Ronald Aronson
Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies

• Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It.  University of Chicago Press, January 2004.
• Reviews:  Sunday Times |  Village Voice |  New York Times

The Sunday Times - Books


February 29, 2004

SIMON BLACKBURN

CAMUS AND SARTRE: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It
by Ronald Aronson

John Wiley £23 pp391

In 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were the intellectual centre of occupied Paris. Camus, a Frenchman born in Algeria, was a newcomer to the capital, although one who had already written The Stranger and a philosophical work, The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus had favourably reviewed Sartre, and Sartre had discovered Camus. They hit it off. Both were left-wing, opposed the occupation and the Vichy government, and both went in a good deal for the absurd. Sartre was about to publish his best-known philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. His intellect was bent on shaping itself into the permanent form of its own monument, as Tom Stoppard might have put it.

With great patience, and great sympathy to both parties, Ronald Aronson traces what happened next. Camus played an honourable and dangerous role in the Resistance. Sartre did somewhat less. At the liberation of Paris, Camus discovered him asleep in a seat in the Comédie Française, which occasioned him to quip that Sartre had turned his theatre seat in the direction of history, a remark that no doubt pricked Sartre, who never seems to have questioned his own image of himself as at the centre of world events. In any event, after the war their friendship gradually cooled. Camus wrote The Rebel (which Aronson would rightly prefer to see translated as Man in Revolt) in which he gives a somewhat contorted psychological account of the man of the title, but unmistakably takes aim at Sartre’s deterministic historicism, or Marxism.

For Camus the impulse to revolt wells up from a particular psychology that eschews violence, and continually contests whatever political order may exist. For Sartre it is a historical necessity (never mind the choice and freedom celebrated by existentialism). Deflate some of the abstractions, and a cautious referee might say that you could have a bit of both. But for Camus, it was a question of the moderate left against the police state of communism, or freedom and the individual v history with a capital H. For Sartre, on the other side, it was the workers against the bourgeoisie, political realism against romanticism, social justice v conservatism and conformism, the left v the right. It was also a question of who was going to be Pope, and Sartre knew that.

The consciousness of the rebel may not be an issue that would have galvanised the salons of Knightsbridge, but it played havoc in Paris. Sartre fired up his giant organ, Les Temps Modernes, where one of his acolytes, Francis Jeanson, wrote a magisterial dismissal of Camus: “before even touching on the book’s substance Jeanson criticises the man, his previous writing, the book’s reception, and its style”, reports Aronson. Camus replied with a 17-page letter to the editor. Only then did Sartre take up his pen, and anathematise Camus tooth and nail over 20 brutal pages (with another 30 by the loyal Jeanson backing him up). This issue of Les Temps Modernes sold out, reprinted, and sold out again. The two main newspapers, Le Monde and L’Observateur, gave acres of print to the issue. Nobody who was anybody could avoid taking sides.

Camus was devastated, at least largely by Sartre’s vicious personal disloyalty. But in the cafes and bars, connoisseurs of rhetoric, if not of logic, seemed to think that Sartre had won. Camus effectively withdrew (“you don’t discuss things with a sewer”), only reappearing four years later with the masterly The Fall, which helped to win him the Nobel prize the following year (eight years before Sartre). Sartre, meanwhile, fell into bed with Stalin’s Russia, becoming the most notable fellow-traveller in France, and the vice-president of the Franco-Soviet Union Friendship Association. Perhaps this sense of involvement helped him to exorcise the jibe about turning his theatre seat in the direction of history. Simone de Beauvoir wrote a partisan roman à clef, The Mandarins, about it all.

Camus died in a car accident in 1960, after making ill-judged and ineffective attempts to find a moderate position in France’s dreadful colonial war in Algeria. Sartre lived another 20 years. He scarcely wavered in his Manichean view of the world in which the countries of light, led by the glorious Soviet Union, challenge the abodes of darkness in the West.

For a contemporary philosopher, it is exhilarating to read about the thinker as hero, with countries brought to a standstill over the battle of words between the concrete universal (history) and the individual (ideology). On the other hand, Sartre’s positive relish for political violence suggests something worse than blindness. In fact, he must have been perfectly aware of the horrors of the Soviet Union, and, after all, the fiercely anti-communist Arthur Koestler was very much part of his and de Beauvoir’s circle. Camus comes across as more sympathetic. His support for the white colonialists in Algiers is perhaps understandable, but it plays badly to a modern audience, and with hindsight at least suggests a sad political innocence.

It’s a good tale, well told here. Each of the pair began by celebrating the place of the absurd in human life, but perhaps neither of them realised it has a long reach, beyond the gates of the Ecole Normale Superieure, into the most exalted literary weeklies, perhaps even onto the podium in Stockholm.

The Village Voice, (February 13, 2004)
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0407/polt.php       

In 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre, the privileged, amphibian-faced philosopher, befriended Albert Camus, the Bogart-esque, working-class novelist who shared his "gritty humanism." But the friendship went up in smoke in a notorious dispute in 1952. Sartre converted to Communism and insisted that revolution meant getting your hands dirty, while Camus wanted to be "neither victim nor executioner" and denounced the Soviets. For Camus, Sartre's insistence on political "commitment" was an attempt to shanghai artists onto a "slave galley."

Ronald Aronson sees this fight as a tragedy in which each side was "half-right and half-wrong"; the ideal would be a hybrid "Camus/Sartre." Aronson admits, though, that Camus "will remain the more sympathetic of the two." It's hard to disagree; for instance, while Camus took actual risks in the Resistance, the "tangential" Sartre did little more than publish some articles in the final days of the liberation—which were actually written by Simone de Beauvoir. In the '50s, Sartre refused to condemn anti-Semitic purges in Czechoslovakia and the USSR. The one comparable flaw in the French-Algerian Camus is his tendency to condone French colonialism.

Aronson does a fine job of reconstructing this relationship and its undoing. The ideas at stake (like those in the King-Malcolm X dispute in the U.S.) are important. Sometimes, though, you wonder whether all the details of the 52-year-old polemic are worth rehearsing; they can come across as a tempest in a Parisian teapot, where the rhetoric and personalities overshadow the ideas. Not to deny the book's nonintellectual pleasures. Sartre and Beauvoir surrounded themselves with a famille (Left Bank for "groupies") in which all the heterosexual combinations were eventually exhausted—providing fodder for Beauvoir's roman à clef The Mandarins. Well, all the combinations but one: Camus rebuffed Beauvoir's overtures. As he explained to Arthur Koestler, "Imagine what she would be saying on the pillow afterwards. How awful—such a chatterbox." It's not the only point in this history where Camus shows good judgment.

New York Times, 7 February 2004:

"Connections: Camus and the Neo-Cons: More in Common Than They Might Suspect"

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

It was a heady moment. Liberation was at hand. The world's most powerful totalitarian state had been defeated. World-historical struggles had come to an end.
Such was the situation after the Soviet Union collapsed. And the sense of triumph was palpable. In an essay reprinted in "The Norman Podhoretz Reader" (Free Press), Mr. Podhoretz wrote a "Eulogy" for neo-conservatism - the political and cultural movement with which he and the magazine he edited, Commentary, had been so closely identified. It was a eulogy that proclaimed satisfaction and closure. For two decades, Commentary had advocated unrelenting challenges to Soviet power, and while the downfall had never been seen as imminent, it had always been hoped for.

In his introduction to this new collection - which samples Mr. Podhoretz's argumentative power and rhetorical range over nearly 50 years - Paul Johnson notes that the Soviet collapse also brought to its end an era in American intellectual life in which Mr. Podhoretz had been a major player. But as central as Soviet Communism was to neo-conservativism, the eulogy, of course, was premature. History did not come to end. Free-market economies ran into trouble. Genocidal massacres took place. Terrorism erupted. Old conflicts were metastasizing, emerging in new configurations. So neo-conservativism continues, now even taking center stage, named as the ideology behind President Bush's foreign policy.

In neo-conservatism's continued evolution, though, how are lessons learned from the past to be applied to a transformed world? An example from the past may show how vexed such questions can be. Consider the period just after the Second World War, when another tyranny had just collapsed. It seemed as if the
Allies had, through their trials, learned something about totalitarianism and democracy. Could those concepts be used to understand the Soviet Union, the West's erstwhile partner? Was it something very different (a humanitarian revolutionary state gone awry) or something very similar (a fascistic state beyond saving)?
Such issues affected the impassioned arguments between the two most important writers in postwar France, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In his new book, "Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It" (University of Chicago), Ronald Aronson, who teaches at Wayne State University, traces the nuances of their friendship, their mutual influences and hostilities, and the themes that still haunt contemporary debates. Their schism over Communism was not academic. At the time of France's liberation, buoyed by its Resistance role, the Communist Party had 400,000 members; that figure almost doubled by 1946, and the party joined a coalition government. In addition, according to Mr. Aronson, the party dominated the largest trade union, published dozens
of newspapers including the country's two largest, and had a payroll of more than 14,000. The Communist Party was part of the mainstream in a way it never was in the United States. But its allegiances were just as open to question: it slavishly followed Soviet leadership; fellow travelers idealized the Soviet Union, despite readily available accounts of horrors. André Gide, who visited Russia in the 1930's, said he doubted whether anywhere, even in Hitler's Germany, the "mind and spirit are less free, more bowed down." Camus had joined the party in Algeria in 1935 and left two years later in dismay. Mr. Aronson even implies that Camus'
views on absurdity and freedom grew out of that experience.

Then, in France, during the German occupation, Camus did heroic work as editor of a Resistance newspaper, Combat. Sartre, in their developing friendship, called Camus an "outstanding example" of a life lived in "engagement." After the war, both men saw an opportunity to remake the world, redressing social ills. Both also wanted to steer the French left away from the Communists while distancing themselves from the growing cold war. But by 1948, Sartre had become a fellow traveler, even giving the party the right to censor one of his plays. He called freedom under capitalism a "hoax" and France a "society of oppression." He refused to denounce Soviet labor camps or the show trials. And he justified revolutionary violence, praising the African revolutionary Franz Fanon. Meanwhile, Camus found himself ever more repulsed by Communism, which he called "the modern madness." He saw Communism as a desperate attempt to create meaning and certainty. He wrote, "Those who pretend to know everything and settle everything finish by killing everything." If there were a choice between justice and freedom, meaning a
choice between the ideal Communist state and the flawed Western state, he wrote: "I choose freedom. For even if justice is not realized, freedom maintains the power of protest against injustice and keeps communication open." After Sartre's journal, Les Temps Modernes, panned Camus's influential counter-revolutionary book "The Rebel" in 1952, the friends never spoke again. Sartre's influence was so strong that Camus' French reputation was not repaired even after winning the Nobel Prize in 1957. But Mr. Aronson does not want the reader taking sides. He insists that we have to "free ourselves from the dualistic thinking of the cold war," and not take the "currently fashionable" view praising Camus. Mr. Aronson argues, in fact, that "like many another anti-Communist, Camus wrecked his own moral and political coherence by avoiding talking about his own society" while Sartre correctly "confronted the violence of the democratic capitalist system" and the evils of colonialism. But in this, Mr. Aronson is simply taking Sartre's side without attending to its minefields. Camus, in his concreteness and human sensitivities, is more
perceptive, and in his compassion, more trustworthy. He had a major influence on later French writers like André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner - the neo-cons of the French left. And in Camus's rejection of utopianism and his acceptance of sad compromise there remain hints of what might form some sort of realistic political ideal.