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To François
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to particularly thank Bill Swainson for his unwavering support and heartwarming erudition; Simon Trewin, a wonderful born trouper; Dorian Karchmar for her laser-sharp eye and attention to details; Gillian Blake, favorite publisher grande dame; Caroline Zancan, editor supremo alongside Kerry Cullen; and Michael Fishwick at Bloomsbury for his shrewd comments.
I would also like to thank my first reader, Linden Lawson, whose enthusiasm proved a great support, and Anna Hervé, a most astute poisson pilote and adviser.
In the course of researching this book, I think I fell in love with both writer Irwin Shaw and the Louvre’s savior Jacques Jaujard, I sympathized with Janet Flanner’s quest for a third sex, smiled at Saul Bellow’s superiority complex, and was awed by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s brazen intelligence. I didn’t drink the way they used to on the Left Bank in postwar Paris, nor did I take any drugs, but sometimes I wish I had.
And to Nicole Parrot, the great inspiration behind this book, I’d like to say: “We will always have Paris.”
Paris was not weary of us. We were still handsome and admired; they smiled and turned on the street. The rooms were chill but they had proportion and there was more than a hint of another life, free of familiar inhibitions, a sacred life, this great museum and pleasure garden evolved for you alone.
—JAMES SALTER, Burning the Days
CHRONOLOGY
1939
August 23
Soviet foreign minister Molotov and his German counterpart von Ribbentrop sign a pact of nonaggression giving Hitler free rein to attack the West.
August 24
Jacques Jaujard closes the Louvre: four thousand treasures are being packed for safety secretly.
September 1
Germany invades Poland.
September 3
France and Great Britain declare war on Germany.
1940
May
Hiding in Paris at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop, Arthur Koestler sends his manuscript Darkness at Noon to a London publisher.
May 10
Germany invades Belgium and northern France.
June 10
Mussolini’s Italy declares war on France and Britain.
June 11
The French government flees Paris.
June 14
The German army enters Paris.
June 18
In an address broadcast by the BBC, French general Charles de Gaulle calls from London for France to continue the fight, urging all young men and women to join him in résistance.
June 22
Jean-Paul Sartre and Henri Cartier-Bresson are held prisoner and taken to war prisoners’ camps in Germany.
June 23
Adolf Hitler poses for photographers in front of the Eiffel Tower.
1941
March
Jean-Paul Sartre is back in Paris after escaping his prisoners’ camp.
April–
Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty start Resistance group Socialisme et Liberté
September
but soon give up as many members prefer the more effective communist resistance groups. Sartre goes back to teaching philosophy at the Lycée Condorcet.
December
Germany declares war on the United States.
1942
January
Sonderführer Gerhard Heller, the Francophile and yet German censor of French literature, reads Albert Camus’ The Outsider and authorizes its publication.
September
The CNE, Comité National des Écrivains, the résistant writers’ group, has its weekly meetings at the flat of writer Édith Thomas.
November
The United States invades North Africa.
1943
June
Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Les mouches opens at the Théâtre de la Cité.
August
The same week, Jean-Paul Sartre’s seven-hundred-page philosophy treatise L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) and Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel, L’invitée (She Came to Stay), the semiautobiographical story of a ménage-à-trois, are released.
September
Picasso asks Hungarian photographer Brassaï, who lives in hiding in Paris, to take pictures of the works he has done under the occupation.
1944
June
On June 6, D-Day starts at dawn. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Georges Braque listen to the news together on the wireless.
August
The insurrection in Paris starts on August 16. Nazi commander von Choltitz signs his surrender on August 25 at 4:15 p.m.
September
L’épuration (the purge) of collaborators starts.
1945
January
Albert Camus, editor of Combat, sends Jean-Paul Sartre as a reporter to the United States for his first American trip and Beauvoir to report on life in Spain and Portugal.
July
Alexander Calder works on a mobile exhibition with the help of Marcel Duchamp and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he has just befriended.
August
Marshal Pétain’s trial for treason. Atom bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.
October
Sartre gives his lecture “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” at Club Maintenant. Women faint.
Elections in France. The French decide to bury the Third Republic.
1946
January
Charles de Gaulle resigns.
April
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a fast bestseller in France.
May
Richard Wright settles in Paris.
September
Simone de Beauvoir starts research on The Second Sex.
December
Boris Vian secretly publishes his first novel, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Spit on Your Graves), under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, “a black American writer.” Its sex scenes land its publishers in court.
1947
January
Beauvoir, on a four-month trip to the United States, meets and falls in love with Nelson Algren.
March
President Truman institutes the loyalty program.
April
Jazz club and bar Le Tabou on the rue Dauphine opens its doors, soon branded the “Existentialist den.”
June
Albert Camus’ La peste hits the bookshops in Paris.
The U.S. secretary of state, George Marshall, outlines what would become the Marshall Plan in a speech to Harvard graduate students.
November
Norman Mailer and his wife settle down in Paris for a year on the GI bill.
1948
January
Alberto Giacometti exhibits his latest works, among them Man Walking. The catalog is written by Sartre.
February
The Czech
coup shakes many Communists’ faith in the Party.
March
Sartre creates a political party, the RDR (The Democratic and Revolutionary Alliance), to unite the non-Communist Left and to promote an independent Europe.
June
GI bill students Art Buchwald, Richard Seaver, Ellsworth Kelly, and Lionel Abel settle on the Left Bank.
August
Theodore H. White goes to Paris to cover the implementation of the Marshall Plan.
September
Saul Bellow and his family arrive in Paris.
November
James Baldwin arrives in Paris with forty dollars in his pocket.
Twenty-seven-year-old Garry Davis interrupts first session of the UN assembly to launch his movement “one government for one world.”
1949
January
The Kravchenko trial.
Samuel Beckett finishes writing Waiting for Godot.
April
Saul Bellow finally starts writing Augie March.
May
Ellsworth Kelly finds his voice.
Nelson Algren completes The Man with the Golden Arm and arrives in Paris for a four-month visit with Beauvoir.
Juliette Gréco meets Miles Davis after his first performance in Paris. It’s love at first sight.
June
Release of the first volume of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
July
Fifteen-year-old Brigitte Bardot is chosen by Elle magazine to feature on its cover.
November
Release of the second volume of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which triggers a scandal.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Nelson Algren, American writer, born in 1909.
Dominique Aury, French writer, born in 1907.
James Baldwin, American writer, born in 1924.
Sylvia Beach, American bookseller and publisher, born in 1887.
Simone de Beauvoir, French philosopher and writer, born in 1908.
Samuel Beckett, Irish writer, born in 1906. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.
Saul Bellow, American writer, born in 1915. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.
Sonia Brownell-Orwell, British translator and publisher, born in 1918.
Art Buchwald, American journalist, born in 1925. Pulitzer Prize in 1982.
Alexander Calder, American sculptor, born in 1898.
Albert Camus, French writer, born in 1913. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
Jean Cocteau, French poet, born in 1889.
Miles Davis, American jazz trumpeter, born in 1926.
Janet Flanner, American Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, born in 1892.
Alberto Giacometti, Swiss sculptor and painter, born in 1901.
Juliette Gréco, French muse and chanteuse, born in 1927.
Jacques Jaujard, French director of the Louvre during the Second World War, born in 1895.
Ernst Jünger, German writer, born in 1895.
Ellsworth Kelly, American painter, born in 1923.
Arthur Koestler, Hungarian-born British writer, born in 1905.
Norman Mailer, American writer, born in 1923. Pulitzer Prize in 1969 and 1980.
Jean Marais, French actor, born in 1913.
Adrienne Monnier, French bookseller and publisher, born in 1892.
Jean Paulhan, French publisher, born in 1884.
Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter, born in 1881.
Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, playwright, and writer, born in 1905. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964.
Irwin Shaw, American writer and screenwriter, born in 1913.
Simone Signoret, French actress, born in 1921.
Edith Thomas, French writer and archivist, born in 1909.
Boris Vian, French jazz musician and writer, born in 1920.
Theodore H. White, American journalist, born in 1915. Pulitzer Prize in 1962.
Richard Wright, American writer, born in 1908.
INTRODUCTION
Left Bank is a portrait of the overlapping generations born between 1905 and 1930, who lived, loved, fought, played, and flourished in Paris between 1940 and 1950 and whose intellectual and artistic output still influences how we think, live, and even dress today. After the horrors of war that shaped and informed them, Paris was the place where the world’s most original voices of the time tried to find an independent and original alternative to the capitalist and Communist models for life, arts, and politics—a Third Way.
Those young men and women, budding novelists, philosophers, painters, composers, anthropologists, theorists, actors, photographers, poets, editors, publishers, and playwrights, shaped by the ordeals of the Second World War, did not always share the same political or cultural outlook, but they had three things in common: the experience of war, their brush with death, and the elation of the Liberation in Paris. And they promised themselves to reenchant a world left in ruins. Left Bank is the story of their life-changing synergy and explores the fertile fields of interaction among art, literature, theater, anthropology, philosophy, politics, and cinema in postwar Paris.
After four years of Nazi occupation and daily torment, Paris’s galleries, boulevards, jazz clubs, bistros, bookshops, and the myriad daily newspapers and monthly reviews born in the last years of the war became forums for heated discussions, battle plans, and manifestos. Among the most influential periodicals: Combat, edited by Albert Camus; Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Temps modernes (named after Chaplin’s film Modern Times); and of course, a few years later, the many Paris-based English-language magazines catering to an international crowd of ex-GIs and students flocking to the city. These flourishing publications, all edited within one square mile, boasted an audience well beyond Paris. When editorialists and artists shouted on the boulevard Saint-Germain, their cry echoed in Manhattan, Algiers, Moscow, Hanoi, and Prague. These intellectuals, artists, and writers were heard and followed by decision makers in Europe and elsewhere in the world precisely because they originated from Paris.
How could Paris regain such a high cultural standing so soon after the war? Germany was in eclipse, Russian and Eastern European cultural life devastated, Spain isolated by General Franco’s regime, Italy busy recovering from a generation of Fascism, and Britain as marginal as ever to European intellectual debates. To paraphrase the Anglo-American historian Tony Judt, despite France’s own relative decline, Paris’s voice mattered more during the decade after the war than it had at any time since 1815, the peak of Napoleonic grandeur.
Together, in Paris, our band of brothers and sisters created new codes. They founded the New Journalism, which got its official name a decade later but was born then, in the smoky hotel rooms of the Left Bank, and forever blurred the lines between literature and reportage. Poets and playwrights slowly buried Surrealism and invented the Theater of the Absurd; budding painters transcended Socialist Realism, pushed Geometric Abstraction to its limits, and fostered Action Painting. Philosophers founded new schools of thought such as Existentialism while setting up political parties. Aspiring writers found their voices in Paris’s gutters and the decrepit student rooms of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, while others invented the nouveau roman. Photographers reclaimed their authorship through photojournalism agencies such as Magnum; censored American writers such as Henry Miller published their work first in French; black jazz musicians, fleeing segregation at home, found consecration in the concert halls and jazz clubs of Paris, where New Orleans jazz received its long-overdue appreciation while bebop was bubbling up. Some in the Catholic Church experimented with Marxism, while a colorist and former art gallery owner turned couturier named Christian Dior intoxicated the world with the New Look in fashion design.
After 1944, everything was political; there was no escape. World citizens of the Left Bank knew this, and they did all they could to question both U.S. policies and the Communist Party’s views. Paris was, for them, both a refuge and a bridge to think in a different way. They opened up the possibility of a
Third Way, ardently embracing the idealism of the United Nations and the glimmer of utopia in what would later become the European Union. Those pioneers also reinvented their relationships to others. They questioned, shook, and often rejected the institutions of marriage and family and adopted polyamory as an ambition in life. They campaigned for the right to abortion thirty years before it was legalized and consumed drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol with passion. Their heightened sexuality proved an inherent part of their creativity and permeated everything they did. They also proved, with only a few exceptions, to be very hard workers, workaholics even. They worked hard and played hard.
Women took on a central role. The Mona Lisa’s return to the Louvre after six years of hiding during the war heralded a new era in which Elle magazine was founded and edited by twenty-nine-year-old Françoise Giroud, who would become a government minister exactly twenty-nine years later. As Colette, the grande dame of French literature, passed away, so did the figure of the demimondaine. Bardot and Beauvoir became the two new faces of feminism to whom the world would soon surrender. In this predominantly male environment, only very strong women survived and made a mark. You had to be pugnacious in those years if you wanted to exist as an individual and not just as the escort of a great man. Women who refused to be just wives, or mistresses, more often than not exploited by their famous and unfaithful other halves, were almost all bisexual, and female Don Juans. Some were even on the quest for a Third Way into sex, as in politics. The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner, who signed all her articles with the pseudonym Genêt, known before the war for her statuesque and beautiful female lovers, asked her liberal mother in a letter in 1948: “Why cannot there be a third sex, a sex not dominated by muscle or the inclination to breed?”1 A good question in a decade bursting with testosterone.
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