The Sartre that we read at Lancaster in 1980-81 for the Existentialism course was no more than an excerpt from Being and Nothingness. Such was undergraduate study that only some early pages from the major work was enough to justify a degree in it. Similarly, in Eng Lit., a lecture on Ulysses was provided due to the interest and demand for it but students were advised not to attempt to write about it.
And so, Sartre is one of the few philosophers that I have read in anything like a primary source (that is, of course, in translation). He is one of the most accessible and enjoyable philosophers as a writer whereas, to a non-philosopher, most of the rest are best approached via commentaries.
Camus probably wasn't a philosopher at all. Many years ago, in a biography of him, I was surprised to read that he didn't regard even his novels (exemplary and brilliant as they are) to be his main work, which he saw as his theatre and political writing.
Andy Martin successfully escapes the temptation of writing his own personal story of hagiography for these once very fashionable thinkers to provide a commentary on an alliance that became enmity. He does a good job of describing the early traumas that formed Sartre's epoch-making philiosophy. Having had adorable, flowing blond hair as a child, it is cut short to make more of a man of him and it is suddenly revealed that he doesn't actually look like an angel. More publicly, both Sartre and Camus lived under Nazi occupation which made any consideration of the value of being alive somewhat more pressing.
They were at first admirers of each other and friends but they were very different. Sartre's pursuit of women was hard work undertaken with great effort whereas it was easy for Camus and it rarely helps a friendship if your friend becomes intimate with your girlfriend. Their differences were both personal, philosophical and political. For Sartre, it was a pugilistic engagement with evil whereas for Camus it was an encounter with absurdity, and, more transcendentally,
If the rebel becomes a revolutionary he can no longer be a true rebel; he has to conform to some political orthodoxy.
I wasn't sure if I was going to take sides. Sartre is clearly the more 'intelligent' writer but also maybe the more flawed human being. There is no substitute for being good-looking and Sartre never gets beyond some jealousy of Camus on that very basic point. On the other hand, Camus's thought is somewhat more 'hazy' and the Nobel Prize, among other things, overwhelm his capacity to produce useful work. Of course, in purely revolutionary terms, if you're not with them you are against them and Camus became anti-communist but whether that was entirely a bad thing remains unproven.
Gradually, I was feeling more sympathy for Camus and the argument was settled not only by Sartre seeming to be the more ad hominem in his attacks on Camus, but Camus's eventual confidence to his notebook that says one can make the world a better place,
'By giving, when you can. And by not hating, when you can.'
That might be nice work if you can get it and Sartre isn't entirely wrong in his resistance to compromise and insistence on the need to fight. It's just that he seems to want to fight anyway. And we all tend to think what it suits us to think. But, meeting his fellow icon, Che Guevara, it turned out that real 'men of action' questioned the need for philosopers of revolution and so Sartre's position advocationg violence but only writing in favour of it was somewhat undermined.
It seems that both had run out of new ideas and vitality before they died, Camus perhaps too young and Sartre, it says here, arguably too old.
Andy Martin mentions the car that Camus died in, the death-trap Facel Vega, often enough to suggest he is is a little bit fixated on the glamour of a 180 mph car, however unreliably designed. His biographical details tell that he lectures at Cambridge University, likes surfing and is a roadie for his sons and there's also a book on Bardot, so 'cool' is apparently high on his agenda. That's okay if you do it well enough and this is an enjoyable book.
My main reservation is how he treats himself to imagining what was said in private conversations between Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir. We get enough of biographers imaging the detail for us in the Shakespeare biography industry and commentary on extant primary sources is surely more authentic. Andy even gives us three pages of imaginary dialogue at one point. If he really wanted to write a play that's what he should have done.
But then I notice that his profile on Cambridge University's website says the book in preparation was to be called Loser wins: Sartre vs. Camus and I wonder who did win, or who was going to be adjudged the winner in the original synopsis. I'm guessing that the title was changed because it was found that neither did win in the end.
