Sartre vs. Camus

In The Curtain Kundera brings up the feud between two war-time friends: Sartre and Camus. Re Sartre's attack on Camus he writes:

     After the political anathema Sartre had cast upon Camus, after the Nobel Prize that brought down jealousy and hatred on him, Camus felt very uncomfortable among the Paris intellectuals. I am told that he was further distressed by labels of "vulgarity" attached to him personally: his lowly origins, his illiterate mother; his situation as a pied noir (a Frenchman from Algeria) sympathetic to other pieds noirs--people so "overfamiliar"(so "crass"); the lightweight philosophy of his essays; and so on. Reading the articles in which such lynching occurred, I note this passage: Camus is "a peasant dressed up in his Sunday best,... a man of the people with his gloves in his hand and his hat still on his head, stepping for the first time into the drawing room. The other guests turn away, they know whom they are dealing with." The metaphor is eloquent: not only did he not know what he was supposed to think (he disparaged progress and sympathized with the Algerian French) but, graver yet, he behaved awkwardly in the drawing room (in the actual or figurative sense): he was vulgar.

***

I also dug up a few words attempting to describe this squabble between two great literary/philosophical giants. I found these "clips" in Camus and Sarte: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It by Ronald Aronson:


 

 
 

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