At the Existentialist Café (39 page)

Sartre was now under attack from all sides, politically confused, and overworking himself more than ever in an attempt to make it all add up. Much of his stress was self-inflicted, yet he was not prepared to make his life easier by simply keeping quiet occasionally. Beauvoir
too was under strain from work, political tension and a personal crisis: she was trying to decide how to manage her long-distance relationship with Nelson
Algren, who was not happy coming second to Sartre and wanted her to move to America. She and Sartre both tried to stave off their exhaustion with pills. Sartre became ever more addicted to his favourite drug Corydrane, a combined amphetamine and painkiller. Beauvoir took orthedrine for anxiety attacks, but it only made them worse. By the time she and Sartre set off for a Scandinavian holiday in the summer of 1948, she was suffering hallucinations in which birds swooped down at her and hands pulled her upwards by her hair. The calm of the northern forests helped her more than the pills did. She and Sartre saw beautiful things there: ‘
dwarf forests, earth the colour of amethysts planted with tiny trees red as coral and yellow as gold’. Beauvoir’s pleasure in life gradually returned. But Sartre remained a tormented soul for the next few years.

On 29 August 1949, after years of espionage and development, the Soviet Union exploded an atom bomb. From now on, the threat of annihilation would be mutual. A few months later, on 1 October, Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China and allied it with the Soviet Union, so that now two Communist superpowers faced the West. The fear level increased. American schoolchildren were put through drills in which they responded to a bomb warning by diving under desks with their hands covering their heads. The government poured money into further research, and on January 1950 announced that they were working on a much bigger weapon, the hydrogen or H-bomb.

That year,
war broke out on the Korean peninsula, with both China and the Soviet Union backing the North against the US in the South. The consequences seemed incalculable: would the Bomb go off? Would the war spread to Europe? Would the Russians occupy France as the Germans had done? This last idea came remarkably quickly to French minds, which may seem odd when the war was on the other side of the world, but it reflected the still-recent memories of the last Occupation, and the alarming and unpredictable nature of the new conflict.

Camus asked Sartre if he’d thought about what would happen to him personally if the Russians invaded. Perhaps the ‘hyena with a fountain pen’ would not be allowed to have the last laugh. Sartre turned the question back on the questioner: what would Camus do? Oh, said Camus, he would do what he did during the German Occupation — meaning he would join the Resistance. Sartre responded piously that he could never fight against the proletariat. Camus pressed his point: ‘
You must leave. If you stay it won’t be only your life they’ll take, but your honour as well. They’ll cart you off to a camp and you’ll die. Then they’ll say you’re still alive, and they’ll use your name to preach resignation and submission and treason; and people will believe them.’

Over dinner with Jacques-Laurent Bost, Olga Kosakiewicz and Richard Wright — the latter now living in Paris — Beauvoir and Sartre again discussed the subject: ‘
how to get away, where, when?’ Nelson Algren had written offering to help them get into the United States, but they did not want this. If they had to leave France, it should be for a neutral country. Perhaps, Beauvoir wrote, they would
go to Brazil, where the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig had found refuge during the last war. But Zweig had committed suicide there, unable to endure exile. And this time it would be to
flee socialism! How could this be happening?

Merleau-Ponty likewise feared the worst for France should there be war, yet he too did not want to run away from Communists. Sartre noted that he now seemed exceptionally light-hearted — ‘
with that boyish air which I always knew him to assume when matters threatened to turn serious’. If the invasion came, joked Merleau-Ponty, he would go and become an elevator boy in New York.

Merleau-Ponty was more disturbed by events than he showed, and not just from personal fear. While the Korean conflict was building, he and Sartre had bumped into each other on holiday in Saint-Raphaël on the Côte d’Azur. They were happy to see one another, but then argued all day, first as they walked along the seafront, then on the terrace of a café, and then at the station where Sartre awaited his train. They had to thrash out a coherent editorial position on Korea for
Les Temps modernes
. But
Merleau-Ponty had come to feel they should not fire off instant opinions on situations they did not understand. Sartre disagreed. If war is imminent, how can you keep silent? Merleau-Ponty took a gloomy view: ‘
Because brute force will decide the outcome. Why speak to what has no ears?’

The underlying disagreement was about more than editorial policy; it was about how far one should take one’s belief in Communism. Merleau-Ponty had been shocked by North Korea’s invasion of the South, and thought it showed the Communist world to be just as greedy as the capitalist world and just as inclined to use ideology as a veil. He had also been disturbed by the increasing publicity about Soviet camps. This represented a major change of perspective for the man who, until recently, had been the most pro-Communist of them all. Conversely, the once-wary Sartre was becoming more inclined to give Communist countries the benefit of the doubt.

No Soviet invasion of France came out of the Korean conflict, but the war, which continued until 1953, did change the global political landscape and spread a mood of paranoia and anxiety as the Cold War settled in. During these years, Merleau-Ponty continued to develop his doubts, while Sartre climbed off the fence. What really radicalised him was a bizarre event in France.

One evening, on 28 May 1952, a police road unit waved down the current leader of the French Communist Party, Jacques
Duclos, and searched his car. Finding a revolver, a radio and a pair of pigeons in a basket, they arrested him, claiming that the birds were carrier pigeons intended for taking messages to his Soviet masters. Duclos replied that the pigeons were dead, and thus unsuitable for use as carriers. He had been taking them to his wife to cook for dinner. The police said that the birds were still warm and not yet stiff, and that Duclos could have hastily smothered them. They locked him up in a holding cell.

The next day, an autopsy was conducted on the pigeons, searching for microfilm hidden inside their persons. There followed a hearing at which three pigeon experts were brought in to give an opinion on the birds’ ages, which they estimated at twenty-six and thirty-five days respectively, and on their exact breed — which they pointedly said they
could not identify ‘because the number and variety of known pigeon types, and the many cross-breeds that have been and still are being created by amateur breeders, makes identification difficult’. The experts concluded, however, that the pigeons were probably of the common domestic type found everywhere, and showed no signs of being bred to carry messages. All the same, Duclos was kept in prison for a month before being released. A huge campaign was mounted to support him, and the Communist poet Louis
Aragon wrote a poem about the ‘pigeon plot’.

This absurd affair seemed to Sartre the culmination of years of harassment and provocation of Communists in France. As he wrote later, ‘
after ten years of ruminating, I had come to the breaking point’. The pigeon plot drove him to make a commitment. As he wrote, ‘In the language of the Church, this was my conversion.’

Perhaps, in the language of Heideggerianism, it was his
Kehre
— a ‘turn’ which required every point of Sartre’s thought to be reconsidered according to new priorities. While Heidegger’s turn had led him away from resoluteness into ‘letting-be’, Sartre’s now led him to become more resolute, more
engagé
, more public, and less willing to compromise. Feeling at once that he had to
‘write or suffocate’, he wrote at top speed and produced the first part of a long essay called
The Communists and Peace
. He wrote it with rage in his heart, he said later — but also with Corydrane in his blood. Barely stopping for sleep, he produced pages of justifications and arguments in favour of the Soviet state, and published the result in
Les Temps modernes
in July 1952. A few months later, he followed it with another intemperate outburst, this time attacking his friend Albert Camus.

A confrontation with Camus had been building for a while. It was almost inevitable, considering how different their views had become. In 1951, Camus published an extended essay,
The Rebel
, in which he laid out a theory of rebellion and political activism that was very different from the Communist-approved one.

For Marxists, human beings are destined to progress through predefined stages of history towards a final socialist paradise. The road
will be long, but we are bound to get there, and all will be perfect when we do. Camus disagreed on two counts: he did not think that history led to a single inevitable destination, and he did not think there was such a thing as perfection. As long as we have human societies, we will have
rebellions. Each time a revolution overturns the ills of a society, a new status quo is created, which then develops its own excesses and injustices. Each generation has a fresh duty to revolt against these, and this will be the case forever.

Moreover, for Camus, true rebellion does not mean reaching towards an ecstatic vision of a shining city on a hill. It means setting a
limit
on some very real present state of affairs that has become unacceptable. For example, a slave who has been ordered around all his life suddenly decides he will take no more, and draws a line, saying
‘so far but no further’. Rebellion is a reining in of tyranny. As rebels keep countering new tyrannies, a balance is created: a state of moderation that must be tirelessly renewed and maintained.

Camus’ vision of endless self-moderating rebellion is appealing — but it was rightly seen as an attack on Soviet Communism and its fellow travellers.
Sartre knew that it was directed partly against himself, and he could not forgive Camus for playing into the hands of the right at a delicate historical moment. The book clearly called for a review in
Les Temps modernes
. Sartre hesitated to rip his old friend to pieces, so he delegated the task to his young colleague Francis
Jeanson — who ripped Camus to pieces, damning the
The Rebel
as an apology for capitalism. Camus defended himself in a seventeen-page letter to the editor, meaning Sartre, although he did not name him. He accused Jeanson of misrepresenting his argument, and added, ‘
I am beginning to become a little tired of seeing myself … receive endless lessons in effectiveness from critics who have never done anything more than turn their armchair in history’s direction.’

This dig prompted Sartre to write his own response after all. It turned into an ad hominem tirade that was overemotional even by his own recent standards. That’s it, said Sartre; their friendship was over. Of course he would miss Camus, especially the old Camus that he remembered from wartime Resistance days. But now that his friend
had become a counter-revolutionary, no reconciliation was possible. Again, nothing could trump politics.

Camus never published a reply to Sartre’s reply, although he did draft one. Again, the rest was silence. Well, not exactly, because ever since this famous quarrel occurred, a little industry of books and articles has flourished, analysing the confrontation to its last punctuation mark. It has come to be seen as a quarrel that defines a whole age and an intellectual milieu. It is often mythologised as a drama in which Sartre, a ‘dreaming boy’ chasing an impossible fantasy, meets his comeuppance in the form of a clear-sighted moral hero who also happens to be cooler and wiser and better-looking:
Camus.

This makes a good story, but I think there are subtler ways to think about it, and that it helps if we make the effort to understand Sartre’s motivation, and to ask why he reacted so intemperately. Pressurised about politics for years, taunted as a decadent bourgeois, Sartre had undergone a conversion experience which had made him see the whole world in a new light. He considered it his
duty
to renounce personal feeling for Camus. Individual sentiment was a self-indulgence, and must be transcended. Just like Heidegger in his
Being and Time
period, Sartre thought the important thing was to be resolute at all costs: to grasp what must be done, and do it. In the Algerian War, Camus would choose his mother over justice, but Sartre decided that it was not right to choose his friend if his friend was betraying the working class.
Beauvoir, charmed though she had been by Camus in the past, took the same line:
The Rebel
was a deliberate gift to their enemies at a crucial point in history, and it could not be allowed to pass.

Camus was disturbed by the quarrel, which occurred at a difficult period for him. His personal life was soon to get worse, with marriage difficulties, writer’s block, and the horror of war in his Algerian homeland. In 1956 his crisis would find expression in a novella,
The Fall
, whose hero is a ‘judge-penitent’: a former trial judge who has decided to sit in judgement on himself. In an Amsterdam bar, over several evenings, the judge relates his life to an unnamed narrator, culminating in a shocking story. One night in Paris, he saw a woman throw herself off a bridge, yet failed to jump in and save her. He cannot forgive himself.
The judge acknowledges his sins, but on the other hand he seems to feel that this gives him moral authority to point out the sins of others. As he tells his interlocutor, and implicitly also us, his readers, ‘
The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.’ There is a lot of Camus in this remark.

Sartre and
Beauvoir were not penitents like the protagonist of
The Fall
, but they were aware of stern eyes looking back at them from the future. ‘
We feel that we are being judged by the masked men who will succeed us’, wrote Sartre in 1952, adding, ‘our age will be an object for those future eyes whose gaze haunts us’. Beauvoir wrote in her last volume of memoirs that she had once felt superior to earlier writers because, by definition, she knew more history than they did. Then the obvious truth dawned: her generation too would one day be judged by future criteria. She saw that her contemporaries would suffer what historian E. P. Thompson later called ‘
the enormous condescension of posterity’.