Richard Wright often went to the ciné-club screenings of the Latin Quarter, especially since he and his family had moved back to the Left Bank. He had found a spacious eight-room family flat a stone’s throw from the Luxembourg Gardens and the boulevard Saint-Germain. It stood on the fourth floor of 14 rue Monsieur le Prince, an 1850s stone and brick building with a tall wooden door adorned with two feminine figures, one a libertine woman, the other a studious jeune fille. The building looked across to the aged limestone walls of the Sorbonne’s École de Médecine. The composer Camille Saint-Saëns had lived there in the 1880s.
Their visitors, whether French or foreign, were amazed by the opulence of the Wrights’ home, at least compared with how most Parisians lived. Soon-to-be Paris resident Chester Himes, another fellow black American writer whom Richard Wright helped, just couldn’t believe his eyes when he first set foot at the Wrights’.
Their flat occupied the entire 4th floor and to me it appeared sumptuously furnished. The first room to the right of the entrance foyer was his book-lined study, with two large modernistic paintings, dozens of copies of his own books, several typewriters, his desk, a tape recorder, and overstuffed leather armchairs. Beyond it were the dining room, the living room, the master bedroom, and at the back, the bath, all overlooking the street. On the other side were a storeroom, pantry, kitchen, nursery and children’s bedroom.57
Ellen Wright was expecting their second child, and the decision had been made that they would not return to live in the United States. Paris was the family home now. The Wrights had even decided to invest in the ultimate luxury: central heating.
Richard Wright was happy in Paris, basking in literary success and enjoying the friendship of the most prominent French and European intellectuals while conducting brief affairs with a string of women. However, he had felt unable to start work on a new novel for nine months now. Wright convinced himself he needed to find the perfect café before he could begin to write again. He had rigorous criteria: soft electric lighting, sunlight at the right time, and not too intrusive a patron. He settled on the Monaco, a slightly shabby café at the south end of the rue de l’Odéon, next door to Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop and Sylvia Beach’s flat. The clientele was both local and international and he liked the mix. He had also negotiated a new delivery date for his next novel with his American publisher, Harper and Brothers, so all was well. Yet despite all this he would not, could not, start writing. He spent more and more time going to the ciné-clubs of the Latin Quarter. The particular brand of cinephilia raging in Paris had gripped him in the same way it had gripped the young François Truffaut.
In fact, Wright did not want to write yet another novel; what he wanted was to make a movie. Since Orson Welles and Roberto Rossellini, two leading lights of cinema, had contacted him a year earlier about adapting Native Son to the screen, Wright had dreamed of taking part one way or another in moviemaking. After all, Sartre had written a few scripts already that had been made into films, and even Simone de Beauvoir had been contracted to write dialogue, all of which was better-paid work than writing novels. When Rossellini wrote to Wright to say that he had to give up on adapting Native Son because a film criticizing the United States at the beginning of the Marshall Plan was simply impossible to produce in Europe,58 Wright felt terribly frustrated.
Still, life was sweet for any American living in Paris. One could now buy in shops nearly anything one wanted, and if the average Frenchman did not have the means of paying for it, Americans did. Many important items were still rationed for the French. Except for doctors and taxi drivers, the French did not get a drop of gasoline. However, because the government needed tourist dollars, “gasoline flowed in fountains for American tourists, as well as for abashed American journalists (French journalists got none), for whom the liberated franc made life nice and cheap anyway.”59 Janet Flanner enjoyed telling her New Yorker readers about how Parisians lived. It certainly made folkloric reading for Americans now used to such a high standard of living and to modern comfort: “Parisian adults had had no butter ration since Christmas and in April 1948 their quarter-pound monthly coffee ration was to be skipped, but they received a government Easter present—a rationed tin of sardines, at thirty times the pre-war price.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“PARIS’S GLOOM IS A POWERFUL ASTRINGENT”
HOTEL LIFE
“Paris looks sadder and sadder every day: dark, cold, damp, empty. Maybe I should have a real home; I should not feel so chilly. Spring seems so far away,”1 Simone de Beauvoir had written to Nelson Algren on January 9, 1948, the day she turned forty. She was writing with the red fountain pen he had given her, seated at her little desk in her round room at the Hôtel La Louisiane, her home since 1943. She had just come back from the Temps modernes office where she had picked up the English translation of her novel Le sang des autres (The Blood of Others), lying in the pile of mail. On the way back, walking down the rue Jacob, she had been drenched in “something which was neither snow nor rain but an icy, dark, sad water.”2 In her badly heated room she was shivering with cold. She poured herself a glass of whiskey, “not ‘scawtch’ but bourbon,” and looked out the window. The crossroads of the rue de Buci and rue de Seine were eerily calm for a Friday afternoon. A strike had closed down shops and restaurants for the day.
Hotels had been her home for more than twenty years now, and like Sartre she had always enjoyed the complete freedom this lifestyle gave her and the negation of domesticity it represented. Living in hotels had been a positive choice for both of them, an ethical decision. They earned this freedom through writing. This “cameral philosophy” came from Christian asceticism but also from a certain “separatist elitism.”3 Sartre had reluctantly agreed to move in with his widowed mother, but he had remained true to his convictions: he owned nothing, the furniture was not his, neither was the flat. He would have felt completely lost if he had owned anything. For him, and for Simone, domesticity, privacy, having a home were synonymous with the bourgeoisie, the class that they came from but had wholeheartedly rejected. A home also represented family, matrimony, and children, three things they had turned their backs on once and for all. This had not been easy, especially for Simone, and it had required great mental and moral strength, but they would stick to it. Many secretly admired them for it. Their way of life had become a holy grail for generations of intellectuals to come.
And unlike in other countries such as Britain, home ownership in France was not considered a great personal achievement, or a landmark in one’s life. The choice in Paris in the late forties was usually either renting a decrepit small flat with ancient bathroom and kitchen facilities or living in a hotel out of a suitcase. When one was young, intellectual, and unattached, the second solution was by far the preferred option. However, for Simone de Beauvoir, a forty-year-old single woman, still to be living in this way, despite her fame and financial independence, was truly original. It also made it easier for sensationalist and Communist publications to pry into her colorful private life. Perhaps it was time for her to rent a studio flat somewhere on the Left Bank.
“A LONG LEAKY FRENCH WINTER”
Although elated to have received a letter in December 1947 from his New York publisher telling him that revision of his first novel would be minimal and that publication would be brought forward to early May, Norman Mailer, too, had felt the gloom of what he called “a long leaky French winter,”4 as had—and would—many of his compatriots. The screenwriter and novelist Irwin Shaw, a liberator of Paris and soon to be a resident for the next twenty years, studied that very peculiar brand of seasonal melancholy: “Paris in the wintertime is the city for misogynists, misanthropes, and pessimists, for students of history who believe that the whole thing is all one long downhill ride. Winter, like unhappiness, is more biting in Paris than elsewhere.”5
Mailer had just returned from a short skiing trip in the Alps with his wife Bea but was feeling restless. He could not decide on a subject for his second n
ovel, while Bea was pretending to be a writer, too, supposedly working on a novel about Russian immigrants when in fact she was spending her days enjoying Paris, learning French, and taking painting lessons from an impoverished French artist friend. Norman turned to reading; he might as well read since he had not yet found anything to write about. He read everything by Sartre he could find in English, getting his supplies from the bouquinistes along the Seine. He read at home, in his flat on the rue Bréa; he read in heated cafés, he read during his lectures at the Sorbonne, and he read on the benches of the Luxembourg Gardens during rare sunny spells. He thought he should force himself to write something. Anything. After meeting a “vapid young American man” in a café “who asked a lot of dull questions”6 and whom Norman never saw again, he got an idea for a story. He provisionally titled it Mrs. Guinevere (it was later known as Barbary Shore). A young man, wounded in the war and suffering from amnesia, rents a room in Brooklyn with the intention of writing an autobiographical novel, except of course his past is a secret to himself. Norman did not go far with it, though; he wrote fifty pages and ran aground. In his own words, his “novelistic tanks ran out of gas.”7
At night, to compensate for their writer’s blocks, the Mailers assiduously went out. One evening in January 1948, either at Harold Kaplan’s8 or at Stanley Geist’s9 small flat on the posh avenue Gabriel in the 8th arrondissement, near the Champs-Élysées, Norman was introduced to Jean Malaquais, who, at forty, was fifteen years his senior. Not old enough to be a father figure, but certainly charismatic enough to be a mentor.
Malaquais, tall and thin with short, curly black hair, looked severe and haughty, but there was something in his eyes that drew Mailer to him. A glass in his hand, Mailer casually introduced himself. After a few minutes of conversation, Mailer went straight to his friend Stanley Geist: “Who’s that arrogant bastard?” he asked. Geist took him aside and told him about Malaquais. Born Malacki Wladimir Israel Pinkus in Warsaw, a Polish Jew, Jean had left Poland in 1925 to travel the world. He had embraced Leninism, gone to Africa, enrolled in the International Brigades against Franco, worked as a miner and manual laborer, and finally settled in France. Like Joseph Conrad, another Polish emigrant, and Arthur Koestler, he had taught himself to write in a foreign language. And while working nights unloading crates in Les Halles, he had immersed himself in French literature at the Sainte Geneviève library, an imposing 1850 palace standing on the place du Panthéon.10 André Gide, to whom Jean Malaquais had written, had encouraged him to record his experience as a miner and helped him publish it in 1939. As the war broke out, Les Javanais (Men of Nowhere) won the Renaudot literary prize against Sartre’s Le mur (The Wall). Stateless and Jewish, Jean, who had adopted the family name of Malaquais after the Quai Malaquais on the Left Bank facing the Louvre, had managed to escape France via Marseilles. From there he had reached Mexico and then New York, where he had spent the war years and acquired an American passport. Malaquais, now back in Paris, was a fierce anti-Stalinist and an intellectual heavyweight. “Now you’re warned,” Geist told Mailer.
Norman Mailer and many of his fellow GI Bill students in Paris meant well: they were antifascist and wanted to prove it with deeds, as well as with words. Now imbued with Existentialist thinking, Norman had resolved to be a writer engagé, a doer rather than just an observer. Spanish Republican refugee friends in Paris had asked him whether he would agree to “go on a mission” to Barcelona to help arrange prison escape for comrades. Mailer had eagerly embraced the adventure. After changing francs into pesetas in Geneva, he had driven with Bea and his younger sister Barbara to the Spanish border. They had previously rolled the money for their comrades in tight wads and put them into condoms, inserted the condoms in toiletry tubes, and stuffed propaganda in the spare tire of Norman’s Citroën. In Barcelona they found the contacts, delivered the money and the leaflets, and then returned to Paris feeling absolutely elated.11 However, Norman’s political thought was thin and verging on the naively romantic. He had been a Sartrean even before reading Sartre and he believed himself a Marxist without having read Marx. This was all going to change after meeting, and eventually befriending, Malaquais.
Malaquais, a Trotskyite, could not accept Stalin’s regime with its Siberian labor camps, repression, and purges. He also thought that capitalism was as great an evil as fascism and Stalinism and that Western democracies had as great a capacity for dictatorship as the Soviet Union. This allowed for a larger and far more complex worldview than Norman previously considered. At first annoyed by the arrogant Parisian, then intrigued and soon enthralled, Mailer quickly fell under the spell of what he viewed with envy as intellectual sophistication. From January 1948 on, their exchanges would sometimes be tetchy and heated, but Mailer acknowledged Malaquais as his mentor and his life coach in politics, and later he would be proud to acknowledge him as his translator. Mailer firmly intended to be a success in France, and he pushed Rinehart to sell the French rights and to establish Malaquais as the translator of The Naked and the Dead and all the books he might write in the future. In fact, Malaquais was a sought-after translator. He had just been approached to translate Nelson Algren’s second novel, Never Come Morning. Simone had found a French publisher for Nelson and was actively promoting his work in Paris, where it appeared in Les Temps modernes, as ever an incubator and a platform for talent.
Malaquais’ worldview, a rebuttal of both capitalism and Stalinism, did not leave any clear line of political action open except for the Third Way advocated by Sartre, Camus, Koestler, Wright, Beauvoir, and their army of followers. The world situation, with its slow slide into the Cold War mentality, called for action. At a time when old friends were going their different ways, feeling compelled to choose one camp or the other, even if reluctantly, when the Gaullists were borrowing the tactics and language of the Communists to spread fear, when Communist reformists were being expelled from their own party, feeling orphaned and lost—the alternative the Existentialists offered became more and more appealing.
JAZZ—FROM NEW ORLEANS’S “INHERITED COMPLAINT OF SLAVERY” TO “BEBOP’S JOYOUS AGGRESSIVENESS”
Instead of butter, Parisians increasingly fed on jazz. Jazz clubs were opening every month, providing further venues for French and visiting foreign jazz musicians while world-famous names performed in more prestigious concert halls. Boris Vian, “the young man with a horn,” as Beauvoir called him in her letters to Algren, had become not only a successful writer since he had revealed he was in fact Vernon Sullivan, the author of the scandalous J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, but also a very sought-after jazz impresario and concert organizer. In late February 1948, Louis Armstrong filled the Salle Pleyel, “our own Carnegie Hall,”12 as Beauvoir explained to Algren. “It was full of screaming people, chiefly young people mad with enthusiasm. People half killed one another to get seats.”13 In a typical French cross-fertilization, Boris Vian and the publisher Gallimard had a party for Louis Armstrong and his orchestra so they could meet the poets of négritude Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, along with Beauvoir, Camus, Sartre, Richard Wright, “and many other American intellectuals,” writers, and artists living in Paris; “Paris is crowded with them,” Beauvoir told Algren.
Dizzy Gillespie had preceded Armstrong by a few days and had also performed at the Salle Pleyel, in front of Parisian bebop fanatics. Picasso’s neighbor and friend the art critic and anthropologist Michel Leiris, just back from a six-month trip to Africa, was in the crowd and was intrigued to listen to the “most sensational jazz musician since Duke Ellington.” In his diary, he could not help analyzing Gillespie’s jazz in terms that would surely have interested if not fascinated many American jazz reviewers.
1) Extreme virulence of the brass instruments and force of the drummers, one American and one Cuban. 2) Great freedom of expression and treatment of the musical themes with successive instrumental soli. 3) Africanisms (or rather, most probably, West-Indianisms). Deliberate and sometimes verging on exoticism of poor taste. It is
however true that some trumpet ensembles made me think of certain things heard in Cameroon. Those Africanisms have led some people to talk about the influence of atonal music on Bebop but it seems to me baseless. 4) Correlation between Bebop and Cab Calloway’s scat-singing. To sum up, Bebop seems to me more extreme than truly original. I wonder whether its negrism proceeds from a spontaneous desire of jazz musicians to return to jazz origins, or simply from the white public’s demand for exoticism.14
Four days later he felt compelled to return to the subject.
Gillespie’s jazz is novel in that it seems to have almost killed off Blues, and overcome the inherited complaint of slavery (in which Armstrong still sort of indulgently basks). Gillespie has replaced the harrowing nature of jazz with Blues as its foundation, by something akin to joyous aggressiveness. It might be reflecting the change of blacks’ mentality, less resigned to their plight and now more ready to protest.15
As Janet Flanner confided to her New Yorker readers: “French jazz fans are as intellectual in talking about swingue as if they were discussing Schoenberg.”16
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