On matters of art and politics, Beauvoir and Sartre were increasingly at loggerheads with Communists; there could be no ideological entente with them. They could go on arguing, but they had reached an impasse. This was a difficult and even painful situation: their relationship with Communism felt essential to these two bourgeois who had chosen to betray their own class. Neither Beauvoir nor Sartre was, however, ready to bargain their freedom, esprit critique, and independence for the sake of acceptance into the Communist fold. They had recently met Italian Communists such as Elio Vittorini, the editor of the monthly review Politecnico, and had felt a real affinity: “At least with them, you could talk!”16 They decided to prepare a special Italian issue of Les Temps modernes, in which they would explain why Italian Communism was so much more inclusive and less dogmatic than its French counterpart. The new friends all agreed to meet in Milan over the summer.
At the end of June 1946, Beauvoir and Sartre were on the night train bound for Italy. They were firmly set on understanding why Italian Communism seemed so much more inclusive and flexible than its French counterpart. They were also going to Italy to do book signings, give talks, and, if at all possible, enjoy a little sightseeing.
After their publisher Bompiani publicly put some distance between himself and the Existentialist couple, whom he as a conservative now deemed too controversial, Elio Vittorini, their new friend, contacted the other big Italian publishing house, Mondadori. The opportunity was too good to be missed and the keen publisher sent his own son, Alberto Mondadori, to give Sartre and Beauvoir a substantial advance in cash to seal their partnership. Mondadori senior also instructed his son to be the philosophers’ chauffeur, and to offer to drive them wherever they liked in his brand-new cabriolet. Beauvoir and Sartre greatly appreciated the gesture and asked Alberto to drive them to Venice, then Florence, and, finally, Rome.17 There they met the writer and painter Carlo Levi, whose first novel, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli), had just appeared. Depicting his forced exile by the fascist regime in the Basilicata region, the deep south of Italy, the novel triggered a national debate about the extreme poverty of the Italian south. After reading a few pages, Beauvoir decided to publish extracts in the autumn issues of Les Temps modernes.
Simone de Beauvoir soon developed a clear analysis of the political difference between the French and Italian Left: “In France, national unity, having been achieved through the fight against foreign occupants, consequently weakened after peace had returned, with Right and Left going their own ways.” Nationalism had in fact proved a shaky foundation for national unity.
In Italy, the nationalists were the fascists. Everyone who had fought fascism wanted democracy and freedom. All non-fascists had the same aims, which were based on principles, rather than events, and therefore survived after the war ended. In Italy, liberals, socialists and Communists were all fighting together against the nationalist Right and in favor of the end of monarchy and a new republican constitution. The sincerity of the Italian Communist Party’s republican and democratic positions was never in doubt.18
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 had tainted French Communists. For two years, until Hitler broke the nonaggression pact, French Communists were of two minds about resisting the German occupants. Their hesitation made people suspicious, and they never could wash the opprobrium away, even after wholeheartedly committing to the Resistance and indeed becoming its most active members between 1941 and 1944. The non-Communist French Left always had their reservations about them, and their suspicion, once the war over, came back with the force of a boomerang. Who were the French Communists taking their orders from? Was the umbilical cord with the Soviet Union more important than that with France?
The Italian Communists, having fought Fascism since the early 1920s, were not stained by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in the way their French counterparts were. Besides, Antonio Gramsci, one of their leaders and thinkers, who had been incarcerated by the fascists in 1926 (“We must stop this brain from functioning”) and died of illnesses contracted during his imprisonment in 1937, had somehow created “a dazzling synthesis between Marxism and Bourgeois Humanism.”19 In France, the Communist Party was going in the opposite direction: taking its orders from Moscow and the Comintern, abiding by the Stalinist dogma. Retractors claimed they were serving the interests of the Soviet Union and not France.
The rising tension within the French Left between non-Communists and Communists had in fact claimed its first victims within the editorial team of Les Temps modernes: Raymond Aron had slammed the door and left to join Combat. Aron considered Les Temps modernes too lenient with the Communists, while Sartre and Beauvoir considered Aron too much on the Right.
Churchill, now retired, had spoken frankly three months earlier in his famous Fulton Speech in the United States of “these anxious and baffling times.” A shadow had fallen upon the editorial committee of Les Temps modernes and the Paris Left Bank, as indeed it had “upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.”20 Churchill had spelled out what everyone was feeling.
Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies … From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent … Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.21
In July, Beauvoir and Sartre parted ways in Milan. Simone kept only a rucksack and sent the rest of her books and clothes back to Paris. She was so much looking forward to hiking in the Dolomites.22 Luckily, le petit Bost would be able to join her later; she was elated to discover a new mountainous region of Europe. Meanwhile, Sartre was off on a three-week holiday with Wanda Kosakiewicz. He did not intend to be idle for three weeks, though: this would be a working holiday. He had two plays in mind that he wanted to write fast: Morts sans sépulture (The Victors) and La putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute).
AMERICA: I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU NOT
Between the beginning of 1945 and the summer of 1946, Sartre had visited the United States twice. He had stayed for almost six months in total, had a New York girlfriend, and had extensively toured the country and lectured at the most prestigious universities. Simone de Beauvoir would soon follow in his footsteps. He had met many people and made many new friends. Some of the American writers Sartre had met had even settled in Paris, like Richard Wright, one of many black American writers and artists to make the journey to France in the late 1940s. American artists were also following him back to Paris.23 Alexander Calder was aboard the first transatlantic direct flight from New York, which TWA had started operating a few months earlier.
Sartre had written Calder’s forthcoming exhibition catalog. He had spent only two afternoons in his Roxbury studio in Connecticut and yet it was as if he had lived among Calder’s work all his life. Or perhaps the little peacock mobile Calder had given Sartre, made of cuts from flattened license plates, allowed Sartre to spend more time in Calder’s universe and understand it better than most. “Sculpture suggests movement, painting suggests depth or light. Calder suggests nothing. He captures true, living movements and crafts them into something. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves. They simply are: they are absolutes.”24 And to conclude: “Calder’s mobiles are at once lyrical inventions, technical, almost mathematical combinations and the tangible symbol of Nature, of that great, vague Nature that squanders pollen and suddenly causes a thousand butterflies to take wing.”25
Sartre was fascinated with America. The young man in him had fed on American literature, films, and jazz. Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, to name but a few, held no secrets for him. He loved Americans and America and, especially, American popular culture, which he knew
intimately, but his love and fascination were typically lucid.
He felt compelled to share his America with French readers, warts and all, in Les Temps modernes’ first double summer issue of 1946. Its publication, with many specially commissioned pieces from avant-garde American writers and an uncompromising introduction by Sartre, had created quite a stir.
I saw men chased within the heart of their conformist happiness by a nameless obscure malaise. Those men are tragic precisely because they fear to be tragic, because they lack tragedy in and around them. In America, there is the myth of equality and there is racial segregation; there is the myth of freedom and there is the dictatorship of public opinion; there is economic liberalism and those faceless multinational companies which cover a whole continent don’t belong to anyone, but operate like a state within a state. In America, there are a thousand taboos that ban love outside marriage and there are those thousands of used condoms littering the back courtyards of university campuses, there are all those cars, lights switched off, parked by the road, there are all those men and women who need a stiff drink before making love, in order to copulate and forget all about it. Nowhere will anyone find such a discrepancy between myths and men, between life and its collective representation.26
“In this special issue,” stated the introduction,
our aim has been to show men and women. Every one of them feels close to what he or she criticizes or praises. None thinks they say anything bad against America. In France, if one reveals an injustice, it is seen as a criticism of France because one sees her in the past or as unmovable. For an American, to reveal an injustice is to pave the way toward reform because he or she sees their country with eyes set on the future. Every article in this issue is like a human face, an anxious face, but a free and moving one. This is what we have wanted to offer readers who haven’t crossed the Atlantic Ocean yet and who don’t know the strange softness faces take, in New York, when the first lights are switched on over Broadway.
This special issue was, in fact, a love letter to America. However, a love that was honest. The issue also included articles by American writers who attacked European arrogance in dealing with America. In fact, Sartre liked nothing more than being contradicted by intelligent voices. An article on comic strips by David Hare27 deciphered the new American comic hero: “The war has created a new American hero, superman, superhuman, and violent, in many ways antipoetic and vulgar. However, this is the product of an irresistible imagination, force and invention, but never of intelligence.” In his review of American art in the twentieth century Clement Greenberg saw that the most influential period of American art history had just taken place during the war, through the symbiosis between young American painters and artists in New York and exiled French Surrealists such as Matta, Ernst, Duchamp, Breton, and Tanguy. Greenberg thought that in 1946, “apart from Alexander Calder, a product of the Paris school, no American artist has international stature.” In a few years, Action Painting, embodied in the works of Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, a result of the symbiosis Greenberg described, would change this.
Richard Wright finished reading Les Temps modernes’ special U.S. issue at the Paris American Hospital, where his wife, Ellen, had been taken for an appendectomy. Although not life threatening, her condition was serious enough, and they had decided to go back to New York for a while. Their flat on the boulevard Saint-Michel was too small, and it was a short lease anyway. Before packing, Wright had just enough time to send an enthusiastic note to Sartre, who had given him the manuscript of the play he had written on holiday, La putain respectueuse. Sartre wanted to know Wright’s opinion as his play dealt with race relations in America and was inspired by the case of the Scottsboro Boys. In the 1930s, nine black teenagers had been wrongly accused of the rape of two white women on board a freight train heading to Memphis.28 Wright thought Sartre had admirably captured the essence of racial segregation and was awed by Sartre’s artful synthesis and powerful dialogue: “Black man: ‘When white men who don’t know each other meet to talk, you can bet a black man is about to die.’”29
Wright had gotten so used to Parisian color-blindness that he felt all the more shocked to be back in New York. In Greenwich Village, where the family lived, “there were several violent incidents when gangs of Italian youths took it upon themselves to punish interracial couples.”30 As a result, Wright never allowed Ellen to take his arm in the street. Also, perhaps because of Paris’s less comfortable life, Wright was taken aback by how much a new materialism was reigning over the entire country. “In France, people were interested in your opinions, not your income.”31 He felt that the liberal spirit of Roosevelt had completely disappeared.
Wright was trying hard to be positive and turned to the city’s cultural events as a way to escape. He was very much looking forward to meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson. The photographer was busy preparing the first retrospective of his work for the Museum of Modern Art, which was opening five months later. Like Camus, Cartier-Bresson had declared to the U.S. authorities that he did not hold Communist sympathies. That was an outright lie, and his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art would indeed completely, and intentionally, overlook that essential detail. His philo-Communism was, however, key to understanding his work. Cartier-Bresson was a fellow traveler of the French Communist Party and would vote Communist in every election for the next ten years.32
Among the French writers and intellectuals who had visited the United States after the war, Albert Camus cut a singular figure. America had left him indifferent. He had confided to his diary on board the Oregon, a cargo freighter with a few passenger cabins, that on finally entering New York Harbor after a ten-day journey, he had felt nothing. “Manhattan’s skyscrapers are against a background of fog. My heart is calm and dry and I feel I’m watching a spectacle that does not affect me.”33
His indifference turned sometimes to bewilderment. His five weeks of lectures had been five weeks of bafflement. Americans seemed so alien to him, friendly yet forgetful, hospitable yet indifferent, engrossed in frivolous things, afraid of seriousness. He had learned very quickly that “the secret to conversation is called small talk, the art of saying nothing meaningful.”34 He had wondered in his diary whether one was “among madmen or the most reasonable people on earth; if life was as easy as they say here or as foolish as it seems; if it is natural that they hire ten people instead of one, without improving the service; if Americans should be called modest, liberal or conformist.”35
He had marveled at the cultural differences between New York and Paris, between America and France, from the shape of doorknobs to the popularity of vitamin pills. He had made notes about everything he had found strange: “large consumption of scotches and soda in the cultural milieu; the luxury and bad taste, especially in neckties; the love of animals; the habit of drinking fruit juice in the morning; millions of windows lit up at night; hot baths; vitamins; drugstores serving bacon and eggs.”36 America would remain an oddity for him, a mystery he was not much interested in cracking.
THE BOOK THAT BEAT THE COMMUNIST PARTY AT THE BALLOT BOX
April 1946 had come early and the weather was so mild that Simone de Beauvoir wore neither stockings nor a coat.37 Over lunch one day, her mother told her about that book everybody was reading at the moment, by a certain Hungarian ex-Communist named Arthur Koestler. His book was Le zéro et l’infini (Darkness at Noon). Simone had read it before it reached the bookshops, on New Year’s Day 1945. It had come out a few months later and had been an instant success: seven thousand copies had sold in its first month of release, fifty thousand by April 1945, a quarter million by May 1946, and the number would reach half a million by the end of the year, Koestler’s greatest publishing triumph anywhere.38 After lunch the sun was shining and she did not want to go back to the hotel. She walked straight to Le Bar Vert on the rue Jacob to see Jacques-Laurent Bost. Unlike Juliette Gréco, Simone was not so fond of the place:39 it had nice posters but awful red tables and green w
alls, so green it made her feel almost sick. Here, too, everyone was discussing Koestler’s book.
Newspapers had announced in their gossip columns that Simone and Sartre were deserting the Café de Flore once and for all for the basement bar of the Hôtel du Pont Royal. “Let’s celebrate!” she had told Bost when the news broke, just before taking him to have an ice cream at the Flore: now that people thought she was not going anymore, perhaps she could go back and enjoy peace again. There they had bumped into Giacometti and Tristan Tzara discussing Darkness at Noon. Giacometti was the only one talking about it with intelligence, she had thought.40 When Beauvoir thought of Koestler’s intensity as a writer, she thought writing was probably a little like sex for him—or, as she had said, “There are days, just after I have worked very hard for days on end, when I feel like those flatfish washed onto the rocks after they have fucked too much, moribund, emptied of their substance.”41
May 5, 1946. Referendum day had come. Would the French say yes or no to the new constitution cooked up by the Communists? The new constitution the French were being asked to vote on was championed by the Socialists but disapproved of by the Gaullists and General de Gaulle, who still exerted a great influence despite his withdrawal from political life. It was based on the concept of an all-powerful parliamentary regime with one chamber and little executive counterbalance. On the day of the vote, Simone had to close her window—Parisians were arguing on the pavement below and she could not work. She had missed the deadline to register to vote and would not be able to cast a ballot. She felt rather ashamed. Sartre had forgotten to register too. But as he kept telling her, “the important thing is not to vote; it is to know how one would vote.” This was Sartrean rhetoric in all its glory: witty but questionable.
The result came as a surprise to foreign observers and to the French themselves. Fifty-two percent of the electorate voted against it. It was seen as a rebuff for the Communists. Washington was pleased and the Gaullists were both relieved and content, but now what? On the day after, a Monday morning, Beauvoir could not find any newspapers left at the kiosk. She heard from her newsagent that the Catholic writer François Mauriac had argued that the most important factor in tipping the vote against the Communists had been the publication of Darkness at Noon.42 Could books make or unmake elections? She certainly hoped so.
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