Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  NORMAN MAILER FOLLOWING THE WASHINGTON TRIALS FROM A PARIS CAFÉ

  Norman Mailer, having just delivered the manuscript of his war novel The Naked and the Dead to publisher Rinehart and pocketed his advance, sailed to Le Havre with his wife, Bea, and arrived in Paris the day Koestler and Sartre parted company. Norman had planned to stay in Paris for a year, to learn French and write and party no end, all at once. According to his biographer J. Michael Lennon, “It was one of the happiest seasons of his life, shadowed only by his anxiety about the future.”17 The Mailers were not living on a grand scale in Brooklyn—far from it—but they did not expect to be so uncomfortable in Paris. Along with the strikes, there were electricity shortages and a generally gloomy atmosphere. They shivered through their first few weeks while staying at the Hôtel de l’Avenir, 65 rue Madame in the 6th arrondissement, a hundred yards from the Luxembourg Gardens. When they first saw their bed, the young couple looked at each other with wide eyes: a pull-down bed! As for the bathroom, it was along the hall, rudimentary, to say the least, and had to be shared with all the other hotel guests.

  One evening, after coming back from one of his first French classes at the Sorbonne, Norman found a note slipped under his door. A friend had found them a three-room apartment. Their future flat was not very far, standing at 11 rue Bréa, a little street linking the boulevard Montparnasse and the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The place was a typical turn-of-the-century sandstone five-story building, and although the façade had not been cleaned since its construction in the 1870s it felt terribly Parisian. They went to visit the next day, and neither the red wallpaper nor the orange rug nor the bathtub in the kitchen managed to dent their joy. At less than one dollar a day it was a great find, exactly where they wanted it to be, and, besides, the gas stove worked.

  The Mailers began classes at the Sorbonne in early November. Every morning, wearing layers of woolen sweaters, they walked through the Luxembourg Gardens toward the boulevard Saint-Michel and the Sorbonne, all the while conjugating subjunctive verbs and kissing. Along with several hundred other ex-GIs, the Mailers had enrolled in the Cours de Civilisation Française, designed to garner American tuition dollars. If they flunked, they’d lose the $180 a month from the GI Bill.18 Compared with French students and young writers, they were well off.

  The Mailers made friends very quickly, starting with other GI Bill students. Some had briefly served at the end of the war, some had just been in military training in the United States but not deployed. There was a young Jewish man from Brooklyn, Mitchell Goodman. A scholarship student at Harvard, Goodman had not been deployed overseas during the war but had traveled to Europe following the war and met the poet Denise Levertov, whom he had just married in Paris. There was a friend of Norman’s from Harvard, Mark Linethal, who had served as a navigator during the last months of the war and been taken prisoner by the Germans, before being liberated by the Russian army. Linethal was in Paris with his wife, Alice Adams, a writer. And there were the aspiring writers Stanley and Eileen Geist, who lived with the rich Americans on the Right Bank. In Paris, Norman and his friends embraced politics in a new way, both vigorously and rigorously. In other words, more seriously than they had ever done before. When he arrived, Norman was a “naïve fellow-traveler,” a “liberal with muscles,” to use the social critic Dwight Macdonald’s expressions.19 Paris would change Mailer, his politics, and his writing, for better and for worse.

  For ten days, at the very end of October and early November, Mailer often left the flat early to stop at the news kiosk right at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel and the rue Soufflot on the way to the Sorbonne and sit at the café opposite to read the account of the Washington trials. The French press had called it “épuration à Washington” to reprise the French term for “purge” used in 1945 for the hunting of Nazi collaborators. French journalists were following closely the nine-day hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington into alleged Communist propaganda in the motion picture industry, and they reported back every word. In fact, many of Hollywood’s most talented were singled out for having once felt sympathy to the Communist cause, usually at the time of the Great Depression of 1929, and thus for being “un-American,” a concept that would never be defined.

  French correspondents in Washington covering the event were fascinated by the fact that for some, including Walt Disney and a few other staunch American Republicans, voting Democrat was akin to being a Communist. The House Un-American Activities Committee had, since its creation in 1919, been principally concerned with pro-German and then pro-Nazi sentiments and propaganda in the United States and had asked for stricter immigration and deportation laws against such propagandists. In 1945 it had turned its attention to Communist sympathizers considered to be in positions of influence in American society.

  The witch hunt started in the glare of the world’s media; four hundred seats had been reserved for the public, and a hundred twenty journalists were present at the hearings, which were broadcast on the radio. At home, sometimes in the middle of the night owing to the time difference, Americans on the West Coast gathered around the radio, as they had during the war. Would some of the glitziest stars of the silver screen admit to their liberal sins? Gary Cooper, called as a witness and very ill at ease, testified before Ginger Rogers’s mother and Walt Disney, both red-baiters advocating a purge of liberals in Hollywood. The Committee for the First Amendment, composed of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, and Gene Kelly, among others, was set up to support those incriminated. Many witnesses refused to answer the question “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” citing their rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Ten screenwriters and directors, later known as the Hollywood Ten, were charged with the crime of contempt of Congress. Hollywood studios had agreed to abide by the committee’s diktats, so the Ten all lost their jobs, but it also meant that nearly three hundred artists working in Hollywood felt the urge to go and work in Europe, Charlie Chaplin, Irwin Shaw, and Orson Welles among them. They no longer enjoyed living and working in a country where blacklists and fear were now permeating the whole society and getting hold of newspaper editors, theater and radio directors, and publishing houses.

  A FAILED INSURRECTION

  After the French Communists’ attempt at a popular insurrection through general strikes had failed to spark a revolution in 1946, the Communist Trade Union (CGT) chose increasingly violent tactics against the police. The government retaliated by creating a specific riot police also known as the CRS (Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité) to control protesters’ violence. In early December 1947, Communist militants went as far as to sabotage and derail a train they thought full of riot police, with devastating results: sixteen dead and fifty badly injured. Suddenly frightened, the Communist Party secretly negotiated the end of the strikes with the government in exchange for freedom for four of their saboteurs.20 The Communist trade union CGT consequently imploded, with a substantial minority leaving to set up the reformist and non-Communist FO (Force Ouvrière), with the financial help of American trade unions and the recently created CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).

  The French Communist Party had played with fire and been burned. Les Temps modernes, in its December 1947 issue, was quick to point to the Communists’ contradictions and bad faith, and to admonish them in no uncertain terms.

  L’Humanité [the official daily newspaper of the Communist Party] has been telling us for some time that we must choose between freedom and fascism, but since it attacks every single other political movement, it is in fact saying very clearly that we must be either Communists or Fascists. To say this at a time when the RPF [Gaullist Party] is getting more and more popular and the Communist Party is in relative decline at elections, it is precisely like pushing every undecided non-Communist toward the RPF. This reckless attitude is a provocation. To declare war on a so-called “American party” and include in it
70 percent of French citizens is asking for a backlash. More than ever, we ask the question: Is a reasonable socialism possible today? And which one exactly? In our European countries, is there any room for anything other than the clash of the world’s two big armies?21

  Sartre and Beauvoir were refusing bloc politics and increasing the urgency of the political debate both in France and in the Western world.

  The same week as Les Temps modernes was confronting the Communists’ incendiary and fruitless tactics, Sartre’s essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” was released in America. The Partisan Review writer Lionel Abel, who had met Sartre during his American tour, was left reeling. “The effect it had was quite sensational. It was more talked about than any other intellectual effort of the period.”22 In his essay, Sartre stated clearly that anti-Semitism was not an opinion that could be discussed and argued about, analyzed as true or false; it was a crime. For Abel, “the tenacity of your anti-liberal opponent forces a certain degree of anti-liberalism on you. To act, whatever your commitment to clarity, you may have to begin to think darkly.”23 And this proved an incredible discovery.

  Across the Atlantic and over the Channel, another hero of Lionel Abel’s had started to think darkly too. Back in his drafty, damp little cottage in north Wales, Arthur Koestler was in a foul mood, with Mamaine trying to bear it calmly. “Am afraid he’s starting a period of very bad temper. I just try to shut my eyes and ears and withdraw into my shell. I feel pretty dismal,”24 she wrote to her sister Celia. The weather was as dreadful as ever: extremely cold inside, snow outside, and despite new heating pipes and new stoves the house felt icy. There had been one small improvement, though: the purchase of a “radiogram with automatic change,” which meant they could listen to the Third Programme of the BBC every evening. This however did not much raise Koestler’s spirits. He was nagging all the time, making life difficult for his partner and secretary. In fact, Koestler had come back from Paris hurt and deeply annoyed by Sartre and Beauvoir’s snub. He would get his revenge, he swore, albeit a literary one. He had an idea for a futuristic fantasy piece about the “Existenchiks,” in which le Petit Vieux Ivan Pavelitch (Sartre), leader of the Existenchiks, and Simona Castorovna (Simone de Beauvoir) and other friends play their parts. Koestler asked Mamaine whether her sister Celia, an editorial assistant at a new monthly and trilingual magazine in Paris called Occident, might be interested in publishing it. “It is pretty violent politically but will make the fame of any mag which publishes it,”25 Mamaine wrote to Celia.

  He was writing it with such fury, it would have no real plot and the basic idea would never be fully realized. It did however make Camus laugh when he received the first draft and even gave him an idea. Like Koestler, Camus had a lot to get off his chest, and he secretly started penning a satirical story about Sartre and Beauvoir, which he titled “L’Impromptu de Philosophes.”26

  Koestler was in fact not finished with Paris and politics, quite the opposite—he was planning to go back and settle there. He had just persuaded the editor of the British newspaper the Observer to send him there on assignment for a few months to write about France.

  Koestler’s title for his eight-thousand-word satirical piece on Parisian Existentialist life under Communist rule was “Heroic Times.”27 He had fiddled with Beauvoir’s nickname for a long time and changed it from Castorovna to Bovarovna. Before mailing the manuscript to Paris, Arthur Koestler had read the first lines one last time: “Entering the house of Gallimardov, Miss Bovarovna had a slight palpitation of the heart. Twice, between the former Café de Flore and the bar of the Pont Prolétaire (formerly Pont Royal), she had fallen into the cordons of the Liberty Police.”28

  SOCIALIST REALISM VS. EXISTENTIALIST ARTISTS

  The Zhdanov Doctrine had reached Paris, and Aragon was implementing it to the letter. He had imposed Socialist Realism as the only acceptable art form, promoting talents he had carefully groomed for the purpose. The painter André Fougeron was one of them and would from now on become the French Communists’ official artist. Fougeron’s reign would last as long as Stalin lived, which was another five years. In the meantime, his fellow Party member Picasso could not help but laugh at his paintings. Inevitably, positions polarized and arguments became more strident in the arts, reflecting political points of view. Campaigns in the powerful Communist press glorifying Socialist Realism were astonishingly aggressive against the enemy, Geometric Abstraction, heir to the pioneers Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich and considered bourgeois art.

  In the arts, too, Existentialism was offering an alternative. It called itself the Informel movement. This “open” representation in free gesture fed discussions of the new painting and sculpture with echoes of Sartrean “authenticity.” It rejected political diktats. Informel, Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, and Lyrical Abstraction were emerging at the same time on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet, Wols, Hans Hartung, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Pierre Soulages were the artists who defied party politics.

  And of course there was Giaco, as Simone called him. A Surrealist before the war, Giacometti was now his own man and had declined to exhibit alongside his old Surrealist friends at the Galérie Maeght in the summer of 1947. Having rekindled his relationship with Matisse’s son Pierre, the celebrated gallery owner in New York, Giacometti had agreed to show his latest work, tall, thin figures cast in bronze. There was one condition, though: he wanted Sartre and nobody else to write the catalog’s preface.

  Beauvoir had urged Algren, who had never heard of him, to go and see his exhibition in New York. She had introduced Giaco in this way:

  A friend of us is a sculptor, we see him often and he may be the only one we always see with pleasure. I admire him as an artist immensely. Twenty years ago he was very successful and made much money with kind of surrealistic sculpture. Rich snobs payed expensive prices, as for a Picasso. But then he felt he was going nowhere. He began to work all alone, nearly not selling anything. He works 15 hours a day, chiefly at night, and when you see him, he has always plaster on his clothes, his hands, and his rich dirty hair. He works in the cold with hands freezing, he does not care. Now, I think he has really achieved something: I was deeply moved by what I saw yesterday.29

  In his studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron in the 14th arrondissement, “a kind of hangar, big and cold, without furniture or stove, just walls and roofs,”30 Beauvoir had seen the first cast of the six-foot-tall L’homme qui marche (Man Walking). Accompanied by Sartre, she had moved silently around the wiry, spindly man in midstride, his right foot jutting forward, and had felt a strong emotion, one that would soon resonate across the world.

  That same evening, after bidding Simone goodnight, Sartre sat at his desk overlooking the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church. He filled his rosewood pipe, arranged a few sheets of squared paper, held his fountain pen between his index and middle finger, and began to write.

  One doesn’t need to stare very long at Giacometti’s antediluvian face to understand his pride and will to place himself at the world’s beginning. He doesn’t care about Culture and does not believe in Progress, at least Progress in the arts; he doesn’t consider himself more “advanced” than his chosen contemporary, the Altamira caveman. At this stage of extreme youth of nature and men, neither the beautiful nor the ugly exist yet, neither taste nor people of taste, not even criticism: everything is waiting to be created. For the first time, the idea comes to man to carve the figure of a man in stone. Here is the model: man. Neither dictator nor general nor athlete, he doesn’t have the dignities and glittery trimmings that will seduce future sculptors. It is only an indistinct figure of a man walking on the horizon.31

  For Sartre, the fact that Giacometti neither believed nor followed any dogma in art, life, or politics was the source of his creative power, and his genius.

  SARTRE: PARTY LEADER

  By the beginning of the year 1948, Sartre had resolved to take political action even further. Signing mani
festos, writing essays and editorials, producing plays, editing a magazine, giving lectures and talks throughout Europe, speaking to the nation for an hour every week on the radio,32 supporting causes, helping new voices to be heard and published—the prodigiously prolific and indefatigable intellectual engagé already had a number of commitments, but he was now ready to cross the Rubicon: he would make the ultimate radical pledge and found a political party.

  The idea came from David Rousset, the author of the eight-hundred-page Les jours de notre mort (The Days of Our Death). A chillingly detailed and lucid account of the machinery of Nazi concentration camps, the first by a former prisoner ever published,33 the book had earned Rousset considerable prestige in France and abroad. At thirty-five, he struck anyone he came across by his sheer physicality. Call it charisma or personality, Rousset looked half ogre and half pirate. A tall man who had regained his ample prewar girth, he had only one eye, and many of his teeth were missing, none of which he bothered to replace. Together with Georges Altman, a fellow résistant and editor of the non-Communist socialist daily newspaper Franc-Tireur, Rousset asked Sartre to join forces to create the RDR, Rassemblement Démocratique et Révolutionnaire (the Democratic and Revolutionary Alliance), and present as many candidates as possible at the next elections. The RDR would appeal to “everyone who does not think that war and totalitarianism are inevitable.” “The idea was to unite the non-Communist Left under one banner and to promote an independent Europe”34 as a bridge between the two blocs, the United States and the USSR. Sartre dived headfirst into the adventure and momentarily left Merleau-Ponty at the helm of Les Temps modernes. He had a political party to create and also a play to finish and produce.

  Beauvoir had little time for this new political adventure of Sartre’s even if she fully supported him. She was feverishly trying to wrap up the research and writing of her “very short essay,” which had now grown to become a voluminous study of women’s situation, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex). She was also more interested in the play he was writing for the Kosakiewicz sisters. Wanda had demanded that Sartre write her a leading part and he had kindly obliged. Les mains sales (Dirty Hands) would prove to be one of his finest plays.