The Sartre-Merleau-Ponty friendship effectively ended over a cut editorial note

Evidence

When Merleau-Ponty realised this, he and Sartre had a long, strained telephone conversation. Sartre recalled it later; Marianne Merleau-Ponty also remembers overhearing it. After two hours on the phone, her father hung up, turned to her mother, and said, ‘Alors, c’est fini’ — ‘Well, that’s the end of it.’ He probably meant that he had ended his involvement in Les Temps modernes, but it could equally be taken as referring to the end of the friendship. Afterwards, the two men spoke from time to time, and Merleau-Ponty would courteously say, ‘I’ll call you.’ But, said Sartre, he never did. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 829

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the existentialist-phenomenology movement history in this book’s broader narrative of friendships breaking over politics and the Soviet question. — connects to: Beauvoir and Sartre co-founded Les Temps modernes with Merleau-Ponty in 1945 — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 52