In fact, Jean Paulhan was now a member of the Musée de l’Homme group,11 one of the very first resistance groups operating in Paris, just like Samuel Beckett’s best friend Alfred Péron and Agnès Humbert.12 And he was hiding the duplicating machine, which served to print tracts and mimeographed news bulletins, right in his tiny Gallimard office. He had also started a clandestine publication called Les Lettres françaises.
Gallimard’s example was going to offer a strange blueprint for many businesses and institutions having to deal with the Germans during the Occupation. Gallimard compromised itself with the Nazis, appearing to trample upon principles the house had seemed to hold dear, precisely for them to be maintained even in a small part. At the time, Gaston Gallimard felt it was the only possible approach. Others chose to close down all activities and join de Gaulle in his resistance efforts in London. Gaston Gallimard elevated ambiguity to an art form instead. By choosing to endure, Gaston Gallimard had paved the way to an “acceptable” form of existence under Nazi duress.
There was of course another option for writers and artists who felt they could not live in a country occupied by the Germans, but who could not muster the moral strength to take an active part in the combat alongside de Gaulle. The Emergency Rescue Committee, the private American program that aided refugees, helped many celebrated artists and writers flee to the United States via Marseille. They were accommodated at the Bel Air Villa while their evacuation was being facilitated. Two hundred artists, writers, and intellectuals benefited from the program. Many of them were Jewish artists, but not all of them. There were the Surrealists André Breton, Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Jean Arp, André Masson, Marchel Duchamp, but also Marc Chagall, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, and the writer Anna Seghers.
For those who had chosen to stay in Paris, 1941 would be a turning point.
TAKING SIDES
Samuel Beckett started to do more than just convey information he heard on the British radio to Alfred Péron. Jeanine Picabia, daughter of the painter, had formed a cell called Gloria. Beckett agreed that his apartment at 6 rue des Favorites could be used as a drop for information collected by others. Beckett would “collate the information, typing it out and translating it into English as briefly and concisely as possible … on one sheet.” At a second drop “a member of the group known as ‘the Greek’ would put the sheet of paper which Beckett had brought onto microfilm for its transfer to the unoccupied zone and from thence to England.”13
For the young Simone Signoret, choices had to be made. She could no longer bear to work for a Nazi collaborator during the day while spending her evenings with her anti-Nazi friends at the Flore. Eight months after starting her job and emboldened by her time spent at the Flore, Simone decided to leave Les Nouveaux Temps and told her boss that she was going to be an actress. Jean Luchaire laughed at her audacity, and at her youth. She was bluffing, of course. She had not found another job, and she had not discussed it with her mother.
Before leaving, she turned back and looked at Luchaire and with the impudence of youth said to her boss: “You will all get shot for treason after the war.” He laughed again and wished her luck. It was spring 1941, and Simone became, as she put it, a full-time “florist.” “Florists” arrived in Saint-Germain-des-Prés around noon and had lunch at Chez Rémy, rue des Beaux-Arts, or Chez Chéramy, rue Jacob, where the boss would let customers eat with rationing tickets or on credit. They went back to the Flore around two for an ersatz coffee with saccharine, left again to go for a stroll in the neighborhood between three thirty and five thirty, then returned at six to meet those they had left at three thirty. They ordered lemonade, just one, and made it last until dinnertime.
Simone would lament how unproductive her day had been, but in fact the Café de Flore was a school of life where she and her friends learned everything. They learned from the “Charlatan,” as the Flore’s twenty-year-olds used to call Picasso. They learned from the Russian Jewish painter Chaïm Soutine, who asked them to buy his paints for him as he feared that the lady in the shop, whom he had known all his life, might denounce him. They learned from the Swiss-Italian man with curly hair, the anxious-looking and kind Alberto Giacometti. Simone and her friends were even learning from those who were no longer there, those who had suddenly disappeared, such as Sonia Mossé. Disappeared, deported, hiding, or fighting. The great forty-year-old French poet Jacques Prévert was the great absentee, not yet back in Paris, but newcomers like Simone would “learn” Prévert from the others’ memories of him. Spending one’s days at the Flore was not wasted time. It was a university.14
When Jean Paulhan was arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion of resistance activities, his archrival and Gallimard house fascist Drieu La Rochelle managed to have him freed. Others from the Musée de l’Homme cell were less lucky. Agnès Humbert was arrested and taken first to the Cherche-Midi prison and then to the Fresnes prison before being deported to Germany, and its founders, the anthropologists Anatole Lewitsky and Boris Vildé, were executed.
* * *
One evening at the end of March 1941, Simone de Beauvoir found a note slipped under the door of her hotel room, in Sartre’s handwriting: “I’m at the Café des Trois Mousquetaires.” Beauvoir ran into the street toward the café. Sartre had tricked the camp’s authorities and had been released under a fake identity. He was changed, he could not stop talking. It was not the kind of romantic reunion she had dreamed of. On learning that Simone had signed an affidavit declaring she was not a Jew, he gave her a stern look. And how could she buy food on the black market? Action was the only word he now cared for. Their friend the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also back in Paris. Together, they organized themselves and federated other writers into a resistance group, Socialisme et Liberté. Simone was surprised at Sartre’s vehemence. During the summer of 1941, they cycled together into Vichy France to establish contacts with potential members south of the Occupation line. However, it seemed that the sticking point was the nature of the resistance action the group would carry out. Sartre favored words over bombs. Soon, many of his colleagues wanted to join the more effective and better-organized Communist resistance groups. This was the end of Sartre and Beauvoir as leaders of the Resistance. Sartre went back to teaching at the Lycée Pasteur, and soon after at the Lycée Condorcet. He never signed the affidavit, though. Sartre and Beauvoir went back to their students, to their words, to their complex and diverse relationships, but they were changed forever and they would fight the occupants, only not with guns.
* * *
Jean Bruller, better known as Vercors, took a similar approach; his underground publications would soon have as dramatic an impact as bombs. Bruller was known in the late 1920s for his children’s books. A pacifist until 1938, Bruller joined the Resistance as soon as the armistice was signed. His job was planning escape routes for British prisoners of war. He took the alias Vercors, the name of a part of the French Alpine foothills near Grenoble, which would come to be associated with the most fearless French résistants.15
In the summer of 1941, thirty-nine-year-old Bruller was on a short trip to Paris, walking down the rue du Vieux Colombier, when he bumped into the well-known literary critic André Thérive.16 Thérive was the opposite, politically, of his younger colleague Bruller. Quick-witted, “sharp as a mongoose,”17 he was a reactionary but, more important, an anarchist. Too independent and free-spirited to belong to or serve any political group, he was no collaborationist. Thérive had just read a book that had shaken him; he had it with him and wanted to give it to Bruller.
* * *
The book in question was Ernst Jünger’s Gardens and Roads, his diary of his time as captain in the Wehrmacht during the Battle of France. Ernst Jünger, a German nationalist writer who profoundly disliked the Nazi Party, offered a complex image of the German officer. His diary revealed, in essence, a sensitive man, caring and refined, reading Casanova’s memoirs, the letters of Erasmus, short stories by Herman Melville, André Gide,
and Herodotus while his Wehrmacht unit thrust forward through Belgium and France. Ernst Jünger’s book would soon be banned by the German occupiers, probably for its humanity and underlying criticism of the Nazis. While it was available, though, Gardens and Roads proved very popular. His curiosity piqued, Jean Bruller thanked Thérive and later read the book. He was shocked and alarmed by Jünger’s sincerity. “Would not the average French reader imagine that the kindly Jünger represented the behavior and intentions of all Germans?”18
There was no room for a good German officer, Bruller thought. There was no room for complexity and subtlety; this was war and war had to be fought, Germans defeated, and France liberated. He felt prompted to write a kind of response. In just a few weeks he wrote Le silence de la mer, the story of an old French man and his niece obliged to house a German officer in their home during the war. The officer, a former composer, wants nothing more than to strike up a friendly relationship with his French hosts, but they refuse to talk to him. Crushed, defeated by such resounding silence, the officer enrolls to go and fight on the eastern front.
Bruller and his résistant friends decided to publish Le silence de la mer as a book. “Thus began the most unusual publishing house of the Left Bank, then or ever.”19 The men found a courageous printer whose inconspicuous printing plant just off the boulevard de l’Hôpital in the 13th arrondissement specialized in death notices offered the safest option. Bruller wanted an elegant one-hundred-page book, printed on fine paper. In a time of paper rationing, extreme danger for clandestine work, and general scarcity, it was, in Bruller’s eyes, paramount to be as professional as one could possibly be. They called their publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit (Midnight Editions), and Vercors designed the star that would soon symbolize the résistant publishers.
Each week, Vercors brought the printer eight pages, which were destroyed as soon as the type was set. He then went to drop the printed pages to a cache on the boulevard Raspail where a friend took them for binding. It took weeks to print and bind the first three hundred and fifty copies. Vercors had a copy passed on to Jean Paulhan at his office at Gallimard in February 1942 and from there it was duplicated and reached London and New York. One morning in London, the book dropped onto the desk of Sonia Brownell at Horizon magazine. She read it immediately and passed it on to her boss Cyril Connolly, who translated it as Put Out the Light and published it as fast as he could in 1944. In New York, Life magazine serialized it. It was so successful in France and abroad that Les Éditions de Minuit asked other celebrated writers to provide texts to be published. Aragon, Paul Éluard, Jean Guéhenno, and Jean Paulhan all published texts and poems under noms de résistance. Each book, four and a half by six and a half inches, had on its second page the words “In France, there are writers who refuse to take orders.” Paul Éluard became Les Éditions de Minuit’s chief literary adviser, while living in hiding at the antiquarian bookseller Lucien Scheler’s shop at 19 rue de Tournon.20 Les Éditions de Minuit expanded its horizons beyond French writers and published a translation of John Steinbeck’s novel about a village in northern Europe occupied by a foreign army, The Moon Is Down.21
* * *
Life for the American citizens who had chosen to stay in Paris even after Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941 was becoming more and more difficult. And dangerous. Sylvia Beach decided to hide all her books and close her bookshop: a German officer had threatened her after she refused to sell him anything. Along with the other Americans in Paris, Beach had to report to her local police station every week. “The Gestapo kept track of me, and they’d come to see me all the time.”22 Sylvia and Adrienne were freezing. Adrienne had installed a woodstove in her bookshop but her flat was glacial, too cold even to read or write. The two women would combine their ration tickets and take it in turn to cook a hot meal for two with only one ration of coal, which they used at midday or dinnertime. Chocolate, sugar, wine, and coffee were available only on the black market, at ten times their prewar prices.23 Even worse, women were not allowed tobacco rations, unlike men.
On September 24, 1942, three hundred fifty American women, including Sylvia Beach, were rounded up and taken to the zoo in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, in the Bois de Boulogne, and into the now empty monkey house. “We were the only monkeys,” Sylvia later commented drily. This strange cohort of women—artists, bourgeois wives, dancers, and spies—were then driven to the northeastern French town of Vittel, in the Lorraine region, where they were kept under house arrest, accommodated in one of the once grand old spa hotels. They lacked freedom, but they were better fed than in Paris. Sylvia bided her time while friends back in Paris did their best to obtain her release.
Tension rose tangibly in Paris after the United States officially entered the war in December 1941. Major General Carl Oberg of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the much-feared Nazi Party’s security service) took over Paris. The forty-five-year-old was a true SS, having joined the ranks as early as 1931. He also looked the part: shaved head, rimless steel spectacles, and a long black leather coat over his black uniform. As Höherer SS und Polizeiführer, Oberg was taking over from the Wehrmacht the policing of the occupied zone. He had two missions: to send Jews from France to die in Poland and to destroy the French resistance. With the roundup of more than thirteen thousand Parisian Jews (one-third of them children) on July 12, 1942, Oberg became known as the “Butcher of Paris.”
A few weeks later, Alfred Péron was arrested. A coded telegram sent straightaway by Péron’s wife allowed Samuel Beckett and Suzanne to destroy any incriminating documents and leave Paris at once before other members of the résistant cell Gloria were arrested. They first took refuge just outside Paris in Janvry with Nathalie Sarraute, the Jewish Russian-born novelist, also in hiding under a fake identity.
In 1942, every action had a meaning and consequences. In May, Jean Cocteau attended an exhibition of Hitler’s favorite artist, the sculptor Arno Breker, at the Orangerie. Picasso did not. Cocteau was not cautious. Neither was the movie star Arletty, madly in love with the German officer Hans Jürgen Soehring, with whom she lived on the seventh floor of the Ritz, next door to Coco Chanel and her own German beau, Hans Günther von Dincklage. On August 24, 1942, Life magazine launched the first in a series of American press campaigns against French collaborators, publishing a blacklist of the “Frenchmen condemned by the underground for collaborating with the Germans.” It included America’s French darling Maurice Chevalier, Arletty, and the playwright Sacha Guitry.24
PARIS ON THE HUDSON
In the summer of 1942, Apollinaire’s young American translator, the ardent Trotskyite Lionel Abel, had returned from Chicago to New York. The thirty-year-old literary critic for the Nation had been in Chicago for a year on the prestigious Writers’ Project, and now, back in New York, he dreamed of only one thing: to meet the French Surrealists who had found exile in New York. Before approaching them, though, he went to seek advice from his friend the art history professor Meyer Schapiro. One had to be careful—the Surrealists and their leader André Breton had an aura akin to Hollywood stars, and Lionel did not want to make a faux pas. At Professor Schapiro’s, Abel met the slender and handsome twenty-seven-year-old New York painter Robert Motherwell, who also dreamed of paying a visit to André Breton, who lived nearby, at 265 West Eleventh Street.
Abel already had his foot in the door of Surrealism thanks to another exiled Surrealist from Paris whom he had befriended, the thirty-one-year-old painter Roberto Matta. Matta and his young American wife, Ann, lived on Twelfth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in a modest but elegant three-room flat. Matta had managed to bring a few cases of absinthe back from France to share with New York visitors. “This is not anisette, this is the real thing!” he would warn his guests, laughing.25
An audience with the pope of Surrealism was arranged for Lionel Abel and Robert Motherwell; the young Americans were not disappointed. “Breton took us both with him to the 18th century. The movements of his hands w
hen he talked were graceful, his voice musical, his diction perfect, and his sentences always in syntax: he never failed to use the subjunctive as required.”26 A few weeks later, Roberto Matta invited both Lionel Abel and Robert Motherwell to a party: Matta had just finished painting a very large canvas and would name it during the evening. Marc Chagall, the Surrealists André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and Kurt Seligmann, the composer John Cage, the art gallery owner Pierre Matisse (son of the painter), and of course His Surrealist Highness André Breton were there, too.
Now part of the group, Abel was asked by André Breton to help him edit a new Surrealist magazine called VVV. They worked on the first issue together but their relationship lasted only a few months. If Breton was a very compelling and fascinating figure, he could also behave like Zeus, hurling bolts of lightning down from his throne. Abel, an upright New York Jewish intellectual, also had some difficulty with the intense promiscuity displayed by the French Surrealists. Somebody was always breaking up, divorcing, stealing another man’s wife or another woman’s husband, or sleeping with a third party, and all within their circle. The Parisian Surrealists in New York had re-created their sexual ronde, just like in Arthur Schnitzler’s controversial play Reigen, known as La ronde or Hands Around. Somebody somewhere was always going to fall in love and be heartbroken, repeatedly, with a different person each time but within the group. For instance, Matta broke up with his wife Ann, but she would accept a divorce only if he fathered her a child. He reluctantly agreed and she went on to have twin boys. Matta left her as soon as his sons were born and immediately married one of his lovers, Patricia Connolly, who was also having an affair with the gallery owner Pierre Matisse. André Breton’s wife Jacqueline left him for a young American painter, David Hare, a friend of Robert Motherwell. And so on.
A friend of Abel’s, the twenty-four-year-old Chicagoan Harold Kaplan, was also in New York. He had enrolled in the army the month Paris fell into Nazi hands, dreaming of following in the steps of Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings as an ambulance driver. But the U.S. Army had found another use for him, at its little-known Office of Facts and Figures in New York. Young Kaplan’s academic knowledge of both French culture and language and his love of Marcel Proust, on whom he wrote his PhD thesis, qualified him to join the radio team in New York whose broadcasts, in French, were aimed at France and French-speaking North Africa. Useful, as General Eisenhower was about to invade North Africa in November 1942. And who better to speak to the French from New York, with his mellifluous baritone voice and commanding tone, than André Breton? Kaplan was as “mesmerized”27 by the Surrealist as Abel was.
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