For such a rigorous mind, one that had always cherished doubt and rejected certainties, Édith proved particularly unrestrained, perhaps even naive, in her passion for Dominique. “I’m not going out tonight to meet Stephen Spender, I just want to keep feeling your kisses on my skin. Could this time be love, my love?”27 Édith sometimes wrote several times a day to Dominique: “I only want you, Dominique, you, alone in the desert, a desert made of sand and white bones, just for you. I don’t understand a thing about love if it’s not whole and absolute. My destiny is to love a human being the way I love you, so that there is only one being inside me, filling me up.”28 For months to come, Édith and Dominique would share a passion that would transport Édith to a state of delirious ecstasy. Did she know it could not last? Dominique may have left her mysterious male lover for Édith but she was a born huntress, and after passion subsided she always chased other prey. If her torrid affair with Arthur Koestler, whose collection of articles The Yogi and the Commissar she was translating into French, was going to be short-lived, her relationship with Jean Paulhan, which had been slow-burning for months, would eventually overshadow her feelings for Édith. Édith sensed it and feared it.
SARTRE AND BEAUVOIR: ROLE MODELS
The young Anne-Marie Cazalis might have been presented with the Valéry award for best newcomer in poetry at the age of twenty-three, but what she wanted most in life was not to become the next Paul Valéry. She wanted to be Simone de Beauvoir, to live in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and work as a journalist. Like many people her age, she had read L’invitée (She Came to Stay) in 1943. The story, fictionalized but still recognizable, of Beauvoir and Sartre’s ménage à trois with their former student Olga Kosakiewicz had electrified a whole generation. And Cazalis had fallen under the spell. “I had never thought one could live so freely. Simone had earned the right to live like this, and thanks to her, this freedom was given to my generation, like a gift.”29 Cazalis started writing bits and pieces for France Dimanche, nothing important or even very interesting, but it was a start and it meant she was often outside, roaming the streets looking for stories and people to interview.
One day, while walking down the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, she noticed a curvy young brunette. The teenager was wearing a black turtleneck and jodhpurs, and her eyelids were lined with heavy black kohl. She was beautiful, she ate gherkin and mustard sandwiches, and, Cazalis later learned, despite her attire, she never rode horses.30 Her name was Juliette Gréco. The two young women soon became inseparable friends. In the evening they often met at the Méphisto, a bar that stayed open until one in the morning and had a secret basement where only the lucky few were admitted. Cazalis had heard that Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, and the journalists from Combat used it as one of their headquarters. One had to press the bell for a long time, and Cazalis and Gréco were not always let in. When unlucky, they spent their evenings at Jacques Prévert’s local, Le Bar Vert, 10 rue Jacob. The girls particularly relished the graffiti in the phone booth. One read: “When you hear ‘Allo?’ doesn’t it make you think of the Seine?”31
* * *
In October 1945, Claude Lanzmann had just been accepted to Louis-le-Grand’s Hypokhâgne preparatory class. The twenty-year-old had spent the last five years in the town of Clermont-Ferrand and the Auvergne region risking his life as a French résistant. He also happened to be Jewish, not that it actually meant much to him until 1941 and Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws. Lanzmann and his friend Jean Cau were among the most gifted students of their class. Both men had an equal passion for literature and women but little appetite for studying, and they soon came up with a grand scheme. Jean Cau was convinced that in order to become a writer, one needed to start by being the private secretary of a celebrated author. “For him, it was a Balzacian rite of passage.”32 One afternoon, Lanzmann found his friend bent over a desk in the Lycée’s library with an ardent gaze. He was writing, or rather composing, a dozen letters, to among others Malraux, Aragon, Sartre, Gide, Mauriac, and Paulhan. Days, weeks passed. Finally, one morning, the Lycée’s supervisor gave Cau a letter. It was the only reply he would get from all the luminaries he had contacted. It was from Sartre. Lanzmann and Cau carefully opened and read the letter with moist hands. Sartre was inviting Cau to meet him any day of the week he liked at the Flore, between two and three o’clock in the afternoon.
They met; Sartre liked the young man, and his first secretariat was organized from the Lycée’s library. In truth, neither Cau nor Sartre had any idea what “secretariat” really meant and how it could help the philosopher. “Cau invented the method and its purpose, forcing Sartre, little by little, to put some order in his diary and finances”33—in other words, in his life. Sartre was known for spending his money freely. Insisting on being paid cash for his work, he liked carrying huge wads of banknotes and always paid at restaurants and cafés, never letting anyone else foot the bill, and left huge tips for the waiters. His generosity was astounding and attracted many friends in temporary or chronic financial difficulty. Sartre would discreetly pay for former students’ abortions, cover the rent of his past and present lovers, make loans to impoverished writers—the people indebted to him were legion. In fact, Sartre had no desire to own anything and, true to his word, never would. Cau quickly realized that his main activity would be to free Sartre from his increasingly busy social life and from all the profiteurs so that he could have long stretches of time during the day to concentrate on his writing. Cau abandoned his studies, found a small room in a dingy hotel on the rue des Écoles right next to the Sorbonne in the 5th arrondissement, and moved a little desk into Sartre’s flat where, every day from ten in the morning until one in the afternoon, he answered the phone, replied to the mail, and managed Sartre’s diary. Sartre’s life became very organized. At one thirty he left to have lunch at Lipp, or the Flore, returning at four thirty. Simone would then turn up around five and write on her little bridge table with its green cloth and they would work side by side until at least eight o’clock, even nine, then go and have dinner. Sometimes, to loosen his fingers and relax, Sartre took to the piano and practiced a Beethoven sonata or a Bach prelude. They drank tea through the afternoon from their respective thermos flasks, an old habit from their hotel days, and smoked like chimneys, Sartre his pipe, Beauvoir her cigarettes.34 Meanwhile, Jean Cau was waiting for an opportunity to introduce the pair to his friend Claude Lanzmann. Lanzmann would later make a great impression on the philosophers, particularly on Simone.
Sartre and Beauvoir fascinated young people like Hollywood stars; they had a special aura. It was not, however, a one-way relationship. Sartre and Beauvoir constantly learned from the young. It was an enriching exchange for all involved. Boris Vian, who was educating both Sartre and Beauvoir in jazz, often took them to the latest jazz clubs, like the one that had just opened in the shadow of the Pantheon, Le Caveau des Lorientais, in the basement of a hotel35 at 5 rue des Carmes in the 5th arrondissement. The owners of this modest hotel, a Breton couple named Pérodo, thought it a good idea to ask their many regular jazz musician guests to play for the young people of the Latin Quarter every evening from five to seven. The basement was badly ventilated, but for two hours nobody should suffocate: they would leave the doors open and the youngsters would simply feel a little hot. To be granted the prefecture’s authorization, the Pérodos had argued that all profits from the jazz club would be given to the badly damaged town of Lorient, which had been almost razed by Allied bombing during the liberation. The Pérodos offered the cheapest entrance fee on the entire Left Bank;36 they set out to attract the young, and so they did.
The opening of the club did not go unnoticed. Juliette Gréco and Anne-Marie Cazalis soon made it a daily routine to meet in the rue des Carmes at five o’clock each afternoon. “For five francs, one could get in and have a glass of orangeade with saccharin! At a time when we were all penniless.”37 They also secretly hoped to bump into Beauvoir and Sartre. The twenty-two-year-old French clarinetist Claude Luter—a blue-eyed,
fair-haired young man six feet tall with a penchant for reading Tarzan comic books—was another attraction. Starry-eyed young girls rushed to the “Lorientais,” as Claude Luter and his musician friends were soon nicknamed, as much for their athletic allure as for their music. The black American trombone player Tyree Glen, visiting Paris, noticed Luter during an afternoon session and went to talk to him. He was surprised that such a young man should adopt the New Orleans style. They spent the night talking about New Orleans jazz and Sidney Bechet, whom Luter and his Parisian friends would resurrect from oblivion in just a couple of years and put back on the international stage.
Claude Luter was as broke as his adoring fans. Sometimes he had to take his clarinet to the pawnshop and wait a few days to receive payment for his various gigs in order to get his instrument back and return to performing. Neither he nor Juliette Gréco nor Anne-Marie Cazalis could afford decent meals. They lived off coffee and tartines at the Café de Flore until five in the afternoon, when they’d get their orangeade at the jazz club. Juliette Gréco had moved to the Hôtel Bisson, 53 ter Quai des Grands Augustins, next to Michel Leiris. Unlike the art critic’s, her tiny room of a home had no grand views over the Seine, just a little window giving onto a dark and filthy courtyard.
WOMEN’S EMANCIPATION
It was la rentrée in Paris, the period in early September when Parisians come back rested and suntanned from their provincial family homes, children count their pencils and wipe the dust from their satchels, and reviewers sharpen their wits for the new season of novels, films, and plays. La rentrée was always a time for new projects, and Simone had one. Just before their summer holidays, Sartre had suggested to her a possible topic for an essay: women’s condition—in other words, what it meant to be a woman. Simone liked the idea and would draw on her experiences. She was no longer a debutante; at thirty-eight, she could take more risks in both subject and form.
At first, she thought the task would be easy and that this study would be almost like an exercise in style; she envisaged a very short essay. Simone had been brought up by her father, who had hoped for a boy. Seeing her intellectual and academic abilities, he had pushed her, so her experience was different from that of many other women. “I had never had any feeling of inferiority, no one had ever said to me, ‘You think that way because you are a woman’; the fact that I was a woman, my femaleness, had never bothered me in any way. ‘In my case,’ I said to Sartre, ‘it hasn’t really mattered.’” Sartre urged her to reconsider: “But still, you weren’t brought up in the same way as a boy: you should take a closer look.”38 She did. Every morning she went to the National Library on the rue de Richelieu.
There, on the beautiful but hard wooden benches of the oval room, bathed in the warm September sun filtering through the glass skylight, Simone had an epiphany. “It was a revelation. This world was a masculine world, my childhood was nourished by myths concocted by men, and I hadn’t reacted to them in the same way I would have done if I had been a boy. I became so interested that I gave up the project of a personal confession in order to focus on the condition of woman.”39 This was not going to be a short and quick essay. She had started researching The Second Sex, a book that would shake the world.
Simone had so far lived her life as she pleased by breaking social conventions, so researching this subject was also a journey of self-discovery. She would understand in the process why she fascinated younger women. Her life was a model of emancipation, one that the younger generation aspired to and one that she was going to analyze in great detail, not shying away from sexually explicit content.
* * *
At exactly the same moment, Édith Thomas was working on historical biographies of remarkable women through the ages. Her two latest novels,40 which had finally been published at the end of 1945, had encouraged her to pursue this direction.
Having published seven novels since the age of twenty-two without ever enjoying real success, she thought changing literary genres, from fiction to nonfiction, might prove liberating. After all, she had just been appointed chief curator at the Archives Nationales with access to a vast wealth of historical documents and material.
She interested two publishers, one in a portrait of Joan of Arc,41 another in a collection of profiles of feminist pioneers from the Second Republic of 1848.42
Dominique was now working as a feature writer and critic for L’Arche, a literary magazine. She wanted to help Édith in every way she could. She saw in Édith a champion of women’s rights or, as it was called then, la condition féminine. “All the heroines in Édith Thomas’s novels refuse, at their own peril, the ordinary condition of women. They refuse to live for and through somebody else. They want to be autonomous.”43 Bolstered by Dominique’s support, Édith embarked on those new editorial projects, while finishing a collection of short stories she would call Ève et les autres. There was an overall theme in these short stories: women reclaimed their independence from their husbands and from God, and asserted their ambition to be free and to fulfill all their desires in life.
Thomas was an excitable and feverish writer and often got carried away by ideology. Simone de Beauvoir’s brilliance lay, on the contrary, in a rigorous intellectual approach combined with a cool and superbly concise style. And while posterity chose to remember only one of them, it is striking that both women, of similar age, were coming to grips with the same existential dilemmas at the same time just a few streets away from each other: how to be free and a woman, how to be independent and autonomous in a man’s world.
Many women around Simone had not mustered the courage to break free. This was the overwhelming norm in the middle class. Simone only had to look at the thirty-year-old English rose Mamaine Paget, Arthur Koestler’s partner and wife-to-be. Orphaned at a young age, along with her twin sister Celia, she had been educated at exclusive English and French boarding schools paid for by relatively well-off cousins. Intelligent, polyglot, cultured, pretty, and feminine, the sisters had turned heads in their late teens at the chic opera soirées of Glyndebourne, in the south of England. However, all they could apparently aspire to was to become socialites or “wives of.” The alternative, to break away from their milieu, would have required an incredible determination, a steely character, and even a certain degree of madness. Mamaine did not have this in her. She was soft in a good way, sensitive, caring, a little mischievous certainly, but not rebellious. Mamaine was everything Simone de Beauvoir and Édith Thomas had refused to be and had fought hard not to be. Mamaine, like Francine Camus, was going to be a wife whose talents would lie in fostering her husband’s career without ever getting the credit for it. This imbalance, this injustice, and the hypocrisy surrounding it would both poison their marital and family lives and ruin their health.
Mamaine had been the secret behind her husband’s success since she met him at a party given by Cyril Connolly in his London flat in Bedford Square in January 1944. This became especially true once he decided to write and publish in English. Mamaine was Koestler’s translator, editor, and copy editor, and the one he constantly bullied and occasionally made love to, though not exclusively. It was the second time he had switched languages. As a student he had gone from Hungarian to German, and he had now decided to leave German aside. He also had a history of relying heavily on the women in his life to translate, research, type, and edit his work. His current success, Darkness at Noon, had been written in German on the eve of the war and translated into English by his then British girlfriend, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, who had passed the manuscript on to Macmillan in London.
There were some advantages for the women who ran Koestler’s work and life. Through Koestler, Mamaine lived a scintillating life and met the greatest intellectuals and writers of her time, who often fell for her, and very occasionally she for them. On February 15, 1946, she wrote a postcard to her sister Celia from the dining car of a train leaving Lausanne in Switzerland: “Dear Twinny, yesterday I lunched with [Tristan] Tzara,44 who asked me to go to Vienna wi
th him as a guest of the [Russian] government; he’s a Stalinist of the deepest dye.”45
The couple also regularly entertained renowned guests: the recently widowed George Orwell had come to spend Christmas with his eighteen-month-old son, Richard, and had rather embarrassingly asked Mamaine’s sister Celia to marry him (desperately, Orwell had asked a string of young women to marry him). There was also the “extraordinarily witty and charming” philosopher Bertrand Russell and his third wife; after one too many drinks, Russell had issued fantastic predictions. “Russell said that as the Catholic population of America was increasing by leaps and bounds the United States would one day be Catholic-controlled, and we should then be faced with a new choice: Stalin or the Pope.”46
Mamaine had agreed to move in with Koestler a year earlier and to live in Wales at Bwlch Ocyn. Arthur did not like London and somehow the Welsh hills reminded him of Austria. He had promised marriage, a promise he took seven years to deliver, perhaps because of his refusal to have children, which she had eventually and reluctantly accepted. Their daily life could be austere. Having to do all the domestic chores, occasionally helped by a “moronic servant,” Mamaine also did all Koestler’s secretarial work.47
For the younger generation just after Mamaine’s, who were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s and who were children during the war, autonomy was much more desirable than domestic life and worth taking risks for. It might have been the air of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the return of real and strong coffee to their cups, or their adoration for Simone de Beauvoir, but Juliette Gréco and her friend Anne-Marie Cazalis were not going to be anyone’s submissive other halves. It was not only a question of working and earning one’s living but also, as Édith Thomas had said about her heroines, one of self-reliance and not feeling dependent on anyone else in order to feel whole. Those younger women also firmly intended to enjoy a very free sex life, just like Dominique Aury and Simone de Beauvoir. Gréco and Cazalis found Combat’s young and not so young journalists, who spent their nights at the Méphisto bar on the boulevard Saint-Germain, very attractive. “Between two jives, they disappeared from Paris for a few days, traveling to the Black Forest to go and interview Martin Heidegger. The German philosopher would puff on his porcelain pipe and declare: ‘the atomic bomb is the logical consequence of Descartes’ and would then dismiss his French visitors.”48 Despite their admiration, Gréco and Cazalis were not going to throw themselves at these journalists. They were, in fact, gamines fatales. They decided to take men as seriously as men usually took them.
Left Bank Page 17