Book Reviews
Camus and Sartre: The Story of a
Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It
The (London) Sunday Times - Books
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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.
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The Village Voice, (February 13, 2004)
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0407/polt.php
Voulez-vous couchez avec Simone de Beauvoir? Mais non!
|
| Dirty Hands |
by Richard Polt
February 13th, 2004 6:00 PM
Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It
By Ronald Aronson, University of Chicago, 291 pp., $32.50
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.
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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.
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The (London)
Times Higher Education Supplement
April 9, 2004; No.1635; Pg.26
"Cafe Au Lait Avec La Creme De Siècle"
by Philip Pothen
Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century by Bernard-Henri Levy
Polity, 536pp, Pounds 25.00 ISBN 0 7456 3009 X
Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It
by Ronald Aronson, University of Chicago Press, 276pp, Pounds 23.00 ISBN 0 226
02796 1
How did the author of acclaimed masterpieces of scepticism such as Nausea
and Being and Nothingness become, two decades later, the apologist for
totalitarianism, one who could say that freedom of expression in the Soviet
Union was total and that all anti-Communists were "bastards"? The question seems
to touch on something essential concerning not only the development of one of
the foremost thinkers of the 20th century, but of the course of the century
itself.
Bernard-Henri Levy analyses this conjunction in his 500-page Le Siècle de
Sartre, published in France in 2000. Sartre, Levy suggests, stands at the
heart of the intellectual, cultural, literary and political preoccupations of
the century, representing some of its deepest challenges, fissures and, indeed,
tragedies. In an otherwise excellent translation by Andrew Brown, which brings
to life Levy's word play, his sometimes conversational, sometimes labyrinthine,
but always vivid prose, the title of the English translation, Sartre: The
Philosopher of the Twentieth Century might represent something of a
dilution. Levy means, after all, that the century belonged to Sartre and his
thought in some definitive sense. To understand the century, Levy suggests, we
must "go through Sartre".
It would be easy to put this down to Gallic excess. It would be easy, too, to
question the elaborate rhetorical gestures or to suggest that here are 500 pages
desperately in search of a strong editor. While the work aspires to the grandeur
and the status of Sartre's own critical works, it lacks the voyeurism of
Sartrean or existentialist psychoanalytic method, as well as its close textual
analysis. But the portentous sweep gives us insights instead into Sartre's
indebtedness to and struggles with Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Gide and
Heidegger, as well as the extraordinary web that linked Sartre intimately to
almost every French cultural figure of the century. If there is a tendency to
conceive the entire intellectual world of the 20th century as gathered entirely
within the confines of Paris' Left Bank, with the Cafe Flore as its epicentre,
and perhaps Marburg, Freiburg and Berlin as suburbs, this hardly comes as a
surprise.
Levy's key thesis is that there were two Sartres – the pessimistic,
Nietzschean Sartre who wrote the extraordinary works of his early maturity and
the optimistic Sartre, in thrall to various shades of totalitarian Marxism. To
the latter Sartre, Levy offers no consolation. He is more generous to the Sartre
of the Resistance, whom Camus found asleep in a deserted theatre that Sartre was
supposed to be guarding, than most others and more generous than he is to the
Stalinist, then Maoist, Sartre.
The virulence of Levy's critique comes as a surprise, until we discover that
his narrative ends with an account of Sartre's apparent "conversion" to Judaism,
and the appearance of Levinas – or more unlikely still, Benny Levy - as a
deus ex machina to bestow at the last meaning and purpose on the drama of
Sartre's life and to absolve him of earlier "crimes". Not only do we remain
unconvinced by this, the third Sartre, but it leads us to question what went
before. Sartre is found guilty, but only because he will ultimately find
Judaism. If the story of the century is the story of Sartre, then both deserve a
less convenient, less conclusive ending than the one Levy foists on them.
Sartre asleep in the theatre becomes a theme of Ronald Aronson's Camus and
Sartre, which looks at the friendship between the two writers and thinkers,
their intellectual relationship and the devastating break between them in 1952.
After their split, Camus referred sarcastically to Sartre pointing his theatre
seat "in the direction of history", while Sartre's vicious assault on Camus in
the pages of Les Temps Modernes rendered reconciliation impossible.
Aronson analyses their writings before their break to show what brought them
together and then how, afterwards, they continued to influence each other. As
Sartre indicated in his eulogy for his dead friend, "being apart is just another
way of being together".
It is a gripping story, superbly told, of an epic struggle of ideas and an
intense and personal account of shattered trust and broken friendship.
Analysing many unpublished and untranslated texts, particularly the
journalism of both figures, the book traces the history of the divergent paths
of the two thinkers, the one the "pope of existentialism", the universally
acknowledged genius, opening the gates of Parisian cultural life to the other,
the handsome young French Algerian, managing somehow to cut his own dash. If
there can be a criticism of the book, it is in the almost over-scrupulous
fairness by which the author judges the "score draw" that sees Sartre condemned
for his blindness to Communist oppression but praised for his support for the
third world, and Camus championed for his hostility to violence while lambasted
for his silence on French colonialist violence in Algeria. Or perhaps this is
another strength of the book, suggesting as it does that the questions these
thinkers fought over carry resonance and significance into the 21st century and
hinting that we have still to understand their legacies.
*****
Philip Pothen works for the Joint Information Systems
Committee at King's College London, and is researching Sartre's aesthetics.
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The (London) Times Literary Supplement
August 20, 2004
Ronald Aronson
CAMUS AND SARTRE
The story of a friendship and the quarrel that
ended it
291 pp. University of Chicago Press;
distributed in the UK by Wiley. £23.
0 226 02796 1
They first met through their writings, Camus reviewing Sartre's La Nausée
in 1938 and Sartre reviewing Camus’ L'Etranger five years later. Both
attended a meeing of Resistance writers in February 1943 before their first
“real” meeting at the opening of Resistance writers in February 1943 before
their first “real meeting at the opening of Sartre’s play Les Mouches in June.
As friends – but not as inseparable as the media hype sometimes claimed; as
existentialists – although both were uneasy with the label – they shot to fame
as the intellectual superstars in the euphoria of post-Liberation Paris. And
then the Iron Curtain started to come down and the polarization of what was to
become the Cold War set in. Tensions between the two men that had always been
present became more pronounced, culminating in the violent public break in 1952
which Raymond Aron described as “a national dispute.” (Camus’ book L’Homme
révolté had been harshly reviewed in Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes.)
The break between Sartre and Camus was both a product of the Cold War and, for
French intellectuals and beyond, an important reference point within it. In that
Manichaean world, to be for Camus or for Sartre meant not just siding with an
individual but implied other choices related to political means and ends. The
personal was indeed political.
With the Cold War now behind us, it is possible to stand back from the Camus-Sartre
relationship and view it dispassionately, and it is this that Ronald Aronson
sets out to do. With meticulous even-handedness, this internationally renowned
Sartre expert has produced a remarkably non-partisan account which also reminds
us that it is possible to combine the highest level of scholarship with a lively
and readable style of writing. Making judicious use of archive and original
interview material, which he combines with literary criticism, political
insights and anecdotes, Aronson firmly locates the Camus-Sartre relationship in
the political and cultural context of early post-War France. This important
contribution to twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history reveals as
never before the extent to which the two men interacted with each other through
their writings both before and, importantly, after the 1952 rupture.
David Drake
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