At the Existentialist Café (23 page)

Back in Paris, it was important to stay mindful of how dangerous the occupiers were — something easy to forget if you were not among their direct targets. Sartre wrote of how the Germans ‘
gave up their seats to old ladies in the Métro, they showed affection to children and stroked their cheeks’. What’s more, he added, ‘do not go imagining that the French showed them a crushing air of contempt’ — though they did venture small discourtesies when they could, as a way of preserving self-respect. Jean
Guéhenno’s diary recorded times when he deliberately failed to give directions on the street to Germans, or gave them rudely, in a way he would never normally do.
Merleau-Ponty noted the difficulty he had in overcoming the rules of good manners that he had learned in childhood, but he too forced himself to be rude as a patriotic duty. For someone as naturally affable and well brought up as he, it took a decided effort.

Jews, and anyone actively suspected of Resistance activity, had a grimmer sense of what the Occupation really meant — but they too could be blithe for too long. When the regulation came in on 29 May 1942 that Jews must wear the yellow star, many of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s
Jewish friends ignored it. They also defied the bans on using restaurants, cinemas, libraries and other public places. As each new rule was announced, a few took it as their cue to flee if they could, usually via Spain to Britain or America, but others stayed. It seemed possible to live with the insults and threats — until it wasn’t.

At the most unexpected times, terrifying holes could open up in the fabric of things. Sartre described it with his usual cinematic sense:

You would phone a friend one day and the telephone would ring and ring in the empty apartment; you would ring his doorbell and he wouldn’t come to the door; if the concierge broke in, you would find two chairs drawn up together in the hallway with German cigarette ends between the legs.

It was as if the sidewalks of the city opened occasionally, he wrote, and a tentacled monster reached up to drag someone down. The cafés, always filled with familiar faces, also became an index to disappearances. Beauvoir wrote of how two attractive Czech women, regulars at the Café Flore, were suddenly not there one day. They never came back. It was unbearable to see their empty places:
‘it was, precisely, a
nothingness
’.

Cafés such as the Flore continued to be a focus for Parisian life. For a start, they were the best places to keep warm, certainly better than the sparse, cheap hotels in which many lived without heating or proper cooking facilities. Even after the war, the American writer James Baldwin would observe in the 1950s, ‘
The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafés.’ They also became places to talk, to conspire a little, to keep one’s mind alive. They certainly governed Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s social lives, being the places where they saw ever-increasing circles of new acquaintances: poets, playwrights, journalists, artists like Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, and avant-garde writers such as Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau and
Jean Genet. The latter, a former thief and prostitute now gaining fame as a writer, simply marched up to Sartre one day in the Flore and said
bonjour
. This was one of many relationships forged at wartime café tables.

They met Albert
Camus in a similarly abrupt way, but at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, where he introduced himself one day in 1943 while Sartre’s play
The Flies
was in rehearsal. He and Sartre already
knew a lot about each other: Camus had reviewed
Nausea
and Sartre had just been writing a piece on Camus’
The Stranger
. They immediately got on well. Beauvoir later said that she and Sartre found Camus
‘a simple, cheerful soul’, often funny and bawdy in conversation, and so emotional that he would sit down in the snow in the street at 2 a.m. and pour out his love troubles.

Since his lonely interlude in Paris in 1940, Camus had travelled to and from Algeria a few times. His wife Francine was still there, having become stuck in the country when Allied forces captured it — Albert being near Lyons at the time, receiving treatment for a bout of the tuberculosis from which he suffered throughout life. He had now finished the ‘absurds’ he had been working on three years earlier; these spoke above all of his dislocated experience as a French Algerian, caught between two countries and never fully at home in either. They also reflected his early experience of poverty: the Camus family had never been well off, but their situation had become dire after
Camus’ father Lucien died in the first year of the First
World War. (Being recruited into an Algerian regiment, he was sent into battle wearing a picturesque colonial uniform of red trousers and a bright blue waistcoat, fatally inappropriate for the grey mud of northern France.) Albert, born on 7 November 1913, was then less than a year old. He grew up in a sordid apartment in Algiers with his brother, his grieving illiterate and deaf mother, and his grandmother, who was both illiterate and violent.

Thus, while the bourgeois young Sartre had his dreams of literary derring-do, and Merleau-Ponty had his happiness at being unconditionally loved, and Beauvoir had her books and sweet-shop windows, Camus grew up into a world of silence and absences. His family had no electricity, no running water, no newspapers, no books, no radio, few visitors at home, and no sense of the wider ‘life-worlds’ of others. He did manage to escape, to a lycée in Algiers and then to a career as a journalist and writer, but his childhood marked him. The very first entry of his first diary, written when he was twenty-two, contains the remark, ‘
A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility.’

(Illustrations Credit 7.1)

Camus went on to spend much of his life in France, but he always felt an outsider there, lost without the brilliant-white Mediterranean
sun that had been the one compensation in his early life. The sun became almost a character in his fiction, especially in his first novel,
The Stranger
. This tells of a French-Algerian called Meursault (his first name is never given), who gets into a confrontation on a beach with a knife-wielding ‘Arab’ — whose name is never given at all. Meursault, who happens to have a friend’s gun, shoots the man almost absent-mindedly while dazzled by the light glancing off the sea and the knife blade. Arrested and put on trial, he confusedly tells the judge that he did it because of the sun. As this shows, Meursault does not put his defence case well, and his lawyer is not much better. The court’s attention is allowed to move away from the actual killing and on to Meursault’s apparent lack of remorse for it, or indeed of an appropriate emotional response to anything at all, including his mother’s recent death. Found guilty,
he is sentenced to execution by guillotine: a killing just as cold and inhuman as Meursault’s own crime, although no one points this out to the judge. The novel ends with Meursault in his cell awaiting death. He is afraid, yet finds a perverse consolation as he looks up at the sky and opens himself ‘
to the tender indifference of the world’.

It may seem odd that the man Beauvoir described as warm, funny and gushingly emotional should have been able to write so well about a man who is an affectless blank — or who, at least, cannot express emotion in the ways society expects. It is not hard to find possible reasons in his background: his father’s pointless death, his own recurrent life-threatening illness, and his whole family’s silence and disconnection. Yet the novel also captures something of the French wartime experience in general: again there is that seemingly bland surface, under which the abyss lurks.

In the same year as publishing
The Stranger
, 1942, Camus developed his ideas further in
The Myth of Sisyphus
. This too was short, though it would have been longer had he not agreed to drop a chapter on Franz Kafka because the censors would not accept material about a Jew. Camus, like Sartre and many others, learned to make compromises. Later, in a preface to the English translation in 1955, he would remark that
Sisyphus
owed much to his discovery, while working on the book during the French defeat, that ‘
even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism’.

The book’s title refers to a story from Homer’s
Odyssey
. King Sisyphus, having arrogantly defied the gods, is punished by being condemned to roll a boulder endlessly up a hill. Each time it gets near the top, it slips out of his grasp and rolls down, so he has to plod back and begin again. Camus asks: if life is revealed to be as futile as the labour of Sisyphus, how should we respond?

Like Sartre in
Nausea
, he points out that mostly we don’t see the fundamental problem of life because we don’t stop to think about it. We get up, commute, work, eat, work, commute, sleep. But occasionally a breakdown occurs, a Chandos-like moment in which a beat is skipped and the question of purpose arises. At such moments, we
experience
‘weariness tinged with amazement’, as we confront the most basic question of all: why exactly do we go on living?

In a way, this is Camus’ variant on Heidegger’s question of Being. Heidegger thought the questionable nature of existence looms up when a hammer breaks; Camus thought similarly basic collapses in everyday projects allow us to ask the biggest question in life. Also like Heidegger, he thought the answer took the form of a decision rather than a statement: for Camus, we must decide whether to give up or keep going. If we keep going, it must be on the basis of accepting that there is no ultimate meaning to what we do. Camus concludes his book with Sisyphus resuming his endless task while resigning himself to its absurdity. Thus: ‘
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

The main influence on Camus here was not Heidegger but Kierkegaard, especially in the 1843 essay
Fear and Trembling
. This too used a story to illuminate the ‘absurd’: Kierkegaard chose the Bible tale in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac rather than the more usual goat or sheep. Rather to God’s surprise, it seems, Abraham travels to the sacrifice site with Isaac, making no complaint. At the last moment, God lets him off, and Abraham and Isaac go home. What astounds Kierkegaard is neither the obedience nor the reprieve, but the way in which Abraham and Isaac seem able to return to the way things were before. They have been forced to depart entirely from the realm of ordinary humanity and fatherly protection, yet somehow Abraham is still confident in his love for his son. For Kierkegaard, the story shows that we must make this sort of impossible leap in order to continue with life after its flaws have been revealed. As he wrote, Abraham ‘
resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd’. This was what Camus thought his modern readers needed to do, but in his case without any involvement of God. Here, too, one can see connections to life in Occupied France. Everything has been compromised, everything lost — yet there it all still seems to be. It is the
sense
that has gone. How do you live without sense? The answer offered by both Camus and Kierkegaard amounted to something
like the motto in the British morale-boosting poster: Keep Calm and Carry On.

Camus’ ‘absurds’ proved lastingly popular, although the third of the trio is less well known today:
Caligula
, a play recreating Suetonius’ story of that depraved first-century emperor as a case study in freedom and meaninglessness pushed to their limits.
The Stranger
and
Sisyphus
remained bestsellers, appealing to readers for generations afterwards — including those grappling with nothing more unbearable than discontentment in suburbia. I was in that category when I first read them, at around the same time I read Sartre’s
Nausea
, and I took all these books in a similar spirit, although I felt myself to be much more of an ill-at-ease Roquentin than a cool blank Meursault.

What I didn’t realise was that important philosophical differences divided the work of Camus and Sartre. Much as they liked Camus personally, neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. For them, life is
not
absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.

As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of
The Stranger
, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata
is
a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a
soccer match, I see it
as
a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.