Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  By Christmas 1945, Beauvoir was in need of a break. Le petit Bost had just returned from reporting in the United States for Combat and would follow her to the French Alps. She packed her suitcase, booked herself a couchette in the overnight train from the Gare d’Austerlitz to Megève, and on the way bought a copy of Les Lettres françaises, which had just published a vitriolic attack on Sartre and Existentialism. On its front page, an article by the Communist apparatchik Roger Garaudy claimed: “On a reactionary philosophy. A false prophet: Jean-Paul Sartre.”15 Sartre’s independence made him an enemy of the Communists. The Communists in fact feared Sartre, who was becoming increasingly popular with the young.

  The sight of the snowy mountains lifted Beauvoir’s mood and she climbed the path toward the Chalet Idéal-Sport, carrying her heavy suitcase, with renewed energy. Bost, Olga, and Wanda were arriving by the next train. For a week, while the indolent Kosakiewicz sisters never left the sundeck of the chalet, Simone and Bost would race merrily down the slopes. She was looking forward to 1946. She had been asked to give a series of talks on Existentialism in North Africa, starting in Tunis, and was going to travel by plane for the first time.16

  THE VIEW FROM BROOKLYN

  From Brooklyn, the thirty-seven-year-old star of black literature Richard Wright was delighted by Les Temps modernes’ decision to publish his short story as its first serialized piece of fiction. Reactions had been encouraging, and his French publishers were planning to use the commotion it had created to promote his forthcoming books. He had not met Beauvoir or Sartre yet but he felt an affinity with his Left Bank admirers. They shared a certain anger at the world, though Wright was even angrier than his French counterparts—or, as his friend the black American writer Ralph Ellison had put it, “agitated to a state of almost manic restlessness.” Wright agreed with his friend’s judgment. He wrote in his diary: “Why can’t I just sit like other people? What is gnawing at my gizzard? It is because I’m in such contradictory circumstances; a plantation Negro living in New York, a peasant who is an artist of sorts, a Negro married to a white girl, a Communist who cannot stand being a member of the Communist groups?”17

  Wright lived in Brooklyn among the black middle class, what the blacks from Harlem called “the People on the Hill.” He was married to a white American woman of Russian and Jewish origin, Ellen Poplowitz, and they had a three-year-old daughter named Julia. Reviews had compared him to Steinbeck and Dostoyevsky. In other words, he was a successful and admired writer with his life firmly rooted in America. He had no personal connection with Paris or France. The grandchild of African American slaves who had worked in the cotton fields in Mississippi, Richard Wright had heard stories as a boy about black American servicemen fighting in France during the First World War. He knew that France’s General Foch had given the highest military distinctions to African American soldiers when their own General Pershing had denied them the right to use bayonet rifles against the white Germans.18 And as a teenager, Wright had devoured French literature: Dumas, Balzac, Flaubert, Anatole France, Maupassant, Pierre Loti, Rabelais, Voltaire. Marcel Proust had dazzled him, Aragon’s Stalinist poem “Front Rouge” in 1930 had shaped his politics, and André Gide’s Retour de l’URSS (Return from the USSR) in 1936 had cured him of his Communism.

  Fame had been both a blessing and a curse for Wright. He was now receiving a lot of mail from shocked fellow African Americans who disapproved of his marriage to a white woman. A Southern black woman had written to him that he had set a bad example. He ought to have married a colored woman—“there are all shades among us,” the woman had argued—and he should have shared his wealth with his own race. “I did not marry a white woman,” he retorted in his journal on January 17, 1945, “I married the woman I loved.”19 A week later he added: “I’d say that one could live and write like the way I do only if one lived in Paris or some out of the way spot where one could claim one’s whole soul. And I cannot do that here now.”20 Richard Wright wanted to leave his color at home and not be exclusively defined by it; he wanted to be free from race consciousness. On March 11, 1945, Wright and his wife had submitted a passport application to go to Paris.

  INCUBATING NEW IDEAS, TALENTS, AND LITERARY GENRES

  With Sartre touring American universities and giving talks on Existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir could not afford to stay away from Paris for too long, and after a couple of weeks spent in Tunisia lecturing about the philosophy of existence and visiting the Sahel desert, she returned to the helm of the magazine, with editorial meetings taking place once a week in her hotel room or at the journal’s tiny office at Gallimard. She particularly wanted to help and promote new and young writers. She kept encouraging Violette Leduc, who was working on a novel.

  Leduc was an odd one. She had fallen for Simone after reading She Came to Stay in 1944, which had revealed Simone’s bisexuality. An unwanted and unloved child never officially recognized by her father, Violette had spent the war years living off the black market, trafficking and schlepping heavy loads of meat and butter from Normandy to Paris restaurants every week. She was angry, rebellious, and amoral and had decided to channel her raw energy and spite into her writing. One afternoon, Violette had appeared in front of Beauvoir’s table at the Café de Flore with a manuscript in her hand; it was titled L’asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin). Beauvoir had been immediately struck by Violette: “She was tall and blonde, elegant with a face that was brutally ugly but bursting with life.”21 Simone had promised to read her manuscript. She was hooked from the first sentence: “My mother never held my hand.” Simone asked her to rewrite the second part; Violette did it at once. Simone then offered the revised manuscript to Camus who, in parallel to his work for Combat, edited a collection of novels by first-time writers at Gallimard. Beauvoir also chose an extract to be published in the November issue of Les Temps modernes. A new angry and original voice was born. Both Sartre’s new protégé, the thief turned poet Jean Genet, and Jean Cocteau recognized in Violette Leduc a sister in arms.

  * * *

  Beauvoir had introduced Violette Leduc to another writer who had just had her first piece accepted in Les Temps modernes—Nathalie Sarraute. Sarraute, née Tcherniak, a Russian Jew married to a Frenchman, eight years older than Beauvoir, had spent the war years in hiding, under false identities, moving from one place to another. She had herself sheltered Samuel Beckett and Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in September 1942 when they had been forced to leave their Paris home immediately after the Resistance network Gloria was uncovered by the Gestapo. The anti-Semitic laws of 1941 had deprived Sarraute of her métier, that of lawyer, so she had turned to writing. Both Sartre and Beauvoir, who had warmed to this woman with her “disquieting subtlety,”22 had resolved to help her find a publisher. Sarraute was currently writing her first “anti-roman,” as Sartre had swiftly named it with his talent for formulas, which she had titled Portrait d’un inconnu (Portrait of a Man Unknown). Les Temps modernes decided to publish extracts in the hope of attracting the interest of a publisher.23 The term “anti-novel” stuck. Also widely known, ten years later, as le nouveau roman, this literary form, subordinating plot and characterization to a vision of the world, was a product of the laboratory of ideas that Sartre and Beauvoir’s monthly review encouraged.

  Simone de Beauvoir spent her evenings with her new friend24 Boris Vian, engineer, jazz trumpeter, former Zazou,25 translator of American thrillers, and aspiring writer. Simone laughed at the way Vian was still dressing, à la Zazou, in blue jeans and checked shirts from the U.S. Army surplus. They both liked to drink and to listen to jazz. Six years earlier, a barely twenty-year-old Vian had married his sweetheart, a pinup blonde named Michelle; they had had a boy, Patrick, whom they entrusted to her parents. Neither of them had any aspiration or talent for parenting, and they were not going to pretend otherwise. They liked inviting their friends to “tartine parties”26 when they could lay their hands on bread. Sometimes they simply asked their friends to come with their own rations.
Just before the October 1945 elections the Gaullist government had taken bread off ration, astutely trading bread for votes—except that by January 1946 the newly elected deputies, facing a wheat shortage, reintroduced bread rationing. The French were allowed only three slices per person per day more than the Nazis had permitted in 1942, the worst of all the war years.27

  At one such soirée in January 1946, Beauvoir and Vian talked until dawn, a “fleeting moment of eternal friendship”28 as she recalled. Vian was making a living as an engineer and was dying of boredom during his office hours. He was also literally dying of a lung condition he had had since his childhood; he knew he would not live to forty. Life was going to be very short and he had resolved to make the most of it. To do this, he almost had to give up on sleep. In January 1946, life for Vian really began only at six in the evening and continued until the wee hours of morning, when he slept a few hours before going to work. He was, however, hoping that a writer’s advance he got from Gallimard thanks to his friend Raymond Queneau would soon allow him to quit his day job. He had an idea for a first novel, he teased Simone, in which he might write about her and Sartre. Sartre and Beauvoir had become a living and philosophical gold standard, especially for Boris Vian’s generation.

  In Sartre’s absence, Beauvoir had been particularly struck by two unpublished autobiographical works by David Rousset, the short L’univers concentrationnaire29 and the eight-hundred-page “novel” Les jours de notre mort (The Days of Our Death). Both revealed for the first time, in great detail, with sangfroid and in-depth analysis, the machinery of the concentration camps. Rousset, a résistant and former Paris correspondent of the American magazines Time and Fortune, was bearing witness in a cool and thus extremely powerful way to his two years spent at Buchenwald and Neuengamme camps. It would be another year before Primo Levi would write his own memoirs of survival in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man. Les Temps modernes published extracts of both David Rousset’s forthcoming books in its March and April issues, to great acclaim and general stupefaction. Offers from foreign publishers started flooding in, such was the power of the journal at home and abroad. Simone wanted Sartre to meet Rousset, a real character, who had regained his prewar corpulence and was now a chubby thirty-four-year-old with only one eye (the result of a prewar tennis game that went terribly wrong).

  Sartre finally came back from the United States at the end of April 1946. Simone had so many things to tell him, so much to give him to read. She had worked hard, and partied hard, while he was away, and she had one manuscript ready and another started. She needed his advice. They spent their first evenings together in the smoky, noisy basement bar of the Méphisto, the only place where members of the public would not harass them. The doorman let in only people he knew and they were almost all writers and philosophers. Sartre read the last draft of Simone’s novel Tous les hommes sont mortels (All Men Are Mortal) in one go. She had been writing and rewriting it since 1943. It told the story of a young actress, not unlike their darling Olga, and of an immortal man she gets involved with. It dealt, in fact, with Simone’s obsession with the passing of time and death closing in on her. After turning the last page, Sartre smiled at her. She could send it to Gallimard, he told her. She was relieved. She then told him about an essay she had started writing Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity), but she stopped midsentence: Sartre was not looking well. Was it the noise, or the smoke? He had difficulty swallowing, he said, his ears were buzzing, and he felt feverish. “Let’s go,” said Simone, and they walked back to the Hôtel La Louisiane, avoiding the boulevard Saint-Germain and taking the little streets instead, rue Jacob and then rue de Seine. The fresh air restored his spirits for a while, but something was wrong.

  The following morning Simone called the doctor, whose visit bore bad news: Sartre had mumps. He had to remain in quarantine. The doctor spread a thick black ointment on Sartre’s face and neck. He looked at himself in the mirror and they both burst out laughing. The doctor gave Simone a list of things to buy at the pharmacy. She took her bag and left Sartre to ponder his new condition humaine. Or was it condition masculine? The doctor had told him to look at his testicles regularly, as the mumps might cause them to swell.

  In the very animated rue de Buci, Simone looked around her with a smile. The street stalls and grocery windows were full of goods—a far cry from the spring of 1945. Women were admiring cauliflowers, asparagus, the first strawberries, and lilies of the valley in little tin pots.30 Prices remained steep, so there was more admiring than buying. A new banknote had just come out, but it remained a rare sight in Parisians’ purses. The “fancy 500 Francs note was stamped with the portrait of the melancholy poet Chateaubriand holding his head, as well he might,”31 noted Janet Flanner.

  EXISTENTIALISM GOES GLOBAL

  Time magazine dedicated five pages of its 1945 issue to “the literary lion of Paris who had bounced into Manhattan.” The caption under the flattering portrait of Sartre that ran with the article read PHILOSOPHER SARTRE. WOMEN SWOONED.32

  American women may have swooned, but they did not pass out, as they had at Club Maintenant. Marcel Duchamp, seated in the first rows of Carnegie Hall in New York, had exclaimed: “We are now before Sartre Cathedral.”33 The literary critic Lionel Abel, also seated in the first rows at Carnegie Hall, not far from Marcel Duchamp, had had the chance to meet the philosopher for lunch beforehand, at a French restaurant on West Fifty-Sixth Street. The lunch had been organized by the anti-Stalinist and Trotskyite-leaning magazine Partisan Review. Lionel Abel and the philosopher Hannah Arendt had been invited as guests but were also expected to serve as interpreters for the French philosopher. Abel did not exactly swoon when he met Sartre, but he could not take his eyes off him, either. Sartre had “the most interesting modern face,” he wrote. “Short, stocky, thick-wristed and broad-chested, the thrust of his shoulders gave one a sense of physical power; his speech was sharp, crisp, virile, while his complexion was an unhealthy gray.”34 The Partisan Review’s editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, wanted to make sure that they were all on the same wavelength and that Sartre would continue to attack Stalinist influence when he returned to Europe, as they were doing in America.

  What they did not realize was that Sartre was even more suspicious of American capitalism than he was of Stalinism. But Sartre did not want to bruise his American friends too much, delighted as he was by his trip—he loved New York and its adoring crowds. He wanted to enjoy the moment as long as he possibly could, a desire Sartre confided to the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” columnist just after his talk at Carnegie Hall, showing his childlike happiness, and his wit: “Two phrases only are necessary for a whole evening of English conversation, I have found: ‘Scotch and soda’ and ‘why not?’ By alternating them, it is impossible to make mistakes.”35 The truth was that Sartre, like Beauvoir a few months later, was both fascinated and repulsed by America and American culture. He was already thinking about Les Temps modernes’ special double summer issue, which he wanted to dedicate to the United States. Sartre, who loved America in so many ways, was also lucid, seeing through the American “founding myths: happiness, progress, realism, optimism, triumphant motherhood, and freedom.”36

  Albert Camus was to follow closely in his friend Sartre’s footsteps and was packing his suitcase for America. Camus was considered the third Existentialist musketeer. He didn’t think he had much in common with his friends’ “modish new philosophy,” as Janet Flanner put it in the New Yorker, but the association certainly did not bother him, at least for the time being. After all, Existentialism mania had feverishly gripped New York’s intellectual and student circles. Newspapers and magazines were full of it, trying to explain it to their readers. It scared many people, though, who deemed it a little too gloomy.

  Richard Wright was not scared; he was impatient, and a year had passed without any news of his passport application. One afternoon in March 1946 he had received a call from Dorothy Norman, columnist for the New Yor
k Post, Alfred Stieglitz’s lover, and the wife of a millionaire. She was throwing a party for Sartre and would love him to come. Wright was excited; though his short story had been published in the first issue of Les Temps modernes, he had never met Sartre in the flesh. The evening was a great success; he warmed to Sartre immediately and, just as important, he met the French cultural attaché Claude Lévi-Strauss, who promised to resolve his passport problems. “Leave it to me,” the anthropologist and diplomat told him. Six weeks later, on April 25, Lévi-Strauss presented him with an official invitation from the French government to come and visit Paris. France would pay for his fare and first month’s expenses.

  Even the U.S. State Department in Washington was taken by Existentialist fever. All these French events, activities, talks, lectures, and articles in the U.S. press got the State Department slightly concerned, or perhaps simply curious. On the morning of January 31, 1946, Frederick B. Lyon, head of the foreign activity correlation division, had written to the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, to inquire about a certain Camus whose newspaper Combat had published inaccurate and unfavorable reports about America.37 Could a preliminary investigation be made? There was no file on Camus yet at the FBI. Washington agents had to resort to reading the press, and more particularly an article written by Hannah Arendt published in the Nation early in February, to get slightly more familiar with Existentialism and Albert Camus. They also learned that both Camus and Sartre had refused the Legion of Honor. Suspicious. On his visa application Wright had asserted that he had never been a Communist sympathizer. This provoked hilarity among his close friends but the FBI took his word for it.