At the Existentialist Café (41 page)

When it came to Raymond Aron, Sartre nursed a more lasting resentment, perhaps because they had been closer in schooldays and yet had gone on to diverge more starkly over politics. In 1955, Aron
published
The Opium of the Intellectuals
, a direct attack on Sartre and his allies, accusing them of being ‘
merciless towards the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines’. Sartre took revenge in May 1968, when Aron opposed the student rebellions: he accused Aron of being
unfit to teach.

Very late in life, during an event in aid of refugees from Vietnam in the late 1970s, Sartre and Aron met and shook hands while photographers clicked away, excited at capturing what they took to be a major reconciliation. By this time, however, Sartre was ill and rather dazed, losing his vision and much of his hearing. Either because of this, or as a deliberate snub, Sartre did not reply in kind when Aron greeted him with their old term of endearment,
‘Bonjour, mon petit camarade.’
He responded only,
‘Bonjour.’

One famous remark has come to be associated with Aron and Sartre, although it was not spoken by either one of them. In 1976, during an interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy, Aron opined that leftist intellectuals hated him not because he had pointed out the true nature of Communism, but because he had never shared their belief in it in the first place. Lévy replied, ‘
What do you think? Is it better, in that case, to be Sartre or Aron? Sartre the mistaken victor, or Aron defeated but correct?’ Aron gave no clear answer. But the question was remembered, and converted into a simple and sentimental maxim: that it is better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.

During the 1950s, determined to give his time and energy to any cause he thought needed him, Sartre overstretched himself alarmingly. This led to some of his most foolish and reprehensible moments, as when he travelled to the
Soviet Union at the invitation of an organisation of Russian writers in May 1954, and afterwards published a series of articles suggesting, for example, that Soviet citizens did not travel because they had no desire to do so and were too busy building Communism. Later, he claimed that, having come home in a state of exhaustion, he had delegated the
writing to his secretary, Jean Cau.

Cau did recall of this period that Sartre’s fear of underproducing
often drove him over the edge. ‘
There’s no time!’ he would cry. One by one, he gave up his greatest pleasures: the cinema, theatre, novels. He wanted only to write, write, write. This was when he convinced himself that literary quality control was
bourgeois self-indulgence; only the cause mattered, and it was a sin to revise or even to reread. He filled sheets with ink while
Beauvoir, a painstaking reviser herself, watched nervously. Sartre churned out essays, talks, philosophical works — occasionally with help from Cau, but mostly alone. His bibliographers Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka calculated that, over his entire life, he averaged
twenty pages a day, and that was of completed work, not drafts. (By this stage, there
were
no drafts.) In Ireland too John Huston had been amazed each morning at
breakfast to find that Sartre had been up for hours and had already written some twenty-five new pages of his Freud script. Sartre’s biographer Annie Cohen-Solal used engine-room and
turbine metaphors to describe his production from the late 1940s onwards, while Olivier Wickers wrote of his treating sleep as a military necessity: a bivouac, or the pit stop one must give a machine to keep it working.

(Illustrations Credit 11.1)

Meanwhile, he continued overdosing on
Corydrane. The recommended intake was one or two pills daily, but Sartre got through a whole tube. He combined it with heavy drinking, and even enjoyed the way the combination scrambled his brains: ‘
I liked having confused, vaguely questioning ideas that then fell apart.’ Often, at the end of a day, he took downers to help him pass out. He did cut down on the Corydrane when writing something ‘literary’, because he knew it led to too much ‘
facility’, as he put it. Writing a new scene for his
Roads of Freedom
series, for example, he found that every street his character Mathieu walked down generated a mass of fresh metaphors. When he mentioned this to Beauvoir in an interview, she added, with (one imagines) a shudder, ‘I remember. It was dreadful.’ The fatal ‘facility’ had already become evident in a 1951 notebook
he kept in Italy, of which he said to Beauvoir in 1974 that there were some twenty pages ‘
about the plashing sound that gondolas make’. Of course, this could just be diligent phenomenology.

Very little of the overproduction came from either authorial vanity or from need of money. His Freud screenplay, taken on to pay a bill, was a rare exception. Mostly it came from his love of commitment and his desire to help friends by promoting their writing or campaigns. This generosity of purpose is an easily forgotten fact about Sartre. He expected himself to
do something
at every moment: to be engaged and active even when he had no time to think things through. More circumspect types stopped for reflection, but Sartre thought that was a bourgeois luxury too.

Merleau-Ponty once said in an interview that there was a simple fact about Sartre that few people know and that did not often come across in his books. It was this:
‘il est bon’
. He is good. His ‘goodness’ was his fatal flaw: it led him to overwork, and more significantly it was what led him to believe that he must reconcile his existentialism with Marxism in the first place. That was an impossible and destructive task: the two just were incompatible. But Sartre thought the oppressed classes of the world required it from him.

Many years later, in an interview just before Sartre’s death, his young assistant Benny Lévy challenged him — quite aggressively — to say who exactly it was that vanished when the pro-Soviet apologist in Sartre finally disappeared. Who died, he asked? ‘
A sinister scoundrel, a dimwit, a sucker, or a basically good person?’

Sartre answered, mildly, ‘I’d say, a person who’s not bad.’

Whatever goodness there had been in defending Soviet Communism earlier in the 1950s, it became harder to see in October and November 1956.

When Stalin died, the talk of a ‘thaw’ in the Soviet Union’s policies had encouraged reformers in Hungary’s Communist government to introduce a few signs of personal and political freedom. Demonstrators took to the streets demanding more. In response, the Soviet Union sent soldiers, and battles broke out around Budapest; the
rebels seized the city’s radio station and called on Hungarians to resist. An apparent truce held for a while, but on 1 November Russian tanks rolled across the border from Ukraine and lumbered on into Budapest. Tank troops demolished buildings where people were hiding. They fired on railway stations and public squares, and threatened to destroy the city’s Parliament buildings. On Sunday 4 November, at noon, the radio rebels surrendered with their final broadcast: ‘
We are now going off the air.
Vive l’Europe! Vive la Hongrie!
’ The rebellion was defeated.

For Communist sympathisers in the West, this demonstration of brute Soviet power was a great shock. Many tore up their Communist Party cards, and even the remaining believers wrung their hands and wondered how to incorporate the new development into their vision. Sartre and Beauvoir were among those most confused. In January 1957, they produced a special issue of
Les Temps modernes
condemning the Soviet action and giving space to many Hungarian writers to write about the events — but in private they continued to feel uneasy, and they disliked the way the right seized on the invasion to promote their own ideology.

Very soon after the Hungarian uprising, Sartre began to write a new work of vast extent, the
Critique of Dialectical Reason
. It was an attempt to create something on the scale of
Being and Nothingness
, but built around his new social thinking and the ideal of political commitment. Instead of emphasing consciousness, nothingness and freedom, he now brought everything back to concrete situations and the principle of concerted action in the world. Beauvoir considered the
Critique of Dialectical Reason
Sartre’s ultimate response to the catastrophe of 1956. As if merging Marxism with existentialism were not acrobatic enough, he was now trying to adapt the result to a situation in which the Soviet Union had proved itself untrustworthy. As Sartre himself put it in 1975, ‘
The
Critique
is a Marxist work written against the Communists.’ It could also be seen as an existentialist work written against the old, unpoliticised existentialism.

The book was formidably difficult to bring off. Sartre published the first volume,
Theory of Practical Ensembles
, in 1960; that alone reached nearly 400,000 words. The
second volume — surprise! — was never
finished. He made extensive notes but could not get it into shape. These notes were published posthumously in 1985.

By the time of giving up on the second volume, Sartre’s attention had already turned away from the Soviet Union and towards new battles. He took an interest in Mao’s China. He also began to see himself as an intellectual pioneer, not of Communism, but of a more radical rebellion — one that fit much better with the existentialist way of life.

12

THE EYES OF THE LEAST FAVOURED

In which we meet revolutionaries, outsiders and seekers after authenticity
.

If a lot of people with incompatible interests all claim that right is on their side, how do you decide between them? In a paragraph of the final part of
The Communists and Peace
, Sartre had sketched the outline of a bold solution: why not decide every situation by asking how it looks to ‘the eyes of the least favoured’, or to ‘those treated the most unjustly’? You just need to work out who is most oppressed and disadvantaged in the situation, and then adopt their version of events as the right one. Their view can be considered the criterion for truth itself: the way of establishing
‘man and society as they truly are’. If something is not true in the eyes of the least favoured, says Sartre, then it is
not true
.

As an idea, this is astoundingly simple and refreshing. At a stroke, it wipes out the weasely cant indulged in by the advantaged — all those convenient claims that the poor ‘deserve’ their fate, or that the rich are entitled to the disproportionate wealth that accumulates upon them, or that inequality and suffering should be accepted as inevitable parts of life. For Sartre, if the poor and disadvantaged do not believe such arguments, they are wrong arguments. This is similar to what one might call the Genet Principle: that the underdog is always right. From now on, like Jean Genet, Sartre submits himself joyfully to the alienated, downtrodden, thwarted and excluded. He tries to adopt the gaze of the outsider, turned against the privileged caste — even when that caste includes himself.

No one could say that this is easy to do, and not only because (as
Beauvoir had pointed out in
The Second Sex
) borrowing someone else’s perspective puts a strain on the psyche. Anyone who tries to do it also runs into a mass of logical and conceptual problems. Disagreements inevitably ensue about
who
exactly is least favoured at any moment. Each time an underdog becomes an overdog, everything has to be recalculated. Constant monitoring of roles is required — and who is to do the monitoring?

As Merleau-Ponty pointed out in his ‘
Sartre and Ultrabolshevism’,
Sartre himself did not stick to his own principle. Confronted with the gaze of those unfavoured in Stalin’s prisons, he managed for a long time to take no account of their accusing eyes, giving reasons why they could be disregarded. But perhaps the ‘gaze’ idea was never intended to make consistent sense. Just as with Levinas’ or Weil’s ethical philosophies, in which the demands made on us by the gaze of the Other are theoretically infinite in extent, an ideal does not become any less inspiring just because it is impossible to stick to.

Sartre’s ‘eyes of the least favoured’ idea is as radical as Levinas’ Other-directed ethics, and more radical than Communism. Communists believe that only the party can decide what is right. To turn morality over to a mass of human eyes and personal perspectives is to invite chaos and lose the possibility of a real revolution. Sartre ignored the party line and revealed himself to be just as much of an old maverick as ever. He could not be a proper Marxist even when he was trying.

His new approach appealed more to activists who did not want to join any party but who were active in new-style liberation movements, especially the protests of the 1950s and 1960s against racism, sexism, social exclusion, poverty and colonialism. Sartre threw his weight behind these struggles, and did what he could to help — mostly with his favourite weapon, the pen. Writing forewords for younger authors’ polemics gave him new subjects to be
engagé
about, and allowed him to feel that his philosophy was truly achieving something, a feeling that had eluded him after the Soviet project curdled.