Free Travelers' Tales Paris by James O'Reilly Page B

.... Some faces are stingy, denying one even the flicker of eyelids. They appear starched. I love his lower lip like a white Negro’s, his squint, his wandering eye, his shipwrecked eye, a slipstream of light when he enters our troubled waters .
    â€”Violette Leduc, La Folie en tête , 1970
    Existentialism was a hard philosophy to live by, as it put the responsibility of life squarely on man’s own shoulders, offering him no alibis and no comfort. Amazingly, Sartre himself found it toohard to bear: he tried to reconcile Existentialism with Marxism—an attempted “squaring of the circle” which led him to compromise and to personal “inauthenticity.” He and Simone de Beauvoir aligned themselves with the Communist Party and became staunch fellow-travellers. They established a kind of intellectual terrorism by declaring “all anti-communists are swine,” broke with their friends—Camus, Aron, Koestler, even the suave Merleau-Ponty—and surrounded themselves with younger cronies, many their ex-students. By 1957, after the Hungarian uprising and the Khrushchev Report, most Communist intellectuals had left the Party or been expelled, but Sartre continued to “believe.” Later, when asked why he had concealed the existence of concentration camps in Russia, about which he had known for a long time, he replied: “One should not drive Billancourt [i.e. the Renault car workers] to despair”—a quote that has become famous since as a supreme example of “treason of the clerks.” Towards the end of his life, when he was ill and almost blind, and history—to which he had sacrificed truth—had moved on and left him behind, he declared: “I’m not a Marxist.”
    Sartre was not alone in this political trajectory; countless other Left-wing intellectuals and fellow-travellers followed it. Disillusioned with Russia, they kept finding promised lands, in China, Cuba.... “Something in them aspires to slavery” is how Camus described their attitude.
    A Sunday morning full of wind and sunlight. Over the large pool the wind splatters the waters of the fountain; the tiny sailboats on the windswept water and the swallows around the huge trees. Two youths discussing: “You who believe in human dignity.”
    â€”Albert Camus,
Notebooks 1942–1951
    By contrast Camus remained honourable and true to himself till the end of his life. He and Sartre had quarrelled after the publication of Camus’ The Rebel in the early 50s—a dispute chronicled in numerous volumes since. Suffice it to say that Camus contrasted man’s continuing metaphysical and political revolt with the banality of “revolution:” the one a refusal of injustice and an affirmation of human dignity,the other a suspension of human values for the sake of a “ programme ,” a hypothetical better future. “I rebel, therefore we are” against “the end justifies the means,” which sanctions violence, deceit and terrorism.
    More than a decade before it became a commonplace, he understood the nature of totalitarianism and denounced it—the irrational totalitarianism of Fascism as well as the rational totalitarianism of Communism. Not wishing to align himself with either the Left or the Right, he became increasingly isolated, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Stoically, he stood his ground, won the Nobel Prize in 1958, and died in a car crash in January 1960. And then, what posthumous triumph over his persecutors! All his predications came true and by the time that Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989-90 not a single intellectual of note was left in the French Communist Party.
    Camus embodied a temperament both rebellious and mystical, but always on the side of life and joy. Unable to endorse a philosophy which says that moral principles have to be sacrificed until they can be resurrected in a “better future,” I found myself more