Confessions of a teenage existentialist: back in the early 1970s, when my mates and I were all revving up for A-levels, Jean-Paul Sartre was, simply, the most famous of all living philosophers, and just about the most famous of all proper, serious writers. He was inevitable, compulsory, ubiquitous. You didn’t even have to be a swot to have a fairly good idea of who he was, since BBC2 had just devoted 13 solid hours of prime-time viewing to its dramatisation of the Roads to Freedom trilogy. (Thinkable nowadays?) The Monty Python gang performed a Sartre sketch and for weeks afterwards, schoolyards echoed to imitations of Mrs Premise’s high-pitched telephone query to Sartre’s (fictitious) wife: “Quand sera-t’il libre?” Pay-off: “She says he’s spent the last 60 years trying to work that one out!” Oh, we did laugh.

If you did happen to be a swot and/or would-be intellectual, Sartre was even harder to avoid—he was one of the few modern gurus who could rival Kafka and Beckett in the bookish adolescent’s pantheon of lugubrious heroes. Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) was among that year’s set texts for my local examination board’s French A-level syllabus, while my swotty contemporaries elsewhere were no doubt busy giving similarly respectful attention to Les Mouches (The Flies), or La Nausée (Nausea), or Huis Clos (aka No Exit or In Camera, a staple at the time of high-minded amateur dramatic companies, and the source of the one Sartrean line everyone could quote: “Hell is other people.”) No self-respecting south London neo-existentialist lacked a copy of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Nausea, complete with garish Salvador Dali cover; and when, at the age of 16, I went off with my army cadet unit to the Hebrides, I found a small niche in my backpack for Words, the Penguin translation of Les Mots, Sartre’s part-mordant, part-glacial account of his cosseted early years. “I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it…” ran the words on the otherwise plain front cover. Irresistible.

I look back on all this adolescent Sartreanism with relatively slight embarrassment; everyone, after all, has to start the messy job of growing up with the fodder their culture is offering at the time, and at least I wasn’t gorging my half-formed brain on Tolkien. Nevertheless, today, it very nearly goes without saying that my contemporaries and I were being hopelessly old-fashioned in what we mistook for our avant-gardism. We began reading Sartre at almost exactly the time he gave up writing: his last real book, the third volume of his monumental study of Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille, was published in 1972, and he went completely blind in the summer of 1973. But in the upper sixth, we had barely heard of anything Sartre had written since about 1950. La Nausée was first published in 1938; Huis Clos was first performed in 1944; the Roads to Freedom trilogy appeared between 1945 and 1949; Les Mains Sales had its premier in 1948. L’Être et le Néant, aka Being and Nothingness, a 700-page philosophical monster, saw the bleak light of day in 1943. And L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme (translated as Existentialism and Humanism)—the short book which, with its stress on “authenticity” and the “anguish” of existence, probably did more than any other to endear Sartre to generations of adolescents—was published in 1946. We were, in short, the better part of three decades behind the Parisian cutting edge.

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