Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  One evening in February 1946, the thirty-eight-year-old phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was also a terrific dancer in his spare time, noticed a raven-haired teenager with doe eyes at the Méphisto. He approached her. Her silence and seeming indifference intrigued him greatly. The married Merleau-Ponty had just fallen for Juliette Gréco, aged nineteen. She was not entirely insensitive to his charm, though, and the Creole black pudding they served at the Méphisto helped.49 She was very hungry in those days, with very little money to live on, but was too proud to tell anyone. She felt instant sympathy for people who shared their dinner with her. Merleau-Ponty was also a professor of philosophy, and in her book that was the closest one could get to God—that is, if God existed. The day after her first encounter with him she bought the February issue of Les Temps modernes; she had heard he had a long opening essay in it titled “Faith and Bad Faith.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A THIRD WAY

  WANTED: NEW BLOOD FOR A NEW POLITICS

  It was a time to take a position, as Les Temps modernes had stated in its inaugural issue. French women had cast their vote for the first time in the first national election since before the war in October 1945, and Albert Camus had called for readers of Combat to vote for the non-Communist socialists for want of a better choice. He admired Charles de Gaulle but was wary of a general’s meddling with politics in time of peace. He supported many of de Gaulle’s choices and policies but could not resolve to trust the party behind him. Camus wished, in fact, to find a new path, midway between the reformist nationalism of de Gaulle and the Communist Party’s internationalism. He dreamt of a humanist socialism, of new blood in politics, a fresh, harsh, and pure new elite coming from the Resistance to rule over an old country. He dreamt of social justice and of individual freedoms. Many in France shared the same dream; unfortunately, no party represented their aspirations. The non-Communist socialists were too divided, exhausted, and compromised a party to represent this new democratic élan.1 So Camus advocated a complete renewal of the political class at the helm of the country; he deeply disliked the old generation of politicians, even the courageous ones like Léon Blum who had been persecuted by the Vichy government. He called the old guard of politicians “coeurs tièdes” (“lukewarm hearts”).2 The younger one was, the purer and less compromised. Camus wanted a virile and virtuous République. Beauvoir and Sartre agreed with him.

  However, this political independence not only was challenging to define beyond “neither Communist nor nationalist,” it was also difficult to achieve. The idea was not that new. It had reemerged in Europe in the 1920s and more recently, in 1938, an obscure British politician and future prime minister named Harold Macmillan had even theorized his own version in a book titled The Middle Way. Stuck between a rock, the Gaullists, and a hard place, the Communist Party, the Third Way, as desired by free-spirited Left Bankers such as Camus, was in fact brave and even revolutionary in a country that was traditionally so polarized. The challenge was to consider social democracy as the only desirable and possible revolution. Its powerful detractors, on both sides of the political divide, accused Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus of being empty, nihilistic even. The Communists branded them traitors, attacked them for having abandoned the ideals of the Left, and for promoting a soft-faced capitalism. And the Gaullists hated them for betraying the enlightened bourgeoisie and playing into the hands of the Soviet army. For Camus, those criticisms did not stand up. He was not promoting a tired compromise between left and right, socialism and capitalism, but a complete renewal of social democracy. Camus considered himself a Dur (tough), not a Mou (soft), and to resist the pressure and comfort of belonging to either camp, while fighting off their constant ferocious attacks in the press, demonstrated real fortitude. In fact, looking at the first free elections’ results since before the war, Camus had reason to be quietly optimistic. It seemed as if the French electorate was split equally. This meant paralysis, to start with, but for Camus it also showed there was room for a third force to expand. Camus, Beauvoir, Sartre, and their friends would from now on dedicate themselves, body and soul, to enabling that alternative force to rise.

  The world, and especially London and Washington, had also waited with a keen interest for the election results, or “with unusually flattering attention,” as Janet Flanner put it. What did France choose? It first decided, overwhelmingly, to kill the Third Republic and its 1875 constitution and to create a Fourth Republic. And whom did the French choose to write their new Republic’s constitution: the Socialists, the Communists, or the Gaullists? The Socialists, an eclectic mix of worn-out and fresh politicians who spent more time bickering than agreeing among themselves, wanted, on the whole, a radical change, but not a revolution. The Communists, powerful, respected for their role in the Resistance, and disciplined, wanted a revolution, and the nationalization of credit, in other words, the end of the Banque de France. The Gaullists, or the rightist Popular Republicans, wanted a more modest change. French voters chose the three of them almost equally. As Janet Flanner put it to her New Yorker readers: “France’s Fourth Republic is starting out like a woman with three hands, two Left and one Right, the Communists and the Socialists being on the side closer to her newly reawakened revolutionary heart and the Popular Republicans on her other, purse-carrying side.”3 In other words, what France now had was a National Assembly incapable of agreeing on the nature of the country’s future institutions, and a head of government, General de Gaulle, increasingly frustrated by party politics.

  Nevertheless, three months later, on January 20, 1946, the news of Charles de Gaulle’s resignation came as a shock to everyone, even for his opponents. It was clear that the Gaullists, favoring a Fourth Republic with two chambers and an executive power led by a president, would never be able to agree on future institutions with the Communists and the Socialists who wanted one chamber with all the powers and no president. Disillusioned by party politics, France’s savior retired, leaving “French morale in a state of empty gloom.”4 Yet perhaps, as Sartre thought, this was in fact a great service the general was doing his country. With de Gaulle off the scene, France could perhaps move on and try to go forward. Except that a quiet malaise, made up of the disillusion that had set in since the high hopes of the Liberation in the summer of 1944, was gnawing at people. The ambitions and spirit of the Resistance were losing ground. With de Gaulle gone, who would contain the rise of the Communist Party, which since the election had become France’s first party by a small margin?5 De Gaulle’s party vowed of course to continue his oeuvre and to keep defending his ideas even with him gone; however, Washington was especially concerned.

  THE RISE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN THE ARTS WORLD

  The Communist Party not only was France’s first political party, it had also a kind of spiritual power over the youth and the intelligentsia. It was a conscience, and a magnet. Many argued it was like a church, albeit an atheistic one, and a church that controlled its image. It had perfected the arts of propaganda and was successfully courting renowned public figures to bolster its image. Great artists of international fame had joined ranks and become fully fledged party members. Picasso’s decision to join in October 1944 had a considerable impact in France and abroad.

  A year later, his fellow painter Fernand Léger’s decision to join had a similar impact. The sixty-five-year-old mustachioed painter and master modernist had sailed on a liner from New York to Le Havre at the end of 1945, wondering how he would find the French capital after his six-year absence.6 He had taught at Yale University during his American exile and had decided to keep on teaching art students, but this time in his own personal university, in the studio he had managed to keep through the war at 86 rue Notre Dame des Champs in the 6th arrondissement, a hundred yards from the Luxembourg Gardens’ giant sequoias he so loved. Two hundred fifty ex-GIs on the GI Bill of Rights program, which allowed them to study abroad and receive a monthly stipend, quickly enrolled to be his students.7 They were eagerly awaiting the
return of the Tubist in chief, as he had once been called by the Parisian art critic Louis Vauxcelles.

  Had Léger felt he needed to join the Communist Party to compensate for his absence during the war? Was it a case of bad conscience, or true conviction, or perhaps both? Just as it had with Picasso, the Party used the news to maximum effect; it reverberated widely, making headlines worldwide. Here was yet another famous artist bestowing some of his genius and talent upon the Communist cause. In truth, both Picasso and Léger were greater than the Communist Party, and each was to remain very much his own man, but their joining nevertheless had an impact on other artists, young people, and public opinion at large.

  The Party was intent on invading every nook and cranny of public life, and the art world was at the forefront of its battle of ideas. The idea of Communist art (and Communist artists) as the only morally acceptable kind was gaining some ground within a small clique of Communist leaders in both Paris and Moscow. The party clearly intended to take advantage of the commotion of the immediate postwar art world to start occupying the ground.

  In 1946, “the art world was caught in powerful cross-currents: Individual vs. Community, Pessimism vs. Optimism, Disillusion vs. Engagement, Abstraction vs. Figuration, Insurrection vs. Conservatism, Colour vs. Monochrome, Canvas vs. Mural, Instinct vs. Reflection, Body vs. Mind, Archaism vs. Modernity, Realism vs. Unrealism.”8 If Communists and the Left in general took center stage in the arts world, the public conversation about the arts was still, however, a fluid one in which politics did not loom too heavily. “War had touched everyone without exception and divergences in art were based on one’s conception of the individual’s place in the world, rather than on one style vs. another.”9 Everybody seemed to agree that culture and the arts had to play a major role in rebuilding a free world on new foundations. The résistants had written a manifesto in 1944 in which access to culture was proclaimed as a fundamental human right, and this still enjoyed a broad consensus.

  The French poet Louis Aragon, the Communist Party’s supremo of all things artistic, and of propaganda, liked docile artists. Léger and Picasso, too flamboyant and too independent, could never be told what to say, think, or paint. Aragon was thinking of grooming morally irreproachable young artists for the promotion of the Communist cause. Two of them in particular, the painters André Fougeron and Boris Taslitzky, had perfect credentials: they were both former résistants, and Taslitzky had been imprisoned at Buchenwald. Aragon was playing with the idea of welding aesthetics with morality, and he needed malleable artists to shape it. He had even started, very discreetly, putting his idea into practice through the curation of new arts exhibitions in Paris, as a way of testing the water.

  Simone de Beauvoir had made a note not to miss the opening of the Musée d’Art Moderne’s new exhibition on February 15, 1946. Called “Art et Résistance,” it opened in Paris before touring the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain. The visit left a strange aftertaste. Instead of art produced during the war, it displayed a disparate selection of artworks especially commissioned for the show, and shockingly it completely overlooked Abstract art. Aragon and the Communist Party were, in fact, behind this. How could you show the ties between art and the Resistance after the fact! Mad and dishonest, thought Beauvoir. Picasso, Bonnard, and Matisse, who had been amicably nudged to do so, were officially supporting the exhibition. With such patronage, Parisians had flocked to see it. How could Matisse endorse such a travesty, Beauvoir wondered? Had it simply been a case of being nice to people who had asked nicely? Or, like his friend Picasso, had the seventy-six-year-old maestro had other things on his mind? In 1946, Matisse’s oeuvre was mutating. He seemed to be breaking away from everything he had done before. Attracted by much bigger spaces, by light, his work gave out a primitive joie de vivre. His paper cutouts, serigraphies, and tapestries all celebrated a golden age, turquoise-blue sky and indigo-blue sea, birds, and light. “He shared with his times a taste for the transcendental.”10 Both the Catholic Church and the Communist Party were trying hard to capture this new artistic effervescence, which could be defined as a quest for a new transcendence, a new spirituality.

  The Catholic Church had not exactly shone during the war, and here was an opportunity to renew its image. Unlike the Communists, the Church was not looking to impose a new aesthetic, but it wanted to embrace modernity and be seen as relevant to the times. A Dominican Father in particular, Pierre Couturier, had spent his life questioning the Church’s artistic choices and advocated a revolution of mentalities, no less. “Believing the Church should open its doors to non-believer or non-Christian artists, and that creation itself was an act of faith,”11 he commissioned art from Bonnard, Léger, Braque, Matisse, and two Russian and Jewish artists, Lipchitz and Chagall, for the redecoration of the church at Assy, near Chamonix. A few months later, Abbot Morel had also organized an exhibition of “Sacred Art” at Galérie René Drouin and had chosen to exhibit modern artists without any ties to Christian circles: Bonnard, Rouault, and Braque.

  The Catholic Church was embracing abstract art with surprising honesty and real curiosity at a time when the Communist Party was rejecting it, trying instead to debase art with ideology and morality, which didn’t go unnoticed. These developments were frequently reported on, and in great detail.

  Denise René’s art gallery and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles set up in 1946 were the epicenters of abstract art in Paris. There, debates, schisms, and confrontations were taking place almost daily. René was not afraid of controversies and polemics: from a family of résistants, she had sheltered the first clandestine meeting of the CNR (Comité National de la Résistance) in 1943 in the basement of 124 rue de la Boétie in the 8th arrondissement. As they always were these days, Les Durs (the tough) were at war with Les Mous (the soft). Aragon was lying in wait. In fact, abstract art was divided within itself and also had to withstand continuous attacks from the omnipotent Communist press. Paris art galleries and newspapers’ arts pages had become the scenes of critical carnage.

  The artists who could spar with the Communists, and call their bluff, were the Surrealists. They belonged to the older generation who, even though in their fifties, still had vigor. They were not, however, above reproach. Parisians hadn’t forgotten the many Surrealists who had gone into exile in New York during the war. And if some of them denounced the nature of Stalinism, many also chose to remain in the United States. Roberto Matta, Victor Brauner, Francis Picabia, André Masson, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, and Max Ernst either stayed in America or became American citizens.

  The artistic and cultural effervescence and battle of ideas seething in Paris was watched and followed closely by foreign observers. In London, Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, had translated and published Les Temps modernes’ manifesto, written by Sartre, and made it his own and his generation’s. A few months later, a Horizon special issue about France came out, introducing Left Bank thinkers, some for the first time in translation, to an English readership. For the people at Horizon, “France stood for civilisation itself.” Connolly had made no bones about the “lassitude, brain fatigue, apathy and humdrummery of English writers” and artists. Paris by contrast “blazed with intellectual vitality and confidence. Its writers, galvanized by four humiliating years of occupation, now stood ready to ignite the torch that would light the way to freedom, choice and rational reform.”12It was true that London had withdrawn from intellectual debates and its intelligentsia were happy to leave Paris the honor of holding the torch. Philip Toynbee tried to explain the feeling among the British intelligentsia in his dispatches from London in Les Temps modernes: “We do not have any philosophy. These days, our lack of fanaticism is the evidence of our apathy.”13 A few months later, Toynbee added: “Things have come to a point where France and Flaubert are playing as big a role for British intellectuals as Russia and Stalin for the Communists.”14

  This “symbolic handover” from London to Paris gave Sonia Brownell both power and purpose. She h
ad already made herself indispensable in the Horizon office—it was at her prompting that Connolly had rushed to meet Simone de Beauvoir a year earlier—but she would soon commission new authors and new pieces. She worked closely with Peter Watson, the coeditor of Horizon, a homosexual and a French speaker, two qualities for which she usually fell. She was not the only one. The photographer Cecil Beaton was pursuing Watson even though he thought he had the “charming face of a codfish.”15 Peter was also sleek, subtle, and a smooth operator, but he had vision, too. He was the one who commissioned Horizon articles in Paris on artists barely known in Britain, like the Swiss painter Balthus and the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. He had persuaded Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to report on the contemporary art market and the art critic Michel Leiris to write about his friend Alberto Giacometti. Through Leiris, Watson commissioned Giacometti to make a chandelier for his home, or perhaps for the office in Bedford Square—he had not decided yet where he would hang it.

  COMMUNISM THE ITALIAN WAY