The RDR, Sartre’s party, quickly became the talk of the town. The press conference to launch it, attended by more than a thousand people, including many French and foreign journalists, was followed just a week later, on March 19, by the party’s first public meeting. Four thousand members of the public turned up at the Salle Wagram, Paris’s biggest concert hall. “People were enthusiastic, applauded and gave money and their names to become members of the party. But then, what now? There is a possibility to do something, indeed, but things go too quickly,”35 wrote Beauvoir to Algren a few hours later. The Communists, sensing the danger, increased their attacks against the Existentialist couple. Many Communist newspapers such as Action and Les Lettres françaises published salacious stories about their private lives, alluding to orgies. The Communists were clearly afraid of the RDR.
The RDR did indeed seem to be gaining in popularity. While not a member, Albert Camus publicly gave it his support. Raymond Aron was a Gaullist and an editorialist for the conservative daily newspaper Le Figaro, but he still wrote favorably about the RDR. He had just published a very sharp essay, “Le Grand Schisme,” in which he argued that “French intellectuals on the Left fear above all not to be seen as revolutionary.” Their attraction to Communism came from the “bad conscience they felt in front of men of action, i.e., Bolsheviks, who alone have the capacity to change the world.”36 If Aron was critical, and an incisive observer of the French Left, he was, however, well inclined toward the RDR, and he truly admired Sartre’s energy at fighting both the Gaullists and the Communists. Richard Wright also joined forces with the RDR and so did André Breton. Le Monde chose to support it too. A strong and independent Europe was at the heart of “L’alternative,” stated one of its editorials.
“DEADLY FALLACIES”
Koestler, back in Paris, had attended a few Gaullist rallies and was seeing a lot of Malraux, “now official chef de propaganda of the Gaullists.”37 Arthur was helping him raise money, for he thought it important to strengthen the left wing of the RPF. Malraux did not beat about the bush: “I desperately need between ten and fifteen million francs,” he had told Arthur. That was for his anti-Communist propaganda. Arthur called on his friend Guy de Rothschild and was straightforward with him: Could he cough up the money? Guy was not sure his family could give so much, but he nevertheless invited both men to dinner. Mamaine went with them and just watched, as everyone else did, even Koestler, Malraux being Malraux, master of his own pyrotechnics. “Malraux was more extraordinary than ever. He spoke for four hours non-stop. Usual brilliance,” summarized Mamaine in a letter she wrote the same evening to her sister. Malraux spoke with his “strange, indirect tenacity,” “his somber eyes apparently seeing nothing but his own thoughts.”38 However, this made Arthur increasingly ill at ease: “Malraux has now given up his line on de Gaulle being un homme de gauche and K says that despite Malraux’s new job, his left wing has clearly lost to the right wing of the Gaullist movement.”39 It took another three months for everyone else to realize this. As Janet Flanner later shared with her New Yorker readers: “Malraux is now the General’s right-hand man. There is no left-hand de Gaulle man.”40
To the editor of the Observer, who was eagerly awaiting Koestler’s take on French politics and growing impatient, Koestler replied sternly: “I don’t think I can write the articles. You see, I can’t write the only things worth saying.”41 Koestler had chosen his camp, the Gaullists, and yet he was already disillusioned with them, though he couldn’t actually say it. Terribly frustrated, and quarreling with Mamaine all the time, he let her go to Italy while he set off for New York to give a series of lectures at the invitation of the former antifascist, but now firmly right-wing, International Relief and Rescue Committee. Koestler had not realized quite how famous he was in the United States and quite how polarized American politics had become. The FBI initially blocked Koestler’s entry to the States on account of his being a staunch Communist, but the American ambassador in Paris had urgently briefed J. Edgar Hoover that that was not the case anymore, quite the opposite. The FBI’s files were seriously in need of updating. This first trip to America, following in the steps of Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir, was an eye-opener for Koestler.
Koestler tailored his talks around one theme: the dilemma of the radical. He often summarized the issue in this way:
The Communists today present the same dilemma to France as the Nazis to Germany in 1930: whether democratic privileges should be extended to a party which aims at the destruction of democratic privileges. The dilemma is complicated by the fact that, while Nazism frankly professed its intention to abolish democracy, the Communists pose as its defenders; their disenfranchisement could only be justified by indirect evidence and deduction by analogy.42
Unlike Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and many others in Paris, Koestler refused to put Stalinism and American Imperialism in the same bag. For him, “deadly fallacies” were hindering the “Babbitts of the Left” from understanding the true nature of the Communist threat. Above all, he rejected the “false equation: Soviet totalitarianism is bad, American imperialism is bad, there is nothing to choose between them.”43 One had to choose the lesser evil. There would be Pax Americana or there would be no pax. His words certainly fell on fertile ground in the United States, but he was dismayed at the general feeling of hysteria, rising in intensity as he made his way from New York to Washington and from Washington to Hollywood. In a letter to Mamaine he confided: “It is quite impossible to give you any impression. It is a kind of delectable nightmare. Five times a day I am telling myself this is a country where I want to be forever, five times a day that I would rather be dead than live here.”44 In fact, annoyed at being used by his very conservative hosts for their right-wing red-baiting maneuvers, Koestler tried to cut his trip short. After talks in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston, he returned to New York. There were farewell parties with Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, whom he swore he would seduce one day. On his last night, he toured Harlem’s jazz clubs with Marlene Dietrich on his arm. He did not know what he enjoyed more that evening: speaking German all night or peering closely into those piercing blue eyes.
THE THIRD SEX
After a trip to her native New York, Janet Flanner had sailed back to France just before the launch of the RDR and was following its eruption on the European political stage with much attention. “Two of the best known literary figures, Jean-Paul Sartre and David Rousset have founded a political party, heaven help us. Sartre’s political ideas are less clear, if more optimistic, than his novels. His talent, his scholarly mind, his French essence, and his hypersensitivity to Europe’s dilapidation give momentary importance to his political hopes. The Sartre-Rousset party declares that it expects to collect, in the next six months, a hundred thousand followers. If words were all, its followers should number millions, from all over this earth.”45 Janet had lived in France for more than twenty-five years now, and, as veteran foreign correspondents often do, she sometimes viewed her favorite topic, France, with a world-weary eye.
At fifty-six, she had finally reached that most French stage in life, the phase of being blasé. She had just been made a knight of the Légion d’Honneur and was wearing the bright red ribbon on her lapel, but somehow she felt both parvenue and frustrated. She was tired of journalism. She was tempted to tackle the Paris Commune of 1871 in a proper book, but would she stick to it? “I have manufactured journalism for nearly a quarter of this century; nowadays everyone manufactures. Few create. If an individual knows the difference, and I do, the failure to create leaves only one conclusion: one has manufactured,”46 she confided to her ex-lover and secretary Solita. Her private life was also a source of conflict and pain, and she was trying to restore some order to it. Early in 1948, her lover Natalia Danesi Murray had settled back in Rome. Janet had decided to divide her time between Natalia in Rome and her old lover Noeline in Paris, spending nine months a year with Noeline and the rest of the year with Natalia. With all this talk about a Third Way in
politics, she wondered whether there could not be a third sex, too. She had half-humorously asked her very old and very liberal mother in a letter, “Why can’t there be a third sex, a sex not dominated by muscle or the inclination to breed?”47 Janet had in fact invented for herself a “third sex” in the public world: she signed her articles with the androgynous pen name Genêt. “Neither masculine nor feminine, passive or active, Genêt was androgynous, anonymous, invented. The persona offered Janet security and identity; it gave her a form, a discipline, even what she later called a formula.”48
Samuel Beckett had finally found his stride, and as for sex, he was happy with Paris’s filles de joie (prostitutes)—much happier, it seems, than with Suzanne, his companion, sister, mother, and best friend. Beckett looked at politics, the Existentialists, and the new party in town, the RDR, from afar, or rather from the other side of Montparnasse Cemetery, in his spartan one-bedroom flat on the rue des Favorites. The “siege in the room” was going on and he seemed to be taking some pleasure from it. He had now written four novellas in French: La fin, L’expulsé, Premier amour, and Le calmant (The End, The Expelled, First Love, and The Calmative). He was thinking about a second play, too. He had a title in mind and asked Suzanne what she thought of it. What about En attendant Godot? She looked puzzled. Waiting for Godot? And who was this Godot? Of course, Beckett could not tell her. He mumbled something about a wordplay on “God.” He would later confide to his friend Con Leventhal the real origin of the title. Beckett often went to the rue Godot de Mauroy, in the 9th arrondissement, popular with prostitutes. One day a girl asked if he needed her services; when he turned down her offer, she replied sarcastically, “Oh yeah, and who are you waiting for, then? Godot?”49
Nobody had wanted to produce his first play, Eleutheria, which Suzanne kept mailing to theater directors, but this did not bother him. He had recently met Matisse’s son-in-law, Georges Duthuit, an art critic and the editor of a new magazine, Transition. He had found in him a kindred spirit and a partner with whom he could engage on matters of art and artists. And also an employer. Beckett was tired of giving English lessons and his allowance from his brother was decidedly meager. He lived on forty francs a week, half of which went to rent, and Suzanne’s dressmaking jobs were not always enough to make ends meet. Georges Duthuit gave him interesting translation work and provided him with a new social circle. From now on, Beckett would get a regular income, contributing every month to Duthuit’s magazine and its English sister edition (catering to the young literary Anglophones now thronging the Left Bank). Beckett translated authors such as Sartre or Apollinaire—what more could he ask for? Besides, thanks to Georges, he also stopped being a hermit and allowed himself to have a social life, going to editorial meetings organized by Duthuit in his flat at 96 rue de l’Université, just off the boulevard Saint-Germain. Georges and his wife, Marguerite Matisse, the leaders of a little circle, were presiding over Tuesday lunches attended by Informel artists such as Nicolas de Staël and Bram van Velde but also the twenty-four-year-old Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle whose future wife, the young American Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, would soon fascinate Beckett.
DISSIDENCE IN LITERATURE AND FILM: LA RUE SAINT-BENOÎT AND ANDRÉ BAZIN
In January 1948, Elio Vittorini, a well-known Fascist intellectual, published an open letter to Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian Communist Party, questioning the Zhdanov Doctrine and Stalin’s cultural policy. Vittorini was a translator of William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, head of the influential monthly review Politecnico, and a great admirer of Sartre and Beauvoir. In his letter, published in the French review Esprit, he argued that art and culture should be left out of politics. Artistic creativity should be autonomous and free. The review was hoping to stir up the same debate within French Communist circles. The young Communists around Edgar Morin, Marguerite Duras, her ex-husband Robert Antelme, and her second husband, Dionys Mascolo—known as “la rue Saint-Benoît”—embraced Vittorini’s cause and brought it to Commissar Aragon, hoping to influence the Party’s policies. La rue Saint-Benoît was thus gaining a reputation for being a den of young “Communist reformists”; the contradiction in terms would not become obvious to them until a couple of years later. Marguerite Duras’ flat, the group’s epicenter, was “one of those houses out of the Russian novels of the period of the intelligentsia, where one sees coming in or going out, at every instant, three ideas, five friends, twenty papers, three indignations, two jokes, ten books, and a samovar of boiling water.”50 It was a beehive in which Duras was the queen, a beautiful queen. Her fellow writer Claude Roy remembered her vividly: “She had an abrupt mind, a baroque and often droll vehemence, an infinite capacity for fury, appetite, warmth and astonishment.”51 Duras, Mascolo, and Morin had actually managed to publish a long interview with Vittorini in Les Lettres françaises.52 They thought they could persuade their elders in the Party to yield some ground, at least as far as culture and the arts were concerned. But no matter how hard they tried, they failed. Artists were soldiers like any other Party member and they had to obey the Party line blindly, pronounced Aragon. Though this was the end of the argument, Vittorini’s letter had far-reaching repercussions in Paris and would prove as decisive as the Yugoslav prime minister Tito’s excommunication a few months later.
Along with the Vittorini affair, the Czech coup in February 1948 had also contributed to shake many Communists’ faith in the Party and in Stalin, and young intellectuals and writers like those of la rue Saint-Benoît could not fail to notice “the growing resemblance between the Nazi enterprise and the Stalinist one.”53 Edgar Morin and Marguerite Duras may still have felt like Communist missionaries but they were not blind, nor were they deaf. “We belonged to the Party but also to the Left intelligentsia. Ideas flowed freely and whenever we met Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus and Rousset, we chose to discuss rather than vaticinate.”54
For longtime foreign Paris residents and visitors, it was obvious that the rigidly dogmatic Communism of the 1940s suddenly no longer countenanced the vague, revolutionary liberalism of the 1930s, when it was possible to combine individual fantasy and Party membership. “The Communist Party boys have no nonsense about them these days. Their papers brand Existentialism and the intellectual life of Saint-Germain-des-Prés as the ultimate expression of bourgeois decadence. You won’t catch them compromising their orthodoxy by taking an apéritif in this enemy territory,” wrote John L. Brown, in charge of the “Paris column” for the New York Times Magazine. The tribe of la rue Saint-Benoît would eventually have to choose sides, even if they would have preferred not to.
Artists were not the only ones to see their world invaded by dogma and they were not the only ones having to position themselves for or against; art critics too had to choose sides. The thirty-year-old André Bazin, a rising star of cinema criticism, was one of them. Bazin had embraced the Resistance motto “Culture is a human right and should be freely accessible to all” with passion. More than a critic, Bazin was also an educator and a youth leader. Through Travail et Culture [Work and Culture], a Communist-leaning association and a magazine, he was setting up film clubs in factories and in schools, in France but also in Germany and Algeria, and writing about films. For Bazin, presenting and explaining great works of art to the working class would help emancipate them from purely commercial cinema ventures. Bazin was eclectic in his choice of collaborations with publications and wrote for many magazines such as Esprit, Les Temps modernes, and the newly created La Revue du cinéma. A champion of Italian Neorealism and Orson Welles, he wrote and spoke about films in a radically new way, forcing his readers and listeners to consider cinema seriously on a par with literature and philosophy. Cinema was not frivolous, he argued, it was meaningful and was taking part in the social changes of the times.
In his review of Citizen Kane for Les Temps modernes, he discussed Orson Welles’s genius: “Flaubert didn’t invent the imperfect, nor André Gide the pluperfect or Camus the past perfect,
but the way they use them belongs to them, and to them only. If Orson Welles has not discovered the tracking shot, he has however invented its meaning.”55 In praising Orson Welles, André Bazin was aiming his review against Georges Sadoul, the Communist Party’s official film critic, as the party was anti-Welles, too free a talent.
Tensions rose, especially at Travail et Culture, where Bazin’s love of American cinema, his overriding interest in aesthetics, and his criticism of some Communist films put him at odds with his more militant colleagues. Bazin had not quite officially positioned himself against Socialist Realism in cinema, but the time would come when he could no longer remain silent. It took great courage to make a stand as Stalinists not only were very intimidating but also controlled a good part of French culture and the many jobs attached. For the time being, though, Bazin decided to dedicate his energy to setting up ciné-clubs aimed at the youth, who were rightly more interested in cinema as an art form than as a political discourse. Ciné-clubs popped up everywhere, showing classics but also premieres of recent works, with panel discussions, public debates, and dedicated journals such as La Revue du cinéma.
Sixteen-year-old François Truffaut, spurred by the ciné-club mania that was gripping Paris, ventured to set up his own ciné-club called Cinémane, a “Cinema Club for Film Addicts,” in the Latin Quarter. At the time, he already had a police record for petty thefts and had run away from home. In books and films he had found a refuge from an unloving mother and a harsh upbringing. One afternoon, Truffaut went to complain to Bazin that one of Bazin’s ciné-clubs was interfering with his own. They ended up speaking about films all afternoon. Bazin was amazed by Truffaut’s encyclopedic knowledge and by his enthusiasm, which matched his own. When Bazin learned that Truffaut’s father, having finally traced the teenager, had arranged for his arrest by the police, he intervened. “I was imprisoned at the minor delinquents’ centre of Villejuif, south of Paris,” recalled Truffaut. “At the time, the place was half lunatic asylum, half remand home. André Bazin literally saved me.”56 Bazin began a campaign to free the young Truffaut. He contacted Truffaut’s parents, who agreed to his early emancipation, and persuaded the police and the child psychologist to release him into his care. Bazin found Truffaut a job at Travail et Culture: the teenager wrote notes on the films being released every week and organized screenings in factories at lunchtime. François Truffaut was truly saved.
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