Time on the US publicity trail with British author Sarah Bakewell revealed enduring angst about Sartre, de Beauvoir and the meaning of freedom itself

'Freedom, or their idea of it': does America need the existentialists?

'Freedom, or their idea of it': does America need the existentialists?

Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel is a fitting place to meet Sarah Bakewell to discuss her new book, At the Existentialist Cafe. Not for the wall art by the bar’s namesake, Ludwig, the author of the Madeline stories (“In old houses in Paris that were covered in vines, lived 12 existentialists writing lines upon lines”) but for the convivial din.

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Waiters bring manhattans while a pianist plays jazz. At the closely packed tables, conversations buzz. It is a distinctly pleasant way to conduct an interview. It is also distinctly difficult to hear.

Bakewell, though, is on a publicity tour, and three days later she is at Albertine, a bookstore run by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, for a Q&A with New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz.

Bakewell’s last book, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, was a bestseller and award winner on both sides of the Atlantic. Researching it, she tells Schulz, she read an essay on Montaigne by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. That took her back to existentialism, which she read eagerly as an adolescent, and to the existentialists themselves. Hence the new book, which seeks to present some familiar names and ideas afresh – possibly, to rehabilitate them.

In America, even as the 70th anniversary of Albert Camus’ famous visit is celebrated, Bakewell’s book seems timely. Much of the existentialists’ work is out of favour, their political leanings questioned, their personal lives held up as examples of how not to live. Under the porphyry columns and gold leaf of Albertine, Bakewell is obliged to play defense, batting back assertions such as a suggestion from Schulz that no one “would want to be an existentialist now”.

Bakewell points out that much of what Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir thought and did “only makes sense in context”. And in that context, she says, the existentialists were concerned primarily with “freedom, or their idea of it”.

At the Existentialist Cafe begins in Germany after the first world war, with Edmund Husserl and his pupil Martin Heidegger. It spans the rise of Nazism and Soviet communism, before taking flight after the second world war in a Paris scarred by occupation and scared by the bomb, yet intoxicated by the rich possibilities of freedom.

Bakewell discusses this and more, including her elevation of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, to the status of key existentialist text. One reason de Beauvoir’s book has not been seen as such, Bakewell says in her very British way – self-deprecating, funny – is that, as she writes, US publishers tended to put “misty-focus naked women on the cover, making it look like a work of soft porn”. Also, the first American translator took all the existentialism out.

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘All existentialism is applied existentialism,’ says Sarah Bakewell, arguing for its relevance to modern life. Photograph: Tundi Euhenia Haulik

The tape from Bemelmans, it turns out, is salvageable. Shouting over the hammering yammer of Friday night in Manhattan, we discuss freedom – or America’s idea of it. It’s an attempt on my part to work out why existentialism, with its emphasis on freedom and responsibility, should not be so popular here.

This is also the year of a presidential election in which, surprise surprise, freedom is a constant buzzword. So, I suggest, the American idea of freedom is different. For one thing, God isn’t dead here. For another, the American notion of freedom tends towards the individual.

“Once Sartre and de Beauvoir became politicised,” Bakewell says, “they said that since one is free, what one does really matters. You must choose what you do as if you were choosing for the whole of humanity.

“They drew from that the idea that being free is being responsible, and being responsible is being committed, being engaged.

“It’s interesting. If it wasn’t for their desire to act for the benefit of humanity, if they had just thought you should act for the individual, [existentialism] would actually be a much more unpleasant philosophy than it is, even though that’s what led them into support for communism.

“It also led them out of having a horrible sort of Ayn Rand, look out for No1, greed is good theory – the Gordon Gekko strand of existentialism. They made that impossible for themselves.”

[It's not] a horrible Ayn Rand, look out for No1, greed is good theory: the Gordon Gekko strand of existentialism Sarah Bakewell

Some in the Republican party – House speaker and supposed presidential white knight Paul Ryan comes to mind – are quite fond of Ayn Rand. Many voters do not feel noticeably averse to the greed-is-good of Donald Trump. So, the inevitable question: how would an existentialist have dealt with the rise of The Donald?

Quite rightly, Bakewell laughs. “I think he wouldn’t have a lot to say, beyond being horrified … It would be more interesting to ask what a psychoanalyst would say, about where this rage comes from. I’m afraid Sartre would just see it as yet another example of why capitalism is no good.”

And there’s the political point again: the existentialists are tarred by their leftwing allegiances. Sartre, for example, supported Stalin, Chairman Mao and even Pol Pot.

“He was trying to do the right thing,” Bakewell says, with a very British grimace. “To us now it doesn’t seem he did do the right thing, and maybe he didn’t. But he was trying.”

Such modern distrust is evident, Bakewell says, “not only here. The same happens in Britain and in France to some extent. History hasn’t been kind to Sartre’s attempt to reconcile Marxism with existentialism.

“[But] he wasn’t a communist all his life and … his brand of existentialism, emphasising freedom, didn’t do anything for the communist ideal. He was in trouble with the communists as often as he was in trouble with the right. He was usually in trouble with everybody, which is one of the things I quite admire him for.

“What I wanted to do in the book was to try to understand his motive, what led him to try so hard to reconcile two ideas that cannot be reconciled.”

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest Albert Camus, 1957 Nobel laureate for literature, seen in 1959. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

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There is much to be mined from the existentialists’ experience of America, much of it with distinct contemporary relevance.

“All existentialism is applied existentialism,” Bakewell says at Albertine. It’s one of her central contentions: that a philosophy squarely based on experience – rather than the text – must have something of value for anyone who reads it.

She repeats, admiringly, Sartre’s contention that in any situation one must identify those who will be most disadvantaged, and take their side. At Bemelmans, conversation turns, briefly, to the rise of Bernie Sanders.

Then we discuss the NSA and Edward Snowden. Towards the end of her book, Bakewell ponders the possibilities of existentialist thinking in the modern surveillance state. If we know we are surveilled – not free – we must choose to act responsibly, not live unquestioningly, in what Sartre called bad faith.

We discuss Norman Mailer’s infamous – and infamously dull – 1957 essay on existentialism in America, The White Negro, with its expression of nuclear dread. And as we talk, governments worldwide are expressing the fear that terrorists could obtain nuclear material.

Bakewell says: “It’s something that was said by both Sartre and Camus at the end of the second world war, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki … that from now on the human race always has to live with the knowledge that it can destroy itself, and therefore we must decide every day that we want to live, and to engage. That’s really the fundamental idea about existentialism, put in a very bleak context. It’s not easy.”

Coincidentally, discussion of Bakewell’s own experiences of America, which are similar to those of her subjects, also touches on the nuclear question.

Sartre was usually in trouble with everybody, which is one of the things I quite admire him for Sarah Bakewell

“My view of America is such a mixture of enormous admiration and affection mixed with a kind of terror,” she says. “I just came from Washington DC this morning, and admittedly this is enhanced at the moment because the nuclear summit is going on and there are 50 heads of state in town, but … there is this feeling of raw power, even in the architecture of the place.

“To European eyes it’s at once very, very impressive and exciting, and really quite freaky.”

The existentialists experienced variations on such thoughts when they visited, Bakewell says, “One by one, Sartre in 1945, Camus in 1946 and de Beauvoir in 1947. And all of them were just amazed, by the colour, the prosperity, the advertising, the technology and the sheer optimism.”

De Beauvoir loved the neon glare of Times Square, to the point of wanting to take bites from the signs. She spent time with a lover, Nelson Algren, in Chicago. Sartre marvelled at American technology and the apparent happiness of the American worker. Camus wasn’t particularly enamoured – other than by some locals taking him for a French Humphrey Bogart – until he spent some time with the down and outs of New York City.

“They had come out of Paris where there was rationing,” Bakewell says, “where they had been struggling just to feed themselves and heat themselves and the streets were drab and grey.

“Camus, for instance, felt quite out of his depth in New York. Until he went to the Lower East Side, to the Bowery. And then he said, ‘Ah! Now I feel at home.’”