No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures: The Crazy Love Life of Albert Camus

Simone                                                 Maria                                                    Francine

Football-loving, sun-worshipping, French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, was an absurdly stylish and good-looking man who always had an eye for the ladies ...

In 1934, whilst still a student at the University of Algiers and working odd jobs to make some money, he tied the knot with Simone Hié, daughter of a wealthy eye doctor. Sadly, things didn't turn out for the best. Mutual infidelity and an increasingly serious drug habit on her side meant that the marriage failed within just a couple of years.

Camus then married the very talented and very striking pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, in 1940. She bore him twins five years later and the marriage lasted until his fatal car crash in 1960, despite Camus's numerous affairs, including - most significantly - his obsessive, on-off relationship with the distinguished stage and screen actress Maria Casares.       

The Fall (1956), described by Sartre as perhaps the most beautiful and least understood of Camus's works, is the confession of a successful and celebrated man brought to a point of emotional and intellectual crisis when he fails to come to the aid of a drowning woman. If the former is a self-portrait, then the latter is poor Francine, who overlooked her husband's constant womanising and allowed him his erotic freedom for many years until, finally, this gentle, kind-hearted woman cracked and suffered a severe mental breakdown.

Not only was Francine hospitalised and subjected to electroshock therapy, but she also attempted suicide. Her depression grew so severe that she would withdraw from the world for prolonged periods, staring straight ahead whilst endlessly repeating the name Maria Casares. Doubtless, her mental fragility had several causes, but the pain and humiliation she experienced due to Camus's open infidelity can't have helped.    

In a letter written shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957), Camus claimed that he had never stopped loving Francine - albeit in his own admittedly shitty manner. He also claimed that she had forgiven him. I don't know if that's true, but, after her death in 1979, Francine was buried with her husband in Lourmarin - where they had spent an idyllic last summer together twenty years earlier - in a tomb surrounded by flowers. 

Not that Camus had changed his libidinous ways following Francine's breakdown. Indeed, in the last days of his life he was still sending passionate love letters to at least four mistresses, including Maria Casares, who, arguably, was the only woman Camus truly respected as an equal and to whom he felt tied by the bonds of the earth, by intelligence, by heart and flesh.


Afternote 

The daughter of a wealthy Spanish Republican, Maria Casares was an extraordinary woman, fully capable as one commentator has written of playing Don Juana to Camus's Don Juan, though often resentful of the fact that he refused to leave his wife and children for her. Casares discussed her often stormy sixteen-year relationship with Camus in her 1980 autobiography Résidente privilégiée. 

Readers may also be interested to know that 860 of the letters exchanged between Camus and Casares (his petite mouette) have recently been published in a lengthy volume entitled Correspondance, ed. Béatrice Vaillant (Editions Gallimard, 2017). In her introduction to the book, Catherine Camus writes that these letters not only make the world a bigger and brighter place, but demonstrate that beyond absurdity and revolt ... lies love.   

Xanthippe

I: The Nietzschean View of Marriage

Nietzsche famously declares that all great philosophers are instinctive bachelors who dislike marriage as well as that which might persuade them into it. For a free spirit, the prospect of settling down to a domestic life with a little woman by their side and a pair of slippers by the bed is anathema. They dream of living on mountain top or in those unexplored realms of dangerous knowledge. Home sweet home strikes them as a kind of cosy prison built in the name of Love. 

And Nietzsche even provides us with a convenient list of unmarried philosophers to prove his point; a list that includes Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer - and, of course - himself. None of these thinkers ever wed and, what's more, it's almost impossible to imagine them married.

A philosopher who has tied the knot, concludes Nietzsche, belongs to comedy - as the case of Socrates proves. Whether the latter wed ironically in order to demonstrate this point, as Nietzsche claims, I don't know. But the fact is, Socrates - an undoubtedly great philosopher - did marry and I'd like to say a few words about his wife ...

II: The Blonde Horse

Xanthippe was an Athenian from a possibly noble (certainly privileged) family, who, despite her name, is believed to have had flaming red hair. She was also much younger than her husband, to whom she bore three sons. Plato portrays her in the Phaedo as a devoted wife and mother, but she is described in other works - such as Xenophon's Symposium - as difficult and argumentative.

Socrates, however, is said to have found these latter characteristics attractive and crucial to his own development as a philosopher; perhaps less so after she allegedly emptied a chamber pot over his head in a fit of jealous rage, although even this he accepted with philosophical grace, saying: "After the thunder comes the rain."

This, and other stories of her violent temper, have rightly or wrongly left us with the impression that Xanthippe was - to put it crudely - a bit of a bitch. Indeed, her name has now come to mean any sharp-tongued and assertive woman. In Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, for example, Petruchio famously compares Katherine to Xanthippe. More recently, the sarcastic and rebellious teen character played by Dylan Gelula in the Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is named after Socrates's wife.

Ultimately, who's to know what kind of woman Xanthippe was - or why she agreed to her parents suggestion that she marry an ugly, elderly, penniless philosopher who spent a good deal of time drinking with his friends whilst pursuing his love of wisdom (and young boys). Nevertheless, she stuck with him to the bitter end, which shows fidelity on her part and indicates that he must have had something about him that she found lovable.

Happy New Year from the Ghost of Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Sticker

Redbubble Ltd. 

When asked during an interview in January 2006 with Antoine Perraud what it meant to wish someone Happy New Year, Baudrillard amusingly replied that it was "a collectively remote-controlled symbolic ritual that has its place in a [...] cost-free sphere". 

In other words, an empty gesture without value; a seasonal greeting from another time which, just like Merry Christmas, tries to desperately recreate a social bond or, more accurately, evoke nostalgia for such, via an exchange of disintensified signs. All the high days and holidays that we so want to enjoy and make special, invariably leave us feeling lonely and inadequate; hostages to our own lives of consumption.    

Having said that, Baudrillard hates to be thought of as a pessimist or a nihilist in the pejorative sense of the term.

And he does, in fact, still anticipate that there might be an element of radical newness in times to come; a counter-force lodged within the present that's the source of future ambivalence; a catastrophic force that enables individuals to change established forms and punch holes in the order of things; an unverifiable force which, inasmuch as it has "nothing to do with consciousness, common sense or morality", we might simply call evil.

And so, in wishing readers a Happy New Year, I suppose I'm wishing them the courage to become complicit with l'intelligence du mal.

See: Baudrillard, 'The Murder of Reality', trans. Chris Turner, essay in The Disappearance of Culture, ed. Richard G. Smith and David. B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 266-71. 

Tits and Beaks

Photo: Dennis van de Water

It is, I suppose, another sign of advancing middle-age when one starts to be more interested in tits and beaks than what the Americans crudely refer to as t and a.

Thus I was intrigued to hear that the British obsession with feeding birds seems to be causing a rapid evolution in the rostrums of certain species, including tits, as they physically adapt to the garden environment.      

In fact, researchers at Oxford who have been studying the great tit population in Wytham Woods for over 70 years, have found that the beaks of UK birds in comparison to their Continental cousins are up to 0.3 mm longer. This may not sound like a big deal, but it's actually an astonishing development and even such a tiny advantage can mean the difference between life and death.  

Further, in conjunction with colleagues in the Netherlands, they have also discovered that, due to natural selection, genes determining beak length are now significantly different in British tits; in other words, Dutch birds not only have shorter beaks, but different DNA sequences. 

Apparently, the British spend about £200 million each year feeding their feathered friends; that's twice as much as the rest of Europe. And they have been doing so for many years now. Thus, whilst researchers can't definitively say that bird feeders are responsible, it certainly seems reasonable to suggest that the longer beaks are a result of this interspecies generosity.

However, whilst it's interesting to note that the number of species of birds that now rely upon supplementary food supplied by householders has risen to around 130 (up from just 18 forty years ago), one does worry about dependency and what would happen if, for whatever reason, people decided to hang up less feeders and more anti-bird spikes in the trees - like those sons of bitches in Bristol worried about protecting their precious BMWs. 

Notes 

For further details, see 'British birds adapt their beaks to birdfeeders' (20 Oct 2017) on the Oxford University News and Events page: click here. Most of the factual information above was gleaned from this source. 

The actual study referred to - 'Recent natural selection causes adaptive evolution of an avian polygenic trait', by Mirte Bosse, Lewis G. Spurgin et al - was published in Science, Vol. 358, Issue 6361, (Oct 2017), pp. 365-68. 

The case of residents in Clifton - the affluent Bristol suburb - fixing spikes to trees in their neighbourhood in an attempt to prevent birds from perching and shitting on the expensive cars parked below, was widely reported in the press earlier this month. I refrained from commenting here on Torpedo the Ark, as I didn't want to be seen to be inciting vandalism in response to this grotesque act of selfish and spiteful stupidity. Click here to read a report in the local paper, the Bristol Post.   

Le Visqueux: Notes on Existential Slime and Ontological Sexism

I've never been a great fan of Jean-Paul Sartre and fully endorse Heidegger's repudiation of the Frenchman's attempt to characterize existentialism as a humanism. Mostly though, my dislike of Sartre is an irrational one. Simply put, I've always found him physically repulsive; one wouldn't want to cruise his body, as Barthes would say.

To me, there's something slimy about him - which is ironic, since Sartre offers a controversial account of slime and the danger of all things gooey (including women) towards the end of his most famous and sustained work of philosophy, Being and Nothingness (1943).

Le visqueux, says Sartre, compromises the masculine, non-sticky, sugar-free nature of consciousness or being-for-itself and threatens to submerge the latter in what Camille Paglia memorably describes as "the fleshy muck of the generative matrix" - just like a wasp drowning in the jam.

Slime, in all its base viscosity, affords us neither the reassuring inertia of the solid, nor the liquid dynamism of a fluid. It sticks to us and it sucks us in: it is the feminine revenge of non-conscious being that exists in itself beyond our knowledge of it.

The gynephobic character of this language - and let's not even get started on what he says about holes and the nature of the obscene - would be shocking, were it not so ludicrous and dated. But one can't help wondering what, privately, Simone made of it ...?

In her own writings, she happily adopted Sartre's ontology and seemed to turn a blind eye to his sexism. But what about in the bedroom? One likes to think she might have had a word in his ear about the nature of embodiment and how, whilst a dry soul is best, a moist cunt is the bestest thing of all.   

See:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Routledge, 1969), pp. 610-12.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 93.

See also Margery Collins and Christine Pierce, 'Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis', in Philosophical Forum, (vol. V, 1973), pp. 112-27.

Who's a Pretty Boy Then?

Mexican red-headed parrot 

For some reason, I have developed a sudden affection for parrots; or psittacines, as some people (irritatingly) insist on calling them. 

I don't know why, but it probably has as much to do with their intelligence as with their vivid colours, for I'm also fond of birds that belong to the crow family and they mostly like to rock an all black plumage (at least here in the temperate zone that I inhabit).

The fact that parrots sometimes not only imitate but mock human beings further increases my fondness for them. It's as if they want to remind us that we are, after all, only an unusual type of ape that has, as Nietzsche says, lost its healthy animal reason along with its body hair.  

D. H. Lawrence was also amused with the manner with which these super-smart birds use their language skills to make fun of people - and their pets. In the essay 'Corasmin and the Parrots', he describes how "two tame parrots in the trees" near his house in Mexico are ever-ready to ridicule those who pass below "with that strange penetrating, antediluvian malevolence" and a squawking sound that belongs to an earlier evolutionary period (or sun).

He writes: 

"The parrots, even when I don't listen to them, have an extraordinary effect on me. They make my diaphragm convulse with little laughs, almost mechanically. They are a quite commonplace pair of green birds, with bits of bluey red, and round, disillusioned eyes, and heavy, overhanging noses."

First they mimic the sound of a servant, Rosalino, whistling, as he sweeps the patio with a twig broom: "The parrots whistle exactly like Rosalino, only a little more so. And this little-more-so is extremely sardonically funny. With their sad old long-jowled faces and their flat disillusioned eyes, they reproduce Rosalino and a little-more-so without moving a muscle."

And then they "break off into a cackling chatter, and one knows they are shifting their clumsy legs, perhaps hanging on with their beaks and clutching with their cold, slow claws, to climb to a higher bough, like rather raggedy green buds climbing to the sun", before suddenly imitating the sound of someone calling the dog with "penetrating, demonish mocking voices". 

That a bird - or any creature - should be able to pour such acidic sarcasm over the voice of a human being calling a dog, strikes Lawrence as truly incredible. It makes him chuckle and it makes him ask himself: "Is it possible that we are so absolutely, so innocently, so ab ovo ridiculous?"

And of course, he's honest enough to acknowledge the answer that comes back from an older dimension of being: "not only is it possible, it is patent". Ultimately, man is the joke of all creation who should cover his head in shame. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Corasmin and the Parrots', Mornings in Mexico, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press), 2009. 

Note that the original 1927 version of Mornings in Mexico can be read online thanks to Project Gutenberg Australia: click here.  

Fresh Air Contra Central Heating

I remember being introduced from an early age to something my mother called fresh air and which she seemed to hold in the highest possible regard, as if, for her, a cold draught signified the veritable presence of the Holy Spirit. She would fling open the bedroom windows and the back door - whatever the weather, whatever the temperature - as if fulfilling a daily religious duty. 

In this way, I learnt to equate being healthy and being righteous with exposure to a cool breeze blowing down the back of my neck and quickly grew to hate warm, stuffy rooms with windows closed and the radiators turned up high.  

Later, this obsession with ventilation was reinforced by a neo-primitive form of pagan vitalism. Like Lawrence, I resented all those things - such as central heating and double glazing - that intervened between me and what I thought of as life; the naked forces of the latter being something that had to be experienced directly in order to be authentic. 

This meant, for example, that when a large hole appeared in the roof of the house in which I was living in Leeds, I saw it as an opportunity to admire the stars in the night sky and allow in a little more fresh air, rather than as something in need of urgent repair. Eventually, the bathroom ceiling fell through and I remember sitting in a tub amused as snowflakes fell upon the soap suds.             

But this, of course, was a long time ago and I've since tempered my ascetic idealism and learned to accept many of the conveniences provided by the modern world. It turns out that having frozen fingers doesn't make you a better writer after all and the demand for fresh air can itself become a stale obsession.  

Indeed, even Lawrence discovered during his final days spent living in the South of France that there's something to be said for indoor plumbing after all. For as his biographer David Ellis reminds us, Lawrence was obliged due to ill health to make a number of compromises:

"Central heating was a major concession on his part. Only a few years before, he had been sarcastic about those who turned up the radiator [...] For them, he had felt, there was no vivid relationship with the living universe; they had allowed technology to intervene between themselves and physical reality, numbing and atrophying their senses."       

The son of a miner, Lawrence loved the magical glow of a coal fire; but not the suffocating false heat provided by pipes.

Not, that is, until failing health eroded such long held principles and prejudices, just as mild-mannered middle-age destroyed such in my case (although, in my heart, I still maintain a degree of kontempt for those who happily conform to an easy life founded upon those words beginning with the letter C ... Comfort ... Convenience ... and yes, even Christmas). 

See: David Ellis, Death and the Author, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 6. 

Should Sade be Saved?

Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage (1785) 
Photo of the original manuscript: Benoit Tessier / Reuters

It was amusing to read that the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth century masterpiece, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been awarded official status as a trésor national and withdrawn from sale at auction in Paris - along with André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos - thereby ensuring that the novel doesn't fall into foreign hands.    

The work, which Sade famously composed in just 37 days on a roll of paper 39 feet in length made from bits of parchment glued together that he had smuggled into his cell whilst imprisoned in the Bastille, tells the story of four wealthy male libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification achieved via the rape, torture, and murder of mostly teenage victims.

When the prison was stormed and looted at the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789, Sade was freed but his manuscript was lost (and believed destroyed) - much to his distress. However, after his death (1814), the unfinished work turned up and was finally published in 1904 by the German psychiatrist and sexologist, Iwan Bloch.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was banned in the UK until the 1950s. Indeed, even in post-War France the work remained highly controversial due to its pornographic nature and disturbing themes to do with power, violence and sexual abuse. Government authorities considered destroying it along with other major works by Sade, prompting the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir to write an essay provocatively entitled Must We Burn Sade? (1951-52).

The essay protests the destruction of The 120 Days of Sodom and celebrates freedom and the flesh, whilst also calling for an authentic ethics of responsibility. Beauvoir not only argues that, ultimately, Sade must be thought of as a great moralist, but she also admits to being sympathetic to his utopian politics of rebellion and credits him with being one of the first writers to expose the despotic (and obscene) workings of patriarchy.

Where he falls short - apart from being a technically poor writer - is that he doesn't examine the manner in which cruelty destroys the intersubjective bonds of humanity and ultimately compromises the naked liberty that he most desires. In the end, Beauvoir concludes, Sade was misguided and his work misleads. But his failure still has much to teach us and it would be folly to consign his work to the flames.

Sadly, one suspects that today - in this new age of puritanism known as political correctness, with its safe spaces, trigger warnings, and all-round snowflakery - Beauvoir's philosophical arguments would fail to convince and there would be rather more voices prepared to answer Yes to the question she posed in relation to the Divine Marquis ...      

See:

Simone de Beauvoir, 'Must We Burn Sade?', Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, (Arrow Books, 1990). Note that this edition also contains other writings by Sade, the above essay by Simone de Beauvoir, and an essay by Pierre Klossowski, 'Nature as Destructive Principle' (1965). 

This post was suggested by Simon Solomon, to whom I'm grateful. 

On the Designers Who Dressed Ziggy Stardust

Photo of David Bowie by Masayoshi Sukita 

wearing a striped bodysuit by Kansai Yamamoto 
designed for the Aladdin Sane Tour (1973)

Bowie always had a thing for Japan. And it's difficult to think of his alien pop persona Ziggy Stardust without also thinking of the traditional form of Japanese musical theatre known as kabuki and the celebrated Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto who created many of the iconic outfits worn during this period of Bowie's career (and, apparently, inspired the flaming-red hair style).

But, if I'm honest, Yamamoto's designs are just a little too theatrical for my tastes. I don't mind elaborate outfits and outlandish makeup, but don't like fancy dress or things that are made to be worn on stage by performers only. And that's why I much prefer the fabulous ice-blue Life on Mars satin suit designed by Freddie Burretti (1973):

For me, Bowie looks perfect wearing this suit in the video directed by Mick Rock [click here]. A little less alien and androgynous than when dressed by Yamamoto, but far more heroic and dandyish.

It's a shame that Burretti doesn't get more recognition for helping shape Ziggy's sartorial aesthetic - for not only did he make this outfit, he also designed the colourful quilted jumpsuit Bowie wore for his seminal appearance on Top of the Pops in July 1972, singing Starman [click here].*             

To be fair, when news broke of Burretti's death in 2001, Bowie generously paid tribute to the young Londoner whom he'd first met at a gay club (El Sombrero) in the late 1960s, saying that Freddie was not only one of the nicest, but also one of the most talented spirits that he'd worked with.     

Notes 

*Although the broadcast date for this performance on TOTP is sometimes mistakenly given as April 14th 1972, it was actually shown on July 6th, having been recorded the day before. 

Readers interested in knowing more about Freddie Burretti might like to watch the documentary by Lee Scriven: Starman: Freddie Burretti - The Man Who Sewed the World (2015). 

To See a World in a Grain of Sand and Being in the Infinite Density of a Dot

Photo: Gary Greenberg 

sandgrains.com

Everyone knows - and everyone seems to love - the opening line from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence concerning a grain of sand and the manner in which, if you look closely enough, it seems to reveal an entire world.

Indeed, when viewed at a magnification of over 250 times, grains of sand are shown to be delicate, colourful structures of great beauty; tiny fragments of crystal, shell and volcanic rock, many thousands of years old and each one as unique as a snowflake.

Viewing the amazing photographs taken by Gary Greenberg reminded me not only of Blake, however, but also of Ian Bogost, author of Alien Phenomenology (2012), who puts forward the interesting idea that rather than conceive of a flat ontological field or network, it's easier to think of a one-dimensional point or what he terms a tiny ontology:

"If any one being exists no less than any other, then instead of scattering such beings all across the two-dimensional surface of flat ontology, we might also collapse them into the infinite density of a dot."

This is being made simple and singular rather than small in size and it places a black hole at the centre of every object, just waiting to expand or explode with the ontological equivalent of the Big Bang.

See: 

Gary Greenberg, A Grain of  Sand: Nature's Secret Wonder, (Voyageur Press, 2008). 

Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 21, 26.  

Note: William Blake's poem, 'Auguries of Innocence', is from a notebook known as the Pickering Manuscript. It was probably written in 1803, but remained unpublished until 1863. It can be read on the Poetry Foundation website by clicking here.