Modern Mind

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 hissympathy 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