̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Andy Martin

Opinion: Brexistentialism: Britain, the drop out nation in crisis, meets Jean-Paul Sartre

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 10:07:29 +0000

̽��ֱ��greatest philosophical one-liner of the 20th century – or anti-EU theme tune? “Hell is other people” began life as a snappy soundbite in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, a short, harsh, brilliant meditation of a play, written in the midst of World War II. It may actually have been delivered first, in rehearsal, by Sartre’s friend and antagonist Albert Camus. Huis Clos is a difficult title to translate – the norm used to be: “No Exit”, stressing some notion of inescapable interdependence. I guess, in the current fissionary climate, it could be rewritten as “Brexit”, or possibly “Brexistentialism”.

I have to ask the unpleasant question of this nation: are we being xenophobic? I am fairly sure Sartre would reply, in his confrontational way: we are not being anywhere near xenophobic enough. Yet. We are not following the Brexistentialist argument where it leads. We have to understand and assume responsibility for the consequences of our own attitudes.

Shortly after the referendum result, I received a message from a young Danish friend: “So you don’t like us any more”, she said. I replied: “We’re not prejudiced. We don’t like anyone”. I was proposing, in other words, an even-handed hostility, an all-round, egalitarian phobia of the other. But I was probably, in the Sartre view of the world, being prematurely utopian, I admit. I suspect that we are still being overly selective in our resentments and revulsion.

Existentialism is usually thought of as a form of radical individualism. There is no “society” in Sartre. Everyone is Shane or Jack Reacher or Lisbeth Salander. Your closest relationship is with your horse or folding toothbrush or computer. In Being and Nothingness, the longer essay Sartre wrote alongside Huis Clos, he makes clear that the core of the self (not that it has a core) is its nexus with other people.

How do I define myself, sitting in this West Village cafe in New York right now? Like so many philosophical answers, it is obvious and yet far-reaching in its implications. I am not this keyboard that I have under my fingers, I am not this cup of black coffee, I am not this woman in sunglasses who is sitting opposite me. I am defined, in short, by a series of negations.

Staring at the void (and seeing nothing)

Anecdotal allegory: I was once at a conference in Geneva where one of the speakers dropped out through illness. I offered to step in to fill the breach. Thank you, replied my good friend Philippe who was overseeing the conference, “Mais on ne peut pas remplir un trou par un vide”. Loosely translated: “You can’t fill a hole with a void”. Funny how certain lines stick in the mind (this was 25 years ago). But, to come to the point (not that there is a point in the entire universe), this is exactly what Sartre proposes we are doing every second of every day: I am a void which I am attempting to fill up with a series of negations. Popeye, on this basis: “I am what I am and that’s all what I am” – is clearly guilty of “bad faith” or delusion. And even he needs a tin of spinach to fully inflate.

Perhaps it was not so surprising in Occupied France in the 1940s that Sartre would conclude that, in our relations with others, we really only have two fundamental options: sadism and masochism. Or (situation normal) some combination of both. There is no third way. As true today as it was then. Which explains why, all too often in the current debates, we refer back to World War II (say, for example, Cameron being accused of “appeasement”), as if we were all retired Spitfire pilots (the “Few” have multiplied to become the many).

Groucho wasn’t much of a joiner, either. MGM/Ted Allan, CC BY

Of course the theory omits the crucial question of the collective. Sartre resorted to Marx (Karl) for the answer. But Marx (Groucho) had already defined the problem: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me for a member.” Sartre wanted to abolish clubs entirely. He dreamed of a system of evenly distributed particles floating free in the meaningless void. A beautiful concept for sure. Perhaps, ultimately, a form of nostalgia. But, rather like particles in the early universe, we have an irresistible tendency to agglomerate, to clump together. Our particular local clump, or club, can only define itself by opposition to other clubs.

̽��ֱ��great French utopian philosopher, Charles Fourier (who provided Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with the notion of the “pivotal” or significant other) analysed humans in terms of their passions – which he equated with Newtonian gravity, causing us to band together. But the “butterfly” passion also causes us to fly apart and split up.

Freedom’s just another word

We are “condemned to be free” in the sense that all our clubs are strictly provisional (except, in my own case, West Ham United). I am aligning myself with one really quite powerful club even by virtue of writing this article: it is in English, so I am implicitly asserting some measure of competence in English and association with other English speakers.

I try not to get too excited by this sense of belonging, however, because I know that English itself splits into a multiplicity of idiolects. In fact, having in the course of drifting around acquired a fairly strange accent, I no longer know where I belong, geographically or socially.

Neither does anyone else. Unless, of course, they are guilty of bad faith.

We (and I am conscious when I write the word of how fictional, how hypothetical, how mythic it is) have chosen (mythically speaking) the path of “anomie” or singularity, to be governed by no rule. “Romantic anomie” was the sociologist Emile Durkheim’s phrase, in his analysis of the causes of suicide (the first philosophical question, as Camus called it).

Whole countries can have an existential crisis, not just lonely, drifting outsiders. We can be a drop-out too. Driven by a sense of the nausea of existence itself. But equally it will not be too surprising if this drop-out mentality catches on. And “we” just ceases to exist. Maybe it already died. I already feel a certain nostalgia for Brexistentialism.

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andy Martin (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages) discusses existentialism and the EU referendum.

Chris Devers

Banksy in Boston: Portrait from the F̶O̶L̶L̶O̶W̶ ̶Y̶O̶U̶R̶ ̶D̶R̶E̶A̶M̶S̶ CANCELLED piece in context on Essex St, Chinatown, Boston

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Opinion: How to write a best-selling novel

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 09:33:53 +0000

So you want to write a novel? Of course you do. Everyone wants to write a novel at some stage in their lives. While you’re at it, why not make it a popular bestseller? Who wants to write an unpopular worstseller? Therefore, make it a thriller. It worked for Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth …

Every now and then I come across excellent advice for the apprentice writer. There was a fine recent article, for example, in ̽��ֱ��Big Thrill (the house magazine of International Thriller Writers) on “how to lift the saggy middle” of a story. Like baking a cake. And then there is Eden Sharp’s ̽��ֱ��Thriller Formula, her step-by-step would-be writer’s self-help manual, drawing on both classic books and movies. I felt after reading it that I really ought to be able to put theory into practice (as she does in ̽��ֱ��Breaks).

But then I thought: why not go straight to the source? Just ask a “New York Times No. 1 bestseller” writer how it’s done. So, as I have recounted here before, I knocked on Lee Child’s door in Manhattan. For the benefit of the lucky Child-virgins who have yet to read the first sentence of his first novel (“I was arrested in Eno’s Diner”), Child, born in Coventry, is the author of the globally huge Jack Reacher series, featuring an XXL ex-army MP drifter vigilante.

It is a golden rule among members of the Magic Circle that, when asked: “How did you do that?”, magicians must do no more than smile mysteriously. Child helpfully twitched aside the curtain and revealed all. Mainly because he wanted to know himself how he did it. He wasn’t quite sure. He only took up writing because he got sacked from Granada TV. Now he has completed 20 novels with another one on the way. And has a Renoir and an Andy Warhol on the wall. Windows looking out over Central Park. Grammar school boy done well.

Cigarettes and coffee

He swears by large amounts of coffee (up to 30 cups, black, per day) and cigarettes (one pack of Camels, maybe two). Supplemented by an occasional pipe (filled with marijuana). “Your main problem is going to be involuntary inhalation,” he said, as I settled down to watch him write, looking over his shoulder, perched on a psychoanalyst’s couch a couple of yards behind him.

Lee Child and Andy Martin in NYC. Jessica Lehrman, Author provided

Which was about one yard away from total insanity for both of us.

Especially given that I stuck around for about the next nine months as he wrote Make Me: from the first word (“Moving”) through to the last (“needle”), with occasional breathers. A bizarre experiment, I guess, a “howdunnit”, although Child did say he would like to do it all again, possibly on the 50th book.

Maybe I shouldn’t be giving this away for free, but, beyond all the caffeine and nicotine, I think there actually is a magic formula. For a long while I thought it could be summed up in two words: sublime confidence. “This is not the first draft”, Child said, right at the outset, striking a Reacher-like note. “It’s the only draft!”

Don’t plan, don’t map it all out in advance, be spontaneous, instinctive. Enjoy the vast emptiness of the blank page. It will fill. Child compares starting a new book to falling off a cliff. You just have to have faith that there will be a soft landing. Child calls this methodology his patented “clueless” approach.

Look Ma, I’m a writer

To be fair, not all successful writers work like this. Ian Rankin, for one (in his case I relied on conventional channels of communication rather than breaking into his house and staring at him intently for long periods) goes through three or four drafts before he is happy – and makes several pages of notes too.

Ian Rankin, creator of Inspector Rebus. Mosman Library, CC BY

And yet, with his Rebus series set in Edinburgh, Rankin has produced as many bestsellers as Child. Rebus also demonstrates that your hero does not necessarily have to be 6’5” with biceps the size of Popeye’s. And can be past retiring age too, as per the most recent Even Dogs in the Wild.

Child has a few key pointers for the would-be author: “Write the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast.” And: “Ask a question you can’t answer.” Rankin also advises: “No digressions, no lengthy and flowery descriptions.” He has a style, and recurrent “tropes”, but no “system”. And Child is similarly sceptical about Elmore Leonard’s “10 rules of writing”. “‘Never use an adverb’? Never is an adverb!” And what about Leonard’s scorn for starting with the weather? “What if it really is a dark and stormy night? What am I supposed to do, lie?”

Elmore Leonard at the Peabody Awards. Peabody Awards, CC BY

Child never disses other writers. OK, almost never (there is one he wants to challenge to unarmed combat). But he is dismissive of a certain writerly attitude, a self-conscious mentality which he summarises as follows: “Hey, Ma, look – I’m writing!” And here we come close to the secret, the magic potion that if you could bottle it would be worth a fortune in book sales. Do the opposite. If you want to be a writer, the secret is: don’t be a writer. Try and forget you are writing (difficult, I know).

This is why both Child and Rankin speak with such reverence for the narrative “voice”. And why both privilege dialogue. ̽��ֱ��successful writer is a throwback to a vast, lost, oral tradition, pre-Homer. Another thing, fast-forwarding, they share in common: the default alter ego is rock star. It’s all about the vibe. Everything has to sound good when you read it aloud.

Art is theft

But if you seriously want to be a writer, think like a reader. Child explained this to me the other day in relation to his novel, Gone Tomorrow, set in New York, which is now often used to teach creative writing. “I introduce this beautiful mysterious woman. I started out thinking: I want my hero to go to bed with her. And then I thought: hold on, isn’t the reader going to be asking: ‘What if she is … bad?’” A small but crucial tweak: one letter – from bed to bad.

“So!“ you might well conclude, “isn’t this bloke like one of those con men who offer to show you how to make a fortune (for a modest outlay) and you think: ‘Well, why don’t you do it then?'” Fair comment. Which is why I am starting a novel right now about an upstart fan who tricks his way into a successful writer’s apartment and steals all his best ideas. I don’t know why, it just came to me in a flash of inspiration. Maybe that, in a word, is the core of all great art: theft.

Andy Martin in conversation with Lee Child is part of the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 14.

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andy Martin (Department of French) discusses the "magic potion" for writing a thriller.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Opinion: ̽��ֱ��man with no plot: how I watched Lee Child write a Jack Reacher novel

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 01:00:10 +0000

Andy Martin spent much of the past year with author Lee Child as he wrote the 20th novel in his Jack Reacher series. Here he describes Child’s bold approach to writing.

Nobody really believes him when he says it. And in the end I guess it is unprovable. But I can put my hand on heart and say, having been there, and watched him at work, that Lee Child is fundamentally clueless when he starts writing. He really is. He has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. And the odd thing is he likes it that way. ̽��ֱ��question is: Why? I mean, most of us like to have some kind of idea where we are heading, roughly, a hypothesis at least to guide us, even if we are not sticking maps on the wall and suchlike. Whereas he, in contrast, embraces the feeling of just falling off a cliff into the void and relying on some kind of miraculous soft landing.

Of course he is not totally tabula rasa. Because he, and I, had a fair idea that the name Jack Reacher was going to come up somewhere in this, his 20th novel in the series.

It’s probably a defensive reflex gesture, but I sometimes like to joke that, when I had this crazy idea of writing a book about a novelist working on a story from beginning to end, I first contacted Amis/Tartt/Franzen/Houellebecq and when they were unavailable I only asked Lee Child as a desperate last resort. ̽��ֱ��reality is he was the first writer I thought of. He has always struck me as a blessed (and I don’t mean by that successful) and exemplary incarnation of what Borges called “the spirit of literature”. He is, more than anyone I can think of, a pure writer, with a degree zero style. Maybe sub-zero. He doesn’t plan. He doesn’t premeditate. He loves to be spontaneous. Which explains two things: One: that he said yes to my proposal. “I’m starting Monday”, he wrote, “so if you want to do this you’d better get over here.” And, two: that he also said: “I have no plot and no title. Nothing.”

When I got there, on September 1 of last year, to his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, overlooking Central Park, just up the street from where John Lennon once lived (and where he was shot dead by a deranged fan), all he had was sublime confidence. And a title, which he had come up with the night before: Make Me. He just liked the sound of it.

Pencilled in

It had to be September 1. It’s a ritual with him: 20 years to the day since he went out and bought the paper and a pencil with which to write his first novel, Killing Floor. (It had to be a pencil: he decided he couldn’t really afford anything better, having just been sacked from his job in television). When he sat down to write the first sentence, all he had in his head was a scene, a glimpse of a scene: a bunch of guys are burying someone, a big guy, using a backhoe (or JCB). He had no idea who they are, why they are doing this, or who the big guy is either, other than that his name is Keever.

So he wrote the following sentence: “Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy.” I was looking over his shoulder, but I was about a couple of yards or so behind him, perched on a couch, so I had to peer hard at the screen. All I could make out was the “-ing”. It was enough for me. Good start I thought: participle, verb, action. I had to know more. But he didn’t know more, at this point. We discussed the first couple of pages, when they popped up out of his printer. He knew it had to be third-person. No dialogue, but he tried to capture something of the vernacular in a Flaubertian style indirect libre. And Reacher, when he gets off the train in the small town of Mother’s Rest, in the midst of “nothingness”, has no absolutely no idea what is going on.

Which was exactly how Lee Child felt. For the next few months I looked on with a degree of anxiety. Maybe he would never finish this one. ̽��ֱ��whole project looked doomed. Reacher was wandering around this small town, trying to work out mainly why it was even called Mother’s Rest. He didn’t even know that Keever was a dead man at this point. He was a fairly useless detective, because he couldn’t even figure out what the crime was, let alone solve it.

Wandering spirit

So too Lee Child. He wandered around New York, then drifted off to the West Coast, then Madrid, then Sussex, and still had no idea what the hell was going on in his book. If it was a book. Around Christmas time I spoke to him on the phone and he said: “Maybe it’ll make a good short story.” And added: “Maybe I should go back and work in television. I hear it’s improved a lot since my day.” And tossed in stray remarks like: “I guess I’m all out of gas.” He was partly winding me up of course – if he didn’t finish then neither would I. But after Phase One in his writing (what he calls “the gorgeous feeling” of the beginning) there is a Phase Two, which puts him in mind of Sisyphus and his travails. He struggles and meanders. Smokes more and drinks more black coffee, if it is possible to drink more black coffee. Puffs on the occasional joint in hope of inspiration finally striking.

Some time in January, it started to crystallise in his mind and he gave me the Big Reveal. Looking back at my notes, I see that I said to him, in a tone of mixed awe and horror: “You evil mastermind bastard.” I realised that there was a simple mistake I had been making all along. I had been mixing him up with his hero Jack Reacher. Whereas I now realised what I should have realised long before that he was also every single bad guy he had ever dreamed up. All those fiendish plots were actually his. ̽��ֱ��role of Reacher was to stop him plotting and for all I know taking over the world. Reacher keeps the author in check.

‘He stopped, so I stopped’

Then, in his phrase, it was the “marathon sprint” to the end. He got to the final page on April 10, 2015, surviving on a diet of Sugar Smacks and Alpen and toast, garnished with mucho caffeine and nicotine.

̽��ֱ��finished product: Make Me Random House

Having feared he would never get to the end, I was not sure I really wanted him to finish. Or whether I should be there to watch. It really seemed as if I was transgressing and crossing the line into some sacred place. I was bearing witness to the creative process dying. But without which the book itself could never be born. Last word: “needle”. “Moving … needle”. ̽��ֱ��whole book was there.

He stopped, so I stopped. That was the rule. I started when he started, so I had to finish when he did, or the day after anyway. No additions, no time for further reflection. It all had to be done according to the same principle he had adopted. Even before he had written the first sentence, he turned to me and said: “This is not the first draft, you know”. “Oh - what is it then?” I asked naively. “It’s the ONLY DRAFT!” he replied, with definite upper case or at least italics in his voice. He didn’t want to change anything, so neither could I.

Hence it took me several months to work out why it was that he worked in this fundamentally terrifying, angst-inducing way. Actually several explanations have occurred to me: sloth for one. He just can’t be bothered. And then there is what he says, which is that he would be “bored” if he knew what was coming next. But contained in that statement is a hint of what I think is the case and in fact is the secret of his whole writing.

Made man: Andy Martin’s meta-novel. Random House

Lee Child writes his books as if he were the reader not the writer. When he is sitting at his desk in that back room in Manhattan he is only typing. ̽��ֱ��real work takes place when he is “dreaming”, when he is being just another reader, wondering what is coming next, waiting to find out. It probably explains too why he allowed me to look over his shoulder and watch his sentences taking shape even before he knew how they would end. He feels a natural sympathy with readers because he is one.

I sometimes like to claim - with absurd grandiloquence - that my book is some kind of first in the history of mankind, sitting around watching another guy write a whole book: but in fact that would be a lie, because I had to run off from time to time so as not to curl up and die of involuntary inhalation. But the “first” that I really would like to lay claim to is this: I am the first reader of a Lee Child novel to read it slowly. I had to keep stopping because he kept stopping. Because he really had no idea what was coming next. “Why did you stop there?” I asked him one day, feeling he hadn’t really written enough for that day. “I had to stop there,” he said. “I have no idea who that guy in the Cadillac is.”

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andy Martin (Department of French) discusses the year he spent sitting behind author Lee Child as he wrote the latest Jack Reacher novel.

Wikimedia Commons / Mark Coggins

Lee Child at Bouchercon XLI, 2010

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Beauty and despair

amb206 — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:16:37 +0000

Published last month, the All Party Parliamentary Group’s report on “Body Image” blames our anxieties on celebrity culture and media images. But the problem of “body dissatisfaction” is not new. Celebrity culture and iconic bodies – and not so iconic ones – go all the way back to the time of Socrates in 5^th century BC Athens. Socrates was famously ugly and pondered what it must be like to be Alcibiades, who was the matinee idol of his day. But Socratic ugliness is not just comic relief in an otherwise serious dialectic.

It is plausible to argue that philosophy begins right here, in the perception of one's own imperfections relative to some unattainable ideal. In fact the ideal (or “Form”) becomes a central tenet of Platonic philosophy – the problem being that you have to die to attain it. In Renaissance neo-Platonism, Socrates, still spectacularly ugly, acquires an explicitly Christian logic: philosophy is there to save us from our ugliness (perhaps more moral than physical). But the implication is already there in works like Plato’s “Phaedo.” If we need to die in order to attain the true, the good, and the beautiful (to kalon), it must be because truth, goodness, and beauty elude us so comprehensively in life. You think you’re beautiful? Socrates seems to say. Well, think again! ̽��ֱ��idea of beauty, in this world, is like a mistake. Perhaps Socrates’s mission is to make the world safe for ugly people. Isn’t everyone a little ugly, one way or the other, at one time or another? Who is beautiful, all the time? Only the archetypes can be truly beautiful.

In modern times, Jean-Paul Sartre is the closest equivalent to Socrates. As per the Parliamentary report, Sartre says that his body image problem started very young. He was only 7. Up to that point he had had a glittering career as a crowd-pleaser. Everybody referred to young “Poulou” as “the angel”. His mother had carefully cultivated his luxuriant halo of golden locks. Then one fine day his grandfather takes it into his head that Poulou is starting to look like a girl, so he waits till the boy’s mother has gone out, then tells his grandson they are going out for a special treat. Which turns out to be the barbershop. Poulou can hardly wait to show off his new look to his mother. But when she walks through the door, she takes one look at him before running up the stairs and flinging herself on the bed, sobbing hysterically. Her carefully constructed — one might say carefully combed — universe has just been torn down, like a Hollywood set being broken and reassembled for some quite different movie, rather harsher, darker, less romantic and devoid of semi-divine beings. For, as in an inverted fairy-tale, the young Sartre has morphed from an angel into a “toad”. It is now, for the first time, that Sartre realises that he is — as his American lover, Sally Swing, will say of him — “ugly as sin.”

“ ̽��ֱ��fact of my ugliness” becomes a barely suppressed leitmotif of his writing. He wears it like a badge of honor (Camus, watching Sartre in laborious seduction mode in a Paris bar: “Why are you going to so much trouble?” Sartre: “Have you had a proper look at this mug?”). I can’t help wondering if ugliness is not indispensable to philosophy. Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking — serious, sustained questioning — arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness. Philosophy, in other words, has an ironic relationship to beauty.

Sartre (like Aristotle, like Socrates himself at certain odd moments) is trying to get away from the archetypes. From, in particular, a transcendent concept of beauty that continues to haunt — and sometimes cripple — us. In trying to be beautiful, we are trying to be like God (the “for-itself-in-itself” as Sartre rebarbatively put it). In other words, to become like a perfect thing, an icon of perfection, and this we can never fully attain. But it is good business for manufacturers of beauty creams, cosmetic surgeons and barbers.

̽��ֱ��beautiful, to kalon, is not some far-flung transcendent abstraction, in the neo-existentialist view. Beauty is a thing (social facts are things, Durkheim said). Whereas I am no-thing. Which explains why I can never be truly beautiful. Even if it doesn’t stop me wanting to be either. Perhaps this explains why Camus, Sartre’s more dashing sparring partner, jotted down in his notebooks, “Beauty is unbearable and drives us to despair".

In the light of the thoughts of Socrates and Sartre, it seems to me the government has two options. Either we need to promote cosmetic surgery for all; or we can have a shot at becoming more truly philosophical.

Andy Martin is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge. He is author of ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus (Simon and Schuster, 2012).

A high level inquiry reported last month that more than half of the British public has a negative body image. Cambridge academic Andy Martin reflects on the idea of beauty and our pursuit of the unattainable.

Celebrity culture and iconic bodies – and not so iconic ones – go all the way back to the time of Socrates in 5th century BC Athens.

Dr Andy Martin

Andy Martin

Dr Andy Martin

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Locked in combat: two French thinkers slog it out

amb206 — Thu, 31 May 2012 09:21:12 +0000

There are no goals in boxing and no red corner in football. Andy Martin’s ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre Vs Camus (Simon & Schuster, 6 June 2012) is a story about two philosophers and their intellectual tussling in the Paris of the 1940s and 1950s. They are an odd pair, mismatched. Sartre was famously ugly, Camus was in comparison an Adonis; Sartre was a Parisian insider while Camus, ‘ ̽��ֱ��Outsider’, came from a poor family in Algeria. But they had much in common: both highly competitive, both richly creative, both prone to angst or ‘Nausea’.

Spiked with seminal moments in author Andy Martin’s own life, the book opens with a small but delicious act of felony committed by the writer as a teenager in suburban Essex, and the creeping guilt that ensued: to give any more away would spoil the narrative. Suffice it to say that Martin, today a languages lecturer at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a poet-cum-screenwriter, was a boy with big questions and a vivid imagination.

Do other people exist, could they simply disappear leaving just their shoes and socks behind, does the boy Andy himself exist? These are the musings that lead Martin – and lead readers of ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper – to discover the works of Sartre and Camus. Along the way, he realises – and we too come to realise - that the clever, coffee-drinking, café-frequenting thinkers and their friends were locked in petty squabbles that subsumed their intellectual arguments in a contest of sheer bitchiness – and yet which remain resonant for us now.

̽��ֱ��guts of the book is a study of two heavyweights of 20^th century philosophy and literature – both winners of the Nobel prize, although Sartre famously rejected his. Whether or not we have read ̽��ֱ��Outsider or delved into Being and Nothingness, we quickly get to grips with the contrasting backgrounds and characters of the two protagonists and the mind-blowing ideas about the meaning of life and love that they kicked about as they sought to out-general one another intellectually.

Martin unravels the tricky concepts of the savage and the symbolic, in the process taking creative leaps of the imagination that he says may annoy his fellow academics. He talks about visiting the barber in Cambridge to tame his mad professor hairstyle. This leads him into a description of the cutting of Sartre’s own blond curls which severed him from a condition of angelic childishness into a state of being Sartre, a transformation that sees his mother rush upstairs in floods of tears. This neatly introduces us to ideas about beauty and ugliness, and the possibility of self-transcendence.

Philosophers are supposed to be gentle, cerebral beings: Martin’s double act is anything but. Sartre was a natural pugilist who wondered: “Can I take him or can he take me?” “I fought constantly,” he wrote of his schooldays in La Rochelle. He learnt to box and, as a teacher of philosophy, he sparred with his students and got into a fist-fight with another teacher over a sarcastic remark. He wanted to win – a boxing bout, he argued, was the “the incarnation of pre-existing violence”. Camus also got into fights but he was a footballer in love with the game. Growing up in Algeria, he played in goal but, despite the urban myth, he was never goalkeeper for Algeria. ̽��ֱ��goalkeeper is not quite part of the team – though vital to it.

Sartre and Camus met in Paris in 1943 where they were both friends of Simone de Beauvoir. They sat in cafes and wrote. Their friendship turned sour and their rivalry travelled far beyond the world of ideas. Late one night in Paris, they are spotted racing on all fours across the boulevard St Germain between two of their favourite bars. Though they disliked each other, they are locked together. After Camus’s death in a car crash in 1960, Sartre wrote: “We had a falling-out, he and I: but a falling-out means nothing – even if we were doomed never to see each other again – but another way of living together and without ever losing sight on what the other is up to in the small world that has been given to us.”

In weaving together anecdote and incident ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper introduces some of the basic concepts of philosophy, encouraging the reader to think about what makes us human – and especially what makes us behave badly. This is not a book that requires any specialist knowledge. ̽��ֱ��only real puzzler of a phrase is the dedication at the start: the book is dedicated not to mum or dad but to “a binary praxis of non-antagonistic reciprocity”. This line modifies Sartre’s original, with the emphasis more on the antagonistic – all of which is unfolded in the book.

What does all this mean today? Martin thinks that in the present context of a kind of nationalistic hysteria about winning (the Euros, the Olympics, standing on the podium) we need to think long and deep about failure. After all, most of us fail most of the time. “ ̽��ֱ��two great philosophers of failure were Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. They are the patron saints of losers and outsiders. Their writings teach us how to get over the notion of success and resign ourselves to failure and discontent. I think everyone would be a lot happier that way, by becoming truly philosophical.”

“Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. His rival on the stage of occupied and post-war Paris was Albert Camus (“I am the world”). ̽��ֱ��two fell out but remained entangled. A book by Cambridge academic Andy Martin – ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper – is an excursion into the worlds of the Frenchmen synonymous with existentialism and absurdism.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are the patron saints of losers and outsiders. Their writings teach us how to get over the notion of success.

Dr Andy Martin

Antanas Sutkus, 2012

Jean Paul Sartre on the beach

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New York, unplugged: a day without words

lw355 — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:55:53 +0000

It was like Desert Island Discs, only without the discs, and no Bible and the works of Shakespeare either. And I was marooned on the island of Manhattan. Which made the experiment challenging or possibly insane, but I knew I had to try it anyway.

I was supposed to be doing research into the bitter philosophical duel between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (a “binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity” in Sartre’s memorable phrase). But one freezing January day I resolved to put to the test what Roland Barthes called the “degree zero” of writing. I had to set aside all books for 24 hours and relinquish entirely my tenuous hold on language. I would eschew not just books but songs, conversation, newspapers, the radio, television, any forms of communication that relied on words. I went out into the world again, on that cold, clear winter’s day, with only a hat, a scarf, and a coat: no books, no paper, no computer, no pen. It was a strange feeling, almost like walking down the middle of the street, naked, vulnerable, unarmoured, without crutches. As if I had just landed from another planet.

On any other day, how many conversations would I have had with random strangers on the subway? Today of all days they were lining up to have a chat, talking about the clothes I was wearing (“Cool jacket, man!” – on the platform at Bleecker Street), the weather, the economy, anything. There was no end to them, as if my very silence was a provocation. But I could say nothing in reply. Perhaps they even preferred it this way, as if having a one-way conversation with a dumb animal.

I wandered along the banks of the half-frozen Hudson River on the west side, then heading east into mid-town, I took the plunge into the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue, where I had an office, by way of testing my nerve. I didn’t read a single word of the billions on offer. Feeling I had resisted the ultimate temptation, I rewarded myself later with a jazz concert at the Lincoln Center, but only got as far as the door where complicated questions as to whether I would prefer the 8 or the 10 o’clock slot forced me to back off. Maybe it was better that way, there was always a risk somebody might break into song.

But in truth the siren call of words can never be silenced, only resisted. We live (as Camus said) in a “society of signs”. It was impossible to cross the street without seeing the word CROSS. Everywhere, street signs brandishing their information about parking and directions, word of bakeries, dentists, radio shacks, buns and burgers, pizzas galore, and Broadway smash-hits – flashing out, endlessly, inescapably, with or without neon. As the philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote, there was “nothing beyond the text”, even if that now tended to suggest (in a deconstructive twist that he would surely have approved of) that everybody was fetishistically attached to their mobile phones. ̽��ֱ��next day I finally stumbled, stuttering, back into the realm of the library.

I found that experience of cognitive dissonance fruitful in addressing the rift between the symbolic and the savage in Sartre and Camus. But now, a year on, all the words that screamed out at me on my degree zero excursion seem to merge into just one – “like” – one of the most over-used words of our era, especially in New York. “He was like…” “She was like…” “I mean, like…” For some as irritating as a record stuck in a groove or a jingle you can’t get out of your head. But can we ever eradicate it?

Philosophically, it implies a degree of scepticism: everything is only approximately true, ‘like’ this or that, but never quite coinciding perfectly with the truth. But poetically speaking, there is a series of implied comparisons or similes: my love is like a red, red rose; the city lies around us (as Camus wrote) like a cloak of glittering shells; it was like Desert Island Discs. Everybody is always like something or someone, everyday discourse is shot through with alikeness, similitude, connectedness, bathed in an invisible continuum. Rub two human beings together, and comparisons fly up like sparks. Perhaps it is only fair that “to say” has now virtually been replaced by “to be like”.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that language originated in poetry. I want to bet that the first sentence uttered, probably in southern Africa, some 100,000 years or so ago, began: “Like…” Or something like that. And I fully expect my last words to be, “It’s like…” I like like.

We are addicted to language. By way of proof, Andy Martin – lecturer in the Department of French and author of books on Napoleon, Bardot and surfing – takes a vow of silence. Spending a day in New York without words, he discovers a liking for one of the most over-used expressions of the era.

It was a strange feeling, almost like walking down the middle of the street, naked, vulnerable, unarmoured, without crutches.

Dr Andy Martin

Sharon Carr

Andy in New York

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