Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [95]
Those on the right, who saw existentialismas another form of Marxism, were also mistaken. The Kremlin defined existentialism as a ‘reactionary bourgeois philosophy’. This was because existentialism was fundamentally anti-collectivist, declaring that man as an individual – not society or history – was responsible for defining his own life.
Sartre cannot be accused of following fashions. Having remained wary of Stalinismafter the Liberation, when praise of the Soviet Union was obligatory in progressive circles, he began to support it in the early 1950s, when French writers outside the Communist Party had started to see it for what it was. His Being and Nothingness was first published by Gallimard in 1943. A. J. Ayer, a sceptic, thought that, apart from a few good psychological insights, the book was ‘a pretentious metaphysical thesis’. He concluded: ‘Existentialism, on this evidence, was principally an exercise in misusing the verb “to be”.’
If Sartre had been just a philosopher, then few people outside a small intellectual circle would have heard of him. But by dramatizing his ideas and themes through novels and plays, and above all by his creation of doomed anti-heroes – Antoine Roquentin in Nausea and Matthieu in The Roads to Freedom – Sartre touched a deep, pessimistic chord in youth to a degree unimagined since Goethe’s Werther led to a rush of suicides among the poetic souls of Europe. Albert Camus’s renown also stemmed largely from his anti-hero Mersault in The Outsider, and existentialism is now remembered more as a literary movement than as a lasting body of philosophy.
This group, which dominated the artistic life of Paris after the war, had begun to assemble in the winter before the Liberation. Sartre first met Albert Camus in 1943, when Camus dropped in on a rehearsal of Sartre’s play The Flies. Simone de Beauvoir then met him with Sartre at the Café de Flore and found that he had ‘a charm based on a happy mixture of nonchalance and ardour’.
This gradually expanding group of friends lived around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, moving from one cheap hotel to another. They congregated, more by chance than by arrangement, in their habitual cafés, usually the Flore, where Sartre and Beauvoir wrote for six hours a day, but occasionally the Deux Magots. The Brasserie Lipp opposite was out of favour for a time, its Alsatian specialities having attracted too many German officers. Sometimes they joined Picasso and Dora Maar at Le Catalan in the rue des Grands Augustins, which was almost an extension of Picasso’s studio.
Those who gathered around Sartre became loosely known as la famille Sartre, in the same way that young writers and actors who gathered round Jacques Prévert were known as la bande Prévert. Prévert was famous as a scriptwriter; between 1936 and 1946, he worked on a series of scripts for the film-maker Marcel Carné – among which were Les Visiteurs du soir and Les Enfants du Paradis. But he never had much success with his poetry until 1945, when Gallimard published Paroles. Prévert’s limpid, irreverent, light-hearted verses hit post-war Paris like a breath of fresh air. They were set to music and sung in the street, and within a few years Gallimard had sold over 100,000 copies. Paul Boubal, the patron of the Flore, felt that Prévert and his friends had sown the seeds of the Saint-Germain phenomenon (at least in his own café); but Simone de Beauvoir rather disapproved of la bande Prévert, because they were politically uncommitted.
While waiting for the Liberation, Simone de Beauvoir gave badly cooked little dinners in her ‘toothpaste-pink’ hotel room, with at least half the guests sitting on the edge of the bed. Sartre talked of founding a magazine with Beauvoir, Camus and Merleau-Ponty,