Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

23

PARIS IN THE YEAR ZERO

In October 1945, following his first visit to the United States, which had impressed him, at least temporarily, with its vitality and abundance, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre returned to a very different Paris. After the years of war and occupation, the city was wrecked, emotionally more so than physically (because the Germans had spared it), and the contrast with America was stark. Sartre’s first task on his return was to deliver a lecture at the university entitled ‘Existentialism is a Humanism.’ To his consternation, so many people turned up for the lecture that all the seats were occupied, and he himself couldn’t get in. The lecture started an hour late. Once begun, ‘he spoke for two hours without stopping, without notes, and without taking his hands out of his pockets,’ and the occasion became famous.¹ It became famous not only for the virtuosity of its delivery but because it was the first public admission by Sartre of a change in his philosophy. Much influenced by what had happened in Vichy France and the ultimate victory of the Allies, Sartre’s existentialism, which before the war had been an essentially pessimistic doctrine, now became an idea ‘based on optimism and action.’² Sartre’s new ideas, he said, would be ‘the new creed’ for ‘the Europeans of 1945.’ Sartre was one of the most influential thinkers in the immediate postwar world, and his new attitude, as Arthur Herman makes plain in his study of cultural pessimism, was directly related to his experiences in the war. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said. Speaking of his time in the Resistance, he described how he had lost his sense of isolation: ‘I suddenly understood that I was a social being … I became aware of the weight of the world and my ties with all the others and their ties with me.’³

Born in Poitiers in 1905, Sartre grew up in comfortable surroundings with sophisticated and enlightened parents who exposed their son to the best in art, literature, and music (his grandfather was Albert Schweitzer’s uncle).⁴ He attended the Lycée Henri IV, one of the most fashionable schools in Paris, and then went on to the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Initially he intended to become a poet, Baudelaire being a particular hero of his, but he soon came under the influence of Marcel Proust and, most important, of Henri Bergson. ‘In Bergson,’ he said, ‘I immediately found a description of my own psychic life.’ It was as if ‘the truth had come down from heaven.’⁵ Other influences were Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Sartre’s attention being drawn to the Germans in the early 1930s by Raymond Aron, a fellow pupil at the same lycée. Aron was at the time more knowledgeable than Sartre, having just returned from studying with Husserl in Berlin. It was Husserl’s theory that much of the formal structure of traditional philosophy is nonsense, that true knowledge comes from ‘our immediate intuition of things as they are’, and that truth can best be grasped in ‘boundary situations’ – sudden, extreme moments, as when someone steps off the pavement in front of an oncoming car. Husserl called these moments of ‘unmediated existence,’ when one is forced to ‘choose and act,’ when life is ‘most real.’⁶

Sartre followed Aron to Berlin in 1933, apparently ignoring Hitler’s rise.⁷ In addition to the influence of Husserl, Heidegger, and Bergson, Sartre also took advantage of the intellectual climate created in Paris in the 1930s by a seminar at the Sorbonne organised by a Russian emigré named Alexandre Kojève. This introduced a whole generation of French intellectuals – Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and André Breton – to Nietzsche and to Hegel’s ideas of history as progress.⁸ Kojève’s argument was that Western civilisation and its associated democracy had triumphed over every alternative (ironic in view of what was happening then in Germany and Russia) and that everyone, eventually, including the presently downtrodden working classes, would be ‘bourgeoisified.’ Sartre, however, drew different conclusions – being far more pessimistic in the 1930s than his Russian teacher. In one of his most famous phrases, he described man as ‘condemned to be free.’ For Sartre, Following Heidegger much more than Kojève, man was alone in the world and gradually being overtaken by materialism, industrialisation, standardisation, Américanisation (Heidegger, remember, had been influenced by Oswald Spengler). Life in such a darkening world, according to Sartre, was ‘absurd’ (another famous coinage of his). This absurdity, a form of emptiness, Sartre added, produced in man a sense of ‘nausea,’ a new version of alienation and a word he used as the title for a novel he published in 1938, La Nausée. One of the protagonists of the novel suffers this complaint, living in a provincial bourgeois world where life drags on with ‘a sort of sweetish sickness’ – Madame Bovary in modern dress.⁹ Most people, says Sartre, prefer to be free but are not: they live in ‘bad faith.’ This was essentially Heidegger’s idea of authenticity/inauthenticity, but Sartre, owing to the fact that he used more accessible language and wrote novels and, later, plays, became much more well known as an existentialist.¹⁰ Although he became more optimistic after the war, both phases of his thinking are linked by a distaste – one might almost say a hatred – for the bourgeois life. He loved to raise the spectre of the surly waiter, whose surliness – La Nausée – existed because he hated being a waiter and ready wanted to be an artist, an actor, knowing that every moment spent waiting was spent in ‘bad faith.’¹¹ Freedom could only be found by breaking away from this sort of existence.

Intellectual life in Paris experienced a resurgence in 1944, precisely because the city had been occupied. Many books had been banned, theatres censored, magazines closed; even conversation had been guarded. As in the other occupied countries of Eastern Europe and in Holland and Belgium, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a special task force under Alfred Rosenberg, whose job it was to confiscate both private and public art collections, had descended on France. The paper shortage had ensured that books, newspapers, magazines, theatre programs, school notebooks, and artists’ materials were in short supply. Sartre apart, this was the age of André Gide, Albert Camus, Louis Aragon, Lautréamont, of Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel, and all the formerly banned American authors – Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Damon Runyon.¹² Nineteen-forty-four also became known as the year of ‘Ritzkrieg’: though the world was still at war, Paris had been liberated and was inundated with visitors. Hemingway visited Sylvia Beach – her famous bookshop, Shakespeare & Co. (which had published James Joyce’s Ulysses) had closed down, but she had survived the camps. Lee Miller, of Vogue, hurried to resume her acquaintance with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Eluard. Other visitors of that time included Marlene Dietrich, William Shirer, William Saroyan, Martha Gellhorn, A. J. Ayer, and George Orwell. The change in feeling was so marked, the feeling of renewal so complete, that Simone de Beauvoir talked about ‘Paris in the Year Zero.¹³

For someone like Sartre, the épuration, the purge of collaborators, was also, if not exactly joyful, at the least a satisfying display of justice. Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trenet were blacklisted, for having sung on the German-run Radio-Paris. Georges Simenon was placed under house arrest for three months for allowing some of his Maigret books to be made into films by the Germans. The painters André Derain, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Kees van Dongen, and Maurice Vlaminck (who had gone into hiding at the liberation) were all ordered to paint a major work for the state as a punishment for accepting a sponsored tour of Germany during the war; and the publisher Bernard Grasset was locked up in Fresnes prison for paying too much heed to the ‘Otto List,’ the works proscribed by the Germans, named after Otto Abetz, the German ambassador in Paris.¹⁴ More serious was the fate of authors such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Charles Maurras, and Robert Brasillach, who had been close to the Vichy administration. Some were put on trial and convicted as traitors, some fled abroad, others committed suicide. The most notorious was the writer Brasillach, an ‘exultant fascist’ who had become editor of the virulently anti-Semitic Je suis partout (? am everywhere’, but nicknamed Je suis parti, ‘I have left’). He was executed by firing squad in February 1945.¹⁵ Sacha Guitry, the dramatist and actor, a sort of French Noël Coward, was arrested and asked why he had agreed to meet Goring. He replied, ‘Out of curiosity.’ Serge Lifar, Serge Diaghilev’s protégé and the Vichy-appointed director of the Paris Opéra, was initially banned for life from the French stage, but this was later commuted to a year’s suspension.¹⁶

Sartre, who had been in the army, interned in Germany and a member of the resistance, saw the postwar world as his moment, and he wanted to carve out a new role for the intellectual and the writer. His aim, as a philosopher, was still the creation of l’homme revolté, the rebel, whose aim was the overthrow of the bourgeoisie; but to this he now added an attack on analytic reason which he described as ‘the official doctrine of bourgeois democracy.’ Sartre had been struck, in wartime, by the way man’s sense of isolation had disappeared, and he now felt that existentialism should be adapted to this insight – that action, choice, was the solution to man’s predicament. Philosophy, existentialism, became for him – in a sense – a form of guerrilla war in which individuals, who are both isolated souls and yet part of a joint campaign, find their being. With Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre (as editor in chief) founded a new political, philosophical, and literary journal called Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), the motto for which was, ‘Man is total: totally committed and totally free.’¹⁷ This group in effect joined the long line of thinkers – Bergson, Spengler, Heidegger – who felt that positivism, science, analytic reason, and capitalism were creating a materialistic, rational but crass world that denuded man of a vital life force. In time this would lead Sartre to an equally crass anti-Americanism (as it had Spengler and Heidegger before him), but to begin with he declared in his Existentialism (1947) that ‘man is only a situation,’ one of his most important phrases. Man, he said, had ‘a distant purpose,’ to realise himself, to make choices in order to be. In doing so, he had to liberate himself from bourgeois rationality.¹⁸ There is no doubt that Sartre was a gifted phrase maker, the first soundbite philosopher, and his ideas appealed to many in the postwar world, especially his belief that the best way to achieve an existential existence, the best way to be ‘authentic,’ as Heidegger would have put it, was to be against things. The critic, he said, has a fuller life than the acquiescer. (He even refused, in later life, the award of the Nobel Prize.)¹⁹ It was this approach that led him in 1948 to found the Revolutionary Democratic Association, which tried to lead intellectuals and others away from the obsession that was already dominating their lives: the Cold War.²⁰

Sartre was a Marxist – ‘It is not my fault if reality is Marxist,’ is how he put it. But in one important regard he was overtaken by the other member of the trinity that founded Les Temps modernes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty had also attended Kojève’s seminar in the 1930s, and he too had been influenced by Husserl and Heidegger. After the war, however, he pushed the ‘anti’ doctrine much further than Sartre. In Humanism and Terror, published in 1948, Merleau-Ponty welded Sartre and Stalin in the ultimate existential argument.²¹ His central point was that the Cold War was a classic ‘boundary situation,’ which required ‘fundamental decisions from men where the risk is total.’ Successful revolutions, he claimed, had not shed as much blood as the capitalist empires, and therefore the former was preferable to the latter and had ‘a humanistic future.’ On this analysis, Stalinism, for all its faults, was a more ‘honest’ form of violence than that which underlay liberal capitalism. Stalinism acknowledged its violence, Merleau-Ponty said, whereas the Western empires did not. In this respect at least, Stalinism was to be preferred.²²

Existentialism, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty were, therefore, the conceptual fathers of much of the intellectual climate of the postwar years, particularly in France, but elsewhere in Europe as well. When people like Arthur Koestler – whose Darkness at Noon, exposing Stalinist atrocities, sold 250,000 copies in France alone – took them to task, they were denounced as liars.²³ Then Sartre et al. fell back on such arguments as that the Soviets covered up because they were ashamed of their violence, whereas in Western capitalist democracies violence was implicit and openly condoned. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were one factor in France having the most powerful Communist Party outside the Soviet bloc (in 1952 Les Temps modernes became a party publication in all but name), and their influence did not really dissolve until after the student rebellions of 1968. Their stance also led to a philosophical hatred of America, which had never been entirely absent from European thought but now took on an unprecedented virulence. In 1954 Sartre visited Russia and returned declaring that ‘there is total freedom of criticism in the USSR.’²⁴ He knew that wasn’t true but felt it was more important to be anti-America than critical of the Soviet Union. This attitude persisted, in Sartre as in others, and showed itself in the philosopher’s espousal of other Marxist anti-American causes: Tito’s Yugoslavia, Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam. Nearer home, of course, he was a natural leader for the protests against France’s battle with Algeria in the mid-1950s, where Sartre supported the FLN rebels. It was this support that led to his friendship with the man who would carry his thinking one important stage further: Frantz Fanon.²⁵

France, more than most countries, lays great store by its intellectuals. Streets are named after philosophers and even minor writers. Nowhere is this more true than in Paris, and the period after World War II was the golden age of intellectuals. During the occupation the intellectual resistance had been led by the Comité National des Ecrivains, its mouthpiece being Les Lettres françaises. After the liberation the editorship was taken over by Louis Aragon, ‘a former surrealist now turned Stalinist.’ His first act was to publish a list of 156 writers, artists, theatre people, and academics who had collaborated and for whom the journal called for ‘just punishment.’²⁶

Nowadays, the image of the French intellectual is invariably of someone wearing a black turtleneck sweater and smoking a harsh cigarette, a Gauloise, say, or a Gitane. This certainly owes something to Sartre, who like everyone in those days smoked a great deal, and always carried scraps of paper in his pockets.²⁷ The various groups of intellectuals each had their favourite cafés. Sartre and de Beauvoir used the Flore at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue Saint-Benôit.²⁸ Sartre arrived for breakfast (two cognacs) and then sat at a table upstairs and wrote for three hours. De Beauvoir did the same but at a separate table. After lunch they went back upstairs for another three hours. The proprietor at first didn’t recognise them, but after Sartre became famous he received so many telephone calls at the café that a Une was installed solely for his use. The Brasserie Lipp, opposite, was shunned for a while because its Alsatian dishes had been favoured by the Germans (though Gide had eaten there). Picasso and Dora Maar used Le Catalan in the rue des Grands Augustins, the Communists used the Bonaparte on the north side of the place, and musicians preferred the Royal Saint-Germain, opposite the Deux Magots, Sartre’s second choice.²⁹ But in any event, the existential life of ‘disenchanted nonchalance’ took place only between the boulevard Saint-Michel in the east, the rue des Saint-Pères in the west, the quais along the Seine in the north, and the rue Vaugirard in the south; this was ‘la cathédrale de Sartre.’³⁰ In those days, too, many writers, artists and musicians did not live in apartments but took rooms in cheap hotels – one reason why they made so much use of café life. The only late-night café in those days was Le Tabou in the rue Dauphine, frequented by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Juliette Gréco, the diseuse (a form of singing almost like speaking), and Albert Camus. In 1947 Bernard Lucas persuaded the owners of Le Tabou to rent him their cedar, a tubelike room in which he installed a bar, a gramophone, and a piano. Le Tabou took off immediately, and from then on, Saint-Germain and la famille Sartre were tourist attractions.³¹

Few tourists, however, read Les Temps modernes, the journal that had been started in 1945, funded by Gaston Gallimard and with Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Queneau, and Raymond Aron on the board. Simone de Beauvoir saw Les Temps modernes as the showpiece of what she called the ‘Sartrean ideal,’ and it was certainly intended to be the flagship of an era of intellectual change. Paris at the time was resurgent intellectually, not just in regard to philosophy and existentialism. In the theatre, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Sartre’s own Huis clos had appeared in 1944, Camus’s Caligula a year later, the same year as Giraudoux’s Madwoman of Chaillot. Sartre’s Men without Shallows appeared in 1946. Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, influenced by Luigi Pirandello, were waiting in the wings.

Exciting as all this was, the climate of les intellos in Paris soon turned sour thanks to one issue that dominated everything else: Stalinism.³² France, as we have seen, had a strong Communist Party, but after the centralisation of Yugoslavia, in the manner of the USSR, the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, and the death of its foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, many in France found it impossible to continue their membership of the PCF, or were expelled when they expressed their revulsion. A number of disastrous strikes in France also drove a wedge between French intellectuals and workers, a relationship that was in fact never as strong as the intellectuals pretended. Two things followed. In one, Sartre and his ‘famille’ joined in 1947 the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, a party created to found a movement independent of the USSR and the United States.³³ The Kremlin took this seriously, fearing that Sartre’s ‘philosophy of decadence,’ as they called existentialism, could become a ‘third force,’ especially among the young. Andrei Zhdanov, we now know, saw to it that Sartre was attacked on several fronts, in particular at a peace conference in Wroclaw, Poland, in August 1948, where Picasso too was vdified.³⁴ Sartre later changed his tune on Stalinist Russia, arguing that whatever wrongs had been committed had been carried out for the greater good. This tortuous form of reasoning became ever more necessary as the 1940s wore on and more and more evidence was revealed about Stalin’s atrocities. But Sartre’s continuing hatred of American materialism kept him more in the Soviet camp than anywhere else. This position received a massive setback in 1947, however, with the publication of I Chose Freedom, by Victor Kravchenko, a Russian engineer who had defected from a Soviet trade mission to the United States in 1944. This book turned into a runaway success and was translated into a score of languages.³⁵ Russian-authored, it was the earliest firstperson description of Stalin’s labour camps, his persecution of the kulaks, and his forced collectivisations.³⁶

In France, due to the strength of the Communist Party, no major publishing house would touch the book (echoes of Orwell’s Animal Farm in Britain). But when it did appear, it sold 400,000 copies and won the Prix Sainte-Beuve. The book was attacked by the Communist Party, and Les Lettres françaises published an article by one Sim Thomas, allegedly a former OSS officer, who claimed that the book had been authored by American intelligence agents rather than Kravchenko, who was a compulsive liar and an alcoholic.³⁷ Kravchenko, who by then had settled in the United States, sued for libel. The trial was held in January 1949 amid massive publicity. Les Lettres françaises had obtained witnesses from Russia, with NKVD help, including Kravchenko’s former wife, Zinaïda Gorlova, with whom, he said, he had witnessed many atrocities. Since Gorlova’s father was still in a prison camp, her evidence was naturally tainted several times over. Despite this, faced by her ex-husband in the witness box, she physically deteriorated, losing weight almost overnight and becoming ‘unkempt and listless’. She was eventually taken to Orly airport, where a Soviet military aircraft was waiting to fly her back to Moscow. ‘Sim Thomas’ was never produced; he did not exist. The most impressive witness for Kravchenko was Margarete Buber-Neumann, the widow of the prewar leader of the German Communist Party, Heinz Neumann. After Hitler achieved power, the Neumanns had fled to Soviet Russia but had been sent to the labour camps because of ‘political deviationism.’³⁸ After the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, in 1940, they had been shipped back to Germany and the camp at Ravensbrück. So Margarete Buber-Neumann had been in camps on both sides of what became the Iron Curtain: what reason had she to lie?

The verdict was announced on 4 April, the same day that the North Adantic Alliance was signed. Kravchenko had won. He received only minimal damages, but that wasn’t the point. Many intellectuals resigned from the party that year, and soon even Albert Camus would follow.³⁹ Sartre and de Beauvoir did not resign, however. For them, all revolutions have their ‘terrible majesty.’⁴⁰ For them, the hatred of American materialism outweighed everything else.

After the war, Paris seemed set to resume its position as the world capital of intellectual and creative life, the City of Light that it had always been. Breton and Duchamp were back from America, mixing again with Cocteau. This was the era of Anouilh’s Colombe, Gide’s Journals and his Nobel Prize, Malraux’s Voices of Silence, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes; it was again, after an interlude, the city of Edith Piaf, Sidney Bechet, and Maurice Chevalier, of Matisse’s Jazz series, of major works by the Annales school of historians, which are considered in a later chapter, of the new mathematics of ‘Nikolas Bourbaki,’ of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and of Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. Coco Chanel was still alive, and Christian Dior had just started. In serious music it was the time of Olivier Messiaen. This composer was splendidly individualistic. Far from being an existentialist, he was a theological writer, ‘dedicated to the task of reconciling human imperfection and Divine Glory through the medium of Art.’ Messiaen detested most aspects of modern life, preferring the ancient grand civilisations of Assyria and Sumer. Much influenced by Debussy and the Russian composers, his own works sought to create timeless, contemplative moods, and although he tried serialism, his works frequently employed repetition on a large scale and, his particular innovation, the transcription of birdsong. In the decade and a half after the war, Messiaen used adventurous techniques (including new ways of dividing up the piano keyboard), birdsong, and Eastern music to forge a new religious spirit in music: Turangaîla (Hindu for ‘love song’), 1946—1948; Livre d’Orgue, 1951; Réveil des Oiseaux, 1953. Messiaen’s opposition to existentialism was underlined by his pupil Pierre Boulez, who described his music as closer to the Oriental philosophy of ‘being’ rather than the Western idea of ‘becoming.’⁴¹

And yet, despite all this, the 1950s would witness a slow decline in Paris, as the city was overtaken by New York and, to a lesser extent, by London. It would be eclipsed further in the student rebellions of the late 1960s. This was as true of painting as of philosophy and literature. Alberto Giacometti produced some of his greatest, gauntest, figures in postwar Paris, the epitome for many people of existential man; and Jean Dubuffet painted his childlike but at the same time very sophisticated pictures of intellectuals and animals (cows mainly), grotesque and gentle at the same time, revealing mixed feelings about the earnestness with which the postwar Parisian philosophical and literary scene regarded itself. Lesser School of Paris artists like Bernard Buffet, René Mathieu, Anton Tapiès, and Jean Atlan all sold embarrassingly well in France, much better than their British or North American contemporaries. But the hardships of war caused a marked shortsightedness among dealers and artists alike, leading to speculation and a collapse in prices in 1962. Contemporary painting in France has never ready recovered. In reality de Beauvoir had got it back-to-front when she said that Paris was in the year zero, being reborn. It was yet another instance of a sunset being mistaken for a dawn. The decade after the end of World War II was the last great shining moment for the City of Light. Existentialism had been invigorated and was popular in France because it was in part a child of the Resistance, and therefore represented the way the French, or at least French intellectuals, liked to think of themselves. Sartre apart, Paris’s final glory was delivered by four men, three of whom were French by adoption and not native-born, and a third who loathed most of what Paris stood for. These were Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco.

Camus, a pied-noir born in Algeria, was raised in poverty and never lost his sympathy for the poor and oppressed. Briefly a Marxist, he edited the Resistance newspaper Combat during the war. Like Sartre, he too became obsessed with man’s ‘absurd’ condition in an indifferent universe, and his own career was an attempt to show how that situation could (or should) be met. In 1942 he produced The Myth of Sisyphus, a philosophical tract that first appeared in the underground press. His argument was that man must recognise two things: that all he can rely upon is himself, and what goes on inside his head; and that the universe is indifferent, even hostile, that life is a struggle, that we are all like Sisyphus, pushing a stone uphill, and that if we stop, it will roll back down again.⁴² This may seem – may indeed be – futile, but it is all there is. He moved on, to publish The Plague in 1947. This novel, a much more accessible read, starts with an outbreak of bubonic plague in an Algerian city, Oran. There is no overt philosophising in the book; instead, Camus explores the way a series of characters – Dr Rieux, his mother, or Tarrou – react to the terrible news, and deal with the situation as it develops.⁴³ Camus’s main objective is to show what community does, and does not, mean, what man can hope for and what he cannot – the book is in fact a sensitive description of isolation. And that of course is the plague that afflicts us. In this there are echoes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his ideas of community, but also of Hugo von Hofmannsthal; after all, Camus has created a work of art out of absurdity and isolation. Does that redeem him? Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 but was killed in a car crash three years later.

Jean Genet – Saint Genet in Sartre’s biography – introduced himself one day in 1944 to the philosopher and his consort as they sat at the Café Flore. He had a shaven head and a broken nose, ‘but his eyes knew how to smile, and his mouth could express the astonishment of childhood.’⁴⁴ His appearance owed not a little to his upbringing in reformatories, prisons, and brothels, where he had been a male prostitute. Genet’s future reputation would lie in his brilliance with words and his provocative plots, but he was of interest to the existentialists because as an aggressive homosexual and a criminal he occupied two prisons (psychological as well as physical), and in living on the edge, in boundary situations, he at least stood the chance of being more alive, more authentic, than others. He was also of interest to de Beauvoir because, being homosexual and having been forced to play ‘female’ roles in prison (on one occasion he was a ‘bride’ in a prison ménage), Genet’s views about sex and gender were quite unlike anyone else’s. Genet certainly lived life to the full in his way, even going so far as to desecrate a church to see what God would do about it. ‘And the miracle happened. There was no miracle. God had been debunked. God was hollow.’⁴⁵

In a series of novels and plays Genet regaled his public with life as it really was among the ‘queers’ and criminals he knew, the vicious sexual hierarchies within prisons, the baroque sexual practices and inverted codes of behaviour (calling someone ‘a cocksucker’ was enough to get one murdered).⁴⁶ But Genet instinctively grasped that low life, on the edge of violence, the boundary situation par excellence, evoked not only a prurient interest on the part of the bourgeois but deeper feelings too. It opened a longing for something, whether it was latent masochism or latent homosexuality or a sneaking lust for violence – whatever it was, the very popularity of Genet’s work showed up the inadequacies of bourgeois life much more than any analysis by Sartre or the others. Our Lady of the Flowers (1946) was written while Genet was in Mettray prison and details the petty but all-important victories and defeats in a closed world of natural and unnatural homosexuals. The Maids (1948) is ostensibly about two maids who conspire to murder their mistress; however, Genet’s insistence that all the roles are played by young men underlines the play’s real agenda, the nature of sexuality and its relation to our bodies. By the same token, in The Blacks (1958) his requirement that some of the white roles be played by blacks, and that one white person must always be in the audience for any performance, further underlined Genet’s point that life is about feeling (even if that feeling is shame or embarrassment) rather than ‘just’ about thought.⁴⁷ As an erstwhile criminal, he knew what Sartre didn’t appear to grasp: that a rebel is not necessarily a revolutionary, and that the difference between them is, at times, critical.

Samuel Beckett’s most important creative period overlapped with those of Camus and Genet, and in this time he completed Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape. It should be noted, however, that both Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape received their world premieres in London. By then, Paris was slipping. Born in 1906, Beckett was the son of well-to-do Protestants who lived at Foxrock, near Dublin. As Isaiah Berlin watched the October Revolution in Petrograd, so Beckett watched the Easter Rebellion from the hills outside the Irish capital.⁴⁸ He attended Trinity College, Dublin, like James Joyce, and after a spell at teaching he travelled all over Europe.⁴⁹ He met the author of Ulysses in Paris, becoming a friend and helping defend the older man’s later work (Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake).⁵⁰ Beckett settled first in London, however, after his father died and left him an annuity. In 1934 he began analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, with Wilfred Bion, by which time he was writing short stories, poems, and criticism.⁵¹ In 1937 he moved back to Paris, where he eventually had his novel Murphy published, by Routledge, after it had been rejected by forty-two houses. During the war he distinguished himself in the resistance, winning two medals. But he also spent a long time in hiding (with the novelist Nathalie Sarraute) in Vichy France, which, as several critics have remarked, gave him an extended experience in waiting. (When he came back, Nancy Cunard thought he had the look of ‘an Aztec eagle about him.’)⁵² Beckett was by now thoroughly immersed in French culture – he was an expert on Proust, mixed in the circle around Transition magazine, imbibed the work of the symbolist poets, and could not help but be affected by Sartre’s existentialism. All of Beckett’s major plays were written in French and then translated back into English, mostly by him but occasionally with help.⁵³ As the critic Andrew Kennedy has said, this experience with ‘language pains’ surely helped his writing.

Beckett wrote his most famous work, Waiting for Godot, in less than four months, starting in early October 1948 and finishing the following January. It was, however, another four years before it was performed, at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris. Despite mixed reviews, and his friends having to ‘corral’ people into attending, it was worth the wait, for Godot has become one of the most discussed plays of the century, loved and loathed in equal measure, at least to begin with, though as time has gone by its stature has, if anything, grown.⁵⁴ It is a spare, sparse play; its two main characters (there are five in all) occupy a stage that is bare save for a solitary tree.⁵⁵ The two central figures are usually referred to as literary tramps, and they are often cast wearing bowler hats, though the stage directions do not call for this. The play is notable for its long periods of silence, its repetitions of dialogue (when dialogue occurs), its lurches between metaphysical speculation and banal cliché, the near-repetitions of the action, such as it is, in the two halves of the play, and the final nonappearance of the eponymous Godot. In its unique form, its references to itself, and the demands it makes on the audience, it is one of the last throws of modernism. It was cleverly summed up by one critic, who wrote, ‘Nothing happens, twice!’⁵⁶ This is true enough on the surface, but a travesty nonetheless. As with all the masterpieces of modernism, Godot’s form is integral to the play, and to the experience of the work; no summary can hope to do it justice. It is a post-waste Land play, a post-O’Neill play, post-Joyce, post-Sartre, post-Proust, post-Freud, post-Heisenberg, and post-Rutherford. You can find as many twentieth-century influences as you care to look for – which is where its richness lies. Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps, are waiting for Godot. We don’t know why they are waiting, where they are waiting, how long they have been waiting, or how long they expect to wait. The act of waiting, the silences and the repetitions, conspire to bring the question of time to the fore – and of course in bewildering and intriguing the audience, who must also wait through these silences and repetitions, Godot provides an experience to be had nowhere else, causing the audience to think. (The play’s French title is En attendant Godot; ‘attending,’ as in paying attention to, amplifies waiting.) In some respects, Godot is the reverse of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust made something out of nothing; Beckett is making nothing out of something, but the result is the same, to force the audience to consider what nothing and something are, and how they differ (and recalls Wolfgang Pauli’s question from the 1920s – why is there something rather than nothing?).⁵⁷

Both acts are interrupted by the arrival, first, of Lucky and Pozzo, and of the Boy. The first two are a sort of vaudeville act, the former deaf and the latter dumb.⁵⁸ The Boy is a messenger from Mr Godot, but he has no message, recalling Kafka’s Castle. There is much else, of course – a lot of cursing, a hat-passing routine, comic miming, problems with boots and bodily functions. But the play is essentially about emptiness, silence, and meaning. One is reminded of the physicists’ analogous scale when illustrating the atom – that the nucleus (which nonetheless has most of the mass), is no more than a grain of sand at the centre of an electron shell-structure the size of an opera house. This is not only bleak, Beckett is saying; communication is not only fatuous, futile, and absurd, but it is also comic. All we are left with is either cliché or speculation so removed from any reality that we can never know if it has any meaning – shades of Wittgenstein. Though Beckett loved Chaplin, his message is the very opposite; there is nothing heroic about Vladimir or Estragon, their comedy evokes no identification on our part. It is, it is intended to be, terrifying. Beckett is breaking down all categories. Vladimir and Estragon occupy space-time; in the early French editions Pozzo and Lucky are described as ‘les comiques staliniens’; the play is about humanity – the universe – running down, losing energy, cooling; the characters have, as the existentialists said, been thrown into the world without purpose or essence, only feeling.⁵⁹ They must wait, with patience, because they have no idea what will come, or even if it will come, save death of course. Vladimir and Estragon do stay together, the play’s one positive, optimistic note, till they reach the superb culmination – as an example of the playwright’s art, it can hardly be bettered. Vladimir cries, ‘We have kept our appointment, and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?’

The important point with Beckett, as with O’Neill and Eliot, is to experience the work. For he was no cynic, and the only satisfactory way to conclude writing about him is to quote him. His endings are better than anyone else’s. The end of Godot reads as follows:

Vladimir: Well, shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

[They do not move.]

Or we can end by quoting Beckett’s letter to fellow playwright Harold Pinter: ‘If you insist on finding form [for my plays] I’ll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That’s the kind of form my work has.’

For Beckett at midcentury, the speculations of Sartre were pointless; they were simply statements of the obvious. Science had produced a cold, empty, dark world in which, as more details were grasped, the bigger picture drained away, if only because words were no longer enough to account for what we know, or think we know. Dignity has almost disappeared in Godot, and humour survives ironically only by grim effort, and uncertainly at best. Comforting though it is, Beckett can see no point to dignity. As for humour … well, the best that can be said is – it helps the waiting.

Beckett and Genet both came from outside the French mainland, but it was Paris that provided the stage for their triumphs. The position of the third great playwright of those years, Eugène Ionesco, was slightly different. Ionesco was of Romanian background, grew up in France, spent several years in Romania, during the Soviet occupation, and then returned to Paris, where his first play, The Bald Prima Donna, was produced in 1950. Others followed in rapid succession, including The Chairs (1955), The Stroller in the Air (1956), How to Get Rid of It (1958), The Killer (1959) and Rhinoceros (1959). One of the biographies of Beckett was given the subtitle ‘The Last Modernist,’ but the title could have applied equally to Ionesco, for he was in some ways the perfect amalgam of Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Freud, Alfred Jarry, Kafka, Heidegger, and the Dada/surrealists. Ionesco admitted that many of his ideas for plays came from his dreams.⁶⁰ His main aim, he said, certainly in his earlier plays, was to convey the astonishment he felt simply at existing, at why there is something rather than nothing. Not far behind came his concern with language, his dissatisfaction at our reliance on cliché and, more profoundly, the sheer inadequacy of language when portraying reality. Not far behind this came his obsession with psychology, in particular the new group psychology of the modern world of mass civilisation in great cities, how that affected our ideas of solitude and what separated humanity from animality.

In The Bald Prima Donna it is as if the figures in a de Chirico landscape are speaking, virtual automatons who show no emotion, whose words come out in a monotone.⁶¹ Ionesco’s purpose here is to show the magic of genuine language, to draw our attention to what it is and how it is produced. In The Stroller in the Air, one of his plays based on a dream (of flying), the main character can see, from his vantage point, into the lives of others. This oneway sharing, however, which offers great comic possibilities, is in the end tragic, for as a result of his unique vantage point the stroller experiences a greater solitude than anyone else. In The Chairs, chairs are brought on to the stage at a rapid pace, to create a situation that words simply fad to describe, and the audience therefore has to work out the situation for itself, find its own words. Finally, in Rhinoceros, the characters gradually metamorphose into animals, exchanging an individual human psychology for something more ‘primitive,’ more group-centred, all the time provoking us to ask how great this divide really is.⁶²

Ionesco was very attuned to the achievements of science, the psychology of Freud and Jung in particular, but biology too. It instilled in him his own brand of pessimism. ‘I wonder if art hasn’t reached a dead-end,’ he said in 1970. ‘If indeed in its present form, it hasn’t already reached its end. Once, writers and poets were venerated as seers and prophets. They had a certain intuition, a sharper sensitivity than their contemporaries, better still, they discovered things and their imaginations went beyond the discoveries even of science itself, to things science would only establish twenty-five or fifty years later. In the relation to the psychology in his time, Proust was a precursor…. But for some time now, science and the psychology of the subconscious have been making enormous progress, whereas the empirical revelations of writers have been making very little. In these conditions, can literature still be considered as a means to knowledge?’ And he added, ‘Telstar [the television satellite] in itself is an amazing achievement. But it’s used to bring us a play by Terence Rattigan. Similarly, the cinema is more interesting as an achievement than the films that are shown in its theatres.’⁶³

These observations by Ionesco were no less timely than his plays. Paris in the 1950s saw the last great throw of modernism, the last time high culture could be said to dominate any major civilisation. As we shall see in chapters 25 and 26, a seismic change in the structure of intellectual life was beginning to make itself felt.