Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A PHILOSOPHY OF EXISTENCE

  The Second World War, both on the ground and in people’s minds, had finally ended. The V-E Day celebrations in May 1945, followed by Marshal Pétain’s trial and death sentence and the capitulation of Japan after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in August 1945, had offered some closure on what had been the darkest five years for millions of young adults. If the war was over, its corpse remained. There was nowhere to bury it, as Simone de Beauvoir keenly felt. However, by dissecting it and understanding it, the generations shaped by the ordeals of the war could perhaps be able to learn from it, free themselves, and bounce back to life.

  * * *

  There was no longer any room for complacency and ambiguity. One had to take sides, speak up, act, and perhaps risk sounding brash and reckless. One had to engage, to engage fully and absolutely, with the society one lived in and the world around it. It was the lesson learned from the war: indifference bred chaos. It was time to stare at the reality with lucidity in order to change it. To experiment with life, love, and ideas, to throw away conventions, to reinvent oneself, and to reenchant the world were the new mottos of Paris’s young.

  * * *

  In the autumn of 1945, Paris was grimier than before the war and yet its lights were on again, its nightlife bearing little resemblance to any other. “The orgy of fraternity” described by Simone de Beauvoir lingered on, but so did food rationing. With a monthly wine ration reduced to one liter per person, nightlife was fueled by the elation of freedom and the fire of political discussions. Game and poultry were back in shop windows, but at three times their prewar price only the nouveaux riches could afford them.

  In the autumn of 1945, France was about to vote in the first elections since before the war. The aim was clear: to kill the Third Republic and its 1875 constitution and refound the Republic. The Third Republic had failed to bar Marshal Pétain from power in July 1940 and was forever tainted by collaborationist Vichy. When Marshal Pétain declared himself head of the French state in 1940, the Third Republic had in effect been killed. It was now high time the French buried its corpse.

  LES TEMPS MODERNES

  In September 1945, together with their band of students and friends, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were working night and day finalizing the first issue of their journal Les Temps modernes. They had launched the idea at the end of 1944, choosing the title as a tribute to Chaplin’s Modern Times, and, apart from Camus who was too busy editing Combat, they could rely on almost everyone else to write for them—Communists, Catholics, Gaullists, and Socialists: their schoolmate and liberal philosopher friend Raymond Aron, the Marxist phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, the anthropologist and art critic Michel Leiris, the Gallimard supremo Jean Paulhan, and even Picasso, who had agreed to design the cover and logo, along with a new generation of writers who were submitting articles and ideas such as Jacques-Laurent Bost. The British writer Philip Toynbee would contribute a Letter from London, while novels and essays the committee particularly liked would be serialized prior to their publication or with a view to attracting a potential publisher. Les Temps modernes would be a laboratory of new ideas and a talent scout rolled into one. Simone de Beauvoir had personally approached the minister of information, the Gaullist and résistant Jacques Soustelle, to ask for an allocation of paper.

  Gallimard had agreed to finance the journal and to give the team a little office where they could hold their editorial meetings. The first issue was planned for October 1, 1945. Jean-Paul Sartre was made the head of the publication, “Monsieur le Directeur,” and he thought it important to make himself available to everyone. This would be democracy and public debate in action. He committed to receiving anyone who asked to see him at the magazine’s office at 5 rue Sébastien Bottin every Tuesday and Friday afternoon between five thirty and seven thirty. This commitment was printed at the beginning of the magazine, along with the telephone number Littré 28-91, where they could be reached. Sartre had decided to dedicate the first issue of Les Temps modernes “To Dolorès,” in all simplicity. Simone did not blink an eye.

  In the first issue, Sartre announced loud and clear what Les Temps modernes1 stood for. It was to be the megaphone that would carry their thoughts far and wide.

  Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps modernes will take sides.2

  The tone was set, the thinking promised to be muscular and the writing fearless.

  The first issue opened with a story from a collection soon to be published in France. The short story, “Le feu dans la nuée” (“Fire and Cloud”) by the black American writer Richard Wright, with its title taken from Uncle Tom’s Children, shocked French readers with its “negroes,” its lynch mobs in the deep American South, and its criticism of religion. “Fire and Cloud” not only introduced a gifted new writer to French readers but also shed light on racial discrimination in America in lyrical and violent language, superbly translated by Marcel Duhamel. It was followed by an article on poverty, inflation, and famine by Raymond Aron; a psychiatrist’s commentary on collective psychosis in time of war and how war introduced a festering anxiety in everyone; an account of the Pétain trial by Raymond Aron; reportage on the V-E Day celebrations in New York; and Philip Toynbee’s Letter from London. This first issue concluded with an article by Sartre titled “The End of the War,” in which he wrote: “Peace is a new beginning but we are living an agony. We go from war to peace through different stages, different shades. War has left everyone naked, without illusions; they now can only rely on themselves and this is perhaps the only good thing that has come out of it.”3

  The first issue of Les Temps modernes made a strong impression on readers in Paris and abroad. The tone was original, the reportage read like literature, the style was uncompromising, and the analysis pugnacious. Les Temps modernes shocked with its pessimism, yet it also felt new. It was not the nihilism of the 1920s with suicide as a lifestyle choice—this new pessimism was less passive, often prompting immediate action. Les Temps modernes enriched whoever read it; it also provoked and disturbed them profoundly.4

  As the journal hit the newsstands, Gallimard released another work by Sartre, the first two volumes (The Age of Reason and The Reprieve) of a three-part novel titled Les chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom). The novel revolved around Mathieu, a Socialist philosophy teacher, and his group of friends, whose lives are redefined by their actions (or lack of actions) during the Nazi occupation. Like Beauvoir in Le sang des autres (The Blood of Others), Sartre was addressing the issue of commitment or, as they called it, engagement. Simone de Beauvoir’s second novel, Le sang des autres, about the nature of freedom, had come out a few months earlier. Praised by reviewers and dedicated to her former student and lover Nathalie Sorokine, it told the story of Hélène and Jean, a young couple during the Occupation, and the consequences of their actions for themselves, for others, and for the course of history. To resist or not to resist the German occupants was a central question in which passivity as much as resistance appeared a radical choice. Simone was on the same wavelength as Sartre and together they were developing what they referred to as a philosophy of existence. The press gave it a different name: Existentialism. Young people flocked to it because of all the varieties of atheism, it placed men and women at the heart of their lives and that of society. Responsibility for their actions as much as for their inactions, for their commitment or lack of it, was theirs and theirs alone. No more excuses; men and women were what they did or what they did not have the courage to do. Sartre’s philosophy also offered new,
modern freedoms expressed through jazz music, American literature including pulp fiction, all kinds of popular culture usually looked down on, sexual experimentation, and innovation in the arts. This greatly attracted young minds.

  Wherever you walked in Paris in October 1945, bookshop windows displayed Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s latest novels side by side, while newsagents sold Les Temps modernes. The three publications were discussed in cafés, in newspapers, and on the radio. There was suddenly no escaping the sometime couple.

  In fact, after just a few issues, Les Temps modernes had not only managed “to break down the divide between literature and journalism,” it had also “acquired, throughout Europe, and parts of North America, a reputation for being fresh, stimulating,”5 and, more important, thought-provoking. The bimonthly Sunday afternoon editorial meetings were now an established routine for everyone and they would soon often take place at Sartre’s new home. His eighteen years of hotel life was coming to an end while Beauvoir’s was going to last another two years at La Louisiane. His mother, Anne-Marie Mancy, had recently lost her husband, a stepfather with whom Sartre had never gotten along well, and he had agreed to live with her. She had found an apartment at 42 rue Bonaparte, on the corner of the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with a view over both the church and the Café des Deux Magots. On the morning of Sunday, May 12, 1946, Sartre took his two brown leather suitcases and reached the fourth floor of this typical sandstone pre-Haussmann building, slightly out of breath. The maid, the good old Alsatian Eugénie whom he had known for years, helped him settle in. He looked around; he liked it there. He chose the living room with its south view over the square as his study, his office, and his boudoir. It was not very large but could host the weekly editorial meetings. In any case, it was never bad when people sat close to each other; the proximity created a certain warmth. He had identified a little corner near the second window where he would put a tiny desk, in fact a bridge table, for Simone so she could come and write in the afternoon. They had ceased to be lovers years ago; Simone was a “grande amoureuse,” while he was more interested in the chase than in the sexual act, but they had many other ways of intimate communion, and writing together was one of them.

  Les Temps modernes’ editorial meetings, which Simone called “the highest form of friendship,” increasingly dragged well into the night, by which time heated intellectual arguments subsided into general laughter. The journal considered its public very seriously. Every Tuesday for two hours, “readers’ conferences” took place at Les Temps modernes’ little office at Gallimard. Simone de Beauvoir attended almost every one of them. As promised at the magazine’s outset, whoever among the magazine’s readers wanted to meet with a member of the editorial committee could do so. The Tuesday visitors came to discuss articles, seek advice, or submit texts, either comments or letters, in the hope they would get published. Abbot Gengenbach, a “half-defrocked priest,” became a regular visitor. “A Surrealist, he drank heavily, cursed the Church, and went out with women. He then locked himself up for a few weeks in a monastery to make amends.”6 The abbot used to come to the office to submit texts, “some of them actually good,” and request money. One day he forlornly asked Beauvoir: “But why does André Breton hate God?” On another Tuesday afternoon the receptionist rushed to Simone’s office: a reader whose text had been turned down by the editorial committee had just cut open his wrists.

  EXISTENTIALISM, THE NEW PHILOSOPHY THAT MAKES PEOPLE FAINT

  On October 29, 1945, Sartre was racing against time, as usual, finishing writing notes for the talk he was giving that night titled “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” He was due at eight thirty at Club Maintenant, a lecture hall and former hôtel particulier of Princess d’Essling, behind the Grand Palais. Sartre did not have time to change—he never did—besides, he was certain there would not be many people attending despite small advertisements in the press. He and Beauvoir left the Café de Flore late and arrived slightly out of breath at the rue Jean Goujon in the 8th arrondissement. They found the right room, but when they opened the door they were greeted with “Go away, you’re too late, there is no room left.” The lecture hall was packed with people standing up and sitting on the floor. The organizers had to help them get through the crowd so Sartre could start his lecture.

  A very tall, thin blond man with a pale face was standing, crushed between a fat middle-aged woman and a young female student with a ponytail and a black turtleneck. His name was Boris Vian, and the twenty-five-year-old would soon immortalize this memorable evening in his first novel, L’écume des jours (Foam of the Days). The room was overcrowded and too hot. Sartre loosened his tie slightly and started explaining his idea of engagement and moral responsibility in a very accessible way. Soon after he had started talking, a woman fainted, and then another. Fortunately, somebody thought to open the windows, but Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s reputation was practically sealed that instant. Existentialism had struck and claimed its first two victims. Here was a new philosophy powerful enough to make people faint. As soon as Samedi Soir’s account was published the next day, word spread and youngsters flocked to buy Sartre’s seven-hundred-page, one-kilo treatise L’être et le néant, much as their mothers had run out to buy it two years earlier to use as a weight. L’être et le néant became a fashionable book, and Existentialism would soon inspire a cult following. Or, as Janet Flanner saw it with her deprecating humor: “Sartre is automatically fashionable now among those who once found Surrealism automatically fashionable.”7

  In its account of the evening, the Communist-leaning Samedi Soir had referred to Simone de Beauvoir as “La Grande Sartreuse” and “Notre Dame de Sartre.” It was meant as an insult; it made her laugh. The newspaper also revealed that, although they were a couple, her relationship with Sartre was not an exclusive one, and that they had never married. This shocked half of France and electrified the other half. In a matter of days, the scandalous couple were being chased by photographers; people stared at them and whispered as they passed. And yet Sartre did not change his routine, at least not at first. He continued to dress the way he had always done—that is to say, without paying much attention to it—he worked in cafés, had dinner out with either Beauvoir or his mistress du jour without trying to hide the way he lived.8 This, of course, caused even more fury among the bourgeois, who hated the vision of France and French bourgeoisie that Sartre’s novels and new journal were projecting back at them. Sartre was accused of “sordid realism” and “miserabilism.”9

  Sartre took fame in his stride, not that he looked for it—rather the opposite. This sudden glory felt to him idiotic and a high price to pay. He had wanted to write novels, to be a writer, to be a genius living in obscurity like Baudelaire. Events had decided otherwise and sentenced him to be an outspoken intellectual living in the glare of public attention. Nobody would ever remember what he wrote but only what he was and what he said—in other words, he would be remembered as a public intellectual, not quite the same thing as the great writer he had once wanted to be. “From now on, he would put the absolute in the ephemeral, he would lock himself up in the present and in the time he lived in, he would accept to perish entirely with his epoch,”10 wrote Beauvoir. What extraordinary clairvoyance and lucidity. Indeed, Les chemins de la liberté, his second novel, would be his last work of fiction. Sartre would sacrifice himself to commenting and trying to influence the world.

  Simone de Beauvoir resented this sudden fame less than Sartre; she was also less exposed than him. She had always liked the immediacy of life, its many physical and sensual pleasures, friendships and conversation, gossip too. Their journal’s first issue had provoked so many reactions, so much anger and so much praise, that they both threw themselves into producing the following ones. However, some Communist writer friends suddenly declined to write for Les Temps modernes. They had been told not to by the Party. What of the Resistance spirit that was supposed never to die? In fact, verbal abuse started flaring up in some corners. The Catholic daily L
a Croix laid into Sartre’s L’être et le néant: “This atheist existentialism is a far greater danger than the eighteenth-century rationalism and the nineteenth-century positivism put together.”11 The Communists branded Existentialism “a sordid and frivolous philosophy for sick people.”12 They attacked Sartre personally, claiming that his dirtiness was both physical and moral and that, just like a pig, he wallowed in dirt. As two bourgeois who had decided to disavow their social origins, Sartre and Beauvoir understood the bourgeoisie’s violence against them, but they were deeply hurt by the Communists’ reaction.

  Editorial meetings became heated affairs. Beauvoir always disagreed with the art critic Michel Leiris about poetry, and Raymond Aron soon refused to publish any pro-Communist articles and comments. Camus had approached him to join Combat and he was seriously considering it. “In this period of renaissance, still hesitant and slow-boiling, there were many new questions, challenges to be met, mistakes to correct, misunderstandings to dispel, and criticisms to reject. Our debates had the intimacy, urgency and warmth of family quarrels,”13 wrote Simone in her diary. Beauvoir and Sartre thrived on dissent and debate. Now that their journal had shaken up public conscience, there was no stopping them.

  The journal’s December 1945 issue did not disappoint. In an uncompromising introduction, Beauvoir explained the nature of Existentialism: “If Existentialism upsets and worries some people, it is not because it is a philosophy of despair but rather because it demands that people live in a state of constant tension. Why so exacting, though? Why insist that people leave their comfort zones?”14 Then came an extract from Jean Genet’s forthcoming Pompes funèbres (Funeral Rites), which opened with the line “To me, sausages and pâtés tasted like corpses.” Genet, still largely unknown, and whose early poetry and novels Sartre and Cocteau had championed, was deemed a pornographic author. Readers were also given the first pages of Sartre’s first critical essay, Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew); Nathalie Sorokine, now pregnant and married to an American GI, the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, wrote a piece based on her own experience flirting with American GIs in Paris called “Nuits sans importance” (“Meaningless nights”) in which she in fact revealed that she had prostituted herself in exchange for cigarettes, coffee, and milk. There was also an analysis of the British social reformer William Beveridge’s book Full Employment in a Free Society, a theater review of Camus’ Caligula, a Letter from America by an ex-GI returning home from France, chilling witness accounts of a former Lagercapo Stubendienst (an inmate assigned to barracks orderly duty) in concentration camps, and a roundup of British and American views and comments on the forthcoming French elections.