Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  Invitations for talks kept landing on Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s desks at Les Temps modernes. After the success of Sartre’s American tour, the whole world now wanted to hear about Existentialism. Countries would have to take it in turn: lectures and signings in Switzerland, Italy, and Scandinavia were planned for the spring and the summer. New friends from afar were also making their way to Paris.

  In May 1946, Richard Wright, his wife, Ellen, and their daughter, Julia, left New York Harbor on board the SS Brazil, an old cargo boat transformed into a troopship and now a passenger liner. The black American writer felt so impatient to reach the other side of the Atlantic that he had not been able to repress a thought that would have astonished many immigrants. He kept his unusual and shocking sentiment for his diary: “I felt relieved when the ship sailed past the Statue of Liberty.”38 Such was his resentment at America, such was his excitement at discovering a new world. The overnight train ride from Le Havre to Paris on May 9, 1946, proved shocking. Wright could not take his eyes off the forlorn scenery: “There was rubble everywhere.”39 As for the French, they looked poor, thin, and hungry. Wright felt strangely privileged, almost part of an upper class. He felt that to the French he was not black, he was simply rich, well fed, and American.

  At dawn on May 10 the train pulled in at the Gare Saint-Lazare. A fresh breeze welcomed the little family as they stepped onto the platform. Wright had prayed and hoped for a triumphant arrival in the City of Light. His wish would be granted. Being a guest of the French government, he was greeted by an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Also on the platform was Douglas Schneider from the American embassy, with not one but two black limousines waiting outside the station. This was unexpected. In fact, smelling the potential for trouble and aware of its compatriot’s ambivalence toward America, the State Department had asked its embassy people in Paris to ingratiate themselves to the Wrights in as many ways as possible. Limousines at dawn would probably impress. They were right. To complete the welcome committee, a journalist from Combat, Camus’ friend Maurice Nadeau, was there, too, with a question for the celebrated writer: What were his first impressions? A little early for this, replied Wright, laughing it off. In truth, he “felt confused and important and scared.”40 The American diplomat asked Wright if he wanted a brief tour of the city before going to his hotel; it was early and the traffic should be good. One limousine was filled up with suitcases and trunks, the other with Wright and his family. The “Paris by dawn” tour, through the place de la Concorde, along the Champs-Élysées, the riverbanks, Notre Dame, and the Louvre, had its effect. Wright was at a loss for words. All he could repeat was “How beautiful! How absolutely beautiful!” The limousine finally drove up the rue Monsieur le Prince and turned left toward the Hôtel Trianon Palace, 3 rue Vaugirard, overlooking the Sorbonne.

  On Sunday, only two days after his arrival, Wright had been invited to attend the editorial meeting of Les Temps modernes at Sartre’s new home. There could not be a more direct introduction to intellectual life in Paris and its strange mores for an American recently arrived from Brooklyn with only a smattering of French. The Paris sky was cloudy when, from their respective hotel rooms and lovers’ dens, the contributors to the review made their way to the place de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Boris Vian, whom Simone had invited to join the writers’ team, had forgotten his umbrella but had thought of bringing his trumpet: one never knew, it could prove useful. A trumpet could lighten somber moods, ease heated political arguments, reconcile enemies. Simone had stopped at the Café des Deux Magots on the way to buy cigarettes, and she had a bottle of cognac in her bag. Though they were meeting at six, discussions often dragged on for hours. Everybody liked a little pick-me-up, especially after one of Merleau-Ponty’s strenuous and long expositions on phenomenology. Sartre’s mother had baked doughnuts, and the maid, Eugénie, had conspicuously placed a bottle of plum brandy from her beloved Alsace on Sartre’s desk.

  When Wright arrived, the cigarette smoke in the room was already so thick that he had difficulty distinguishing Simone’s turban in the fug. The conversation focused on the special double summer issue dedicated to American society, politics, and literature. Wright not only would help and advise on the content; his own work would also take center stage. Les Temps modernes intended to commission many articles from American journalists and writers rather than just publish French opinions on the United States, one after the other. American voices would in fact be predominant. Sartre asked Dolorès Vanetti in New York to be, in effect, the magazine’s liaison officer in the United States, commissioning writers directly, collating pieces, editing, and translating them. Boris Vian volunteered to write about Negro spirituals, and Simone mentioned serializing Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, a study of race and urban life and a sweeping historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago’s South Side from the 1840s through the 1930s.41 She also wanted to publish extracts from Jazzmen by William Russell and Stephen W. Smith, The Book of American Negro Spirituals by James Weldon Johnson, and Generation of Vipers by Philip Wylie, a biting portrait of the American woman. It was agreed that the art critic Clement Greenberg would be commissioned to write a long piece on American art from 1900 onward.

  Boris Vian had slipped into his trumpet case the manuscript of L’écume des jours,42 which he had just finished typing on his engineering company’s paper. Would he dare give it to Simone after the editorial meeting? In his novel, two characters were philosophers, one called Jean-Sol Partre and the other the Duchesse de Bovouard. The puns and wordplays on Existentialism were aplenty: Sartre’s thick philosophy treatise L’être et le néant was referred to as “Lettre et le néon” [The Letter and the Neon], “a catalog of lighting appliances.” During the editorial meeting at Sartre’s, Vian sometimes fell silent and looked around him: he knew he was out of place. Unlike everybody else, he absolutely and resolutely refused to be serious. He had a taste for the absurd, for paradoxes, contre-vérités, and above all irreverence. He would soon come across, in such a politicized age and milieu, as apolitical and therefore would often be looked down on as just an amuseur, a musician, a dreamer. In fact, Vian was not indifferent to the age he lived in, quite the opposite, but unlike the other people in the room he knew he was living on borrowed time.

  After the meeting, as everyone said good-bye, Vian insisted on walking Simone back to her hotel and summoned up the courage to entrust his manuscript to her. She smiled at him knowingly and promised to read it quickly. Simone was an efficient and fast reader with a very sharp eye.

  Back in her bed in her round room, and not at all fazed by the effects of alcohol, Simone started reading Vian’s novel, a love story of a dying young woman with a water lily in the lung and her adoring and eccentric young husband. She read it in a few hours and was struck by “its great truth and profound tenderness.”43 Beyond the wordplays, the almost self-indulgent use of paradoxes, she saw a fragility, a poetry, and a beauty that would make it a bestseller and a classic, but only ten years after Vian’s death. The young writer, whom very few people could make out during his lifetime apart from Raymond Queneau, Beauvoir, and Sartre, did not live in the present tense. He had his eyes firmly set on posterity. His posthumous success would vindicate him.

  Simone and Sartre greatly enjoyed Vian’s impudence, and they promised to say a kind word to Gallimard and to support his novel. They also gave him a monthly column in Les Temps modernes called “The Liar’s Chronicle” and agreed to publish extracts of L’écume des jours in their October issue. Their decision ruffled a few feathers among their young colleagues, who considered Vian too much of an outsider. He preferred to live on the Right Bank, was an engineer by training, played the trumpet, and mocked the Existentialists in his columns. Still, he had style and talent, the most important things.

  The morning after she read Vian’s novel, Beauvoir walked to the Café de Flore. She still used the café as her mailbox. Richard Wright soon joined her, and together
they worked on the content of the U.S. double issue. Richard Wright had spent only a week in Paris and already the culture shock was making his head spin. Every day he took notes about the practical and not so practical differences. “The knobs were in the centre of the doors! Sandwiches were a rough slab of meat flanked by two oblong chunks of bread. Hot milk was used in coffee instead of cream. The women were beautiful and unashamed of being women. There was an openness in France, an intensity too.”44 Wright took to walking the streets at night; he loved their serpentine narrowness, and the yellow lamppost lighting transformed the city into a mysterious theater set. He had also been busy researching figures and data. He learned that there were twenty thousand black people in the country, mostly from the West Indies and Africa but also including five hundred black Americans, ex-GIs, studying under the GI Bill of Rights in Paris. The thing that most surprised him was that he did not feel black in Paris: he felt simply American, and just that, for the first time in his life.

  Wright was bewildered, though, to see how modestly and uncomfortably Parisians lived. Hotels, in which he realized many people dwelled for lack of available housing, were decrepit, to say the least, and the bathroom and toilet on the landing had to be shared. He had no idea what Parisians had lived through. In fact things were not that bad, as Janet Flanner told her New Yorker readers at the end of May 1946: “Shop windows are no more shabby but now excellently dressed. In other words, Paris is now like an old woman with some natural color flushing her cheeks.”45 Transport was improving hugely too. You no longer needed to be pregnant or ill to get a taxi or to apply for the right to do so at the nearest police station. There were now five thousand taxis in Paris. Twenty-seven more of the closed métro stations had just been reopened, which saved hours of walking. There were downsides, though: “Some of the antique green autobuses have lumbered back on the job, all with new routes and numbers, thus mixing confusion with satisfaction.”46

  Constantly in demand, Richard Wright was giving talks and endless interviews. An American official from the U.S. embassy had half-jokingly warned him: “Do not let these foreigners make you into a brick to hurl at our windows!”47 What might he say about racism in the United States? The embassy was concerned and scrutinized every interview he gave the French press, like the Communist Samedi Soir’s long piece in which Wright merely offered his first impressions of France. Wright knew he was being watched; he was careful.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LUST AND EMANCIPATION

  “Was it the weight of war on my too young shoulders?” Claude Lanzmann asked in his memoirs. “Was it the precarious equilibrium of those years between life and death? This new freedom of mine meant that I needed to prove my own existence with sometimes gratuitous acts.”1 The experience of war and the feeling of having cheated death for four years were key to postwar Paris intellectuals’ and artists’ unquenchable thirst for freedom in every aspect of their lives. Whether born into the working class or the bourgeoisie, they wanted little to do with their caste’s traditions and conventions or with propriety. Family was an institution to be banished, children a plague to avoid at all costs. However, these were the hardest notions to do away with, and while Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir managed to stick to their initial plan of “no marriage, no children,” or simply “no children” for Arthur Koestler, for the sake of art and life experimentation, others, usually men, decided to carry on the hypocrisy of their elders by marrying and then enjoying a secret and very free other life on the side. It did not make them particularly happy, though, and men like Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who chose trompe l’oeil existences crushed many lives around them.

  Strong and remarkable women were also hungry for freedom in all its forms. Simone de Beauvoir and Janet Flanner, Édith Thomas and Dominique Aury, were among the many women who called men’s bluff and decided that they, too, would live according to their desires and ambitions without any restraints. Financially independent, intelligent, bold, curious about life’s pleasures and sensations, not afraid of the danger of repeated illegal abortions, those feminist pioneers offered a model of emancipation for many generations to come. Heterosexuals, homosexuals, or bisexuals, on the subject of sex they had “a Greek amoral point of view.”2 Juliette Gréco, Françoise Sagan, and Brigitte Bardot were all the little sisters of Simone de Beauvoir.

  “FAMILY, I HATE YOU”

  Camus was missing Maria Casarès enormously. When she had heard a few months earlier that Francine Camus was pregnant, she had broken up with him. Camus had always told Maria that Francine was no more and no less than “a sister” to him, but the idea of a pregnant sister understandably irritated the young woman. Maria was twenty-two, she had plenty of male admirers, and the success of Les enfants du paradis had made her a star. Why should she let Camus spoil the fun? She would break a few new hearts while he changed diapers. Camus tried to forget Maria and buried himself in his work. He went to the rehearsals of his latest play, Caligula, every day at the Théâtre Hébertot. The leading role had been given to a young and very handsome unknown actor; his name was Gérard Philipe and he was going to be Caligula, the tyrannical Roman emperor who transcended good and evil in search of his own absolute freedom. For Camus, Caligula told the story of the most human and tragic of mistakes: to think that one’s own freedom can be exerted at the expense of everybody else’s.

  On September 5, 1945, Francine gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean, while Camus was at rehearsal. Camus was elated at first but the feeling did not last long. His mother-in-law and sister-in-law had arrived from Algiers to help Francine with the babies, but he did not feel at ease in his new role. What he resented most was the lack of time for his work and the silent demands made on him by his wife. He now started to understand and greatly envy Beauvoir and Sartre’s pact: no children, ever, together or with anybody else. Arthur Koestler had told his English girlfriend, Mamaine Paget: marriage, yes, children, no.3 Mamaine had accepted, even if reluctantly. Perhaps Francine would have accepted it too? Without the burden of children, Beauvoir and Sartre could lead very rich and productive lives. They worked hard, they played hard, they had an iron discipline, writing fourteen hours a day, going out every evening, cultivating a large family of loyal friends and lovers, living in hotel rooms with no issues of domesticity, and spending every penny they earned—was not this the only, and truly revolutionary, way for a writer to live? Camus deeply admired them for it, and profoundly resented his own situation.

  There was no turning back, though: the children had been born, he was a father and a husband, he could not rewrite the story. He would simply have to cheat and lie the way the bourgeois had always done. He wasn’t proud of the thought, but it was a question of personal survival. He had work to do, things to say, battles to fight, an oeuvre to produce, and that was more important than everything, absolutely everything, and everyone, else. He had begun writing a novel that he wanted to call La peste (The Plague), but there was no time to finish it. He dreamed of a hotel room where he could write, where he could be alone, where there would be no in-laws, no babies screaming, no smell of vomit and diapers. And in the evening, Camus wanted to dance again. He loved dancing, just as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty did.

  Camus took every opportunity to leave home. His twins had just been born when he accepted his American publisher Alfred A. Knopf’s invitation to tour the United States to coincide with the U.S. release of The Outsider. Sartre’s enthusiasm for America had piqued Camus’ curiosity. In New York, Camus, more puzzled than fascinated by American culture, was looking for a key into this new world. The key would be named Patricia. Five days after the publication of The Outsider to glowing reviews,4 the thirty-three-year-old Albert Camus met the twenty-year-old Patricia Blake. Like Dolorès for Sartre, Patricia was going to give America to Camus. Patricia was one of those “long-legged [American] dames”5 Camus admired. But she was also more than that.

  The daughter of a doctor, a pianist in her spare time, Patricia had just graduated fr
om Smith College. She had read Lenin and Marx, was attracted to Communism, and loved Proust. She was pretty, fair-haired with blue eyes, and earned thirty-five dollars a week as a copy editor at Vogue magazine. The day after their first encounter they were lovers, and soon Patricia’s girlfriends at Vogue were calling Camus “the young Humphrey Bogart.” Patricia was in love, Albert was smitten. He lived in a Central Park West duplex flat lent to him by an admirer. Patricia would visit almost every day and they would often go out to dinner in Chinatown, which fascinated him. After dinner, they often ended up in a nightclub. Camus loved dancing; it was his way to cheat death. He had put on weight, looked ill, and was coughing up blood; the truth was he thought he would not make it back home. Patricia mistook his intensity for passion. In fact, despite his feelings for Patricia, he longed to go back to the many flaws of Paris and Europe, to a place where people did not just “pretend to live,” a place where “conversations were full of wit, even bad, full of irony, of passion and its string of lies.”6

  Like Sartre, Camus did not forget to bring back new world riches to the old world, and the last few days were frantic with buying everything that Parisians lacked or that was so scarce it cost a small fortune. He came back with a crate of sugar, coffee, powdered eggs, rice, chocolate, flour, baby foods, canned meat, soap, and detergent weighing two hundred pounds. As soon as he reached Paris, however, he thought about exporting back to New York another kind of nourishment: he bought a subscription to Les Temps modernes for Patricia. An ocean might have come between them but the conversation would go on as brightly as it had in “Black Harlem, Jewish Brooklyn and vulgar Cony Island.”7 Back home, relations with Francine were cold, to say the least. She was silently resentful; he was silently offended and angry. He had been happy with Patricia, and the only way to remain happy was to write. La peste was awaiting.