At the Existentialist Café (43 page)

(Illustrations Credit 12.1)

Wright wrote generously to Ellison, praising his work and inviting him to Paris — to which Ellison commented rudely, ‘
I am getting a little sick of American Negroes running over for a few weeks and coming back insisting that it’s paradise.’ He thought Wright had harmed himself by moving abroad: he had spoiled the freedom of his writing
by seeking freedom in real life. Wright got this sort of remark a lot: his editor, Edward
Aswell, thought he had won peace as an individual but lost literary momentum. Even James Baldwin wrote ‘
Richard was able, at last, to live in Paris exactly as he would have lived, had he been a white man, here, in America. This may seem desirable, but I wonder if it is.’

I wonder something different: why did Wright’s Parisian existence attract such condemnation? Baldwin himself lived in France, and Ralph Ellison used a Prix de Rome fellowship to move to Italy for two years after the success of
Invisible Man
— although he did miss America, and returned to it. White writers moved abroad all the time; no one told them they would lose their ability to write if they did so. Wright believed his freedom was essential to him, to get perspective: ‘
I need to live free if I am to expand.’ It seems a reasonable claim. The real objection, I suspect, was not that Richard Wright moved to France but that he wrote about French ideas.

True, Wright wrote no more novels after this. (Neither did Ellison.) He did write books of travel and reportage, notably
The Color Curtain
, about the great Bandung conference of developing countries in April 1955, and
White Man, Listen!
, in 1957, dedicated to westernised individuals in Asia, Africa and the West Indies — those ‘
lonely outsiders who exist precariously on the clifflike margins of many cultures’. His sympathy for the existential misfit never declined; it merely migrated to non-fiction.

On 19 September 1956, Wright spoke at the
First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne. There, he was the only speaker to draw attention to the almost total absence of women in the debate. He pointed out how close the congress’ key topics were to those Simone de Beauvoir had explored in
The Second Sex
: power struggles, the alienated gaze, self-consciousness, and the construction of oppressive myths. Feminist and anti-racist campaigners also shared the existentialist commitment to action: the ‘can-do’ belief that the status quo could be understood in intellectual terms, but should not be accepted in life.

The Second Sex
had meanwhile been having ever more powerful effects on women around the world. The makers of a 1989 television programme and book called
Daughters of de Beauvoir
collected stories from women whose lives were changed by reading her work during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. These were women such as
Angie Pegg, a housewife in a small Essex town who picked up
The Second Sex
at random in a bookshop, and read it until four in the morning. She plunged first into the chapter on how housework isolates women from the world, then went back to read the rest. Until that moment, Pegg had thought she was the only one to feel disconnected from life because of the way she spent her days; Beauvoir made her realise that she was not — and showed her
why
she felt that way. It was another of those life-changing book discoveries, like Sartre’s or Levinas’ when they read Husserl. By the morning, Pegg had decided on a change of direction in her life. She abandoned her mop and duster and went to university to study philosophy.

As well as
The Second Sex
, many women took inspiration from Beauvoir’s four volumes of autobiography, which started in 1958 with
The Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
and continued until
All Said and Done
, in 1972.
Margaret Walters, growing up in Australia, was thrilled by the confident tone and content of these books. They told the epic story of one woman seeking freedom — and finding it. Women living in traditional marriages were especially intrigued by Beauvoir’s account of her open relationship with Sartre and other lovers.
Kate Millett, who became an eminent feminist herself, remembered thinking: ‘There she is in Paris, living this life. She’s the brave, independent spirit, she’s writ large what I would like to be, here in Podunk.’ She also admired Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s joint political commitment. ‘What both of them represented was the adventure of trying to lead an ethical life, trying to live according to a radical ethical politics, which isn’t just the leftist bible — you have to invent situation ethics all the time. And that’s an adventure.’

Simone de Beauvoir led women to make such drastic changes in their lives during these decades that, inevitably, some felt they had thrown away too much. One of the interviewees,
Joyce Goodfellow,
described abandoning her marriage and walking out on a steady but dull job. She ended up as a totally free woman — and a single mother, who struggled for years with poverty and solitude. ‘What you read really does influence your life,’ she said wryly.

What you read influences your life: the story of existentialism as it spread around the world in the fifties and sixties bears this out more than any other modern philosophy. By feeding feminism, gay rights, the breaking down of class barriers, and the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, it helped to change the basis of our existence today in fundamental ways. At the same time, many were inspired to head off in search of more personal forms of liberation. Sartre had called for a new existentialist psychotherapy, and this was established by the 1950s, with therapists seeking to treat patients as individuals struggling with questions of meaning and choice rather than as mere sets of symptoms. The Swiss psychiatrists Medard Boss and Ludwig Binswanger developed ‘Daseinanalysis’, based on Heidegger’s ideas; later Sartre’s ideas became more influential in the US and Britain. Rollo May and Irvin Yalom worked in an overtly existentialist framework, and similar ideas guided ‘anti-psychiatrists’ such as R. D. Laing as well as the ‘logotherapist’ Viktor
Frankl, whose experiences in a Nazi concentration camp had led him to conclude that the human need for meaning was almost as vital as that for food or sleep.

These movements drew energy from a more general desire for meaning and self-realisation among the young, especially in America. After the war, many people had settled into as peaceful a life as they could manage, recognising the value of a steady job and a house in the suburbs with greenery and fresh air. Some veterans found it hard to adjust, but many wanted only to enjoy what was good in the world. Their children grew up with the benefits of this, but then, entering adolescence, wondered whether there was more to life than mowing the lawn and waving to the neighbours. They revolted against the narrow-minded political order of Cold War America, with its blend of comfort and paranoia. When they read J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel
The Catcher in the Rye
, they decided that, like its hero Holden Caulfield, the one thing they did not want to be was
phony
.

There followed a decade or so when literature, theatre and cinema were all abuzz with what we might call ‘authenticity dramas’. They range from the Beat writers, with their riffs on restlessness or addiction, to films of generational disaffection such as
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955), or, in France, Jean-Luc Godard’s
À bout de souffle
(1960). Existentialism was sometimes acknowledged, if only ironically. Marcel Carné’s 1958 film
Les tricheurs
(‘The cheaters’, translated as
Youthful Sinners
) was a fable in which two young Left Bank nihilists are so hip and polyamorous that they fail to notice they are falling in love and ought to have chosen a bourgeois marriage instead. In
Funny Face
(1957), Audrey Hepburn’s character goes into a Parisian nightclub in search of a famous philosopher, becomes carried away by the music, and does a wild existentialist dance. But she too is safely married off — to an ageing Fred Astaire.

Other films and novels maintained a harder edge, refusing to settle for the old ways. A minor masterpiece of this perod is
Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
. Its hero, a war veteran, struggles to fit into his suburban environment and a corporate job in which he is supposed to work long hours on tasks that make no sense. In the end, he lights out for a more authentic way of life, rejecting security. The title became something of a catchphrase, especially after the book was made into a film starring Gregory Peck. As Sloan Wilson recalled, executives began wearing (identical) sports clothes to work instead of grey suits — just to prove that
they
, unlike all the other conformists, were free and authentic individuals.

(Illustrations Credit 12.2)

George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
of 1949 had made a key connection
between conformist culture and technological control; other writers now picked up on this theme. David Karp’s little-known 1953 novel
One
is set in a society that enforces complete psychological uniformity. The hero is arrested after the state detects signs of individualism in him so subtle that even he hadn’t noticed them. He is gently but forcibly re-educated — a soothing, medicalised process rather than a confrontational one, and all the more terrifying for that.

Other dramas also linked the fear of technology with the fear that humans might be reduced to antlike creatures of no power or worth. In an earlier Heidegger chapter, I mentioned one of my favourite films,
The Incredible Shrinking Man
of 1957 — which is a techno-horror as well as an existential drama. It begins when the hero is exposed to a cloud of radioactive fallout at sea. Back home, he begins to dwindle, losing size and dignity until he is the size of a dust speck. He cannot stop it happening, although he uses all the tools and devices at his disposal to survive, and ends as a tiny figure in the grass, looking out at the immensity of the universe. Other 1950s films similarly linked the twin Heideggerian terrors of lost authenticity and uncanny technology — including some, like
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956), that are more often read simply as expressions of Cold War anti-Communism. In movies such as
Godzilla
and
Them!
(both 1954),
squid, leeches, scorpions, crabs, radioactive ants and other nightmare creatures pour out of a devastated, violated earth to take revenge. It is intriguing to read Heidegger’s lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ with its talk of the ‘monstrous’ and ‘terrible’ in man, the violation of the earth, and the stripping of resources, while musing on the fact that the published version came out in the same year as
Godzilla
.

Along with the fiction came a new kind of non-fiction from a new breed: the sociologist, psychologist or philosopher as existentialist rebel. David Riesman led the way with his study of modern alienation,
The Lonely Crowd
, in 1950. A flurry in 1956 included Irving Goffman’s
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
, William Whyte’s
Organization Man
and Paul Goodman’s
Growing Up Absurd
. The most dramatic work of existentialist non-fiction was written a little later by a member of the old guard: Hannah Arendt. Her 1963 work
Eichmann in Jerusalem
,
begun as a
New Yorker
article and developed into a book, concerned the Jerusalem trial of Adolf
Eichmann, organiser of the Holocaust. Having attended the trial and observed his curiously blank responses, Arendt interpreted him as the ultimate Man in the Grey Suit. For her, he was a mindless bureaucrat so in thrall to the Heideggerian ‘they’ that he had lost all human individuality and responsibility, a phenomenon which she characterised as ‘the banality of evil’. Her interpretation was controversial, as were other aspects of the book, but it fascinated an audience that was now in a moral panic,
not
about extreme beliefs, but about the very opposite: faceless, mindless conformism. Partly in response to Arendt’s work, researchers such as Stanley Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo perfected experiments exploring just how far people would go in obeying orders. The results were alarming: almost everyone, it seemed, was willing to inflict torture if a sufficiently authoritative figure commanded it.