Apricot Cocktails at the Existentialist Cafe…
Sarah Bakewell’s book is as intriguingly discursive as the unusually long title suggests. Reading At the Existentialist Cafe with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidigger and others: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails was instructive as well as entertaining. Along with laying out the philosophies of the named protagonists, the author gives a rundown on the background history those writers lived through.
It also inspired me to think back to my youthful impressions of Sartre and Camus and their existential philosophy. The fact is, I was not too impressed. I was excited at the prospect of seeing Sartre’s radical play No Exit— but how well I remember the disappointment and confusion I felt afterwards. “Hell is other people?” If this was existentialist philosophy, I’d pass.
By an odd coincidence, while I was listening to the audio book, Peninsula Productions staged Sartre’s No Exit; I had to see.
“How was it?” asked my daughter. She majored in philosophy at UVic and she used to talk about the existentialists.
“Two hours of my life I won’t get back,” I said sadly. Actually, it may have been less than two hours, but it felt longer. I couldn’t relate to the play the first time I came across it and I still can’t. Clearly, others find more meaning in the work, which continues to be widely produced and filmed. *(see below)
On the other hand, thanks to Sarah Bakewell’s book, I now know a great deal more about the context of Sartre’s writing. For one thing, the French original Huis Clos was first produced in Paris in May 1944, a month before the city was liberated from the Nazis.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sartre was inclined toward depression. He drank a great deal — more toward the end of his life, when he also came to rely on a drug he knew was not good for him. A professional contrarian, Sartre “argued against himself” as well as everyone else.
Bakewell describes him as “monstrous…self-indulgent, demanding, bad-tempered,” and “a sex addict who didn’t even enjoy sex.” He “gave free rein to his obsessions about viscosity and gloopiness, and “with the feeling that other people were looking at him and making judgments.” On top of that, he “defended a range of odious regimes, and made a cult of violence.”
Unapologetically political, he denigrated literature for its own sake as a “bourgeois luxury,” and claimed that “revising one’s writing is a waste of time.” Because of differing beliefs, he also broke off friendships of many years’ standing — including those with Camus and Merleau-Ponty. Yet, admits Bakewell, he is “full of character,” and “bursts out on all sides with energy, peculiarity, generosity and communicativeness.”
Existentialists including Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus also wrote novels. Reading Camus’s L’Etranger (published 1942) in my student days, I recall the feelings of shock and a complete inability to relate to the main character, Merseault. The context provided by Bakewell is illuminating here too. She describes how Camus made friends with Sartre and Beauvoir during a “lonely interlude in Paris in 1940.” She speaks of his “dislocated experience as a French Algerian, caught between two countries and never fully at home in either.”
In the first year of WWI, Camus’s father was “recruited into an Algerian regiment,” and died in the trenches before his son Albert was a year old. Albert and his brother “grew up in a sordid apartment in Algiers with their grieving, illiterate and deaf mother, and their grandmother, who was both illiterate and violent.” Camus suffered from tuberculosis all his life and died in a car crash at the age of 46.
For me, the most interesting character in this book is Simone de Beauvoir. In contrast to Sartre, she was by nature optimistic. Her work, it seems to me, was more clear-sighted and less coloured by personality than that of the two gloomy fellows described above.
Simone de Beauvoir was also an existentialist philosopher. Bakewell describes her foundational feminist text, the 1949 work The Second Sex, as “the most transformative existentialist work of all.” Though English language translations “obscured and even skipped her philosophical passages,’ the book had great impact. “When women changed their lives after reading it, they did so in existentialist ways, seeking freedom and a heightened individuality and authenticity.” Bakewell goes on to say that this book “was considered shocking” at the time, “not least because it included a chapter on lesbianism.”
Bakewell feels that although it was not accepted into the canon — for reasons of sexism perhaps? — The Second Sex stands alongside the works of Darwin, Marx and Freud as “one of the great cultural re-evaluations of modern times.” Tellingly, Howard Parshley’s 1953 translation was shorn of much of its existentialist terminology at the urging of his publisher, a decision he later regretted, when he characterized the work as “one of the handful of greatest books on sex ever written.” Be that as it may, in the 1960s and 70s, English-language paperback editions featured “misty-focus naked women on the cover, making it look like a work of soft porn.”
Though I no longer have the book, and cannot recall the cover, I have a clear memory of reading The Second Sex in the 1970s. The experience was an electrifying revelation. In fact, one passage has stayed with me ever since. Though I cannot quote precisely, the Beauvoir’s chilling description of the social contract implicit in traditional marriages goes something like this: “Man the sovereign will protect woman the liege, but in exchange for material protection, she must forego her liberty and become a thing.”
So often we do not see what is in front of us and all around us until it is pointed out by a visionary. By describing how things were and had been, Beauvoir released women to envision freer and more authentic lives, in the spirit of existential philosophy. In 2010, exity years after the initial publication, Knopf put out a new translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovaney-Chevallier. Introducing this edition, Judith Thurman describes the work as “a deep and urgent meditation on a true hope that…is still elusive for many of us: to become, in every sense, our own woman.”
Indeed, existentialism heralded all kinds of social revolutions. Along with producing Beauvoir’s foundational feminist text, it “offered gay people encouragement to live in the way that felt right, rather than trying to fit in with others’ ideas of how they should be.” It also appealed to “those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or…fighting colonialism…a change of perspective.”
While he worked on “his philosophy of non-violent resistance, Martin Luther King read Sartre, Heidigger, and Paul Tillich. According to Bakewell, “existentialism was responsible for every social change in the mid-20th century” and “gave impetus to radicals and protesters,” including those who launched the 1968 Paris protests of students and workers, in which slogans included “It is forbidden to forbid,” and “Neither god nor master.”
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*A quick internet search reveals that Huis Clos has been widely produced around the world. In 2012, a review of a London production at Trafalgar Studios describes it as “the crucial signpost to modern drama.” it In 1997, it was staged in Beijing. According to news correspondent Wang Ling, the work “portrays a group of French Resistance fighters struggling in jail with the French traitorous government during the (sic) World War II” and “raises questions about the value of human life, human dignity and significance of death.” This seems to me a bit of a stretch from the original, but of course theatrical works are quite malleable to interpretation.