“THE SIEGE IN THE ROOM”
Two solitary figures in Paris, almost oblivious to the sizzling-hot days and suffocating Paris nights that summer of 1947, were Édith Thomas and Samuel Beckett. The Irish writer had returned in June from his annual visit to his mother in Dublin and was experiencing what he later described as “the siege in the room.” In his sparsely furnished home on the rue des Favorites, with a silent Suzanne in the room next door darning old stockings, Beckett was busy writing a new novel, in French, which he would call Molloy. He had had some small success on the publishing front. His painter friend van Velde’s sister, who gave Suzanne a hand in trying to interest publishers in his work, had managed to get his unpublished English novel Murphy translated into French and published by Bordas. The miracle was short-lived, though, and turned into a disaster. Only a dozen copies were sold in the first twelve months. Used to failure, the news did not upset Beckett too much. In fact, he was feeling almost good about writing Molloy. Of course, for the American students who sometimes recognized him in Left Bank cafés he remained “James Joyce’s secretary, a survivor of something that was over, a beached and pathetic figure who was something of a joke.”23 The problem for Beckett was that he did not belong to any circles anymore. He might have been published twice in Les Temps modernes, but he did not belong in Existentialism. Camus’ L’étranger might have started with Beckett-like sentences—“Mother died today. Or perhaps yesterday”—but Camus had traded the absurd for action. In fact, “Beckett was nobody’s hero and he had no followers, or even readers.”24
Still, Beckett was plowing on. With Molloy, and without realizing it, he was working alongside budding anti-novelists like Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Except that he had humor and they did not. With Molloy, Beckett’s antihero was born, following in the steps of other familiar figures of European literature such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. Beckett’s antihero, however, was “the one from whom all vestiges of the heroic or the admirable have been most thoroughly eliminated. The Beckett man is a lone individual who regards others with fear, hatred, impatience or contempt.”25 But were Beckett’s characters familiar enough for readers to feel close to them, or were they too abstract and aloof as literary inventions? Fully using his comic talent for the first time, and with exaggeration as the main technique, Beckett made his readers feel the humanity of his character Molloy. It was a breakthrough for the struggling Irish writer.
The breakthrough in Édith Thomas’s life had taken place in the arms of a woman, Dominique Aury, and was of a purely sexual and emotional nature. Their passion had been going on for ten months now but had stopped being an exclusive one. The seductress Dominique had fallen for Jean Paulhan, twenty-three years her senior but her perfect intellectual match. Their paths often crossed at Gallimard and the inevitable gentle stroking in the publishing house’s narrow corridors had led to more serious cavorting behind closed doors. Besides, he was about to give her a proper editorial position at Gallimard. They were clear from the start. Paulhan would never leave his wife, seriously ill with Parkinson’s disease, and Dominique was neither the marrying nor the exclusive kind. She lived with a seventeen-year-old son from a previous marriage and had her mother to look after; there was no room in her life for a full-time consort. Their affair had to remain completely secret to the world, which suited them both. Resistance had made discretion second nature to them. The terms of their affair did not, however, preclude passion and lasting love, quite the opposite. They remained lovers and soul mates for more than twenty years, until Paulhan’s death in 1968.
Édith had developed a mystical attachment to the woman who introduced her to pleasures she never thought existed. She wrote Dominique letters of an almost metaphysical nature: “You’re my illness, my love, I am ill of never having enough of you. I couldn’t care less whether you’re a man or a woman. I love your caresses, the beauty of your body, the beauty of your brow and of your eyes, and this abandon with which I give myself to you, and you give thyself to me.”26
Although Édith knew there would be a moment when her fickle lover would fly away, when the time came she was not ready. Dominique started, rather astutely and en passant, to mention Paulhan’s name in her letters to Édith. On August 6, 1947, while Dominique and Édith were vacationing separately, Dominique wrote to her: “My love, write to me, even if it’s just a few lines … I take you with me for a walk in my garden-jungle and I lock you in my room, warm and blue. You half-close your eyes, like a cat, but I can see your sparkling eyes, black and ironic. I love you. Dominique. PS: Paulhan tells me our magazine project has fallen through.”27
Édith understood the subtle hint, and there was little she could do. She knew better than to try to fence Dominique in; she would have to endure it, swallow her pride, repress her jealousy, and share her lover with others. It was a painful thought, but it was more painful still to think she might lose Dominique. Besides, she had always rejected bourgeois conventions such as sexual fidelity, why should she now profess it simply because she felt hurt? To forget, she buried herself in her work and even chose to pick a fight with a powerful Communist colleague. Édith was growing tired of being told whom to hate and whom to approve of by Aragon and the Party’s intellectual leadership. She felt more and more uncomfortable in the Party but, like a practicing Catholic, she might criticize the clergy but still believe in God. Yet on one subject she bravely resolved to go head-to-head with Jean Kanapa, the Party’s rottweiler, in charge of savaging anyone deemed anti-Communist in the press. Kanapa had attacked Les Temps modernes for its celebration of Richard Wright, but Édith rose to the American’s defense. She had been captivated by Black Boy. She went as far as to write that discovering Richard Wright had proved “a revelation comparable to the illumination of Pascal and the dream of Descartes.”28 She was taking risks, and her Communist friends, the ones abiding by the ever more rigid Party lines, were noticing. She still enjoyed the aura of the great résistante she had been, but how long would they accept her idiosyncratic ways?
CHAPTER TEN
ACTION AND DISSIDENCE
ZHDANOV AND HIS DOCTRINE: THE GLACIAL AGE
At the end of September in 1947, when Beauvoir landed back in Paris at six in the morning after spending two weeks with Nelson Algren in Chicago, she popped two pills and gulped down four cups of coffee to stay awake. Back to work. As it happened, Beauvoir had touched down in Paris only a few hours before Andrei Zhdanov developed the fateful principles of what would be known as the Zhdanov Doctrine, a riposte to the Truman Doctrine articulated in Washington six months earlier and a response to George Marshall and his famous plan.
Zhdanov had been appointed by Stalin as the head of the newly founded Cominform, a bureau controlling the cultural policy of the Soviet Union and coordinating all the Communist parties in Europe. Zhdanov had established for the whole Eastern bloc the canons of the only acceptable art possible, a kind of universal conception both positivist and pseudoscientific in which every symbol represented a determined moral value. His cultural policy had to be strictly and ruthlessly enforced, with censorship and punishment for all dissenters. In the USSR, composers such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev would soon have to repent publicly for their too “hermetic” music, while the poet Anna Akhmatova would be expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers for being “half harlot, half nun”1 and condemned for “eroticism, mysticism and political indifference.”2 Editions of her poems were withdrawn from sale and destroyed.
Zhdanov also ordered the Communist parties of Western Europe to drum up insurrection on behalf of their working classes. The Cold War was not only pronouncing its name loud and clear but entering the Glacial Age. As Zhdanov had presented it, the world was now divided into two blocs, the “imperialist and anti-democratic” one controlled by America and the “anti-imperialist and democratic” one led by the Soviet Union.
Party member Édith Thomas finished reading Zhdanov’s full speech in Le Monde
on October 7, 1947, while finishing her coffee at the Café de Flore, where she was about to meet her colleagues from Éditions de Minuit. “Cézanne had been for the Nazis the product of Judaeo-freemason decadence, and now, for the Stalinists, he was the expression of bourgeois rot. What a load of bollocks,”3 she wrote that day in her diary. A hundred yards away, at Marguerite Duras’ flat on the rue Saint-Benoît, Edgar Morin was burying his head in his hands, and for the same reason. What was the way forward for former résistants like him who had become Communists only to fight fascism and change the world for the better? To obey blindly and without thinking the Party’s new lines, decided in Moscow, or to abandon politics and return to private passions? Or…? Thomas and Morin were not alone in feeling paralyzed, completely torn apart.
Louis Aragon and Laurent Casanova, a former charismatic résistant whose wife had died in Auschwitz and who was now in charge of the Communist Party’s relationship with the French intellectuals, had drawn up a kind of “death list” of intellectuals. Attacks had to be concentrated on Malraux, Gide, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Mauriac, Aron, Wright, and Koestler.4 No holds were barred. The Communist press had free rein to attack them in any way it deemed necessary.
The Cold War turned intellectual discourse in France into permanent adversarial theater. It was extremely hard for anyone to keep cool when the Communists’ paroxysmal tactics had transformed the public debate into a never-ending psychodrama. Some, however, still believed in a radical Third Way.
Beauvoir and Sartre both hated “the lies of Communism and of anti-Communism”5 and were resolved to expose both camps’ contradictions and bad faith. They did not quite believe in the old Socialist Party, “very corny, very old and weak,” but they started meeting some Socialist Party members to discuss a rapprochement between Existentialists and Socialists. “It is the only chance left for us, squeezed as we are between the conservative Catholic Left and the Communist Party,”6 Beauvoir wrote to Algren.
Richard Wright had been rather taken aback by the French Communists’ attacks against him and his novels. On the other hand, he felt it was almost a rite of passage. He was now a real Left Bank intellectual, he could show his scars, he joked with Beauvoir and Sartre when they came to his Neuilly apartment for dinner at the end of September. Beauvoir particularly enjoyed the Wrights’ company, listening to Bessie Smith records and drinking brandy. One evening, as she left, she pleaded with them: “You must really come back to the Left Bank.” They reassured her. The Wrights had their eyes on a beautiful flat just next to the Luxembourg Gardens; they were planning to move very soon.
Albert Camus had decided not to spare his Communist friends any longer. They might have fought together in the Resistance but they were going astray, and Camus had resolved to say it and write it loud and clear. Arthur Koestler had for a long time urged him to be more vocal. So had Mamaine. In a letter to her sister, she had deplored French anti-Stalinists’ fearfulness. “Now I do wonder why it is that even anti-Stalinist French writers such as Malraux and Camus, who have done enough to put themselves definitely in the anti-Russian camp, don’t go the whole hog while they’re about it and denounce Russia à haute voix as K does. They do, it is true, attack Russia indirectly but a) rarely by name and b) always with some counterbalancing attack on the US.”7
However, unlike the doomsdaymongers Malraux and Koestler, Camus did not think that war was imminent or that the Red Army was a few months away from rolling down the boulevard Saint-Germain. Camus was certainly worried about the state of the world, but he thought that instead of preparing for the worst, it was better to wake up public opinion and offer alternatives.
“THE FIRST APPEAL TO INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC OPINION”
One rainy morning in October 1947, Camus’ secretary at Gallimard, Mademoiselle Labiche, left a pile of letters on his desk. The one on the top came from the editor of the monthly Left-leaning review Esprit, founded in the early 1930s. Esprit was about to publish a manifesto, “the first appeal to international public opinion,” and needed the support of intellectuals like Camus.8 “We all know that the new world order cannot be national or continental, western or eastern, it must be universal,” stated the magazine. Camus called Sartre, who agreed to take part. The third solution, third force, Third Way that these intellectuals had kept searching for in the years after the war was taking shape in Left Bank minds and from there to the wider world. When the appeal was published in Esprit’s November edition, it made wide ripples, at least within Western Europe. “Bloc politics” did nothing to guarantee peace, for “armed peace is no peace,” argued the signatories. The idea of a united and independent Europe as a counterbalance and counterpower to the bloc politics was emerging, a Europe that would adopt non-Communist socialism and divest itself of its colonies.9
Koestler could not keep away from Paris any longer; he needed to be there, to take part in the effervescence and try to weigh in and influence people. On their first day back in Paris on October 1, Arthur and Mamaine met the novelist turned General de Gaulle’s right-hand man André Malraux and his wife, Madeleine, at the bar of the Plaza Athénée hotel, where they ate caviar and blinis, balyk and soufflé sibérien, and drank too much vodka. Malraux confided that “in using his reputation as a man of the Left to help the reactionaries, he was taking a big gamble.”10 It was true and brave of him: he had placed all his hopes in Charles de Gaulle and the Gaullist movement and wanted it to transcend the traditional right versus left, conservatives versus progressives divide.
Early the next morning, despite a slight hangover, Arthur and Mamaine, buoyed by the Paris air, took a walk from their room at the Hôtel Montalembert to the Café de Flore.11 Beauvoir was there and the three friends fell into each other’s arms. They decided to spend the morning together. After their coffee and tartines, and a little glass of dry white wine, they set off to see an exhibition of paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec that had just opened at the Jeu de Paume. All was well in Left Bank land, old friends reunited, and united, it seemed, against the Cold War, everybody being “sincere, simple and friendly”12 and not “arrogant and conceited,” as had been too often the case. All was well—until they had dinner at Albert and Francine Camus’ new flat on the rue Séguier on October 7.
The atmosphere was very amicable to start with. Mamaine and Arthur had carefully chosen the best food on the rue de Buci and arrived with a cold roast chicken, a lobster, and some champagne. Sartre and Beauvoir had brought “many bottles of brandy and wine,” and Francine had cooked some delicious dishes. Koestler, however, wished to talk about politics. The friends, hoping to enjoy, for once, a politics-free evening, began by gently dodging his questions. The evening turned sour only when Koestler’s friend Harold Kaplan and his wife rang the bell. Koestler did not know that Sartre and Beauvoir were convinced Kaplan was “a kind of spy” for the American government. “We all loathe him,” Beauvoir wrote to Algren immediately after the dinner. “He is Jewish yet Anti-Semitic and he hates negroes,” she observed, adding, “Koestler likes him because he’s anti-Communist, I think it becomes as bad as being a Communist when the only reason you like somebody is because he is anti-Communist.” Kaplan, feeling the tension, departed early. This triggered a fierce discussion between Sartre and Koestler over who Kaplan really was and what cause he really served. Alcohol did not help, and Koestler stormed out with a drunken “Now we are enemies.”13 Mamaine wrote about the incident to her sister: “Later in the evening, when all had drunk quite a bit and the Kaplans had left, Sartre started attacking Kaplan in violent terms. K got so cross that he let fly at Sartre and said who are you to talk about liberty when for years you’ve run a magazine which was communisant and thus condoned the deportations of millions of people from the Baltic States and so on? Sartre was a bit taken aback by this. We left.”14
Beauvoir and Sartre were probably right about Harold Kaplan’s being a kind of agent. Kappy, as Koestler called him, had passed the exams to become a Foreign Service officer, and he
had become, in effect, a diplomat attached to the American embassy. However, according to Kaplan himself, he had a certain freedom to work and report back as he pleased. “The embassy understood that I was somehow special and let me run a kind of unofficial cultural centre from home”15 in his vast and gorgeous flat just above Matisse’s studio on the boulevard du Montparnasse. Officially, he worked in tandem with the embassy’s cultural and press officers; his turf was the Paris literary scene and everybody who was part of it. Kaplan’s wife would have preferred for him to follow in the steps of his friends, such as Saul Bellow, and become a writer rather than, as Kaplan put it himself decades later, “a passionate Cold War warrior.” His job could easily be considered within the realm of the CIA cultural activities of the time, including attempting to influence Europe’s present and future elite and win them to the American administration’s cause. “My job was to find out who the most promising writers, scientists, artists and intellectuals in France were and to offer them to study and travel in the United States. The idea was to make new friends.”16 Decades later it would be called Soft Power; at the time of the Cold War, it was rather more than persuasion.
The morning after their argument at the Camus’ apartment over Kappy, Arthur wrote an apologetic letter to Sartre to which the Existentialist in chief replied in warm and friendly terms, so all was well in the end. Like Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, and many others, Koestler was indeed trying to promote a Third Way and to save the Left from Stalin, at least when sober. The entire reason for his presence in Paris was to launch various projects, both editorial and political. Over time, though, he leaned further and further toward the Gaullists, thanks to his friendship with Malraux, and this irritated Beauvoir and Sartre hugely.
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