1942 Camus and Sartre

In my reading life, I decided to step into the world of Camus and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I had not grokked all the romance that entailed: the world of the French Resistance in World War II against Nazi occupation along with the birth and flowering of existentialism. We also see the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. And we see the tensions that will divide Sartre and Camus over the question of Soviet communism, in which we get some echoes of the philosophical struggles of George Orwell, that is, how to square one’s anti-capitalist socialist leftward politics with the totalitarianism of Russia. In this excerpt, we get the happy first meetings of this trio of thinkers and artists and lovers. It is November of 1942. Camus has come from Algiers to work with Sartre's publisher.

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At their first get-together at the Cafe Flore - where Sartre and Beauvoir worked, kept warm, ate and socialized - the three started off awkwardly. Then they started talking shop, Camus and Sartre sharing their regard for the surrealist poet Francis Ponge’s Le Parti pris des choses [“The Way Things Are”]. What “led to the ice being broken” between them, according to Beauvoir, was Camus’s passion for the theater. Camus had led an amateur political theater troupe in Algiers. “Sartre talked of his new play (No Exit) and the condition that would govern its production. “The readiness with which Camus flung himself into this venture endeared him to us; it also hinted that he had plentiful time at his disposal. He had only recently come to Paris; he was married, but his wife had stayed behind in North Africa.” Sartre was pleased with Camus’s work in the role of Garcin, but his financial backer withdrew; this man’s wife, who was to be showcased in No Exit, was arrested for suspected Resistance activity. Sartre was then offered the chance to present the play in a professional production on the Paris stage, and Camus obligingly backed out. But the friendship was cemented. “His youth and independence created bonds between us: we were all solitaries, who had developed without the aid of any ‘school’; we belonged to no group or clique.”

-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus & Sartre”

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Unending Heatwave

The heat won't stop, the rain won't come. I am going to need to ask Pop to let me water on Tuesday. I wish he had not raised such a stink about nothing.

e-Life

I have gone back to consulting Sugar's twitter a number of times during the day, but it is a little depressing to see that steady running of light-hearted and often somewhat clever repartee. I know what it feels like to enjoy that kind of e-life, and I have not had it in years and most likely will never know that feeling again. I am not getting anymore new stuff for my Three Journal. Now it's just quotes and book excerpts and the rare dream.

Lo (1,8) The Gruesome fate of Valeria

In this often whimsical novel, Humbert gets the last laugh on his wife’s betrayal. The novel is funny like that: fate often works wildly in favor of Hummy’s wishes and desires (betraying the fact, or maybe highlighting it, that this is not truly a realist novel and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt - it is fiction, very playful fiction). One of the best examples is the way that Lolita’s mother will sudden drop from the plot in that car accident, clearing the way for his lustful purposes. And this is another example. What a nasty fate awaits the former Mrs. Humbert and her lower-class Russian husband! Valeria ends up in America, after all, and she and her new husband end up as lab rats in a wickedly dehumanizing experiment, being obviously desperate for money.

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The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from the indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with good photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works.

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

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