History is documented in various ways. Traditionally by the winners, then by all kinds of revisionists with universities just as full of historian academics in need of a thesis as they are of exponents of literary biography but, the shifting picture being what it is, I prefer the first Elizabethan age, Doctor Johnson and WW1 to be told by Blackadder and the Existentialists to be as represented in the Tony Hancock film, The Rebel. If we can't be flippant, what else is there left to be.Well, we can be Albert Camus, for a start. Never anything less than the epitome of 'cool' and only that on account of his novels, that he didn't consider anything like his most important work, these are the sort of people widely regarded as 'cool' by their own generation until at least the time I took the course on Existentialism (Russell Keates, who briefly thought I hadn't provided an essay on Kierkegaard, and the black-clad Jane Howarth) at Lancaster circa 1980.
Quite how really cool they were, rather than in any superficial way 'cool' has been judged since,
is how Agnes Poirier, more than once, points out that Jean-Paul Sartre lived up to his own ideal of having 'no possessions' several years ahead of John Lennon trying to imagine what that would be like.
I have nothing but enormous affection and admiration for all of the Beatles, having been just about old enough to have understood the energy and magic of She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah and, similarly as a result of the age demographic I am defined by, there is something about Sartre, and even more about Camus, that means I don't want to hear a word against them.
But at university, Philosophy being not my major subject, we just read texts. The Existentialism course might have begun with a passing reference to Socrates as the beginning of Western sceptiscism but from there the heavy artillerry of Kant and Hegel were brought in, as necessary precursors to what one had really signed up for, Being and Nothingness, the hundreds of intense pages of which, for BA (Hons) purposes, we were required to know about only a few of the early chapters.
God only knows what a degree is worth now but it wasn't worth much then, either.
Agnes Poirier, photographed here with Juliette Greco, who was there, most significantly as a Bardot before the fact but with Miles Davis, explains how it all came out of the resistance. The poverty, the jazz, the cafe society, the books, reading, the commitment - of course it did, it was anti-Nazi. But did our lecturers at university tell us that in 1980. I'm not sure they did. They thought it came out of other, previous philosophers.
I don't think it did.
I'd ask for a refund from my university if only I'd had to pay for it in the first place.
Having only a few weeks ago read Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, in which the Bloomsbury Group, in between finding time to produce some very fine work, can't leave each other alone, these Existentialists are, if anything, worse but at least have the reason that they have survived unspeakable horror and so what else is there to do.
What happens is that, with very little hint of how Camus and Sartre parted company but, gladly, plenty made of how they offered a 'third way' between Gaullism and communism, the seminal decade of 1940's Paris begins with heroic underground resistance and emerges with Brigitte Bardot, Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan and the innate glamour that those of us who voted Remain, and will gladly do again, can't quite do for ourselves but would like to be closer to than we otherwise would be.
