At the Existentialist Café (38 page)

In 1940s Paris, the writer who followed Alyosha’s position was Albert Camus. In his essay ‘Neither Victims Nor Executioners’ he wrote, ‘
I will never again be one of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder.’ Whatever the pay-off, he would not support formal justifications for violence, especially by the state. He stuck to this position from then on, although he never ceased to meditate on it. His Dostoevskian play of 1949,
The Just
, features a group of Russian terrorists debating whether or not they might kill bystanders as collateral damage during a political assassination. Camus makes it clear that he thinks it wrong. He thought the same when independence struggles began in his own country, Algeria, in November 1954. Rebels planted bombs and killed innocents, while the French authorities inflicted tortures and executions. Camus’ view was that neither could be justified. People will always do violent things, but philosophers and state officials have a duty not to come up with excuses that will justify them. His opinion made him controversial. In 1957, at a talk to mark his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Camus was asked to explain his failure to support the rebels. He said, ‘
People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.’ For Camus there could be no objective justification for either side’s actions, so his own loyalties were the only possible source of guidance.

Sartre would train himself to see things differently — at least, he did eventually. In the mid-1940s, he could still sound like an Alyosha himself, or a Camus. Merleau-Ponty, in his pro-Soviet phase, asked him what he would do if he had to choose between two events, one of
which would kill 300 people and the other 3,000. What difference was there, philosophically speaking? Sartre replied that there was a mathematical difference, of course, but not a philosophical one, for each individual is an infinite universe in his or her own eyes, and one cannot compare one infinity with another. In both cases, the disaster of loss of life was literally incalculable. Relating this story, Merleau-Ponty deduced that Sartre was talking as a pure philosopher at the time, rather than adopting
‘the perspective of heads of government’.

Later, both Sartre and Beauvoir moved away from this view, and would decide that one could and even must weigh and measure lives in a judicious way, and that the Alyosha position was an evasion of that duty. They came to feel that refusing to do the calculation — setting one baby now against millions of future babies — was merely selfish or squeamish. If this sounds like an antiquated argument advanced only by wild Communist dreamers, we might remind ourselves that apparently civilised countries have sought to justify tortures, imprisonments, killings and intrusive surveillance in the same way in our own time, citing unspecified future threats to an unspecified number of people.

Sartre, Beauvoir and (for now) Merleau-Ponty felt that they were being tougher and more honest than Camus, because they saw the need to get one’s hands dirty — that favourite phrase again. Of course, the stain was the blood of other people conveniently far away. But Sartre also insisted that he would sacrifice himself if need be. At a writers’ conference in Venice in 1956, the English poet Stephen Spender asked him what his wishes would be if he were wrongly persecuted and imprisoned by a Communist regime. Would he want his friends to campaign for his release, if that campaign damaged Communism’s credibility and jeopardised its future? Or would he accept his fate for the greater good? Sartre reflected for a moment, then said that he would refuse the campaign. Spender disliked this answer: ‘
It seems to me that the only good cause has always been that of one person unjustly imprisoned,’ he said. That, retorted Sartre, is the crux of the drama; perhaps in the modern world ‘injustice against one person’ is no longer the point. It had taken Sartre a while to talk himself out of
his compunctions about this shocking notion, but by the mid-1950s he was there.

The imaginary scenario discussed by Sartre and Spender resembles the plot of
Darkness at Noon
, a novel by Arthur Koestler, an ex-Communist turned anti-Communist. The novel, published in English in 1940 and in French in 1946 as
Le zéro et l’infini
, was based on the case of Nikolai Bukharin, tried and executed during the Soviet purges in 1938. Koestler portrayed his fictionalised version as a man so loyal to the party that he signed a false confession and went voluntarily to his death for the good of the state. This was way too credulous as an interpretation of Bukharin’s real-life case, since his confession was produced under duress. But Koestler gave the intellectuals a story to quarrel over: just how far might a person go to defend Communism? He raised similar questions in his essay ‘
The Yogi and the Commissar’, which contrasted the ‘commissar’ type, prepared to do anything for a remote ideal goal, with the ‘yogi’ type, who sticks to present realities.

Merleau-Ponty, in the first flush of his commissar period, responded to Koestler’s essay with a two-part attack in
Les Temps modernes
entitled ‘
The Yogi and the Proletarian’. He mainly used the rhetorical device sometimes known as ‘what-aboutery’: so the Soviet goal was flawed, but what about the many abuses of the West? What about capitalist greed, colonial repression, poverty and racism? What about the West’s pervasive violence, which was merely better disguised than its Communist equivalent?

Koestler ignored Merleau-Ponty’s piece, but his friend Camus was enraged. According to Beauvoir, Camus stormed into a party one evening at Boris Vian’s, hurled invective at Merleau-Ponty, then stormed out again. Sartre ran after him. The scene ended in recriminations and resentment, and even Sartre and Camus fell out over it for a while, although on this occasion they made up.

Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus and Koestler had previously become good friends, debating political topics in high spirits during convivial, drunken evenings. During one of their wild nights out at an émigré
Russian nightclub around 1946, the question of friendship and political commitment came up. Could you be friends with someone if you disagreed with them politically? Camus said you could. Koestler said no: ‘
Impossible! Impossible!’ In a sentimental buzz of vodka, Beauvoir took Camus’ side: ‘It
is
possible; and we are the proof of it at this very moment, since, despite all our dissensions, we are so happy to be together.’ Cheered by this warm thought, they boozed on happily until after dawn, although Sartre still had to prepare a lecture for the next day on, of all things, the theme of ‘The Writer’s Responsibility’. They all thought this was hilarious. At dawn, they left each other in exuberant spirits. And Sartre did somehow get the lecture written in time, on almost no sleep.

During another late-night carousal in 1947, however, the friendship question came up again, and this time the mood was less good-humoured. Koestler clinched his side of it by throwing a glass at Sartre’s head — not least because he got the idea, probably rightly, that Sartre was flirting with his wife Mamaine. (Koestler was known as an unscrupulous seducer himself, and an aggressive one to say the least.) As they all stumbled outside, Camus tried to calm Koestler by laying a hand on his shoulder. Koestler flailed out at him, and Camus hit him back. Sartre and Beauvoir dragged them apart and hustled Camus off to his car, leaving Koestler and Mamaine on the street. All the way home, Camus wept and draped himself on the steering wheel, weaving over the road: ‘
He was my friend! And he hit me!’

Sartre and Beauvoir eventually came to agree with Koestler about one thing: it was
not
possible to be friends with someone who held opposed political views. ‘
When people’s opinions are so different,’ said Sartre, ‘how can they even go to a film together?’ In 1950, Koestler mentioned to Stephen Spender that he’d bumped into Sartre and Beauvoir after a long gap and had suggested they have lunch. They responded with an awkward silence, and then Beauvoir said (according to Spender’s second-hand version), ‘
Koestler, you know that we disagree. There no longer seems any point in our meeting.’ She crossed her forearms in a big X, and said, ‘We are
croisés comme ça
about everything.’

This time it was Koestler who protested, ‘Yes, but surely we can remain friends just the same.’

To this, she responded with phenomenology. ‘As a philosopher, you must realise that each of us when he looks at a
morceau de sucre
[sugar lump] sees an entirely different object. Our
morceaux de sucre
are now so different that there’s no point in our meeting any longer.’

It’s a saddening image: sweet confections on a table; philosophers peering at them from different sides. To each of them, the sugar presents itself differently. It catches the light from one side, but not from the other. To one, it looks bright and sparkly; to another, grey and matte. To one, it means a delicious addition to coffee. To another, it means the historical evils of slavery in the sugar trade. And the conclusion? That there is no point in even talking about it. This is a strange distortion of the phenomenological theme. The X of political cross-purposes also makes a nasty twist on Merleau-Ponty’s all-reconciling ‘chiasm’ figure. The whole knotted mess ends in silence — and that in turn recalls the silence that descended over Marcuse and Heidegger around the same time, when Marcuse concluded that no dialogue was possible given the immensity of their difference.

The debate about friendship is really a variant of the debate about what sacrifices might be worth making for Communism. In both cases, you have to weigh abstract values against what is personal, individual and immediate. You have to decide what matters most: the person in front of you now, or the effects your choices might have on an un defined population of future people. Each of our thinkers resolved this conundrum differently — and sometimes the same person reached different conclusions at different times.

Sartre was the least consistent of them all, both on the Soviet question and on the question of friendship, for he did sometimes expect people to be loyal to him despite political differences. In October 1947, he expected loyalty from his old schoolmate Raymond Aron, but did not get it, and was so angry that he broke off contact completely.

That year was a difficult one for France — which was probably also why the Koestler quarrel had become so heated. The country was
ruled by a centrist coalition government, but this had come under attack both from the Communist left and from the right-wing Rassemblement du peuple français, led by the wartime head of the French forces in exile, General Charles de Gaulle. Sartre felt that the Gaullist party had become almost fascist in style, indulging in mass rallies and whipping up a personality cult around the leader. But
Aron, who had been with the Free French in London and knew de Gaulle well, had much more sympathy for his approach and had moved well to the right of Sartre.

The autumn saw a growing crisis, as the Gaullists’ marches and the Communist Party’s strikes and demonstrations (actively supported by the Soviet Union) both threatened the stability of the middle. People began to worry that there would be a civil war and even a revolution. Some found this prospect exciting. In a note to Merleau-Ponty, Sonia Brownell wrote that she’d just had lunch with some
French writers in London who could not stop gabbling about the battles they intended to fight on Paris’ streets, and the best way of making petrol bombs.

With this crisis at its height, Aron chaired a radio debate pitting Sartre, as a representative of the left, against a gang of Gaullists — who laid into him ferociously on air. Aron stayed out of it, and Sartre was dismayed at Aron’s letting them gang up on him without attempting to support his old friend. Looking back on the incident, Aron claimed that he did not feel entitled to take sides since he was the chair of the discussion. Sartre suspected that the real reason was Aron’s own Gaullist sympathies. For years, the two men did not speak.

Aron may not have realised how personally threatened Sartre felt during this period. He received menacing letters, one containing a picture of himself smeared with
excrement. One night he heard that a gang of army officers was roaming the Left Bank looking for him; he sought refuge with friends and did not return to his well-known address above the Bar Napoléon for several days. This would not be the last time his outspoken political views put him in danger.

In truth, at this stage, Sartre was simultaneously opposed to the Gaullists
and
still critical of the Soviet Union; he thus drew the anger
of both sides. French Communists had long disapproved of existentialism as a philosophy because of its insistence on personal freedom. A 1946 pamphlet by the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre had summed up existentialism as ‘a
dreary, flabby mixture’ leading to too much dangerous ‘open-mindedness’. People were free, Sartre said — but Lefebvre demanded to know, ‘what would a man who every morning chose between fascism and anti-fascism represent?’ How can such a person be considered better than someone ‘who had chosen, once and for all, the fight against fascism, or who had not even had to choose?’ Lefebvre’s point sounds reasonable until you think about what it implies. The party demanded the kind of commitment that means never having to think again, and this Sartre could not support — yet. Later, he tied himself in knots trying to resolve the conflict between his support for revolutionary politics and his basic existentialist principles, which ran counter to it.

In February 1948, he tried resolving the conundrum by joining a breakaway party, the Rassemblement démocratique revolutionnaire (RDR) or Revolutionary Democratic Assembly, which aimed at a nonaligned socialism. The party did not accomplish much except to make things more complicated, and Sartre resigned after a year and a half.

Meanwhile, in April 1948, he got himself into even more trouble with his new play called, naturally,
Dirty Hands
. This showed party members in Illyria, a fictional small country reminiscent of post-war Hungary, making moral compromises with their ideals and trying to come to terms with their prospects as they wait for a Soviet-style takeover. The Communists were not amused. The Soviet cultural commissar Alexander Fadayev called Sartre
‘a hyena with a fountain pen’ and Sartre went out of favour in all the Soviet bloc countries. The Czech writer Ivan Klíma, then a college student, listened to his teachers attacking Sartre for his
‘decay and moral degeneration’ — which immediately made Klíma desperate to read him.