At the Existentialist Café (47 page)

He did not let his resentments put him off his work, which continued to lead him up and down the mountain pathways of his thoughts in his late years. He spent as much time as possible at Todtnauberg, receiving visits from pilgrims and sometimes from more critical visitors. One such encounter was with the Jewish poet and concentration-camp survivor Paul Celan, who gave a reading in Freiburg in July 1967 while on temporary release from a psychiatric clinic. The venue was the same auditorium where Heidegger had given his Nazi rectorial address.

Heidegger, who admired Celan’s work, tried to make him feel welcome in Freiburg. He even asked a
book-dealer friend to go around all the bookshops in the city making sure they put Celan titles in their windows so the poet would see them as he walked through town. This is a touching story, especially as it is the single documented example
I have come across of Heidegger actually doing something nice. He attended the reading, and the next day took Celan up to the hut. The poet signed the guest book, and wrote a wary, enigmatic
poem about the visit, called simply ‘Todtnauberg’.

Heidegger liked receiving travellers, but had never been a
Homo viator
himself. He was disdainful about mass tourism, which he considered symptomatic of the modern
‘desert-like’ way of being, with its demand for novelty. In later life, however, he became fond of taking holidays in Provence. He agonised over the question of whether he should visit Greece — an obvious destination, given his long obsession with its temples, its rocky outcrops, and its Heraclitus and Parmenides and Sophocles. But that was why he was nervous: too much was at stake. In 1955, he arranged to go with his friend Erhard Kästner. Train and boat tickets were booked, but at the last minute Heidegger cancelled. Five years later the two men planned another trip, and again Heidegger pulled out. He wrote to warn Kästner that this was probably how things would go on. ‘
I will be allowed to think certain things about Greece without seeing the country … The necessary concentration is best found at home.’

In the end, he did go. He took an Aegean cruise in 1962, with Elfride and a friend called Ludwig Helmken — a lawyer and politician of the centre right who had a past at least as embarrassing as Heidegger’s, since he’d joined the Nazi Party in 1937. Their cruise sailed from Venice down the Adriatic, and then took in Olympia, Mycenae, Heraklion, Rhodes, Delos,
Athens and Delphi, before returning to Italy.

At first, Heidegger’s fears were confirmed: nothing in Greece satisfied him. Olympia had turned into a mass of ‘
hotels for the American tourists’, he wrote in his notebook. Its landscape failed to ‘set free the Greek element of the land, of its sea and its sky’. Crete and Rhodes were little better. Rather than traipse around in a herd of holiday makers, he became more inclined to stay on the boat reading Heraclitus. He hated his first glimpse of smoggy Athens, although he enjoyed being driven by a friend up to the Acropolis in the early morning before the crowds arrived with their cameras.

Later, after lunch and a folk-dance performance at the hotel,
they went to the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion — and at last Heidegger found the Greece he was looking for. Gleaming white ruins stood firm on the headland; the bare rock of the cape lifted the temple towards the sky. Heidegger noted how ‘
this single gesture of the land suggests the invisible nearness of the divine’, then observed that, even though the Greeks were great navigators, they ‘knew how to inhabit and demarcate the world against the barbarous’. Even now, surrounded by sea, Heidegger’s thoughts naturally turned to imagery of enclosing, bounding and holding in. He never thought of Greece in terms of trade and openness, as Husserl had done. He also continued to be annoyed by the encroachments of the modern world, with the other tourists’ infernal clicking
cameras.

Reading Heidegger’s account of the cruise, we get a glimpse of how he responded when the world failed to fit his preconceptions. He sounds resentful, and selective in what he is prepared to see. When Greece surprises him, he writes himself further into his private vision of things; when it fits that vision, he cautiously grants approval. He was right to have been nervous of making the trip: it did not bring out the best in him.

There was one other late moment of surprise and beauty. As the ship sailed out of the bay of Dubrovnik on its way back to Italy, a pod of dolphins swam up at sunset to play around the ship. Heidegger was enchanted. He recalled a
cup he had seen in Munich’s museum of antiquities, attributed to Exekias and dating from around 530
BC
, on the sides of which Dionysus was depicted sailing on a vessel entwined with grapevines as dolphins cavorted in the sea. Heidegger rushed for his notebook — but as he wrote about the image, the usual language of enclosure took over. As the cup ‘rests within the boundaries’ of its creation, he concluded, ‘so too the birthplace of Occident and modern age, secure in its own island-like essence, remains in the recollective thinking of the sojourn’. Even the dolphins had to be gathered into a homeland.

One never finds Jaspers’ open sea in Heidegger’s writing; one does not encounter Marcel’s endlessly moving traveller, or his ‘stranger met by chance’. When an interviewer from the magazine
Der Spiegel
asked
Heidegger in 1966 what he thought of the idea that humans might one day travel to other planets, leaving Earth behind — because
‘where is it written that man’s place is here?’ — Heidegger was appalled. He replied: ‘According to our human experience and history, at least as far as I see it, I know that everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition.’

For Heidegger, all philosophising is about homecoming, and the greatest journey home is the journey to death. In a conversation with the theology professor Bernhard
Welte towards the end of his life, he mentioned his wish to be buried in the Messkirch church cemetery, despite the fact that he had long since left the faith. He and Welte both said that death meant above all a return to the soil of home.

Heidegger had his wish. He now lies in the Catholic graveyard on the outskirts of Messkirch. His grave is secular, bearing a small star in place of a cross, and he shares it with Elfride, who died in 1992. Two other Heidegger family graves lie to left and right of them, with crosses. The effect of the three monuments together, with Martin’s and Elfride’s larger than the others, is oddly reminiscent of a Calvary.

On the day I visited, daffodils had been freshly planted on all three graves, with handfuls of small pebbles on Martin’s and Elfride’s headstone. Sticking up perkily from the soil between their stone and that of Martin’s parents was a little stone cherub — a dreaming boy, cross-legged, with his eyes closed.

One of the graves beside Martin Heidegger’s belongs to his younger brother,
Fritz, who had protected Martin’s manuscripts during the war and, along with Elfride, helped him with secretarial work and other support throughout life.

Fritz had done what Heidegger had only philosophised about: he stayed close to home, living in Messkirch and working at the same bank all his life. He also remained within the family religion. Locals knew him as a lively and humorous man who, despite a stutter, was a regular star of Messkirch’s annual
Fastnacht
week or ‘Week of Fools’ —
a festival just before Lent marked by speeches filled with hilarious wordplay in the local dialect.

Some of this wit comes across in Fritz’s remarks to his brother. He would joke about ‘Da-da-dasein’, poking fun at Martin’s terminology as well as at his own speech impediment. Never claiming to understand philosophy, he used to say that Martin’s work would only make sense to the people of the twenty-first century, when ‘the Americans have long set up a huge supermarket on the moon’. Still, he diligently typed his brother’s writings, a great help for a philosopher who was uncomfortable with typewriters. (Heidegger felt that typing spoiled writing: ‘
It withdraws from man the essential rank of the hand.’) Along the way, Fritz would gently suggest
amendments. Why not write in shorter sentences? Should not each sentence convey one single clear idea? No response from his brother is recorded.

Fritz Heidegger died on 26 June 1980, his life relatively unsung until recent years, when he caught biographers’ interest as a kind of anti-Martin — a case study in
not
being the twentieth century’s most brilliant and most hated philosopher.

During the 1970s, meanwhile, Sartre’s faculties had gone into a long, frustrating decline, affecting his ability to work. His papers include a brief undated sheet (possibly written shortly after the moon landings of July 1969, since it begins with the two words, ‘The moon’) in which he records the sad fact that he has written nothing for five months. He lists the projects he still wants to finish: the Flaubert book, a biographical essay on Tintoretto, the
Critique of Dialectical Reason
. But he does not feel like writing, and is afraid that he never will again. For Sartre, not writing was like not living. He wrote: ‘
For years, I haven’t finished anything. I don’t know why. Yes I do: the Corydrane.’

Long-term addictions to Corydrane and alcohol did cause difficulties, but his writing also stalled because, after years of getting by with monocular vision, he was now going blind in the good eye. He could still watch television, seeing moving shadows and listening to the dialogue. In 1976, he saw a long programme about that very interesting subject, Jean-Paul Sartre. Based on interviews filmed a few years
later,
Sartre par lui-même
(
Sartre By Himself
) was marked by an extra interview with Michel Contat to coincide with its broadcast. Sartre told Contat that not being able to write had taken away his reason for existence, but that he
refused to be sad about it.

Other health problems accumulated; he had
strokes, memory lapses, problems with his teeth. There were moments when he seemed to drift away entirely. During one fugue, Beauvoir asked him what he was thinking about. He replied, ‘
Nothing. I’m not here.’ He had always described consciousness as a nothingness, but in fact his head had always been crowded with words and ideas. He had pushed work
out
of himself every day, as though he were full and needed unloading. Now, although still replete with things to say, he was running out of the energy with which to say them. Those who cared for him began to secretly hope that he would have a quick, easy death — a Camus-style death, as his friend Olivier Todd put it. The slow disintegration was too hard to watch: ‘
Sartre,
petit père
, don’t do this to us!’ wrote Todd. Still Sartre battled on, a stubborn small figure at the levers of his vast public persona.

In his last months, partners, lovers and disciples tended him in relays: Simone de Beauvoir, his young companion Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (whom he had adopted as a daughter, to give her legal rights), and his long-time lover Michelle Vian. He also had a new young secretary and assistant, Benny Lévy, who helped with his writing and may have exerted an undue influence on him — at least, that was what some believed. Lévy was a man of strong opinions, a former Maoist now turned anti-Communist, and passionate about his Jewish identity. He was not the sort to efface himself as an invisible amanuensis.

A series of conversations between him and Sartre appeared in
Le nouvel observateur
in the last weeks of Sartre’s life and were later published separately as
L’espoir maintenant
(
Hope Now
). They show a Sartre who is unusually apologetic — about his earlier pro-Soviet and Maoist views, about his 1946 book on
anti-Semitism (which Lévy considered flawed), and about his earlier fascination with violence. This new Sartre looks more benignly on religious faith, although he is still not a believer. He admits to being a daydreamer in matters of politics. He
sounds chastened and defeated. Some of those close to Sartre thought
Hope Now
showed no genuine change of thinking, but only the weakness of a man whose illness and disabilities were making him vulnerable. In the interview, perhaps anticipating such objections, Lévy asks whether Sartre’s ideas have been affected by their relationship. Sartre doesn’t deny it, but says that now he has to work in partnership or not at all. At first he considered it a lesser evil, compared to not working, but now he sees it as something positive, ‘
a thought created by two people’.

He was used to writing in a close partnership with Simone de
Beauvoir, but now Beauvoir was foremost among those who thought Lévy was influencing Sartre too much. Raymond Aron also remarked that the ideas in
Hope Now
were so reasonable that even he could have agreed with them — a sure sign, he implied, that they were not the real Sartre.

This last stage in Sartre’s life remains an enigma. Praising peaceful relationships and non-violence, he seems to be saying sensible and appealing things — yet something is missing in the new vanilla Sartre.
Hope Now
can be read as a reminder of what had been so exciting (as well as shocking) in his earlier work — mistakes, crashing insensitivity, belligerence, graphomania and all. But perhaps I am doing what he and Beauvoir tended to do with Camus: mourning an old version while dismissing an updated version as a mistake. Perhaps it was the knowledge of his own decline that was making him look more mildly on the world.

In any case, if anything demonstrates the truth of Simone de Beauvoir’s vision of human life as an unresolvable, ambiguous drama of freedom and contingency, it is the last years of Sartre. As one traces his decline, one sees a blazing, garrulous figure gradually turn into his own ghost, stripped of vision and to some extent of hearing, of his pipe, his writing, his engagement with the world — and finally, as Wollheim would say, of his phenomenology. All this was out of his control. Yet he never let himself become solidified as a statue: he kept changing his thoughts until the very last moment.