Just like his friend Lionel Abel, Saul Bellow resented—despised, even—what they both viewed as French promiscuity. What was the problem with living the life of a bon bourgeois? Why should a great writer live like a childish bohemian? Months after he had settled in, Saul was particularly infuriated by his chance encounter one morning with Arthur Koestler on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Bellow regarded the Hungarian writer highly. He had reviewed Koestler’s Arrival and Departure for the New York Times in 1943 in glowing terms: “Arthur Koestler is one of the very few living novelists who attacks the most difficult and troubling issues of private and political morality and who, having raised serious questions, never tries to satisfy us with ready-made answers or evasions.”30 However, on seeing Bellow with his son, Greg, Koestler could not suppress his surprise: “Ah? You’re married? You have a kid? And you’ve come to Paris?” Bellow deeply resented what he took as a reproach. Could one not hold traditional values, such as family and marriage, and still be modern, and a great writer? He intended to prove everybody, and Mr. Koestler in particular, wrong.
However, for all his denying it, Bellow was no better cut out for domesticity than his fellow writers, French or American. He seemed only more hypocritical. And more conceited. Once his family was settled in the rue Marbeuf, Saul looked for a room of his own, to work in every day. He would soon find his “room off to one side,” as he described it to his publisher, Monroe Engel at Viking, right in the heart of filthy Saint-Germain-des-Prés at the Hôtel Académie at 32 rue des Saints-Pères. Precisely where he did not want his family to live. He could not have been closer to the many beautiful girls he wished he had more time to get to know, and the arrogant French intellectuals he claimed to scorn. He “liked to wander over to the basement bar of the Pont Royal and observe Sartre from a distance”31—but did not want anyone to know.
Bellow was a contrarian. While boasting to his friends, on a postcard of Notre Dame, that he had not been “at all Frenchified” yet and was feeling “more stubbornly barbarian than ever,”32 he was on a quest for self-definition. A Canadian Jew who had immigrated to Chicago, he was hoping to feel and be seen as American.
For the time being, though, he was struggling, terribly. He was working on “The Crab and the Butterfly,” a moody philosophical story about two invalids in Chicago lying in adjacent hospital beds. Bellow felt the need to prove that he was not a provincial writer, that he was au fait with Western thought. But he was not getting anywhere with this story and he felt frustrated as hell. He labored over the story, rewrote at length, but he knew it was no good. Would it ever be? “I do not get out very often now and when I think of it resent this voluntary encapsulation and damn writing as an occupation.”33 Bellow, irritable and tense, would occasionally get up from his chair and pace up and down the room. He was “depressed and sunk in spirit.” Like many people in Paris, living in badly heated flats and rooms, he suffered from la grippe, while “many more suffered from melancholy and bad temper.” Bellow was quick to identify the culprit behind his problems: Paris itself. He later tried to explain his feelings: “Paris is the seat of a highly developed humanity, and one thus witnesses highly developed forms of suffering there. Witnesses, and sometimes, experiences. Sadness is a daily levy that civilization imposes in Paris. Gay Paris? Gay, my foot!”34
In November 1948, Bellow told Anita that he was off to Switzerland and Italy, alone, for a few weeks “for a change of luck.” His struggle with a society from which he felt, and wanted to feel, excluded would eventually prove extremely stimulating. Putting distance between himself and his past, his origins, would soon give him clarity and freshness. Being an outsider enriched the great writer he was to become. He would soon find that Paris was, after all, “a great machine for stimulating the nerves and sharpening the senses”35—and a great place for discreetly conducting extramarital affairs.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
STIMULATING THE NERVES
RIGHT BANK AMERICANS
In 1948, Theodore H. White was a household name in New York journalism, except every editor in town seemed to have forgotten about him. The reason was simple. To many of his colleagues, he was a Red. White considered himself a liberal, certainly, but had never been a Communist, and he was now stuck writing for obscure little publications that were, ironically, much more left-wing than he was. If he stayed in America, he would become a Communist, he joked to himself, not knowing Beauvoir had thought exactly the same a year earlier during her trip to New York. When a little-known news feature service, the Overseas News Agency, phoned him one afternoon to offer him a job as its Paris correspondent, with the task of covering the Marshall Plan and “how America was to save Europe from communism,”1 he punched the air with joy. His young bride, Nancy, was also elated at the news. Speaking of himself, he wrote: “He had no idea what Europe meant. He would discover how Europeans tormented each other and continued to torment each other, all the while creating the values by which civilized men live.”2
Theodore and Nancy opted for the nineteen-hour flight rather than the six-day sea passage. The thirty-three-year-old White found Paris unchanged from a brief visit ten years earlier: “The old lavender and pewter buildings rose in the familiar fin-de-siècle shades and shapes of gray, the mansard skyline of the Impressionists still unspiked and unspoiled by new skyscrapers.”3 The summer of 1948 was, in fact, a summer that would last several years. “Frenchmen were beginning to feel French again, but with a returning pride that still embraced Americans.”4
Like all his compatriots, Theodore discovered with amazement all the privileges bestowed upon American citizens, and foreign correspondents in particular: “the embossed press card of the accredited correspondent was a laissez-passer anywhere.”5 The French Ministry of Information made tickets to state concerts, festivals, municipal opera, and theater available at all times and instantly; cabinet offices were open to all American reporters, “down to the lowest crawling order of our species. We enjoyed semi-diplomatic privileges—such as participation in the American National Interests Commissary, where we could buy American luxuries which the still-strangled French economy could not provide, as if we were war correspondents at an army outpost in Bavaria.”6 An American reporter did not have to wait for a year for an automobile, as did most Frenchmen, who had to put their names on waiting lists; his passport and his dollars let him purchase one in a matter of days, fresh off the Citroën factory line in suburban Paris. The Whites could not believe their luck and, in the springtime of their marriage, young and feeling rich, they were “silly in the way they lived.”7
Theodore was not only married, he was also a name. He did not have to attend Sorbonne lectures, he was not penniless, he liked comfort and could afford it. In other words, the Left Bank was not for him. He could only look for a flat to rent on the Right Bank, and as close to the Champs-Élysées as possible, an old American habit. He was not, could not ever become, a Left Bank kid. He found an apartment for $100 a month, at 24 rue du Boccador in the 8th arrondissement. When he learned that Guy de Maupassant had lived there in the early 1890s, he asked where to sign on the lease papers. He might have had a rental contract but he was paying his rent in cash and had found the flat on the black market. A draft of dollars issued in New York could be cashed for French francs that summer at the rate of 500 to one. Every American had his own money changer in Paris. White’s was a “jolly old lady full of gossip and good will who became a friend of the family. She would bustle in with a large parcel of paper francs, slip us the penciled named of a Swiss bank account to which our New York check must be sent—and disappear.”8 The Whites kept the paper francs in a satchel under their bed, and into this satchel “Nancy and I dipped at will, with no sense of budget or restraint.”9 They dined out every night, gorging on fine meals costing a thousand francs (two dollars at their rate); they even bought a second car, hired a servant, and looked for a nurse when Nancy found out she was pregnant. In other words, the Whites fitted “not only happily but shamelessly into
this returning rhythm of life, knowing it to be ineffably bourgeois, inexpungeably Right Bank in quality, obnoxiously self-indulgent and sneered at by our unmarried friends who were artists and musicians of the Left Bank.”10
THE UNITED NATIONS’ FIRST GENERAL ASSEMBLY AND THE LAUNCH OF THE MARSHALL PLAN
The United Nations had its first general assembly at the Palais de Chaillot, place du Trocadéro, in October 1948, exactly where, eight years earlier, Hitler had paraded in front of photographers with the Eiffel Tower right behind him. At first sight, the historic meeting felt dull to the newly arrived Theodore H. White. The Americans were busy targeting the Dutch: “we were getting the Dutch out of the East Indies, as, in those days, we were busily urging white empires out of everywhere,” recalled White, who soon left the hall to sit on the broad white stone steps that creep down from the Trocadéro to the banks of the Seine. On his right stood the Musée de l’Homme, on his left the Musée de la Marine. He could see on the horizon, slightly to the left, the golden dome of the Invalides, Napoleon’s mausoleum. Everywhere he set his gaze, history was tempting him to walk into the past rather than write about the present. “To live and report out of Paris was like trying to do business in a museum. I found I could not hurry. Here were numberless pockets of memories in stone, anthems in gray, celebrating past stories I had known only in books. All these stories connected somehow but the buildings would not speak, and I had to string episode and panorama together, to make past connect to present.”11
History was in fact a cornerstone of the Marshall Plan and the choice of Paris as its headquarters could not have been more appropriate. Through a very practical problem, the allocation of the first $5 billion granted by the U.S. Congress, the American administration was forcing Europeans to look at their continent as a whole, to envision Europe not just as a beautiful abstraction but as a concrete reality. The Marshall Plan administrators had set up the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), which was to supervise the way America’s money was to be distributed. Each of the sixteen12 European nations that were beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan had a vote in the OEEC. At first, when the sixteen met at the Château de la Muette, “a lovely old yellow and beige mansion with high scalloped windows, and floors that creaked properly”13 in Paris’s plush 16th arrondissement, their voices were simply “babble” to American ears. Theodore H. White listened to each member in disbelief. He thought he was back “in conversation with Charlemagne; the Duke of Alba; traditional fishing rights; the three sons of Louis I, the Pious.”14 For him, Europe carried too much history, split by too many boundaries.
The mechanism of the Marshall Plan needed to be put in place before the whole machine could be set in motion. One needed to be efficient and straightforward. As White explained:
The Americans took a simple tack. Let the Europeans first diagram their own problems, deciding who could physically supply whom on the Continent with what they needed for each other, ignoring the payment difficulties in European currencies. Then, all should bring to the Americans, Dispensers of the Great Purse, what the net margin of their needs was in dollars and supplies from the outside world, which the Marshall Plan would cover.15
In other words, Americans would yield dollars only to the consensus of all claimants. Sensible and practical. And without actually imposing one, the Marshall Plan was, in effect, inconspicuously mapping out a future European Common Market. A common market that would go hand in hand with a united Europe, one that Sartre and the non-Communist Third Way proponents were ardently calling for, as a solution to counterbalance the world’s two great powers. To think of a united Europe, both politically and commercially, was in 1948 an audacious thought but not one reserved to a minority of naive dreamers. A few months earlier, in June 1948, Janet Flanner had witnessed a vote in the National Assembly that had impressed her vividly.
A mere handful of 130 upsurging intelligent Deputies of many parties have formally laid before the Parliament a resolution demanding “the immediate meeting of a European constituent assembly, having as its mission the founding of the permanent institution of a Federated Europe.” Whatever else happens in Parliament, now or tomorrow, this is the one vital political proposal of the moment, of the year, of the century.16
From his flat on the rue du Boccador to the International Herald Tribune building at 21 rue de Berri, on the other side of the Champs-Élysées, it was just a ten-minute walk. Every day Theodore H. White would greet his concierge, Germain, a Spanish Republican veteran, with a loud Bonjour!, walk past Saul Bellow’s building on the rue Marbeuf, and go to the headquarters for all American correspondents in Paris. He would start his day by reading the French and international press, an education in itself. “The Paris press of 1948 was so beautifully written, engraved with such incision of phrase, enameled with such subtlety of sarcasm and subjunctive, that I did not realize for months after my arrival that its literary talents were devoted chiefly to the embroidery of trivia.”17
Every morning, White would also squint through his horn-rimmed glasses at news reports that looked to him highly partisan in tone and extremely light on facts. French editors, journalist heroes who had risked death in underground publications during the war, “still believed that fact could be subordinated to passion and polemic.”18 They felt “entitled to drive their own particular logic through the facts, fearlessly presenting their arrangement as the real truth.”19 French newspapers were also universally suspicious of the Marshall Plan. Depending on the political color of the publication, the plan was variously described as “a capitalist plot, a finance plot against French industry, a plot against French workers, a plot against Russia, a plot against French culture. But what the plan was, and what it was doing, was scarcely ever reported factually in the Paris press.”20 However, the story of the Marshall Plan, once Theodore White had found his way to it, beyond the trivia, polemics, and untruths, would prove to be the most intellectually exciting thing he was to report on for the next decade.
A ROOM WITH A VIEW
By October 1948, Simone had found a room for rent and finally left the hotel life she had tired of. Considering the housing calamity that plagued Paris, a room was all she could afford, but it would do. She found a room by word of mouth. It was a typical maid’s room, about ten by fifteen feet, on the fifth floor of 11 rue de la Bûcherie, a little medieval street snaking along the Left Bank and facing the south flank of Notre Dame. She decided to paint the walls and ceiling red and have red curtains. Giacometti designed oxidized bronze lamps especially for her and she hung on the exposed beam some exotic and colorful objects she had brought back from her travels in Portugal, Tunisia, Mexico, Guatemala, and Scandinavia. Fernand Léger had given her a watercolor, and she had bought a print from Picasso, which was handy, as she otherwise lacked pictures to decorate the walls. One of her windows looked out on the rue de l’Hôtel Colbert; “I can see the River Seine, some ivy, trees and Notre Dame.”21 Many friends would have killed for such a view. The other window gave onto a hotel for poor Arabs and Africans, who often fought at night. The hotel had a café opening out onto the sidewalk, Le Café des Amis, where fighting between immigrants went on during the day. To complete the picture, a few tramps, or clochards as the Parisians called them, who had their favorite spot right below Simone’s window, enjoyed gulping down their liters of cheap red wine sitting on the pavement’s three steps leading to the riverbank, the Quai Montebello. “They spent their days drinking, dancing, soliloquizing, and bickering.”22 On the roof’s gutters, an army of cats kept Simone company at night, meowing away.
In a corner of her room was a tiny space with a sink, some kitchen utensils, and a tiny stove. The kitchen space also served as the bathroom. Simone was lucky: she had a fireplace, her only means of heating. She bought a couple of white armchairs, grapefruit juice and a bottle of gin, jam, bread, and tea. From her tiny, plain wooden table, which she used as a desk and placed in front of the window with the Notre Dame view, she wrote on the morning of Sun
day, October 24, to her dear Nelson, her “cunning crocodile”: “I begin to be in love with my room.”23 And the day after: “I stay at home, I light up the fire, I make tea, and work and work, and I like my little nest more and more. I have people home for lunch and dinner and I cook nice meals: chiefly, already cooked vegetables and cold ham. But I do not know very well how to manage the can-opener, I broke already two of them. I should need a nice house-keeper husband to open the cans for me.”24 Simone sometimes asked for help from the woman who lived next door, in another small maid’s room. Her name was Nora Stern. Her mother, Betty Stern, whom Simone often invited for tea, was a close friend of Marlene Dietrich. In the 1920s, married to a fur and textile tycoon, Betty had held one of the most influential artistic and literary salons in Berlin and had fled to Paris when the Nazis rose to power, only to find she had to go into hiding during the Occupation.
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