However influential he was, the celebrated and powerful Koestler would find himself challenged as soon as he set foot in Paris a few months later, in October 1946, at the time of a second referendum on a second draft for a constitution. After checking in at the Hôtel Montalembert, which stood right next to the Hôtel du Pont Royal, Koestler went to buy a copy of Les Temps modernes at the news kiosk. In its October issue, Sartre had given Merleau-Ponty free rein to attack Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and his latest book, a collection of essays, The Yogi and the Commissar.
Koestler arrived at a time when Camus was getting back into the journalistic fray, after completing La Peste, which would be published the following year. Camus felt Sartre and Beauvoir were not challenging Communist positions enough, while Camus’ lecturing tone increasingly irked the philosophers. “Combat is too much into morals and not enough into politics,” Sartre had told Camus, now back at the editor’s desk of Combat. Unlike Sartre and Beauvoir, who felt at ease grappling with the many contradictions of their times and deciphering them like mathematical equations, Camus preferred to disengage from them when they proved too murky or too complicated. Camus did not like hesitation; he needed certainty. “Simone, why are you against French clarity?” he had asked Beauvoir.43 The situation was far from clear; it was complex. She thought that Camus’ thinking was too shortsighted and that he was protecting himself by refusing to answer difficult questions. It was easier to hide behind moral principles than get oneself dirty in the mud of ideas and politics. Their relations had remained very friendly, but “shadows were looming on the horizon.”44
The last three months of 1946 were to prove very volatile, contrarian, and exciting. The Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault, who had written an essay on American sexuality in the special U.S. issue of Les Temps modernes, had helped the Gaullist Resistance rebuild the network of French press agencies in North America during the war. He was still well connected and, on seeing how much Beauvoir wanted to follow in the steps of Sartre and Camus in America, suggested arranging a tour of university talks for her. “Am simply dying to go,” she had replied.45 Beauvoir’s tour would prove even easier for Soupault to organize, as his essay had caught the eye of Time magazine with its shocking rudeness and made him an instant celebrity in the literary circles of the East Coast. Jacques-of-All-Letters Philippe Soupault, one of the founding fathers of surrealism, examined love-in-the-U.S., shuddered at what he saw, reported in the French review Modern Times that “Americans consider a love affair in the same light as a crime.” The fear of love, he observed, produces nervous disorders, and “there are more maladjusted people in America than in any other country in the world.”46
Critical successes and catastrophes came in quick succession. On October 23, the first night of Koestler’s play Bar du crépuscule was a “disaster,” according to Sartre, and a “God-awful flop,” according to Mamaine. On October 25, Calder’s opening exhibition was a triumph, with Matisse, Cocteau, Picasso, Braque, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, among many others, flocking to view those “little fiestas” of mobiles, which Paris had never seen before. Simone, who was meeting Calder for the first time, stood in a corner and observed both the mobiles and their creator. This “big, corpulent and bellied man with fat cheeks adorned with thick white hair reminded us all of the laws of gravity,” and therefore also of the miracle of his creations. After Sartre introduced Calder to Beauvoir, the sculptor took a little packet from his pocket; it was a brooch with a spiral he had made especially for her.47 She would wear it often for decades to come.
Two weeks later, on November 8, Sartre’s play Morts sans sépulture opened at the Théâtre Antoine. Was it a success or a failure? It was a proper scandal, the proportions of which frightened even its thick-skinned author. The play was about collaboration and resistance and featured a torture scene. People shouted “Shameful!” during the performances and fistfights broke out in the stalls. On the opening night, Raymond Aron left at intermission, supporting his wife, who had fainted during the torture scene. “It seemed clear that the bourgeoisie did not want to be reminded of certain bad memories”48 that it had managed to sweep under the carpet. Sartre was drinking more these days; whiskey helped him cope with his celebrity and the Communists’ constant attacks on him as a philosopher and as a man. However, he could not get away from photographers, especially from the new gossip magazine France Dimanche, whose editor sent its latest recruit, Anne-Marie Cazalis, to spy on Sartre’s mother with history’s first paparazzo, the twenty-six-year-old Italian Walter Carone. Having failed to secure an authorized portrait of Sartre’s mother, France Dimanche ordered Cazalis and Carone to go back and be less courteous: they were to press the doorbell, spring up like jack-in-the-boxes, shoot a picture, and take to their heels or they would lose their jobs. They did just that, and the next day Sartre discovered a picture of his startled-looking maid Eugénie in the newspaper with the caption AN EXISTENTIALIST’S ANXIOUS MOTHER.
Koestler was in Paris not only to make new friends; he also intended to try to convince the Left Bank movers and shakers, and key French politicians, that there was no greater threat in Europe than Communism. Could the Gaullist Koestler, the liberal non-Communist Camus, and the Existentialists Sartre and Beauvoir reconcile their views or find a common ground other than seduction, sex, and alcohol? Koestler certainly felt impatient with the younger generation who had embraced Communism, but Camus promised to be his ears in Paris and to defend him.
The night of December 12, 1946, Boris Vian and his wife, Michelle, were giving a tartine party. Everybody was talking about the new novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I’ll Spit on Your Graves) by Vernon Sullivan, a black American writer. Its sex scenes had landed its publisher in court. Raymond Queneau, standing in the corner of the kitchen, nursing a whiskey in his right hand, was staying strangely silent. Vernon Sullivan did not exist and he knew it. Boris Vian had invented him. He had been so disappointed by the failure of his first novel that he had decided to trick both his publisher and his readers. On appearing only as the great Vernon Sullivan’s translator, Vian had been deluged with translation work offers, among them books by Raymond Chandler, no less. Camus’ arrival at eleven o’clock put an end to the Vernon Sullivan conversation. He was not in a good mood. He had just read another attack by Merleau-Ponty against his friend Koestler in Les Temps modernes and he was incensed by it. Sartre came to Merleau-Ponty’s defense, which upset Camus even further. He put on his coat and slammed the door. Sartre and Bost ran into the street after him but it was too late; Camus had jumped into a cab. The friends would not talk for three months.49
Camus had returned to the helm of Combat to support his idea of a Third Way in French and world politics. He refused both soulless American capitalism and Stalinist dictatorship. He might have considered himself “a man without a kingdom,” “a man without a party,” but that did not mean he lived in Utopia. There was another way, and he explained it in a series of articles titled Ni victimes ni bourreaux (Neither Victims nor Executioners). He firmly intended to win Sartre and Beauvoir to his cause, but for the time being he was sulking. He was also in a bad way: he had fallen in love with a young singer and had asked Sartre to write a song for her. “He was handsome, attractive, people fell for him, and he thought himself omnipotent,”50 diagnosed Beauvoir, harshly but perhaps accurately.
PART III
THE AMBIGUITIES OF ACTION
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOW NOT TO BE A COMMUNIST?
France had woken up on Christmas Day 1946 with a new republic and a bicameral form of government supposed to restore some stability. However, as Janet Flanner wrote, “France’s Fourth Republic can sit perfectly paralyzed by what temporary Premier Léon Blum has described as ‘those two great parties whose simultaneous presence in government is at once indispensable and impossible.’”1 The two great parties were the Gaullists and the Communists—irreconcilable. There was a third force, which was hostile to both Charles de Gaulle and the Communists but pro
ved too heterogenous a mélange to speak with one strong voice, at least for the time being. To incarnate this Third Way, this democratic alternative, was precisely what was at stake for Left Bank intellectuals. But would they ever agree among themselves?
LEFT BANK INTELLECTUALS’ TIGHTROPE RHETORIC
Arthur Koestler, back in his damp Welsh cottage with Mamaine, still without a telephone line, had to wait for a week to receive his January 1947 copy of Les Temps modernes in the mail, and to discover the Existentialists’ latest attack against him. After tearing open the envelope, he started reading the issue slowly. It began with an extract from Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which he decided to read first. He was impressed. He found it sharp and hard and ultimately gripping. A four-year-old black boy, bored to death, sets fire to his room. The fire spreads rapidly through the house while his invalid grandmother lies in bed, unable to move. Next, Koestler skimmed through Beauvoir’s serialized essay Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity) to get to Merleau-Ponty’s latest piece in a series called “Le Yogi et le prolétaire” (“The Yogi and the Proletarian”), a pun on Koestler’s latest book The Yogi and the Commissar. Koestler paused, got up from his leather armchair, closed the door of his study, and, as he always did, poured himself a glass of arak and lit a cigarette before he began reading.2
With the blessing of Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was merrily keeping up a campaign of destruction against the author of Darkness at Noon. This was Les Temps modernes’ fourth consecutive essay lambasting Koestler’s politics. Sartre and Beauvoir, themselves the targets of vile attacks from the Communists, nonetheless let their phenomenologist friend defend a philo-Communist position within their magazine. They liked heated debates with friends, relished polemics and clashes, but hardly did they know that Merleau-Ponty’s attacks on Koestler were entwined with personal considerations. He had fallen for Sonia Brownell, who happened to be Koestler’s former lover. Sonia had revealed to him that Koestler was a “sadist.”3 She had also confided to Merleau-Ponty that she had had to abort Koestler’s child during the Blitz, a terribly painful, dangerous, and lonely experience.
For the Marxist Merleau-Ponty, the war had proved that the world could not live on capitalism alone and that economic collectivism was a fairer system. Communism might thrive on violence, he granted, but while Communism’s aim was the end of exploitation of man by man, capitalism was merely pretending to defend freedom and peace for all when it was, in fact, defending the interests of a few. In other words, the end justifying the means, Communism was, on balance and in theory, still preferable to capitalism. For Merleau-Ponty, and indeed for a large proportion of French and European intellectuals, it was impossible to be anti-Communist, and impossible to be Communist. The terrible and deep guilt felt by so many French people who did not take part in active résistance against the Nazi occupiers meant that they could not and would not criticize the Communists, the most active members of the French Resistance, even if news from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe meant that they could not embrace Communism either. The Communist Party’s claim of being the “Parti des 75,000 Fusillés” (The Party of the 75,000 Shot) was still sticking. In fact, it was closer to 10,000 résistants shot, and of all political inclinations. But the fact that the Communist résistants had been the most effective still stuck everyone else in 1947 France with a bad conscience. And in 1947, French people with a bad conscience meant almost everyone in the country.
If criticizing the Communists seemed too painful an exercise, however, Merleau-Ponty was honest enough to concede that the Soviet Union had a police force that terrorized its citizens and put on trial any dissenters, falsely accusing them of spying, before sending them to rot and die in Siberian camps. Those were not, however, good enough reasons to condemn the whole system whose ultimate goal was laudable. It was tightrope rhetoric. Merleau-Ponty’s position was clearly untenable, but at the time, many intellectuals on the Left shared it. They refused to condemn Marxism and Communism, not least out of respect for the eighteen million Russians who died during the war;4 however, they could not keep quiet in the face of the abuse of power taking place in the Soviet Union. It was the old omelet argument used during the French Revolution: you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
The thirty-six-year-old British historian Isaiah Berlin was devouring Les Temps modernes on his regular visits to Paris. So was his old Oxford friend the philosopher A. J. Ayer, who was as interested in ideas as he was in chasing Left Bank gamines, among them Celia Paget, Mamaine’s twin sister. Both men followed the battle of ideas closely.
Isaiah Berlin later recalled the atmosphere at the time of the Koestler–Merleau-Ponty spat.
One cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.5
Camus kept siding with Koestler against Merleau-Ponty’s arguments, finding the phenomenologist’s thought too convoluted and, more important in his eyes, immoral. He categorically refused to choose between capitalism and Communism, now firmly and publicly rejecting Marxism. He advocated instead a reformist democratic Left, in other words, social democracy.
Meanwhile, the Communists considered them all—Koestler, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Sartre—traitors, whatever their divergences. They may have been clashing over the philosophical and historical implications of Marxism and Communism, but the Party put them all in the same bag, and ferociously attacked them in its own mighty press. By 1947, with its twenty-seven daily newspapers, the Communist Party accounted for 25 percent of the French national press. Watching it all unfolding from Le Petit Saint Benoît bistro, where he had lunch every week, was the future sociologist and, for the time being, faithful Communist Party member Edgar Morin.
The young Edgar Morin who, in 1938, was looking in Dostoyevsky and Montaigne for answers, dreaming of a bright and happy future, had first been too afraid to become a résistant, afraid of dying before having ever lived. Little did he know that war would in fact teach him how to live. Democracy had yielded to Fascism and been destroyed by it, therefore, in his eyes, “only Stalinist Communism seemed to offer the remedy to Fascism.”6 At first, in 1941, Morin had thought of escaping to Switzerland or to Spain, but his fear and his cowardice had made him sick. One evening, listening to Wagner on the radio in his dark little room, the windows wide open, a cigarette between his lips, using the moonlight to write his diary, he had debated with himself: “Hypocrite. They are here, they are calling you.” In January 1942, Morin had taken a leap of faith and become part of the comradeship. For two and half years Morin and his friends abandoned their habits, their homes, even their identities, and lived from day to day. “Clandestine life had given us a heady freedom: traveling, leather jackets, risks, woolen cardigans and fraternity. When liberation came, we felt unable to adapt to peace, to have a career, to obey conventions, to accept life’s new monotony.”7
It was now two years since peace had returned, but Edgar Morin and all the twentysomething Communists for whom war had been a university of life did not feel comfortable in their skins. Morin had been given a column in the Communist newspaper Action, but he did not have the right style or the right tone for his orthodox communist editors. His war friends had died, been deported, or simply disappeared. He had, however, made new friends within the Party, the writer Marguerite Duras, her husband, Robert Antelme, and her lover Dionys Mascolo among them. They all spent a lot of time at her flat at 5 rue Saint-Benoît, debating, drinking cheap wine, and singing. The Communist Party and its press found work for its intellectuals and offered a large and captive audience for what they produced. Morin was sent to Germany to write a book abo
ut how the country had been faring since the end of the war. Commissioned by a Communist publisher, his conclusions had to follow the party’s line. Upon its release, Les Lettres françaises reviewed the book favorably. Communist intellectuals lived in a self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-reviewing bubble—a whole economy and industry was built around them. Like Edgar Morin, writers who wrote according to the Party’s doxa would get translated into the many languages of the Soviet bloc, and they would be invited to talk in every Eastern European country. “The more docile you were as a writer, the more celebrated. The Stalin award was our Nobel Prize. Most writers and intellectuals got used to this fake world, this byzantine society and its delirium. But let us not forget that those young men had originally enrolled in the Party to change the world and to change life for the better.”8
For them to see clearly, act, and leave the Party meant a second rebellion for which many lacked the strength. “One can hardly rebel twice in one’s life. First against the bourgeoisie and its corruption, and then against the very family which gave you hope.” Being a young Stalinist in 1947 meant belonging to an “unprecedented magical and religious structure.”9 Besides, the Party had managed “to maintain a psychology of war in time of peace.” It had mutated into “a brotherhood with its sacred texts and initiation rituals.”10 The Party was like a “Church which kept its members warm.”11
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