. He considered that an important distinction.
The English writer Colin Wilson was struck by the difficulties Endgame presented to the critics. Wilson was then highly lauded, in the wake of the success of his 1956 book The Outsider. He was initially linked with a loose movement of disillusioned British writers known as the Angry Young Men, although his literary cachet fell when later books revealed he wasn’t that angry or disillusioned. Wilson attended the London premiere of Endgame, having already seen the play in Paris. Clearly neither the audience nor the critics really liked the play, or so it seemed to him, but they were wary of criticising it because nihilism was so tricky to argue with. Those who dismissed it on the grounds that things just weren’t that bad were told that they were in denial, or that they lacked the courage to look as deeply into the nature of things as Sartre, Beckett or Camus did.
But Wilson had, as we noted in Chapter 2, personally experienced the state that psychologists call flow, and which he called peak experience. As a result of this, he too felt that he had seen the true existential nature of things, and it did not produce nausea in him. From Wilson’s perspective, life was wonderful and self-justifying, and the act of living was undeniably of value.
For Wilson, the existentialists were like people who walked round an art gallery in the dark and declared that there was nothing of interest there. His peak experience, in contrast, had been like switching on the light. It didn’t cause the art in the gallery to suddenly appear, because it was always there. Instead, it made it undeniable. It seems possible that Camus also came to understand this. As he wrote in 1952, ‘In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.’
Those who attempt to describe the flow state stress the loss of the sense of self. Achieving Wilson’s insight required deep involvement with something external, which individualist philosophies actively fight against. The protagonists of existentialist novels were almost always passive, isolated figures, while many leading existentialist figures, such as Sartre and Beckett, were children of wealthy families who went through life without normal financial pressures. When Beckett was a young man he once stayed in bed all day, because he couldn’t see any reason to get up. This apathy was the exact opposite of the engagement
and interest in the world needed to trigger the flow state.
The passive navel-gazing of a nihilist was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you engaged in it, then life did indeed appear meaningless. But that perspective, crucially, only described the individual nihilist and not mankind in general. Outside of the existentialist bubble, there was value and meaning to be found. It did not require intellectual gymnastics, or faith in God or Marx. It just required energy, dedication and a desire to get involved.
Wilson’s disagreement with Beckett was philosophical rather than creative, so unlike most critics he was not distracted by how funny, original or creative Beckett could be. Their philosophical disagreement was exemplified by Clov’s final soliloquy, when he remarks that ‘I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.’ ‘This explains why,’ Wilson has written, ‘when I went to the first night of Endgame, I rejected it as an attempt to convince me that black is white. When Clov says that the world is going out, but he has never seen it lit up, I could say ‘Well I have,’ and dismiss Beckett as a man suffering from laziness and self-pity – both his own fault.’
In Sartre’s Nausea, the protagonist Antoine Roquentin initially suspects that the repulsion he has begun to feel towards existence may not be a product of the objective world, but rather something internal that he projects outwards. ‘So a change has taken place during these last few weeks’, he says. ‘But where? It is an abstract change without object. Am I the one who has changed? If not, then it is this room, this city and this nature; I must choose.’ Roquentin initially declares that ‘I think I’m the one who has changed: that’s the simplest solution. Also the most unpleasant,’ yet as he sinks deeper and deeper into despair he increasingly blames the world and confuses his internal impressions with the nature of the world outside him.
