The Existentialists

`If you were twenty, in 1945, after four years of Occupation, freedom also meant the freedom to go to bed at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morn-ing.' It meant offending your elders and defying the order of things. It could also mean mingling promiscuously with different races and classes. The philosopher Gabriel Marcel heard a lady on a train saying, `Sir, what a horror, existentialism! I have a friend whose son is an exis-tentialist; he lives in a kitchen with a Negro woman!' The existentialist subculture that rose up in the 194os found its home in the environs of the Saint-Germain-des-Pres church on the Left Bank of Paris — an area that still milks the association for all it is worth. Sartre and Beauvoir spent many years living in cheap Saint-Germain hotels and writing all day in cafes, mainly because these were warmer places to go than the unheated hotel rooms. They favoured the Flore, the Deux Magots and the Bar Napoleon, all clustered around the cor-ner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue Bonaparte. The Flore was the best, for its proprietor sometimes let them work in a private room upstairs when nosy journalists or passers-by became too intru-sive. Yet they also loved the lively tables downstairs, at least in the early days: Sartre enjoyed working in public spaces amid noise and bustle. He and Beauvoir held court with friends, colleagues, artists, writers, students and lovers, all talking at once and all bound by rib-bons of cigarette or pipe smoke. After the cafes, there were subterranean jazz dives to go to: in the Lorientais, Claude Luter's band played blues, jazz and ragtime, while the star of the club Tabou was the trumpeter and novelist Boris Vian. You could undulate to a jazz band's jagged parps and bleats, or debate authenticity in a dark corner while listening to the smoky voice of Cazalis' friend and fellow muse, Juliette Greco, who became a famous chanteuse after her arrival in Paris in 1946. She, Cazalis and Michelle Vian (Boris' wife) would watch new arrivals at the Lorientais and Tabou, and refuse entry to anyone who did not look suitable — although, according to Michelle Vian, they would admit anyone 'so long as they were interesting— that is, if they had a book under their arm'. Among the regulars were many of the people who had writ-ten these books, notably Raymond Queneau and his friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who both discovered the nightclub world through Cazalis and Greco. Greco started a fashion for long, straight, existentialist hair — the `drowning victim' look, as one journalist wrote and for looking chic in thick sweaters and men's jackets with the sleeves rolled up. She said she first grew her hair long to keep warm in the war years; Beauvoir said the same thing about her own habit of wearing a tur-ban. Existentialists wore cast-off shirts and raincoats; some of them sported what sounds like a proto-punk style. One youth went around with 'a completely shredded and tattered shirt on his back', according to a journalist's report. They eventually adopted the most iconic exis-tentialist garment of all: the black woollen turtleneck. In this rebellious world, just as with the Parisian bohemians and Dadaists in earlier generations... everything that was dangerous and provocative was good. Everything that was nice or bourgeois was bad.