At the Existentialist Café (16 page)

In August 1937,
Husserl had a fall, and did not make a good recovery. That winter, his health declined. He continued to work with collaborators and visitors on a third section of the
Crisis
, but he did not finish it. His mind failed him in his last few months; he spoke little, but occasionally said things like ‘I’ve made many mistakes, but it can still all turn out well,’ or ‘I’m swimming in the River of Lethe and have no thoughts.’ Then, with a flash of his old ambition, he said, ‘Philosophy has to be built up all over again from the beginning.’ He died on 27 April 1938, aged seventy-nine. The nursing sister who attended him said afterwards, to Malvine, ‘
He died like a holy man.’

Edmund Husserl was cremated, because Malvine
feared that a gravestone in a cemetery might be desecrated by vandals. She remained in their home for now, guarding her husband’s ashes, his magnificent library, and his archive of personal papers — all written in that distinctive shorthand script, and including his many unpublished and unfinished works, not least the last sections of the
Crisis
.

Pleading illness,
Heidegger did not attend the funeral.

5

TO CRUNCH FLOWERING ALMONDS

In which Jean-Paul Sartre describes a tree, Simone de Beauvoir brings ideas to life, and we meet Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the bourgeoisie
.

In 1934, after his year of Husserl-reading in Berlin, Sartre returned to France filled with energy. He set to work devising his own spin on phenomenology, enlivening it with distinctively Sartrean takes on Kierkegaard and Hegel. He also drew on personal material: his childhood experiences, his youthful enthusiasms, and his wide range of interesting phobias and obsessions. Now that he was reunited with Simone de Beauvoir, he also involved her in his work, and she in turn brought her past and personality into her own writing and thinking. It became a complex blend.

Sartre had to return to teaching, initially in Le Havre again. In his spare time he became a missionary for phenomenology, urging all his friends to study it — including those, like Merleau-Ponty, who had already done so. Beauvoir, who could read German well (apparently better than Sartre, although he had been speaking and reading it all year), spent much of 1934 immersed in phenomenological texts.

Keen to get his ideas on paper, Sartre finished off the essay he had begun in Berlin, ‘A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality’ — the piece that so memorably explained intentionality as an exile from the cosy digestive chambers of the mind out into the dusty world of being. He also worked on a study of the phenomenology of the imagination, of which a shortened version was published in 1936 as
L’imagination
, and a reworked full version in 1940 as
L’imaginaire
or
The Imaginary
. Both works explored the phenomenological puzzle of how dreams, fantasies or hallucinations can be thought of in terms of the structure of intentionality, even when their objects are non-existent or absent in reality.

To extend his research in these areas, Sartre decided he should experience some hallucinations of his own, so he asked the physician Daniel Lagache, an old school friend, to help him try the drug mescaline, which had first been synthesised in 1919. Intellectuals were falling over each other to get their hands on mescaline in the mid-century; the trend culminated in 1953 with
The Doors of Perception
, Aldous Huxley’s famous phenomenological study of what it felt like to view paintings and listen to music while tripping. An existentialist experimenter of the 1950s, the English writer Colin Wilson, described having an encounter with raw Being that was ‘
like waking up on a train and finding a stranger with his face within an inch of your own’. Long before then, Sartre sought his own face-to-face with Being. Dr. Lagache injected him with the drug, then supervised the trip while Sartre, always the good phenomenologist, observed the experience from within and took notes.

The results were dramatic. While Huxley’s drug adventure would be mystical and ecstatic, and one of Dr. Lagache’s assistants had enjoyed prancing through imaginary meadows with exotic dancers,
Sartre’s brain threw up a hellish crew of snakes, fish, vultures, toads, beetles and crustaceans. Worse, they refused to go away afterwards. For months, lobster-like beings followed him just out of his field of vision, and the facades of houses on the street stared at him with human eyes.

He put relatively little of his drug experience into his studies of the imagination, perhaps because it made him fear for a while that he was losing his mind. But he did use it in other works, including the 1937 story ‘The Room’ and the later 1959 play
The Condemned of Altona
, both of which feature young men under siege by hallucinatory monsters, as well as a semi-fictional 1938 piece called ‘Foods’. This drew both on the mescaline imagery and a 1936 trip to Italy. The narrator, walking alone around
Naples on a very hot day, observes
terrible things: a child on crutches picks a slice of watermelon crawling with flies out of a gutter, and eats it. Through an open doorway, he sees a man kneeling beside a little girl. While she says, ‘Daddy; my daddy,’ the man lifts up her dress and bites into her buttocks as one might into a loaf of bread. Sartre’s narrator is overwhelmed by nausea — but with it comes an insight: that nothing in the world happens with any necessity. Everything is ‘contingent’, and it could all have happened a different way. The revelation horrifies him.

Sartre’s own insight about ‘contingency’ must have come earlier, as he had been collecting notes about it for a while, initially in a suitably random blank notebook which he said he found on a Métro train and which had an advertisement for ‘Midi Suppositories’ on the cover. These notes evolved in Berlin into the draft of a novel, to which he gave the working title
Melancholia
. This in turn became the novel that I would encounter when I was sixteen:
Nausea
, the story of the writer Antoine Roquentin and his driftings in Bouville.

Roquentin has initially come to this dull seaside town to research the life of an eighteenth-century courtier, the Marquis de Rollebon, whose papers are in the local library. Rollebon’s career amounted to a series of wild adventures and would be a gift to any biographer, except that Roquentin now can’t find a way to write about them. He has discovered that life is nothing like these swashbuckling stories, and he does not want to falsify reality. In fact, it is Roquentin himself who has come adrift. Lacking the routine or family which lend structure to most people’s lives, he spends his days in the library, or wandering about, or drinking beer in a café that plays ragtime music on the record player. He watches the townspeople doing their bourgeois, ordinary-folk things. Life resembles a lump of featureless dough, characterised only by
contingency, not by necessity. This realisation comes in regular episodes, like waves, and each time it fills Roquentin with a nausea that seems to attach to objects themselves — to the world out there. He picks up a
pebble to throw into the sea, but it feels like a disgusting globular mass in his hand. He enters a room, and the doorknob becomes a weird bulbous lump. In the café, his usual beer glass with its bevelled edges and bright brewer’s coat of arms
turns horrible and contigent on him. He tries to capture these experiences phenomenologically in a diary: ‘
I must say how I see this table, the street, people, my packet of tobacco, since
these
are the things which have changed.’

(Illustrations Credit 5.1)

Eventually, while looking at the ‘boiled leather’ of a chestnut tree in the local park and feeling the nausea again, Roquentin realises that it is not just the tree but the
Being
of the tree that is bothering him. It is the way in which, inexplicably and pointlessly, it simply sits there refusing to make sense or tone itself down. This is what contingency is: the random, outrageous
thisness
of things. Roquentin realises he can no longer see the world as he used to, and that he will never complete his Rollebon biography because he cannot spin adventure stories. For the moment, he can’t do much at all:

I slumped on the bench, dazed, stunned by that profusion of beings without origin: blooming, blossoming everywhere, my
ears were buzzing with existence, my very flesh was throbbing and opening, abandoning itself to the universal burgeoning.

He does have some moments of respite, and these occur when his favourite café plays the record of a woman (probably Sophie Tucker) singing a melancholy, bluesy number called
‘Some of These Days’. It begins with a delicate piano intro, which segues into the singer’s warm voice; for the next few minutes, all is right with Roquentin’s world. Each note leads to the next: no note could be otherwise. The song has necessity, so it bestows necessity on Roquentin’s existence too. Everything is poised and smooth: when he lifts the glass to his lips, it moves on an easy arc, and he can set it down without spilling it. His movements flow, like those of an athlete or musician — until the song ends, and everything goes to pieces again.

(Illustrations Credit 5.2)

The novel ends with Roquentin finding his way out through this vision of art as a source of necessity. He resolves to leave for Paris, in order to write — not a biography, but a different kind of book that will be ‘
beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence’. Later, Sartre reflected that this solution was a bit too easy; can art really save us from the chaos of life? But it gave Roquentin somewhere to go in what might otherwise have been an endless, unresolved novel, ‘blooming, blossoming’ in all directions. As
we shall see later, anything that enabled Sartre to finish a book is to be applauded.

Sartre had incorporated many of his own experiences into his writing: the out-of-season seaside town, the hallucinations, the insight about contingency. Even the obsession with the chestnut tree was personal: his work is full of trees. In his autobiography, he recalled being terrified as a child by a
ghost story in which a young woman, ill in bed, suddenly screams, points out of the window at the chestnut tree outside, then falls dead on her pillow. In Sartre’s own story ‘Childhood of a Leader’, the protagonist Lucien becomes horrified by a chestnut tree because it sits there unresponsively when he kicks it. Sartre later told his friend John Gerassi that his apartment in
Berlin looked out over a fine big tree — not a chestnut, but one similar enough to keep the memory of his Le Havre trees alive in his mind while he wrote.

Trees meant many things for Sartre: Being, mystery, the physical world, contingency. They were also a handy focus for phenomenological description. In his autobiography he also quotes something his grandmother once said to him: ‘
It’s not just a question of having eyes, you have to learn how to use them. Do you know what Flaubert did to the young Maupassant? He sat him down in front of a tree and gave him two hours to describe it.’ This is correct: Flaubert apparently did advise Maupassant to consider things ‘long and attentively’, saying,

There is a part of everything that remains unexplored, for we have fallen into the habit of remembering, whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the slightest thing contains a little that is unknown. We must find it. To describe a blazing fire or a tree in a plain, we must remain before that fire or that tree until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire.

Flaubert was talking about literary skill, but he could have been talking about phenomenological method, which follows exactly that process. With the
epoché
, one first discards second-hand notions or received
ideas, then one describes the thing as it directly presents itself. For Husserl, this ability to describe a phenomenon without influence from others’ theories is what liberates the philosopher.