At the Existentialist Café (57 page)

41
  ‘You would phone’: Sartre, ‘Paris Under the Occupation’, in
The Aftermath of War
(
Situations III
), 8–40, this 15–16.

42
  ‘It was, precisely, a
nothingness
’: POL, 535.

43
  ‘The moment I began living’: James Baldwin, ‘Equal in Paris’, in
The Price of the Ticket
, 113–26, this 114.

44
  Meeting Genet: POL, 579–80; see also Beauvoir,
Adieux
, 272.

45
  Meeting Camus: POL, 539.

46
  ‘A simple, cheerful soul’: ibid., 561. Funny, emotional: FOC, 61. In 2013, the discovery of a brief letter from Camus to Sartre confirmed the warmth of their early friendship: see Grégoire Leménager, ‘Camus inédit: “Mon cher Sartre” sort de l’ombre’,
Le nouvel observateur
(8 Aug. 2013).

47
  Camus’ father: see the autobiographical novel, Camus,
The First Man
, 55; Todd,
Camus
, 5–6.

48
  World of absences: Camus,
The First Man
, 158.

49
  ‘A certain number of years’: Camus,
Notebooks 1935–1942
, 3 (May 1935).

50
  Sun: see Camus, ‘Three Interviews’, in
Lyrical and Critical Essays
, 349–57, this 352 (interview with Gabriel d’Aubarède for
Les nouvelles littéraires
, 10 May 1951).

51
  Sun in
The Stranger
: Camus,
The Stranger
, 48, 51, 53.

52
  ‘To the tender indifference’: ibid., 111. Inspiration for the novel also came from Camus’ experiences of travelling in central Europe in 1937, and feeling disoriented because he could not speak the language or understand how to behave: see Camus,
Notebooks 1935–1942
, 45.

53
  ‘Even within the limits’: Camus, ‘Preface’ (1955),
The Myth of Sisyphus
, 7. See also David Carroll, ‘Rethinking the Absurd: le mythe de Sisyphe’, in E. J. Hughes (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Camus
(Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 53–66, esp. 53–7.

54
  Sisyphus: Homer,
Odyssey
, Book XI, 593–600.

55
  ‘Weariness tinged with amazement’: Camus,
Myth of Sisyphus
, 19. Why go on living: 11–13.

56
  ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’: ibid., 111.

57
  ‘Resigned everything infinitely’: Kierkegaard,
Fear and Trembling
, 45.

58
  Soccer, ‘is claiming to render’, and Hume: Sartre, ‘
The Stranger
Explained’, in
Critical Essays
, 148–84, this 173. Sartre’s example is rugby, but I’ve adapted it in honour of the fact that Camus played soccer.

59
  ‘A first draft’: William Barrett, ‘Talent and Career of Jean-Paul Sartre’,
Partisan Review
, 13 (1946), 237–46, this 244.

60
  ‘Nothingness’: BN, 48. ‘Air-pocket’: Gabriel Marcel, ‘Existence and Human Freedom’, in
The Philosophy of Existence
, 61.

61
  Absence of Pierre: BN, 33–4.

62
  Non-being of 200 francs: BN, 35.

63
  No cream: the joke is online at
http://www.workjoke.com/philosophers-jokes.html
.

64
  ‘I am nothing’: BN, 48.

65
  Vertigo: BN, 53, 56.

66
  Gambler: BN, 56–7.

67
  Alarm clock: BN, 61–2.

68
  ‘So many guard rails’: BN, 63.

69
  Waiter: BN, 82.

70
  ‘The Queer Feet’: Chesterton, ‘The Queer Feet’, in
The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown
(Oxford & NY: OUP, 1988), 64–83.

71
  ‘Lucien can’t stand Jews’: Sartre, ‘The Childhood of a Leader’, in
Intimacy
, 130–220, this 216.

72
  Bad faith to portray oneself as passive creation: BN, 503.

73
  ‘I have never had a great love’: Sartre,
Existentialism and Humanism
, 48.

74
  Facticity: BN, 501.

75
  Extreme situations: BN, 574.

76
  ‘About freedom’: Beauvoir,
Adieux
, 184.

77
  Too much of an essayist: Hayman,
Writing Against
, 198, quoting review in
Paris-Soir
(15 June 1943).

78
  Why not just rest now?: Beauvoir, ‘Pyrrhus and Cineas’, in
Philosophical Writings
, 77–150, this 90.

79
  Child and lovers: ibid., 97–8.

80
  Tingling: POL, 579.

81
  ‘The world and the future’: POL, 598. For preceding events: 595–6.

82
  Camus on executions: Camus, ‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’, 24–43.

83
  Tough decisions: Beauvoir, ‘An Eye for an Eye’, in
Philosophical Writings
, 237–60, esp. 257–8. On the Brasillach trial, see Alice Kaplan,
The Collaborator
(Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

84
  ‘The war really divided’: Sartre, ‘Self-Portrait at Seventy’, in
Sartre in the Seventies
(
Situations X
), 3–92, this 48.

85
  Ethics: BN, 645, and Sartre,
Notebooks for an Ethics
, tr. D. Pellauer (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) (
Cahiers pour une morale
, 1983).

86
  ‘We are in the world’: Merleau-Ponty, ‘The War Has Taken Place’, in
Sense and Non-Sense
, 139–52, this 147.

87
  Authors must live up to their power: Sartre,
What Is Literature? and Other Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 184. For an account of how Sartre became a powerful public intellectual in this era, see Patrick Baert,
The Existentialist Moment
(Cambridge: Polity, 2015).

88
  ‘I must answer that!’: FOC, 56.

89
  
Les Temps modernes
title from Chaplin: FOC, 22. On seeing it twice and loving it: POL, 244.

90
  Merleau-Ponty at
Les Temps modernes
: Vian,
Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
, 141.

91
  
Roads of Freedom
, vol. 4: fragments were published in
Les Temps modernes
in 1949, then collected with unpublished manuscript pages to make a fourth volume,
La dernière chance
. On Sartre’s claim that the final volume would have solved the enigma of freedom: Michel Contat, ‘General Introduction for
Roads of Freedom
’, in Sartre,
The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV
, 177–97, esp. 193, citing Contat’s interview with Sartre,
L’Express
(17 Sept. 1959). Contat’s introduction (195) also cites an unpublished 1974 interview in which Sartre said that Beauvoir’s
The Mandarins
was ‘the real ending of
Roads of Freedom
as I envisaged it as of 1950, but with another point of view’.

92
  Gray in Italy: J. Glenn Gray,
The Warriors: reflections on men in battle
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 19–22, (originally published in 1959).

93
  ‘Hardly a day’: Marcel, ‘Testimony and Existentialism’, in
The Philosophy of Existence
, 67–76, this 67 (‘Underground’ reconverted to ‘Métro’).

94
  ‘Enormous tenderness’: FOC, 93.

95
  Vian’s manual: Vian,
Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
.

96
  ‘The only one of the philosophers’: ibid., 141. Dancing and philosophising: Gréco,
Je suis faite comme ça
, 98–9.

97
  ‘Marseillaise existentialiste’: Gréco,
Jujube
, 129; see also Cazalis,
Les mémoires d’une Anne
, 125.

98
  ‘Over the Rainbow’: Gréco,
Je suis faite comme ça
, 73.

99
  McCoy: Horace McCoy,
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
, originally published in 1935, was translated as
On achève bien les chevaux
(Paris: Gallimard, 1946).

100
  Dos Passos: Sartre, ‘On John Dos Passos and 1919’, in
Critical Essays
(
Situations I
), 13–31, this 30. See also his essay ‘American Novelists in French Eyes’,
Atlantic Monthly
(Aug. 1946), and Beauvoir’s ‘An American Renaissance in France’, in her
‘The Useless Mouths’ and Other Literary Writings
, 107–12. Also see Richard Lehan,
A Dangerous Crossing: French literary existentialism and the modern American novel
(Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press; London & Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons, 1973).

101
  Vian and copycat crime: James Sallis, ‘Introduction’, Vian,
I Spit on Your Graves
, v–vi.

102
  Sartre on US mechanisation and workers: Sartre, ‘A Sadness Composed of Fatigue and Boredom Weighs on American Factory Workers’, in
We Have Only This Life to Live
:
the selected essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939–1975
, eds Ronald Aronson & Adrian Van den Hoven (New York: NYRB, 2013), 108. Originally published in
Combat
(12 June 1945). It later emerged that the FBI watched the journalists closely too, looking for Communist sympathies or troublemaking tendencies. See Cohen-Solal,
Sartre
, 242–3.

103
  Sartre never shut up: Lionel Abel, ‘Sartre Remembered’, in Robert
Wilcocks (ed.),
Critical Essays on Jean-Paul Sartre
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), 13–33, this 15.

104
  Camus on travelling: for an example, see Camus, ‘Death in the Soul’, in
Lyrical and Critical Essays
, 40–51, describing a disoriented stay in Prague.

105
  ‘The morning fruit juices’, and Camel: Camus, ‘The Rains of New York’, in
Lyrical and Critical Essays
, 182–6, this 184.

106
  ‘A European wants to say’, and lack of anguish: Camus,
American Journals
, 42–3.

107
  Beauvoir posting letters, buying stamps: Beauvoir,
America Day by Day
, 25. For an American audience to see themselves through a stranger’s eyes, she also published ‘An Existentialist Looks at Americans’,
New York Times Magazine
(25 May 1947), reprinted in
Philosophical Writings
, 299–316.

108
  ‘Thrillings’ and ‘laffmovies’: Beauvoir,
America Day by Day
, 36, 214.

109
  ‘Was abundance’: FOC, 25.

110
  ‘Untouchables’ and ‘unseeables’: Sartre, ‘Return from the United States’ (tr. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting), in Gordon (ed.),
Existence in Black
, 83–9, this 84 (originally published in
Le Figaro
, 16 June 1945).

111
  Beauvoir in Harlem: Beauvoir,
America Day by Day
, 1999, 44–5.

112
  Gréco and Davis: Gréco,
Je suis faite comme ça
, 135.

113
  ‘How those French boys and girls’: Michel Fabre,
Richard Wright: books and writers
(Jackson & London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 141 (quoting journal, 5 Aug. 1947). See also Cotkin,
Existential America
, 162.

114
  Visa difficulties: Rowley,
Richard Wright
, 328–9; ‘The knobs’: 336.

115
  ‘Women swooned’: ‘Existentialism’,
Time
(28 Jan. 1946), 16–17; ‘the prettiest Existentialist’:
New Yorker
, 23 (22 Feb. 1947), 19–20. For American reception of existentialism in this era generally, see Fulton,
Apostles of Sartre
, and Cotkin,
Existential America
, especially 105–33.

116
  
Partisan Review: Partisan Review
, 13 (1946). See Cotkin,
Existential America
, 109, and Cohen-Solal,
Sartre
, 271.

117
  
New Republic
: Jean Wahl, ‘Existentialism: a preface’,
New Republic
(1 Oct. 1945), 442–4.

118
  ‘Thingness of Things’: Paul F. Jennings, ‘Thingness of Things’,
Spectator
(23 April 1948), and
New York Times Magazine
(13 June 1948). See Cotkin,
Existential America
, 102–3.

119
  ‘Grim reminders’ and ‘banal and meaningless’: William Barrett, ‘Talent and Career of Jean-Paul Sartre’,
Partisan Review
, 13 (1946), 237–46, this 244. See Cotkin,
Existential America
, 120–23.

120
  ‘Crisis in French taste’:
F. W. Dupee, ‘An International Episode’,
Partisan Review
, 13 (1946), 259–63, this 263.

121
  Gloomy image of existentialists: see, for example, Bernard Frizell, ‘Existentialism: post-war Paris enthrones a bleak philosophy of pessimism’,
Life
(7 June 1946); and John Lackey Brown, ‘Paris, 1946: its three war philosophies’,
New York Times
(1 Sept. 1946). See Fulton,
Apostles of Sartre
, 29.

122
  Wright on existentialism as optimistic: Rowley,
Richard Wright
, 246, 326–7.

123
  Arendt’s articles: Arendt, ‘French Existentialism’ and ‘What Is Existenz Philosophy?’, both in Arendt,
Essays in Understanding
, 163–87, 188–93. Original versions published in
Partisan Review
, 13 (1) (1946) and
Nation
, 162 (23 Feb. 1946) respectively. See also Walter Kaufmann, ‘The Reception of Existentialism in the United States’,
Salmagundi
, 10–11, double issue on ‘The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals’ (Fall 1969–Winter 1970).