It is out of such talk, out of the life of such streets, those outdoor drawing rooms, crowded and amiable (but which can seem suddenly prisons-with No Exit) that Sartre’s work comes: his essays first of all, but also his philosophy and novels, his plays and movies. To him a real street leads not through but into a center, it is not a place which one travels but a closed circuit where one talks and pauses to drink with friends and talks again. Even New York seems to him too open to Nature and those typical American urban thoroughfares, the Euclid Avenues and Michigan Boulevards pushing relentlessly toward the open road, offend him. The world of Sartre is the European City, the City par excellence so that when he comes to America, what makes our world surprisingly alien to him (this he touches on several times in the essays) is that he cannot find anywhere a space tight enough to define him. Reading their essays, one’s first reaction is to cry out in protest, to try to separate them once and for all before their journalistic yoking is translated into the textbooks and they go down into history as immutably and ridiculously twinned as Wyatt and Surrey. Yet it is hard to think of two men temperamentally more different.
There has been attached to both from the beginning the same chic aura: Existentialism and the philosophy of the absurd, equally and indistinguishably the latest from Paris for the readers of Partisan Review or Commentary or eventually Life itself. We can scarcely imagine them apart for they came into existence together for the American mind, a package deal and the chief cultural importation from postwar France. It is not merely a coincidence of publication dates which brings Sartre and Camus simultaneously to my desk.
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