At the Existentialist Café (48 page)

During the night of 19 March 1980, when he was — unusually — left
alone for a few hours, he collapsed, struggling for breath. He was taken to hospital, where he lived on for almost another month. Even in this final illness, he was chased by journalists who tried to get into his room by posing as nurses, and by
photographers who picked him out through the window with zoom lenses from the roof opposite. On the evening of 14 April, suffering kidney failure and gangrene, he slipped into a coma. The next day he died.

Beauvoir was devastated, but her intellectual honesty forbade changing her lifelong conviction that death was the end: an intrusion and an abomination, with no part in life, and no promise of anything beyond. She wrote: ‘
His death does separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.’

On leaving the École normale supérieure back in 1929,
Sartre and Aron had made a deal that whoever outlived the other would write his obituary for the school alumni magazine. Aron survived Sartre, but did not write the obituary. He did write about Sartre in
L’express
, explaining why he had elected not to stick to their deal: too much time had passed, and he considered that the commitment no longer stood. He also commented in an interview that, although Sartre had written
‘touching articles’ about Camus and Merleau-Ponty on their deaths, he doubted that he would have done the same for himself, had their deaths occurred that way round. It’s not clear why he believed this. True, their relationship had declined more sharply than the others, mainly because their politics were more markedly divergent. But Sartre was unfailingly generous with his words, and despite everything, I suspect he would have found something appreciative to say about Aron in an obituary.

In fact, Aron very nearly had predeceased Sartre, suffering a heart attack in 1977. He survived, but never again felt fully well. The second attack came on 17 October 1983, just as he was leaving court after giving evidence for his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel, whom a journalist had accused of harbouring Nazi sympathies during the war. Aron took the stand to argue not only that the accusation was false, but that it
was ahistorical, failing to take into account the moral complexities of French life under Occupation. He left the building, collapsed, and died instantly.

Simone de
Beauvoir lived six years after Sartre’s
death, almost to the hour.

During those years, she continued to head the editorial board of
Les Temps modernes
, which met at her home. She read manuscripts, wrote letters and helped younger writers, including many feminists. One of these, the American Kate Millett, visited her annually in the Paris apartment, which she described as filled with books, photographs of friends (‘Sartre, Genet, Camus and everybody’), and ‘
these funny sort of fifties-type sofas with velvet cushions that were probably all the rage the year she got it and decorated it’. Beauvoir, commented Millett, was distinguished by an absolute integrity, and by ‘such an unlikely thing, a moral authority’.

Just as Sartre had adopted Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, so Beauvoir adopted her companion and heir, Sylvie Le Bon Beauvoir, who looked after her together with Claude Lanzmann and other friends. Beauvoir was afflicted by
cirrhosis of the liver, not unconnected with years of heavy drinking. Complications of this disease led to her being hospitalised on 20 March 1986; after several weeks recovering from surgery and struggling with congestion of the lungs, she slipped into a coma and died on 14 April 1986.

She was buried next to Sartre in Montparnasse cemetery. As had happened with him, her body was put in a smaller coffin inside a large one so that it could be taken for cremation later. Thousands of people watched the hearse process through the streets, piled high with flowers as Sartre’s had been. It was a less grand occasion than Sartre’s, but the throng of mourners was still large enough to create an obstruction at the cemetery entrance. Guards shut the gates, fearing that too many people would crowd in; some climbed over the barriers and wall. Inside, at the graveside, Lanzmann read a passage from the last pages of her third volume of autobiography,
Force of Circumstance
, reflecting on death, life and loss. She had written:

I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the
candomblé
in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again.

At the time she wrote this summing-up, before signing off the book in March 1963, she still had twenty-three years of life to go. Beauvoir was rather given to these premature valedictory reflections. They fill her study
Old Age
in 1970, as well as the 1972 volume of her autobiography that really did turn out to be the last:
All Said and Done
.

Yet these books, ever more tinged with melancholy, also show her resplendent talent for marvelling at life. In
Old Age
, she writes of gazing at a picture of herself wearing ‘
one of those cloche hats and a roll collar’ on the Champs-Elysées in 1929, and feeling amazed at how things that once seemed natural can now look so unfamiliar. In
All Said and Done
, she describes waking after an afternoon nap and feeling ‘
childish amazement — why am I myself?’ Every detail of an individual is unlikely — why did that particular sperm meet that particular egg? Why was she born female? So many things could have been different: ‘I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.’

Any piece of information that a biographer can discover about a
person, she adds, is a trifle compared to the rich confusion of that person’s real life, with its web of relationships and its countless elements of experience. Moreover, each of these elements means something different depending on perspective: a simple statement such as
‘I was born in Paris’ has a different meaning for each Parisian, depending on his or her background and precise situation. Out of this elaborate perspectival network, a shared reality is woven. No one will ever make sense of this mystery, she says.

The longest-lived of our main dramatis personae here was Emmanuel Levinas, who died on 25 December 1995, some three weeks short of his ninetieth birthday. The span of his life covers most of the story of modern phenomenology, from his first discovery of Husserl in 1928 to his own late career — in which he took philosophy into such arcane territory that even his fans found him hard to understand. He became increasingly interested in traditional Jewish scholarship and the exegesis of biblical texts, as well as continuing to work on ethics and relationships with the Other.

Levinas’ ideas were an influence on Benny Lévy, which may be why
Hope Now
is filled with ideas that sound Levinasian. If true, this is another of those intriguing sidelong contacts between Levinas and Sartre. They barely knew each other, and their ideas were often radically different, yet their paths crossed at significant points. Almost half a century earlier, Sartre had bought Levinas’ book in Paris after the conversation about apricot cocktails in the Bec-de-Gaz bar. Then, in the mid-1930s, they both produced remarkably similar writings about nausea and being. Now, through Lévy, their ideas were brought into unexpected proximity again — perhaps without either one acknowledging or reflecting on the fact.

The English ‘new existentialist’ Colin Wilson lived until 5 December 2013, angry to the end, but retaining the loyalty of the many international readers who had been excited and enlightened by his books. One can leave worse legacies in the world.

He outlived two other great communicators: Hazel Barnes, Sartre’s
translator, who died on 18 March 2008, and Iris Murdoch, who had given English readers their first taste of existentialism.

Murdoch died on 8 February 1999, after living several years with Alzheimer’s disease; her last novel,
Jackson’s Dilemma
, shows signs of emerging symptoms. Around the time she was working on it, she decided to abandon a philosophical book called
‘Heidegger: the pursuit of Being’, on which she’d been engaged for six years. Typescript and manuscript versions remain, as disconnected assemblies of chapters of which just a few parts have been published posthumously.

Heidegger seems to have been an enigma to her, as he was to many others. No doubt she was intrigued by him as a person; many of her novels revolve around charismatic, sometimes dangerous guru types. More importantly, his philosophy kept her attention long after she had turned away from Sartre. She was particularly taken by the Heideggerian image of the mind as a
clearing in the forest, which she found beautiful (as do I).

In
Jackson’s Dilemma
, her character
Benet is also writing a book on Heidegger, and like Murdoch herself he is struggling with the project. He wonders whether the difficulty comes from not being able to decide what he really thinks of Heidegger. Some aspects are attractive while others repel him: the Nazism, the appropriation of Hölderlin, and the relentless ‘poeticisation of philosophy, discarding truth, goodness, freedom, love, the individual, everything which the philosopher ought to explain and defend’. He questions whether he is ‘fascinated by a certain dangerous aspect of Heidegger which was in fact so deeply buried in his own, Benet’s, soul that he could not scrutinise or even dislodge it’. What
is
it that he thinks about when he thinks about Heidegger? Later, reading through his Heidegger notes again, he says, ‘
I am small and I do not understand.’

A lifelong Murdoch fan, I had previously avoided
Jackson’s Dilemma
, expecting it to be a sad read because of the signs of illness. Coming to it now, I was astounded to find such an uncannily recognisable description of how I myself felt about Heidegger. Indeed, I found the whole book moving and thought-provoking. In this last novel, Murdoch gives us a glimpse into what it is like to be a mind (or a Dasein) that is
losing coherence and connection, yet retains both the ability to put its experience into words and the fierce
desire
to do so — to the limits of human capability. It is the phenomenological desire shared by Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and everyone in this book, including even Heidegger himself.

In the last scene of
Jackson’s Dilemma
, the title character, Benet’s servant Jackson, sits on a grassy bank by a bridge over a river, watching a spider building a web between blades of grass. As if merging with Benet, he too has been overtaken by the sense that everything is slipping away. Sometimes, he says, he feels a shift, or loss of breath and memory. Has he simply misunderstood what is happening? Is it a dream? ‘At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road.’

He stands up, but as he does, he feels something: it is the spider, walking on his hand. He helps the spider back to its web, goes down to the bridge, and crosses over the river.

14

THE IMPONDERABLE BLOOM

In which we ponder bloom
.

The famous
existentialists and phenomenologists are gone now, and several generations have grown up since the young Iris Murdoch discovered Sartre in 1945 and exclaimed, ‘The excitement — I remember nothing like it.’ It has become harder to revive that initial thrill. We can still find a nostalgic romance in the black-and-white images of the pipe-puffing Sartre at his café table, the turbanned Beauvoir, and the brooding Camus with his collar turned up. But they will never again look as raw and dangerous as they used to.

On the other hand, existentialist ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all. People (at least in relatively prosperous countries where more urgent needs don’t intervene) talk about anxiety, dishonesty and the fear of commitment. They worry about being in bad faith, even if they don’t use that term. They feel overwhelmed by the excess of consumer choice while also feeling less in control than ever. A vague longing for a more ‘real’ way of living leads some people to — for example — sign up for weekend retreats in which their smartphones are taken away like toys from children, so that they can spend two days walking in the country landscape and reconnecting with each other and with their forgotten selves.

The unnamed object of desire here is authenticity. This theme also haunts modern entertainment, just as much as it did in the 1950s. Existential anxiety is more closely intertwined with technological anxiety than ever in films such as Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner
, the
Wachowskis’
Matrix
, Peter Weir’s
The Truman Show
, Michel Gondry’s
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
and Alex Garland’s
Ex Machina
. Existentialist heroes of more traditional kinds, wrestling with meaning and decision, feature in Sam Mendes’
American Beauty
, the Coen brothers’
A Serious Man
, Steven Knight’s
Locke
, and any number of Woody Allen films, including
Irrational Man
which takes its title from William Barrett’s book. In David O. Russell’s
I Heart Huckabees
of 2004, rival existential detectives battle over the difference between gloomy and positive visions of life. In another part of the forest, we find the ecstatic Heideggerian films of Terrence
Malick, who did postgraduate
research on Heidegger and translated some of his work before turning to film-making. All these divergent styles of film revolve around questions of human identity, purpose and freedom.