The generation born around 1925 was coming of age and felt slightly out of place, unsure and unsettled. An article by Roger Stéphane in Les Temps modernes titled “Born in 1925” had looked into precisely this palpable generational malaise.
We, born in 1925, must be cautious: we must not believe in anything, we must not feel close to anyone or anything for we know we can lose everything and everybody, truths and opinions. Then, we realise, with a new freshness, that there is no solution, only “may-be.” We, twenty years old in 1945, are wise people. We have nothing to learn from religions and from philosophy. We know how to savour the deepest and most durable joys in the middle of a demented world.4
John L. Brown, the Paris columnist of the New York Times Magazine, on one of his numerous visits to the city, had felt that generational mal être and put it this way to his readers:
This Bohemia has ceased to believe in style, has ceased to believe in art and, to a serious degree, has ceased to believe in man. They find a savage anti-humanism more honest than a party-dictated doctrine of “brotherhood.” But in the midst of this despair, life goes on. At twenty, metaphysical anguish is a torment that comes and goes, that can even be rather pleasant and distinguished in understanding company. “See you at the Flore at five?”5
LIKE A FRENCH FIDDLER ON THE ROOF
Twenty-two-year-old Art Buchwald was among those thousands of students flocking to Paris’s Left Bank that summer. Traveling to the city on the GI Bill program, he disembarked from the Marine Jumper in Le Havre on June 12, 1948. The ship was loaded with rosy-cheeked American students just like him. “We carried hardly any luggage, but if we’d declared our dreams to French customs, they would have been worth thousands of dollars in duty,”6 he later wrote. The son of an Austrian-Hungarian Jewish curtain manufacturer, Buchwald spent his early years in New York’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum after his father lost his business in the Great Depression, but he had high hopes for the rest of his life. After deceiving the U.S. Marine Corps about his age, he had served in the Pacific in the last years of the war. The Marines, however, had not had much use for him; perhaps Paris would be different.
On his first night there, he found a cheap hotel in Pigalle. The next morning he realized the hotel rented most of its rooms by the hour, except for penniless tourists like him. He enjoyed Pigalle enormously; he thought he was a character in an Utrillo painting with his string bag to carry vegetables from the food stalls. After enrolling at the Alliance Française on the boulevard Raspail, he found a studio flat on the place Clichy in the 9th arrondissement for five dollars a month. He did not know his right bank from his left and could not have cared less. Unlike Norman Mailer, he did not dream of conjugating subjunctive verbs for the next twelve months. When an ex-GI told him he could bribe the girl checking attendance every morning at the Alliance Française for two dollars a month, he seized his chance: no French lessons and still his monthly stipend from the U.S. government. He would not have to sweat over Molière. “If all the GIs in Paris who are supposed to be enrolled went to class, they would need a soccer stadium to accommodate them,”7 laughed his friend. The very resourceful Buchwald discovered other ways to add to his kitty. As an American citizen, he was entitled to gasoline stamps in exchange for dollars. He sold his gas coupons to taxi drivers for $25 a month. “So with $75 from the GI Bill and $25 from gasoline stamps, I was as rich as a French fiddler on the roof.”8
With no Sorbonne lectures or French grammar lessons, Buchwald had all the time in the world to flirt. Jovial and charming, he was also chubby and nearsighted. He was not the sort of man that women fell for at first glance. He needed to make them laugh before offering to buy them a drink, so café terraces were not the best places for Buchwald to try to seduce girls. He accidentally discovered that the best honeytrap in Paris was the Louvre Museum. “Women of all nationalities went there alone because they considered it safe and assumed that anyone looking at the Tintorettos could be trusted,”9 and be talked to. Art, however, was about to wake up from his Utrillo fairy tale. One morning in July 1948 he was summoned to a meeting at the U.S. embassy. The Veterans Administration knew he was not attending classes, and this meant the end of his monthly allowance. If Art wanted to stay in Paris, he would have to find a job, and quickly. He wanted to write for newspapers. If he had managed to trick the U.S. Marines, surely he could trick the International Herald Tribune?
Art first moved to the Left Bank and found a cheaper room in a “Poles’ coop,” as he called it. The Hôtel des États-Unis, at 135 boulevard du Montparnasse, right across from where Matisse and Harold Kaplan lived, was run by Polish veterans who had fought with the Allies. His room, on the third floor, had a sink, a bidet, a bed, a desk, and “a light-bulb so low in wattage that mice went blind trying to find something to eat.”10 His canteen was Wadja’s,11 across the boulevard, a favorite of Samuel Beckett, too, at 10 rue de la Grande Chaumière. The owners allowed their young clients to eat on credit as long as they did not spread the word. No à la carte, just one menu for all. The traditional dish was “steaming platters of meat and potatoes,”12 which they served in big dishes and placed on tables shared by all the patrons.
Art mixed with his fellow American students on the Left Bank and with anyone who could reply in English or who could translate for him. He asked people if they knew of a job vacancy, preferably in the publishing or newspaper industry. He soon landed a job as a stringer for Variety, the American entertainment industry publication. This would be enough to survive. “It paid nothing but got me entrée into all the show-business enterprises, including movies and vaudevilles. It also gave me the chance to attend fancy cocktail parties where I served myself dinner.”13 Throughout the time he spent working for Variety, though, his eyes were on the International Herald Tribune.
THE CAPITAL OF SIN AND LIBERTINAGE
In New York, the Partisan Review’s jack-of-all-trades Lionel Abel was eagerly awaiting his turn to leave for Paris. He already had many friends there whom he had met during the war when they were in exile or when they had toured the United States just after the war. They were the painter Jean Hélion, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, the philosopher Jean Wahl who had taught Beauvoir, André Breton, and Roberto Matta. Call him prudish, but there was one thing Lionel Abel had never felt comfortable with in the presence of his famous French friends, and that was their “cynical view of sentimental and sexual relations.”14 Would he find Paris and Parisians as devoid of morality as his Surrealist friends’ mores suggested? Perhaps it was the self-righteous Jewish Trotskyite in him, but he recoiled at the thought. His Chicago friend Saul Bellow, also on his way to Paris with his wife, Anita, and four-year-old son, Gregory, in tow, shared the same prejudice. He, too, had only contempt for French libertinage despite his own philandering.
Lionel Abel had had a taste of French lust in recent months and had found it disgusting, or simply too disturbing, or too heady, perhaps. His friend Roberto Matta had broken up with his wife, Ann, and they divorced just after the birth of their twin boys. Matta went on to marry his lover Patricia, who had already started an affair with Pierre Matisse, the art gallerist and son of the great painter. Pierre consequently divorced his wife, Teeny, the mother of his three children, for Patricia, who left Matta. He felt fine about it as he was himself having a liaison with Agnès, the wife of the painter Arshile Gorky. This ring of love would have ended rather pleasantly with the marriage of Matisse’s first wife, Teeny, to Marcel Duchamp a few years later, if tragedy had not struck in the midst of it. In the heat of the summer of 1948, after Gorky had confronted Matta in Central Park over his affair with Agnès, Gorky returned to his studio in Connecticut and hanged himself. He was forty-four. André Breton called Matta a murderer, and Pierre Matisse refused to be Matta’s art dealer any longer. For Lionel Abel, “the Surrealist movement died that summer.”15 Still, the thirty-eight-year-old New York intellectual remained intent on going to Paris and living there, in the capital of sin and moral ambiguity.
THE
GI BILL PROGRAM INVASION
Perhaps attracted by libertinage, six hundred young Americans crossed the Atlantic on board the USS Tiger that summer, heading for Cherbourg. Beneficiaries of the GI Bill program, they slept on hammocks and used military latrines as toilets. With an average speed of 300 nautical miles per day, this was an eleven-day trip. On board were Patrick Hemingway, the twenty-year-old second son of Ernest, shy and diffident, and the twenty-one-year-old Richard Seaver, a student of French and American literature who had won the American Field Service fellowship to France, just like Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings before him. Richard told Patrick of his plan to walk the 220 miles from Cherbourg to Paris. The young Hemingway looked at Richard’s shoes and gave a painful smile. Richard later wondered what had made him undertake such an arduous trek: to atone for his absence in Normandy on D-Day? Richard had joined the navy in 1944 at age seventeen. He had been sent to an officers’ training program called V-12 in Alabama and had been released in spring 1946. “In short, though I had worn the uniform for two years, I had really missed the war.”16
Seaver had been given a piece of paper bearing the address of an old hotel in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie at the Odéon. It had small rooms to rent for a dollar a day with views over chimneys and roofs, 70 square feet in total. Tight but fine. Jack Youngerman, an American student at the Beaux-Arts, lived nearby. They had a friend in common, and soon Jack and Dick were hanging out together. “I told him about Joyce, he turned me on to the writings of Louise Labé, a female French poet of the Renaissance,”17recalled Richard Seaver in his memoirs. At first, Richard dutifully attended his classes on comparative literature at the Sorbonne, but he found the lecture halls stuffy and the teaching dull, with ancient-looking, doddering teachers reading from notes probably unchanged since the First World War. “I quickly decided to move my education out of the classroom and into the streets and cafés. Where the action was. Where life was.”
In his first year at the Beaux-Arts, Jack had to go through relentless drawing practice and academic teaching under the supervision of Picasso’s friend Jean Souverbie. The idea was that in order to transcend order, in order to attain originality and perhaps genius, in order to revolutionize the arts, one first needed to master the rules. According to French belief, creativity did not spring from chaos but could be achieved only through discipline and knowledge. This way of thinking was something Youngerman and his American fellow students would have to get used to. It explained the mood at the Beaux-Arts school, which had stood at the corner of the Quai Malaquais and the rue Bonaparte since 1816. For Youngerman and his foreign peers, “it was an unbelievable return to the past.” Each time Jack took his place in the overcrowded room, with only a stove next to the model, he could not help looking around him. “I was amazed that they could preserve a sense of atmosphere down to every detail. The way the professor looked, his dress and all his mannerisms, were all very nineteenth-century. And the studio that I was in had been Toulouse-Lautrec’s and van Gogh’s. As though it had been yesterday.” Youngerman and his colleagues would have to get used to living with such ever-present ghosts. Jack tried to mix with the French students, but at first relations were a little frosty. “They owned art while we were just full of dollars.”18
Jack Youngerman and his fellow students were encouraged to go and observe art in the streets of Paris, so Jack often took Richard for long walks to study art history. This was perhaps their favorite activity, and they pursued it assiduously. Richard’s hotel faced the studio of Balthus; the two friends passed it twice a day and sometimes they took a peek inside at night, hoping to discover some secrets. Jack thought that soon, when he felt more assured, he would summon up the courage to go and knock at Balthus’s door. There were other artists nearby whom he would have loved to meet as well: Picasso, Matisse, Brâncusi, and Jean Arp. His compatriot Ellsworth Kelly, a newcomer at the Beaux-Arts, nurtured the same hopes. Together, perhaps, when they both felt ready, they would go and meet the masters. Meanwhile, if they were not in class, drawing, or in the streets, looking up, they were in museums, sketching. Kelly, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker who had taken part in the Normandy landings and had just graduated from the Boston Museum School with an arts degree, had promised himself he would return to the country where he had spent the most exhilarating year of his life. He had in fact gotten his first art training in the U.S. Army, where he served in a deception unit known as the ghost army. They were the camouflage artists and designer soldiers of the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion, whose inflatable trucks and tanks, among other painted subterfuges, were used to mislead the Wehrmacht as to the position and direction of the Allied forces during D-Day operations.
He found a room just next to the Beaux-Arts school, at the Hôtel Saint Georges, 36 rue Bonaparte. From his room he could catch a glimpse of Sartre going in and out of his building. Like Youngerman, Kelly was not in Paris just to have a good time and then return home after his allowance came to an end. He very seriously intended to find himself as an artist there. Like Youngerman, he followed the advice of his antiquated yet wise art teachers and went every day to the Louvre. He also loved the Musée de Cluny, the National Museum of the Medieval Age, and the Asian art museums Guimet and Cernuschi. For six months Kelly and Youngerman went every day, sketching, copying, soaking up others’ style like sponges. Kelly painted half-length portraits that combined the influence of Picasso and Byzantine art, while Youngerman was experimenting with Geometric Abstraction, Kandinsky on his mind.
“MORE STUBBORNLY BARBARIAN THAN EVER”
A slightly older Canadian-born American who had lost the enthusiasm of his student years was also on his way to Paris, and he was in a foul mood. Aboard the French liner De Grasse, Saul Bellow was seasick, “feeling that his sweetbreads had changed places with his brain.”19 But more than anything else, he was furious. He had chosen to spend his Guggenheim Fellowship year in Paris, and he resented it already. He feared Parisians would mock his Canadian-accented French, to start with. Anita, his wife, was really the one behind their move to France. She had insisted, telling him it would be good for their four-year-old son, Gregory. He had commented to a friend that Paris would be “too exciting and disturbing.” Bellow was intent on not falling into the trap of Paris romanticism. Was Paris still “the holy place of our time,” as the art critic Harold Rosenberg was calling it? He doubted it. “Paris was not going to be my dwelling place, it was only a stopover. There was no dwelling place,”20 he kept repeating to himself.
“I was not at all a Francophile, not at all the unfinished American prepared to submit myself to the great city in the hope that it would round me out or complete me.”21 He laughed at his friends from Chicago like Harold Kaplan and his wife, Celia. Kappy had become “a virtual Parisian—spoke impeccable French, wore French gloves and drove a French car.”22 For another infatuated friend, Julian Behrstock, Paris was “the answer to a dream nurtured from his boyhood in Chicago.”23 Ridiculous, thought Bellow.
Saul told Anita that they would not live on the Left Bank like their friends the Kaplans. He much preferred the idea of the clean, neat, comfortable, and bourgeois Right Bank, preferably near the Champs-Élysées. This seemed more appropriate for his young family, away from the grime of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Anita had seldom seen him so spiteful. “When Bellow was intimidated, he went on the offensive.”24 Bellow was, rather naturally, fretting about following in the footsteps of such illustrious compatriots. Stubborn as he was, he just would not admit it. He would leave it to his future characters to be slightly more honest with their feelings: “But who would complain of this pert, pretty Paris when it revolved like a merry-go-round—the gold bridge-horses, the Greek Tuileries heroes and stone beauties, the overloaded Opéra, the racy show windows and dapper colors, the maypole obelisk, the all-colors ice-cream, the gaudy package of the world.”25
* * *
The venom he freely displayed about his new home was, in a warped way, proof of admiration if not of lov
e. It also betrayed his fear of not succeeding, of not finding his voice, for he, too, had come to Paris to find himself. Bellow had set the stakes very high. He believed in himself and, even more than this, he believed that he had a special talent and destiny. He was not going to be another Fitzgerald or another Hemingway—no, he was going to be another Dostoyevsky. He expected the world to come to him in Paris, but for this to happen he knew that he needed to work very hard and was afraid, at times, that he might not be able to pull it off. Now thirty-three, he had written two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, but sales had been poor—only twenty-five hundred copies of The Victim, and half as many of Dangling Man. This fellowship was providing him with crucial time off from academe during which he had to prove himself, once and for all. Failing this, it would be back to teaching at a university and writing, occasionally, a few short stories and reviews for journals and magazines.
Bellow’s bad temper and animosity toward Paris and Parisian intellectuals also reflected his conviction that American literature needed to free itself from European influence, a European influence that, obviously and ironically, shaped him. He revered both Joyce and Flaubert, but for him a writer should not be invisible or indifferent, nor should he or she be a kind of god. On the contrary, a writer should enter the fray, be ready to improvise as in jazz or Action Painting, and his or her struggles should be on display. Movement, and not stasis, should be the American novelist’s aim. “We must leave it to inspiration to redeem the concrete and the particular and to recover the value of flesh and bone.”26
Bellow was satisfied to find Paris exactly as he had wanted it to be: “a sullen, grumbling, drizzling city.” The weather was oppressive, the riverbanks smelly: “An unnatural medicinal smell emanated from the Seine.” He loathed the fog that kept the city’s smoke and fumes flowing in the streets in brown and gray currents while conceding that “Paris’s gloom is a powerful astringent.”27 Even the comfortable furnished flat a friend found for him and Anita at 24 rue Marbeuf, in a typical Haussmannian building near the Champs-Élysées, did not please Saul. The flat was “fussy,” crammed with antique furniture. In fact, it was just the kind of flat that Augie March—a character about to be born—would sublet on the Right Bank: a “moldy though fancied-up” flat. Saul had brought a new Remington portable typewriter in his luggage, but the French landlady (married to a British car racer) had demanded it as a gift. She had to have the rent in dollars too. It was steep.28 Saul hated Chippendale and Empire-style furniture, and he could have set fire to the dreary dark, heavy curtains that adorned every window, but he still put up with it. Anita wanted a full-time maid to look after Gregory and got one. Greg wanted a French poodle and got one. The little boy named it Malou. Saul was buying domestic peace, if not peace with himself, so that Anita could tell all her friends back home, “We live like kings.”29
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