At the Existentialist Café (42 page)

As long ago as 1948, he had written an essay called ‘Black Orpheus’, originally published as the preface to Léopold Senghor’s
Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry
. Sartre there described how poetry by
black and postcolonial writers often reversed the fixing, judging ‘gaze’ of their oppressors. From now on, he said, white Europeans can no longer coolly assess and master the world. Instead, ‘
these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind’. (Sartre was still polishing his metaphors in those days.)

In 1957, he introduced Albert
Memmi’s double work
Portrait du colonisé
and
Portrait du colonisateur
(translated as
The Colonizer and the Colonized
), which analysed the ‘myths’ of colonialism in the same way that Beauvoir had analysed the myths of femininity in
The Second Sex
. After this, Sartre wrote an even more influential foreword to an epoch-defining 1961 work of anti-colonialism, Frantz
Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth
.

Fanon was a messianic thinker and an intellectual who had been influenced by existentialism himself, and who devoted his short life to questions of race, independence and revolutionary violence. Born in Martinique, of mixed African and European descent, he studied philosophy in Lyons — with Merleau-Ponty among others, although Fanon did not warm to Merleau-Ponty’s calm style. When he published his own first book in 1952, it was impassioned rather than calm, but it was also highly phenomenological:
Black Skin, White Masks
explored the ‘lived experience’ of black people cast into a role of Other in a white-dominated world.

Next, Fanon moved to Algeria and became active in the independence movement, but was expelled for this in 1956 and went to live in Tunisia. While there, he was diagnosed with leukaemia. He had treatment in the Soviet Union, and gained a brief remission, but was once again gravely ill in 1961 when he began work on
The Wretched of the Earth
. Feverish and weak, he travelled to Rome, and was there introduced to Beauvoir and Sartre by Claude Lanzmann.

Sartre fell for Fanon immediately, and was delighted to write a foreword for
The Wretched of the Earth
. He already liked Fanon’s work, and he liked him even better in person. Lanzmann later commented that he had never seen Sartre so captivated by a man as at that
meeting. The four of them talked through lunch, then all through the afternoon, then all evening, until 2 a.m., when Beauvoir finally insisted that Sartre needed to sleep. Fanon was offended: ‘
I don’t like people who hoard their resources.’ He kept Lanzmann up until eight the next morning.

By this time, Fanon had only a few months to live. In his last weeks, he was flown to the United States to get the best available treatment, a trip arranged (surprisingly) by a CIA agent with whom he had become friends,
Ollie Iselin. But nothing could be done, and he died in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961, aged thirty-six.
The Wretched of the Earth
came out just afterwards, with the foreword by Sartre.

Beauvoir recalled Fanon saying in Rome, ‘
We have claims on you’ — just the sort of thing they loved to hear. That burning intensity, and the willingness to make demands and to assign guilt if necessary, was what had attracted Beauvoir to Lanzmann. Now it thrilled Sartre too. Perhaps it took them back to their war years: a time when
everything mattered
. Sartre certainly embraced Fanon’s militant arguments, which in this book included the notion that anti-imperial revolution must inevitably be violent, not just because violence was effective (though that was one reason) but because it helped the colonised to shake off the paralysis of oppression and forge a new shared identity. Without glorifying violence, Fanon considered it essential to political change; he had little sympathy for Gandhi’s idea of of non-violent resistence as a source of power. In his contribution, Sartre endorsed Fanon’s view so enthusiastically that he outdid the original, shifting the emphasis so as to praise violence for its own sake. Sartre seemed to see the violence of the oppressed as a Nietzschean act of self-creation. Like Fanon, he also contrasted it with the hidden brutality of colonialism. And, as in ‘Black Orpheus’, he invited his readers (presumed white) to imagine the
gaze of the oppressed turned against them, stripping away their bourgeois hypocrisy and revealing them as monsters of greed and self-interest.

Sartre’s foreword to
The Wretched of the Earth
provides a snapshot of what was at once most odious and most admirable about him in
these militant years. His fetishising of violence is shocking, yet there is still something to be admired in his willingness to engage with the predicament of the marginalised and oppressed in such a radical way. Indeed, Sartre had by now become so used to taking radical stances that he hardly knew any longer how to be moderate. As his friend Olivier Todd commented,
Sartre’s beliefs changed, but his extremism never did. Sartre agreed. Asked in 1975 to name his worst failing, he replied, ‘
Naturally in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another. But at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.’

Being radical meant upsetting people, and this could include other radicals. Frantz Fanon’s widow
Josie Fanon was among those to turn against Sartre: she disliked the fact that he also supported Zionism during this period, which she felt made him an enemy to most Algerians. Sartre’s ability to engage with both causes speaks for his generous intentions. Yet it also shows another paradox in his ‘least favoured’ principle. More than one group can be considered unfavoured by history, so what happens if their claims are incompatible? Sartre’s praise of violence held a worse paradox too: who could be less ‘favoured’ than the victim of any violent attack, regardless of its motivation or context?

Sartre was aware that odd personal impulses underlay his interest in violence. He traced it to his childhood experience of bullying, and his decision to take on the bullies’ aggression as part of himself. Talking about it with Beauvoir in 1974, he said that he had never forgotten the violence he had learned at the school in La Rochelle. He even thought it had influenced his tendency to put friendships on the line: ‘
I’ve never had tender relationships with my friends since then.’ One suspects it also fed his desire for extremism in all things.

In the case of anti-colonial violence, or violence against whites, Sartre’s own people were implicitly on the receiving end, but this only made him applaud it more. There was satisfaction to be had in reversing viewpoints and picturing himself standing in the gale of someone else’s righteous rage. Beauvoir similarly celebrated news of uprisings
against France’s colonising forces around the word, feeling elated about anti-colonial attacks in Indochina in the 1950s. It was a matter of political conviction, of course, but her response seems more visceral than intellectual. This was a complex emotional state for someone whose own country had been occupied and oppressed just ten years earlier. Indeed, when the Algerian War began in 1954, she observed herself feeling just as disturbed by the sight of French uniforms in public as she had by German ones — except that now she shared the culpability herself. ‘
I’m French,’ she would say to herself, and feel as though she were confessing to a deformity.

The years in which Algeria was fighting for self-determination, 1954 to 1962, were traumatic ones, bringing appalling suffering. The bloodshed found its way to Paris, as pro-independence demonstrators were killed in the heart of the city. French torture and executions of civilians in Algeria caused widespread dismay. Camus’ loyalties were with his mother, but he opposed the authorities’ abuses too. Sartre and
Beauvoir were more single-minded in their support of the Algerian liberation movement; they campaigned actively, and both wrote eloquent contributions to books by and about tortured Algerians. Sartre wrote in his foreword to Henri Alleg’s
The Question
: ‘
Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner’ — an allusion to Camus’ earlier essay ‘Neither Victims Nor Executioners’. Had Sartre and Beauvoir not already fallen out with Camus, they might have done so now over the Algerian situation.

We could accuse Sartre and Beauvoir of cheering on the violence from the safety of the sidelines, but this time their position was not safe at all. Just as in 1947, Sartre received
death threats. In October 1960, 10,000 French army veterans marched in an anti-independence demonstration shouting, among other slogans, ‘Shoot Sartre!’ When he signed an illegal petition urging French soldiers to disobey orders that they disagreed with, he faced prosecution and prison, until President Charles de Gaulle allegedly ruled this out with the remark, ‘One does not imprison Voltaire.’ Finally, on 7 January 1962, someone took the incitements to murder seriously. At 42 rue Bonaparte, where Sartre lived with his mother, a bomb was planted in the apartment above
theirs. The
explosion damaged both storeys and tore off the apartment doors; it was only by good luck that no one was injured. Camus had feared for his mother in Algeria, but it was Sartre’s mother who now faced danger. He moved to a new apartment at 222 boulevard Raspail, renting a separate one for his mother nearby. Sartre was now closer to where Beauvoir lived, and further away from his old, well-known haunts in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, making him harder to find.

Sartre did not let the attack stop his campaigning: he and Beauvoir continued to speak at demonstrations, write articles, and give evidence in support of those accused of terrorist activity. According to Claude Lanzmann, they would get up in the middle of the night to make desperate
phone calls seeking reprieve for Algerians due to be executed. In 1964, Sartre turned down the
Nobel Prize in Literature, saying that he did not want to compromise his independence and that he deplored the committee’s tendency to offer the prize only to Western writers or to anti-Communist émigrés, rather than to revolutionary writers from the developing world.

In effect, when offered the prize, Sartre had mentally consulted the ‘least favoured’, rather as Heidegger had sought the wisdom of the Todtnauberg ‘peasant’ next door when offered the Berlin job in 1934. In Heidegger’s story, his neighbour silently shook his head. In Sartre’s mind, the least favoured similarly gave him the authoritative head-shake:
no
. But Heidegger’s refusal was all about retreat and resignation from worldly complexities. Sartre’s was a response to the demands of unjustly treated human beings — and it tied him more closely than ever to the lives of others.

Long before Sartre, others had written about the role of the ‘gaze’ in racism. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois had reflected in
The Souls of Black Folk
on black people’s ‘
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’. Later black American writers also explored the Hegelian battle for control of perspectives. In 1953, James Baldwin described visiting a Swiss hamlet
where no one had seen a black person before, and where they gawped at him in amazement. He reflected that, in theory, he ought to feel as early white explorers did in African villages, accepting the stares as tribute to his marvellousness. Like the explorers, he was more widely travelled and sophisticated than the locals. Yet he could not feel that way; instead he felt humiliated and ill at ease.

As a black gay man,
Baldwin had been through years of double marginalisation in the United States, where racial divisions were institutionalised and homosexuality was illegal. (The first state to decriminalise it was Illinois, in 1962.) He made his home for years in France — and there he joined his fellow novelist Richard Wright, who was now well settled in Paris.

After his discovery of and meetings with the existentialists in the 1940s, Wright had become more Francophile and more existentialist than ever. In 1952 he finished his existentialist novel
The Outsider
, the story of a troubled man named Cross Damon who flees to start a new life after he is confused with another man who dies in a subway crash. The white authorities are unable to tell one black man from another; Damon takes advantage of their error to flee a lawsuit for getting an underage girl pregnant. He then gets into worse difficulties, committing murders to conceal his identity. He also becomes involved with Communists, as Wright himself had. Having reinvented himself, Damon feels a great freedom, but also a dizzying responsibility to decide the meaning of his life. The story ends badly, as Damon is hunted down for his crimes and killed; in his dying moments, he says that he did it all to be free and to find out what he is worth. ‘
We’re different from what we seem … Maybe worse, maybe better, but certainly different … We’re strangers to ourselves.’

Wright applies the philosophies of Sartre and Camus to the black American experience. The result is an interesting book, yet it also had some weaknesses and could have benefited from editorial help to bring out its ideas more powerfully. Instead, Wright got an editor and an agent who preferred to relieve the book of ideas altogether, rather as happened with the English-language translation of Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
. The publishing world expected something simple and raw from an author like Wright, not an intellectual reworking of the likes of
Nausea
and
The Stranger
. Reluctantly,
he revised his work to trim down the philosophy. While he was doing this painful job, a new novel arrived in the post:
Invisible Man
, by Ralph Ellison. It too told of an alienated black man making a journey from invisibility to authenticity.
Invisible Man
had a lighter touch than Wright’s novel, and contained no French philosophy. It sold better and won the National Book Award.