Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  To Morin and the Party, everyone who chose to stand outside that church was deemed an enemy. Later in life, Morin looked back with perspective: Camus’ moralism was in fact the “distillation of his Communist hope.”12 Edgar Morin later understood that Camus, bitterly disappointed, almost “mortally wounded” by the reality of Communism, had chosen to reject political euphoria. Camus’ stance was that of a solitary conscience. However, at the time, in 1947, Morin the Stalinist attacked Camus for being at best a poseur, at worse a defeatist. As for the Existentialists, they were the most dangerous of all because they had committed to wrestle with the ambiguities of action, but their lucidity, denounced as nihilism, did not fit the epic Communist vision. Les Lettres françaises relentlessly attacked Sartre for being pessimistic, but Sartre refused “a priori hope.” In his view, “writers shouldn’t promise a better tomorrow, but by describing honestly the world as it is, they should trigger in people the will to change it for the better.”13 The Communists feared Sartre the most as he was the only one to offer a real and new alternative to the youth on the Left. But Sartre did not have a party behind him, nor the Red Army.

  * * *

  Koestler finished reading Merleau-Ponty’s riposte and shivered. The ancient oil stove in his study had broken down again. He got up and poured himself another glass of arak (he still had one bottle left from his last trip to Palestine, which he kept in a little oak cabinet). He knew Camus would defend him again. Arthur smiled at the thought of it, knowing why Camus was such a vehement ally of his. It was not only political or philosophical, but personal too, just as it was with Merleau-Ponty. Mamaine had confessed to it.14

  It had started during the memorable night they had all spent at the Sheherazade with Sartre and Beauvoir in October 1946. Camus and Mamaine, the least inebriated of the group, had danced cheek to cheek and Albert had confessed how unhappy he was with Francine, how attracted he was to Mamaine, and how tormented it made him feel given that Arthur was his friend. Mamaine had arranged to stay for another week alone in Paris and let Camus know. An hour after seeing Arthur off at the station, Mamaine received the first of many bouquets of roses from Camus. One promenade in the Luxembourg Gardens during which Camus read to Mamaine from La Peste led to another in the Bois de Boulogne, and to a few days spent together in Provence, near Avignon. Gone was Camus’ torment about seducing his friend’s girlfriend. For a few days, Albert and Mamaine visited Romanesque churches and danced the tango in a Spanish nightclub. As soon as she returned home to Arthur, Mamaine confessed her affair. It was her way of putting an end to her relationship with Camus.

  “The days I spent at your side were the happiest of my life and I will never be able to forget them,” Camus later wrote to Mamaine. He had hoped for a long, secret liaison with Mamaine but accepted that they would now be friends. Koestler took it philosophically and let Camus know he did not bear him any grudges: “I take great liberties in my private life and concede the same liberties. Naturally, this leads sometimes to somewhat painful conclusions. On the other hand, it gives more basic stability to a relationship than things done on the sly.”15 For Arthur, to concede liberties did not mean confessing to every little affair, or living according to a pact like Sartre and Beauvoir. Mamaine certainly did not know that Arthur had slept with Beauvoir or with Dominique Aury, his latest French translator, among others. Koestler did not confess to any dalliances unless he was caught red-handed. Mamaine was always more upfront about her own sporadic affairs.

  POLITICAL PARALYSIS AND STREET PROTESTS: GAULLISTS AND COMMUNISTS AT LOGGERHEADS IN FRANCE AND INDOCHINA

  Arthur Koestler was battling both the Welsh weather and the strike actions in ration-bound Britain and was split between wanting to go and settle temporarily in New York after their farmhouse’s lease ended or stay in Europe and fight Communism from within. Koestler actually feared Europe would soon fall into the hands of the Communists. Depending on his mood, he gave Europe eighteen months or less to succumb to the red devil. On the other hand, he knew he would have great difficulty abandoning Europe. His favored scenario was to find a house in Paris or nearby, and settle there where, as the influential writer he had become, he could perhaps make an impact on national politics. He remained convinced that the future of Europe would be decided in the streets of Paris. His pessimism, though, was pointing to America as the ultimate refuge from tyranny.

  There was another issue that troubled Koestler: he had ambivalent feelings about Britain. He may have embraced its language and applied to become a British citizen, but he was starting to realize that he would never become an intellectual force in Britain in the way he was already considered one across the Channel and across the Atlantic ocean. The literary critic V. S. Pritchett had pointed to the brutal truth in his Horizon essay earlier that year. Koestler was “separated” from the British “by the education and politics of the continent.” He could easily “dazzle us because we have no café conversation and no café writers. We have no skill in playing with ideas. We are not trained to pretend that things which are entirely different may (for the pleasure of the effect) be assumed to be opposites. We have no eternal students.”16 Koestler had taken it badly but recognized some truth in it. “For the French, these negatives were positive,”17 but they never would or could be for the British.

  V. S. Pritchett’s forthright words echoed forcefully, but their condescension toward Koestler also revealed some bitterness at Britain’s lack of intellectual effervescence. In comparison with the never-ending excitement of Paris, weary and bombed London seemed, as Horizon’s editor Cyril Connolly put it, “a grey sick wilderness on another planet.” His deputy editor, Peter Watson, was blunter still, seeing England as a “prison.” Sonia Brownell “found it hard to bear the narrowness and insularity that closed them in at home.”18 Why couldn’t London be more like Paris? To cheer everyone up, Peter Watson resorted to decorating Horizon’s offices on Bedford Square in Parisian style. He took his Picasso paintings out of storage and hung them on the walls. Visiting the review’s office in the spring of 1947, Evelyn Waugh could not suppress his trademark sarcasm and hurriedly wrote to his friend the aristocrat socialite turned gossip writer Nancy Mitford: “I saw the inside of the Horizon office, full of horrible pictures collected by Watson … Miss Sonia Brownell was working away with a dictionary translating some rot from the French.”19

  Unlike Evelyn Waugh, the Left Bank had little time for cynicism. Besides political paralysis, the Fourth Republic was beginning to have serious problems in its colonies, particularly in Indochina. Les Temps modernes was the first to report unequivocally on French endeavors in Indochina, relying on the Vietnamese Tran Duc Thao, a supporter of the Viet-Minh and Ho Chi Minh, to shed some light on the events. The war had now in fact begun. Janet Flanner explained the premises to her New Yorker readers: “France has been fiddling around in Indo-China since the time of Louis XVI, when he slipped an alliance round the Emperor of Annam. From Louis XVI to the first president of the Fourth republic is a long time for the French to have been in Indo-China without making friends.”20 In the March 1947 issue of Les Temps modernes, a special number dedicated to the situation in Indochina, Tran Duc Thao concluded: “Vietnam’s independence is inevitable.” Claude Lefort stated that “the Second World War has not triggered the current struggles against colonial domination; it only sped up a revolutionary process which had been perceptible for a long time”21—a view shared by other writers. A letter from a veteran, written on February 5, 1947, and published by the journal, drily predicted: “After the dress rehearsal in Indochina, the première will be performed in other parts of the French Empire.” Seven years before the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which would lead to the withdrawal of French forces from North Vietnam and the Geneva peace agreements, the Existentialists had seen the future with exceptional clarity.

  THE LOYALTY PROGRAM

  While Koestler was reluctantly toying with the idea of leaving Europe for America, all Richard Wright could think about was going bac
k to Europe with his family. Politics were changing in America and he did not like what he saw. A couple of months earlier, in November 1946, the Republicans had overwhelmingly won both houses of Congress. Theodore H. White, the former China correspondent of Time magazine and the author of the just-published and bestselling Thunder out of China, had seen the victory coming. He had spent the summer and early fall driving through the United States to spend some time with his old comrades of the 11th Bomb Squadron and to find out how they were fitting back into society. He was writing a long reportage, the story of the great homecoming. “In those post-war months thirteen million young Americans released from the military were returning to seek the place into which they could best fit back. For millions of men, now, if ever, was the time to change jobs, styles of life, homes, ambitions.”22 Those men brought the Republicans to power. They had “a mandate that America stand still, a plea that time stop its clock and reverse the pointers and bring America back to some unreal memory of how it had been before the war, a retreat through time to, say, 1925, or 1928, or 1936.”23 It was for the young veterans an attempt to erase the war. They wanted to be home, undisturbed, with mothers, new wives, and wanted a house, a car, and a job. Many of them ran for office, and “historically their entry into politics was the unremarked story of the elections of 1946.”

  The returning veterans, having altered the outline of the world abroad, were preparing to alter the outline of politics in America for the next thirty years. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Richard Nixon, both back from navy service in the Pacific, made their first runs in 1946. So too did “Tail-Gunner Joe” McCarthy of Wisconsin. Few, if any, young black veterans ran for office that year; blacks had two Congressmen, Powell from New York, Dawson from Chicago, and so it appeared they must rest content with only two as far into the future as one could see.24

  It was easy to attack Stalin and his State police, thought Richard Wright, but American politics was far from being civilized. It was cruel, corrupt, vicious, and sometimes murderous. Theodore H. White distinguished between the northern cities like Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, where he deemed politics “corrupt; but not murderous,” and the southern states, where “they condoned murder: the killing of blacks casually, the killing of whites only if they were really troublesome.”25

  On March 21, 1947, the U.S. president, Harry Truman, instituted a loyalty program that required all federal employees to swear they had never advocated or approved “the commission of acts of force or violence” that would “alter the form of the U.S. government.” In other words, government employees had to take an oath that they had never held Communist beliefs. In truth, the program was prompted by overblown fears that the Communists were infiltrating universities, companies, schools, the ranks of administration and government, and Hollywood. Communism was feared to be exerting an increasing influence over the American youth.

  Richard Wright heard the news on the radio. Seated on their flower-patterned divan in the Charles Street flat’s large sitting room, he and Ellen decided they would go back to Paris as soon as they possibly could. They needed to put their apartment on the market first. In fact, Wright was not so much concerned with the political repercussions of the loyalty program for him personally. Only government employees were being targeted, at least for the time being. What he dreaded was a new suspicion creeping through American society as a whole, which might have a negative impact on racial relations.

  Personally, he had wholeheartedly rejected his Communist past in an article in the Atlantic published in August 1944, a decision he now thought of as lucky. The essay opened with these lines: “One Thursday night I received an invitation from a group of white boys I had known when I was working in the post office to meet in one of Chicago’s South Side hotels and argue the state of the world. About ten of us gathered, and ate salami sandwiches, drank beer, and talked. I was amazed to discover that many of them had joined the Communist Party.”26 His mea culpa had been widely reported and accepted, and he was not considered a Communist or even a sympathizer any longer. Wright did not want to discuss it anymore; it was the past.

  Theodore H. White would, however, soon experience the effects of that “creeping feeling” Wright had anticipated. It came slowly, and silently. Once a much-sought-after writer, courted by American mass publications, Left-leaning but not Communist, White could soon publish only in small left-wing magazines.27 He thought this would pass; he had received a good advance for his book and the sales were healthy, everything would be fine. He could live on royalties for many months. No need to worry unduly, he thought at first.

  Across the East River in Brooklyn, in his little apartment at 49 Remsen Street, the twenty-four-year-old Norman Mailer was finishing his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, based on his war experience in the Philippines as an army cook. Mailer had learned about Truman’s loyalty program reading the newspaper. He had written to a friend on the same day: “I’ve gone quite a bit to the Left since I’ve gotten out of the army. I’m a Jew Radical from New York now.”28 Norman did not think highly of Harry Truman’s “containment policy.” The American Congress was going to send military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey, both threatened by Communist-inspired insurrection. The problem, thought Mailer, was that the pressure would continue elsewhere. By now the Republicans had been in power for five months and neither Norman Mailer nor his wife Bea enjoyed living in staunchly Republican America. What about sailing to Europe and settling in Paris for a while? After all, Norman was eligible for the GI Bill. If only he could have his novel published first. He liked the idea of landing in Paris as a published novelist, not just an aspiring one.

  “IF I STAYED I’D BECOME A COMMUNIST”

  Richard Wright had been looking forward to welcoming Simone de Beauvoir to New York, on the first leg of her American tour, and to discussing politics with her. She had feverishly packed for her trip to America. For the first time in her life, she had had to be frivolous and had hated herself for it. It had made her friends laugh but she had cried when she broke down and spent a small fortune on a dress for her American tour.

  Beauvoir had rejected her bourgeois milieu; she did not belong to high society even if she mingled with it as a well-known writer. She snubbed their dress codes and had sworn never to own an evening gown.29 “I refused to wear the livery, not of my gender, but of their class. The cult of elegance implies a system of values that I do not accept.” However, for her American tour, and to avoid the humiliation of being taken to a tailor as soon as she stepped off the plane at LaGuardia, as had happened to Sartre, whose threadbare clothes had horrified his American hosts, she needed at least one new dress. She bought one in a little maison de couture, a finely knitted black dress, for the exorbitant price of 25,000 francs (the equivalent of about $1,650 today). She walked back to Sartre’s flat and told him, pointing to her shopping bag: “This is my first concession,”30 and burst into tears. But the purchase was a sound investment: no one in New York asked her to go and get new clothes. Janet Flanner even told her New Yorker readers: “Mademoiselle de Beauvoir is the prettiest existentialist you ever saw; also eager, gentle and modest.”31

  As soon as she arrived, Simone went straight to 13 Charles Street to visit Richard Wright and his family. She warmed to Ellen, whom she had met only very briefly in Paris, and, surprisingly for a woman who had always shown impatience and indifference to young children, she loved the five-year-old Julia, whom she thought “delightful.” The Wrights introduced her to their friends, mostly Jewish and anti-Stalinists, and she attended parties every evening. Simone had also insisted on meeting Dolorès Vanetti, who was on her way to Paris to fill the vacuum left by her absence from Sartre’s side. They met at the Sherry-Netherland bar quite late one evening and gulped down whiskey (Dolorès especially, terribly nervous at meeting Beauvoir) until three in the morning. Simone wrote immediately to Sartre to report back and to dub her a suitable companion: “I like her a lot, and was very happy because I could understand y
our feelings. She drank one whiskey after another, and this was reflected in a certain volubility, and some classic crazy behavior. She was fantastically moving.”32

  Talking, drinking, smoking cannabis in Greenwich Village with Wright’s friends, Beauvoir was amazed to discover the chauvinism of the New York intellectuals she met. “Their chauvinism reminded me of my father’s. As for their anti-Communism, it verges on neurosis.”33 She could not resist taking notes on all the details, the differences, the feelings she experienced. On January 31, 1947, she wrote: “Americans’ politeness and good humor make life so much easier and nicer.” However, she could not help looking beyond the façade: “Yet, I’m starting to find annoying all those imperious invitations to ‘take life on the bright side.’ On every poster, everyone shows their white teeth in a grin that seems to me like tetanus. On the subway, in the streets, in every magazine, those obsessive smiles are chasing me. It is a system. Optimism is necessary to social peace and economic prosperity based on consumption and credit.”34

  On February 8, Simone went on Bernard Wolfe’s arm to see Louis Armstrong in concert at Carnegie Hall. Richard Wright had introduced Simone to Bernard, seven years her junior, a writer and jazz fanatic who had briefly been Trotsky’s secretary in 1937. Wolfe had managed to get two tickets to the Armstrong concert, no small feat. Just like Camus and Sartre before her, Simone was looking for the person who would give her America. She thought Bernard Wolfe would suit the role, except he was too slow in taking the bait. Before he realized it, Simone had left New York City.

  She had time before she was due to begin her round of prestigious universities and her lecture tour, and she was determined to see as much of America as she possibly could, and to travel as widely as possible, by bus, by plane, by train, by car. On her way to Los Angeles to visit her former student and lover Nathalie Sorokine, now Nathalie Moffat, wife of the British-born screenwriter Ivan Moffat, Simone stopped at Buffalo and Niagara Falls (a disappointment, she noted wryly). In Los Angeles, Nathalie and Ivan introduced her to the film director George Stevens. They had lunch at Lucy’s, a restaurant standing right between the RKO, where Ivan was under contract, Warner Bros., and Paramount studios. Stevens had made his name directing comedies and films with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Now forty-two, he was among the millions of young American veterans trying to fit back in. Still reeling from his experiences during the war—filming the D-Day landings, the liberation of Paris, and, even more dramatically, the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp—he was looking for dramas to direct; he could not do comedies anymore. His four years as lieutenant colonel and head of the U.S. Signal Corps’ film unit had changed him forever.