Fall out

In my life, I have faced several fall  out. Sometimes with my friends, even closed friends. Sometimes we patched up, sometimes we really crossed the rubicon. Yet my personall fall out nothing compare to great names' fall out likes Mahathir-Anwar, Anwar-Ezam and so on.

I  retrieved my past Newsweek Magazine. July 19 1999 to be more accurated. I found nice article about my favourite artists'  falling out. It were Sartre versus Camus.I am a great fan of both. Here I copy the entire article for my readers. This story was narrated by Robert Gallimard, French editor who worked with both of them.

 Jean Paul Sartre

Albert Camus

SARTRE VERSUS CAMUS

When Sartre and Camus worked together on "Combat" after liberation of France, they would drink and joke together as good friend do. They have great mutual admiration, but from the beginning their thoughts and their backgrounds differed. Camus praised 'Nausea' highly in an article for the Chronique d'Alger. His only reservation was that it was a little too philosophical. When the 'Stranger' came out, Sartre was duly complimentary but once again there was a slight reserve; the thinking was too 'light'.

Camus was an artist, Sartre was a thinker. If you read Camus's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, you can see his preoccupation with art and beauty. His artistic  was the most important to him. He also had great doubts about his abilities. One day he said to me, "It's over, I m finished, I am empty." And then 'The Fall' was published, his chef d'oeuvre. By constrast, Sartre never doubted himself; he was certain of his talent and yet also indifferent. Once he had delivered the book he would never ask when it was to be published. He was a muscular thinker. Sartre had a great strenght; in his youth he boxed. His greatest power was his intellect.

The divergence of their ideas centered on the subject of tyranny. Camus saw the tyranny in the Soviet bloc as a crime whereas Sartre didn't want to agree, because it disaproved  his systematic thought. Camus believed systems were dangerous and contrary to liberty. He was a man of the people. He had experienced real poverty in his childhood in Algiers; his mother's illeteracy meant that she never read one of his books. Sartre was the opposite - he came from a bourgeois family and enjoyed a cultivated upbringing. So whereas Sartre believed that man is responsible for his destiny, Camus believed more in chance or accident. He died in an accident. After the liberation, Camus wrote articles that moved the whole France. He had risked his life for the Resistance, so when war in Algeria broke out, it was difficult for him. He viewed Algeria as part of France, but then his whole family was Algerian. When he had won the Nobel Prize, an Algerian student asked him why he wasn't for independence and he replied, "If someone places a bomb on a bus in the name of liberty and my mother is on that bus, then I am no longer for liberty. That is not justice."

The final rupture occurred when Camus's 'The Rebel' was published in 1951 and Sartre wrote a scathing review in Les Temps Modernes. He was always able to touch the most vulnerable points of others. Camus felt betrayed by Sartre, whereas Sartre, the eternal philosopher, was not so affected by their disagreement. He maintainted a certain amount of tenderness for Camus, for his qualities as a man, his humour. Camus was charming and very funny, not at all serious character people expected, judging by his books. He enjyed going to football games. When Camus died, Sartre regularly asked after his children. I am sure that if they needed anything  he would have indirectly helped them with money. He was exrremely generous, he would sometimes  tip the equivalent of the entire bill.