In December 1944,
Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French
Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job
of American correspondent. Perhaps, in light of the perpetual tension
and subsequent acrimonious split between the two men, he was glad to get
him out of Paris. What is certain is that Sartre was delighted to go.
He’d had enough of the austerities and hypocrisies of post-liberation
France and had long fantasized about the United States. Camus himself
would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically
different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions.
The Chrysler and Empire State buildings seemed to Sartre to be like ancient ruins.
In some sense,
existentialism was going home. The “roots” of 20th-century French
philosophy are canonically located on mainland Europe, in the fertile
terrain of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. But it
was not entirely immune to the metaphysical turmoil of the United States
at the end of the 19th century. French philosophy retained elements of
the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce and the psychologism of William James
(each receives an honorable mention in Sartre’s “Being and
Nothingness”). More significantly, both Camus and Sartre had learned and
borrowed from 20th-century writers like Faulkner, Hemingway and dos
Passos —and, of course, from the films of Humphrey Bogart. Camus, in
particular, cultivated the trench coat with the upturned collar and
described himself as a mix of Bogart, Fernandel and a samurai.
When Sartre stepped off the plane in New York in January 1945, only
months after the liberation of Paris, his head full of American movies,
architecture and jazz, he might have expected to feel in his natural
habitat — the pre-eminent philosopher of liberté setting foot in the
land of freedom, a nation temperamentally and constitutionally addicted
to liberty. Was there not already something of the existential cowboy
and intellectual gunslinger in Sartre’s take-no-hostages attitude? Camus
must have thought so in dispatching him to the United States.
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| Albert Camus |
Sartre wrote dozens of
articles for Combat while in the States, often phoning them back to
Camus in Paris, and eventually went on to talk philosophy at Harvard,
Princeton, Yale and elsewhere. In the process, he acquired an American
girlfriend (about whom he wrote abundantly and explicitly to Simone de
Beauvoir: “I am killed by passion and lectures.”). But the very personal
article he wrote for Town & Country, “Manhattan: The Great American
Desert,” records that he suffered on arrival from “le mal de New York.”
He never really recovered.
Sartre, leaving the
confines of the Plaza Hotel, walked up Fifth Avenue beneath a frozen
sky, looking for New York, but not finding it. There was nothing on
which to focus his gaze; it was a city for “the far-sighted,” he wrote,
since the natural focal point was somewhere around infinity, over the
horizon. He missed the intimate quartiers of Paris, finding in their
place only “filmy atmospheres, longitudinally stretched masses with
nothing to mark a beginning or end.” Just the kind of place, one might
think, where an expatriate existentialist ought to fit right in. And yet
he suffered stubbornly from a sense of disorientation. “In the
numerical anonymity of roads and avenues, he wrote, “I am just anybody,
anywhere.” New York put him in mind of the steppes or the pampas.
But soon enough he
started to realize what his fundamental objection really was. The whole
point of the city was to fortify itself against nature. But Manhattan
failed to do that: an “open” city with a limitless sky above, it let
nature in on every side. It was, of course, an island, and thus too
exposed to the elements: to storm, hurricane, snow, heat, wind, floods.
It had no real protection against anything. “I feel as though I were
camping in the heart of a jungle crawling with insects.”` Therefore he
learned to appreciate it only while crossing it in a car, as if he were
“driving across the great plains of Andalusia.”
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| Jean-Paul Sartre |
And just as he inverts
the perception of the American city, so too Sartre turns the notion of
American freedom inside out. By February, having been shuttled to and
fro across the States, wined, dined and given propaganda tours to
industrial installations, he comes to the conclusion in another article,
written for Le Figaro, that America is the land of conformism. He
finds that beneath its notional attachment to “individualism,” America
does not actually trust the solitary individual. Despite the “liberal
economy,” America is an embodiment of a Rousseauist “social contract” in
which the general will of the “collectivity” dominates: “Each American
is educated by other Americans and he educates others in turn.
Everywhere in New York, in colleges and beyond, there are courses in
Americanization.” Existentialist anomie is prohibited: America is
hyper-normative, producing citizen clones.
It is Sartre’s most
powerful and recurrent complaint: that people are being treated as
things. The “nausea” of the 1930s, elicited by pebbles and trees and
ocean depths (and thus, as in New York, nature in general) morphed, in
the ’40s and ’50s, into a specific aversion to the nonorganic products
of economic forces. In America he understood that things (the
“in-itself”), in all their massiveness, were threatening to reify the
amorphous human (or “for-itself”) and produce what he called in a later
formulation the “practico-inert.”
Still, Sartre holds
out the hope that New York is moving in a generally Sartrean and
semi-apocalyptic direction. All those skyscrapers? Obviously, they are
doomed. “They are already a bit run-down; tomorrow, perhaps, they will
be torn down. In any case, their construction required a faith that we
no longer have.” The Chrysler and the Empire State already appear to
Sartre like ancient ruins.
Camus — officially a
cultural emissary of the French government — followed in Sartre’s
footsteps in 1946, providing an ironic commentary on his predecessor.
Where Sartre was obsessed with architecture, Camus was indifferent,
oblivious. “I notice that I have not noticed the skyscrapers, they
seemed to me perfectly natural.” He had no issues with commodity
capitalism. He admired colors, foodstuffs, smells, taxis, tie shops, ice
cream, the “orgy of violent lights” that was Broadway, a jazz bar in
Harlem and the giant Camel advertising icon of “an American soldier, his
mouth open, puffing out clouds of real smoke.”
He fell in love
several times over, notably with Patricia Blake, a 19-year-old student
and Vogue apprentice. He read her pages from “The Plague” and she, in
return, noting his fascination with the American way of death, found him
issues of undertakers’ trade magazines — Sunnyside, Casket,and
Embalmer’s Monthly. He particularly admired a funeral parlor ad: “You
die. We do the rest.”
Camus had to keep explaining to American students that he never had been an ‘existentialist.’
At Vassar he gave a
lecture on “The Crisis of Mankind” and was dazzled by the spectacle of
“an army of long-legged young starlets, lazing on the lawn.” But he was
preoccupied by what he thought of as the “American tragedy.” The tragedy
of the students was that they lacked a sense of the tragic. For Sartre
the tragic was the mechanization and objectification of the human. For
Camus, the tragic was something more elusive: whatever it was, it was
missing in America.
There was an obvious
difference of context between Camus and the students he was addressing.
He’d come from Europe, which had just spent several years tearing
itself apart, whereas they remained more or less physically untouched by
the war. Camus was welcomed both as literary luminary (the translation
of “The Outsider” came out during his stay) and Resistance hero. But his
tragic perception of life was not reducible to the question of the
Second World War. Sailing back from New York to France, at night in the
middle of the Atlantic, staring down from the deck into the ocean,
mesmerized by the wake of the ship, Camus spoke of his love for “these
seas of forgetfulness, these unlimited silences that are like the
enchantment of death.”
Camus, the Resistance
philosopher of solidarity, discovered (or perhaps re-discovered) the
problem of other minds in New York. Unlike Sartre, he had no difficulty
with things, trees, the Empire State Building, the impersonal ocean. It
was only on looking into the face of another human being that he fully
experienced a sense of the tragic. While hell-is-other-people Sartre
came to invoke a notion of the “group-in-fusion,” Camus — who had to
keep explaining to the students that he was not and never had been an
“existentialist” — increasingly redefined the “absurd” in terms of an
inevitable failure of language to bridge the gap between individuals.
And it was not just the problem of inadequate English in speaking to
Americans. He had the same feeling in Quebec.
The clash between
Sartre and Camus would come to be defined by their political divergence
in the ’50s, crystallized by the publication of “The Rebel” by Camus.
But already, in their different reactions to the United States — and
particularly New York — we have the ingredients of a philosophical
schism. Sartre, on his return to Europe, recalls above all America’s
racism and practice of segregation, the inevitable counterpart to its
drive to conformity. He writes a play, “The Respectful Prostitute,” that
dramatizes the episode of the Scottsboro Boys in the ’30s. The split
between contending forces — East and West, black and white, bourgeoisie
and proletariat, humans and things — becomes the defining concern of his
philosophy, summarized in the (admittedly rebarbative) phrase he comes
up with in his “Critique of Dialectical Reason” to define boxing, but
which also applies to his relationship with Camus: “a binary praxis of
antagonistic reciprocity.” Existentialism in this form, inflected with
Marxism, infiltrates the American intelligentsia, is absorbed into black
power philosophy (“black existentialism”) and finds an echo in writers
as disparate as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer.
Camus, on the other
hand, begins to sound more like Samuel Beckett. While Sartre after the
war was more than ever a self-professed “writing machine,” Camus was
increasingly graphophobic, haunted by a “disgust for all forms of public
expression.” Sartre’s philosophy becomes sociological and structuralist
in its binary emphasis. Camus, all alone, in the night, between
continents, far away from everything, is already less the solemn
“moralist” of legend (“the Saint,” Sartre called him), more a
(pre-)post-structuralist in his greater concern and anxiety about
language, his emphasis on difference and refusal to articulate a
clear-cut theory: “I am too young to have a system,” he told one
audience. And it is this anti-systematic aspect of America that he
retains and refuses to clarify: “After so many months I know nothing
about New York.”
Paradoxically, it is
clear that Sartre took his notion of collective action from what he
witnessed in the United States rather than in the Soviet Union. It is
typical that he should choose to frame his notion of freedom and the
fate of individual identity in essentially literary (or textual) terms.
Beware the editor! He didn’t like the way his articles were butchered
when they appeared in American journals and admits to being apprehensive
of something similar — “le rewriting” — happening to his plays, should
they ever be put on in the United States. The F.B.I., while accusing
Camus of writing “inaccurate reports,” also misidentified him as “Canus”
and “Corus.”
Sartre and Camus’s
love-hate relationship was played out and reflected in their on-off
romance with America. As Camus put it, “It is necessary to fall in love …
if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to
feel anyway.” Above all the two thinkers emphasize that America is
always balanced precariously, like a tight-rope walker, on the thread of
a philosophical dialectic.
