Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  Like Saul Bellow, Simone de Beauvoir was sensitive to the Paris weather, but instead of resenting it she embraced it. “It has been a strange weather in Paris all these last days, a thick grey fog from morning to night, and at night so deep it is dangerous to ride a cab. It is so thick that it comes inside houses—the library for instance is all foggy!”25

  She was working hard finishing her study on womanhood. Her publisher, Gallimard, had decided to publish it in two volumes, with only four months between the two releases, the first in June 1949 and the second in November 1949. Le petit Bost had come up with the title: Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex). She had chosen to dedicate it to him, the ex-lover turned brother. As she later explained, “I dedicated it to Jacques-Laurent Bost because he was the least macho of the men I had ever known.”26

  When advocating equality between men and women in matters of love and sex, Simone de Beauvoir was taking risks. She was taking even greater ones when exposing her views on abortion. She had dedicated a whole chapter on the subject of abortion in Le deuxième sexe; she wondered how it would be received, but she felt she had no choice after doctors she knew in Paris had been arrested and tried for criminal activities. In a letter to Nelson she had explained: “There are a lot of abortion scandals just now in France and I feel quite indignant about them. There is no kind of birth control here; it is forbidden. They just arrested a doctor I knew very well and to whom I sent a lot of worried girls. He helped them all, poor and wealthy ones.”27 Les Temps modernes had made its position on abortion clear through eloquent and searing reportages and testimonies, showing both the hypocrisy and inhumanity of criminalizing abortion.

  Twenty-five beds in a long hospital ward painted green. For twelve days, I am Madame number 10. Out of the fifteen miscarriages, I will soon discover that a dozen have been “triggered.” It only took Madame number 9’s announcement that it was her fifth self-inflicted abortion for everyone else on the ward to start speaking up. Doctors and nurses know about it all, of course, and so do not use anaesthetics. The operation is short, between seven and twelve minutes, but extremely painful. Society gets its revenge the way it can.28

  Jean-Paul Sartre was constantly being asked to help pay for the abortions of his former students or impoverished friends’ lovers and wives, not to mention his own mistresses. One of Boris Vian’s brothers, a doctor, performed them for friends and friends of friends, risking arrest and prison.

  BRINGING THE LEFT BANK TO NEW YORK AND HOLLYWOOD

  In the spring of 1948, Norman Mailer had experienced the greatest joyful shock of his life in France, one he would relish for the rest of his life. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, had come out a few months earlier in the United States and the first reviews had been glowing. Driving back to Paris from Italy with his mother, Fanny, his wife, Bea, and his younger sister, Barbara, in a small Peugeot with too little horsepower for his taste, Norman had stopped at Nice’s central post office to gather his poste restante mail. A huge pile of letters had been awaiting him. Back in the car, he had started happily tearing away par avion blue envelopes and brown packages and begun reading their content: there were his book’s reviews. Dozens of them. From the New York Times to the Daily Worker, praise was flowing from page to page, and for the eleventh consecutive week his novel had been number one on the New York Times bestseller list (it would stay on the list for a total of sixty-two weeks). He was about to lose his anonymity and felt funny about it. “I knew I’d be a celebrity when I came back to America … I’d always seen myself as an observer … I was going to become an actor on the American stage.”29 He would always look back and cherish his last months in Paris as an observer.

  When he packed his suitcase after the end of the academic year and bade farewell to Paris on July 21, Mailer took Paris’s fiery appetite for the political with him. He had already made plans for Jean Malaquais, his coach, guru, translator, and mentor, to follow him to New York and then to Hollywood. For better and for worse, he was to take Paris’s spirit back with him to the United States.

  In New York, with Malaquais now a lecturer at the New School for Social Research, Mailer embraced politics with the passion of a Left Bank student. He had chosen sides and decided to work on the campaign of the Progressive Party’s Henry Wallace in the forthcoming presidential election. Wallace, Roosevelt’s former vice president, advocated universal health insurance and the end of racial segregation and did not mind being associated with the Communist Party. Mailer wrote speeches for Wallace, and his first journalism consisted of pieces for the party’s newspaper, the National Guardian. In October 1948, he took Malaquais with him to Hollywood to woo the movie liberals. At a party at the home of Gene Kelly and his wife, Betsy Blair, Mailer improvised a passionate speech in front of Shelley Winters, Edward G. Robinson, Farley Granger, and Montgomery Clift, but when Mailer quoted Malaquais and mentioned raising money to help the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, Edward G. Robinson shouted at him: “You little punk!”

  Mailer continued campaigning tirelessly while being taught by Malaquais, who had drawn up a reading list for him. The two men lived next door to each other in Brooklyn—Malaquais was on Montague Street while the Mailers had a little flat at 49 Remsen Street. Mailer’s friends did not like Malaquais at all. The playwright Lillian Hellman, who wanted to adapt Mailer’s first novel for the stage, found him “cocksure, opinionated and dogmatic.” In other words, they found him too French. But Mailer had been transformed once and for all by his Parisian experience.

  Malaquais’ reading list obliterated what remained of Mailer’s belief in the Soviet Union as the foundation of a new world culture. The political tutorials Malaquais gave Mailer that summer convinced the young American novelist not only that Stalin was a monster but also that both the Soviet and American economic systems were implicitly geared for war. And to complete his education, Mailer read Marx’s Capital. As he later recalled: “I spent a year living more closely in the history of Russia from 1917 to 1937 than in the events of my own life.”30

  GARRY DAVIS, FIRST CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

  Meanwhile, a “carrot-topped, pleasant, shrewd and slightly corny Air Force veteran”31 named Garry Davis entered the Parisian arena and made world news. He was the son of Meyer Davis, the bandleader who played for American presidents and high society. The twenty-seven-year-old idealist Garry was a roommate of Art Buchwald’s at the Hôtel des États-Unis. He thought the solution to the Cold War and a looming third world war was to create a world government, in order to dilute nationalism once and for all. The UN needed to have its power extended. To preserve the peace was not a good and broad enough mandate; the UN needed to be able to impose peace. “To dramatize this,” Art Buchwald later wrote, “he decided to become the first World Citizen by giving up his American passport in front of the Palais de Chaillot where the UN was meeting.” In 1948 an American passport was the most cherished document on earth. “Anyone who would give one up was regarded as crazy.”32

  The plans for the passport surrender were formulated in the bar of the Hôtel des États-Unis between Davis, Buchwald, and all their roommates.

  We weighed the pros and cons of Garry’s act. If he did it, we warned him, Garry would be arrested by the French for not having proof he existed. He said that was exactly what he had in mind. He wanted to prove how ridiculous any sort of identification papers really were. Since there wasn’t much going on that day, we encouraged him to do it. The next morning he went to Palais de Chaillot and tore it into pieces. The police arrested him for not having proper identification. A star was born.33

  Davis then decided to camp opposite the UN headquarters at the Trocadéro. Everyone from Albert Camus to Parisian teenagers embraced Davis’s cause with the passion of the newly converted, transfixed by this young American’s coup de génie. On November 18, 1948, Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s future life and business partner, was celebrating his eighteenth birthday. He had managed to obtain entrance to the UN afternoon session for three dozen f
riends of Garry Davis. UN sessions were open to the public, and seats in the balcony of the Palais de Chaillot were allocated to whoever made a request. Everything had been carefully plotted. When the Soviet Union’s high representative took to the podium to speak, Garry Davis got up and spoke loudly of the urgent need for a world government, “one government for one world,” while his young comrades threw leaflets on the UN delegates seated below. The military police arrived and the youngsters decamped, but three of Garry Davis’s acolytes did not run fast enough and were arrested: the war reporter and former résistant Jean-François Armorin, Pierre Bergé, and Albert Camus. A night at the police station did not dent their energy, though—far from it. A few days later Camus, accompanied by André Breton, who delighted in the Surrealism of Davis’s concept, improvised a press conference in a café at the Trocadéro. They and myriad other intellectuals supported Davis and announced a public meeting at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a covered cycling track standing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. On November 22, twenty thousand people flocked to the velodrome to hear Garry Davis, Albert Camus, and Richard Wright speak. The world media reported their every word in print and on the airwaves. There was no escaping this new Parisian utopia.

  It was late on the evening of November 28 when a shocked-looking Art Buchwald walked toward Garry, a cablegram in his hand. It was from Albert Einstein and it was for “Monsieur Davis.” This was the longest cablegram the two young men had ever seen. They both asked for a double shot of vodka before opening it. It said, among other things:

  I am eager to express to the young war veteran Davis my recognition of the sacrifice he has made for the well-being of humanity, in voluntarily giving up his citizenship-rights. He has made out of himself a “displaced person” in order to fight for the natural rights of those who are the mute evidence of the low moral level of our time. The worst kind of slavery which burdens the people of our time is the militarization of the people, but this militarization results from the fear of new mass-destruction in threatening world war. The well-intentioned effort to master this situation by the creation of the United Nations had shown itself to be regrettably insufficient. A supra-national institution must have enough powers and independence if it shall be able to solve the problems of international security. Neither can one nor has one the right to leave the taking of such a decisive step entirely to the initiative of the governments.34

  A few days later, praising Davis’s scheme, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her famous newspaper column “My Day”: “How very much better it would be if Mr. Davis would set up his own governmental organization and start then and there a worldwide international government.”35

  Art Buchwald felt both slightly responsible and concerned for his idealist compatriot. Letters from the whole world started pouring in, and soon Davis was renting ten rooms in the hotel to accommodate his staff, all volunteers. Art, himself struggling to get by in Paris, was looking at the whole affair with unavoidable sarcasm: “Clad in his leather bomber jacket, Garry became a hero and instant celebrity. For fifteen minutes, people were transfixed by the idea of World citizenship. We were the beneficiaries of Garry’s noble deed. The Hôtel des États-Unis was suddenly besieged by foreign correspondents and newsreel cameramen. I volunteered assessments on Garry to anyone who offered to buy me a drink.”

  Until sarcasm turned into anger. Just before Christmas, Art and all the other residents of the hotel found a note in their mailboxes. “It was a terse letter from the management, announcing that Garry planned to take over all the rooms in the hotel for the administration of his World Citizenship movement.” Art knocked at everyone’s door, and an informal emergency council was held at the bar: “we all agreed that it was a bunch of pork sausage, and we announced we were not going to leave for some crazy peace movement.”36 Art and his beleaguered friends told the Poles in charge of the hotel management that they would not move. The face-off lasted until it became clear that Davis could not come up with the rent. Art kept his small room and the world lost its government, for now. Garry Davis would fight on.37

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ANGER, SPITE, AND FAILURE

  EVERYBODY’S PROTEST NOVEL

  Young, angry North American men with accounts to settle kept washing up on Paris’s shores. After his friend Eugene had left America by jumping into the Hudson River,1 twenty-four-year-old James Baldwin chose Paris instead of death. Had he stayed in New York, he, too, would have gone under: “I had to get out. I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.”2 His one-way plane ticket to Paris was his safe-conduct to life. Baldwin might have had only forty dollars in the pocket of his jacket when he landed in Paris on November 11, 1948, but to his surprise he already had friends there. One of them, Asa Benveniste, a Parisian Sephardic Jew from Istanbul and a poet turned typographer and book designer, left lunch at Deux Magots with Richard Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre to greet Baldwin at the Gare des Invalides.

  Benveniste took Baldwin straight back to the boulevard Saint-Germain to give him a first whiff of Parisian life, and to finish lunch. Richard Wright, an old acquaintance of Baldwin, had helped the young man get his first writing grant in 1945, $500, which had been “one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me,”3 he commented at the time. It had kept him alive, it had launched his literary career, and it had saved him from despair. Always generous with fellow black writers in need, Wright was more than happy to keep helping Baldwin get published, this time in Paris. Sartre had already left the table when they arrived. George Solomos was still there. Also known as Themistocles Hoetis, he was the Greek-American editor of Zero, a brand-new English-language literary review whose ambition was to publish simultaneously in Paris and New York. Themistocles, a B-17 radioman during the war, had hoped to interest Sartre and Wright in contributing to the first issue of his magazine. Wright had readily accepted but had added: “Why don’t you also ask young Jimmy here to write a piece for you?” Little did Wright know that Jimmy’s essay, published in Zero’s first issue in spring 1949, would end their friendship once and for all. Baldwin was about to bite the hand that fed and helped him. His first Parisian essay was an attack on Richard Wright and everything he represented. Sons had to kill fathers, and Paris was the place to commit literary patricide.

  As a book reviewer in New York, a position he owed to Richard Wright’s help, he had had to read all the books, or “tracts” as he called them, about black and Jewish issues. The color of his skin had made him an expert, it seemed, on the discriminated in the United States; this left him feeling extremely resentful. Why was he not asked to review books by Koestler or Sartre? “Most of the books I reviewed were Be Kind to Niggers, Be Kind to Jews, while America was going through one of its liberal convulsions.”4 He channeled these frustrations into the essay, which he titled “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Berating the genre, he wrote, “Those sorts of books do nothing but bolster up an image. As long as I was a victim they could pity me and add a few more pennies to my home-relief check. That essay was the beginning of my finding a new vocabulary and another point of view.”5 It was also his way to shove Richard Wright off his pedestal as the founding figure of the protest novel.

  Paris seemed an ideal place for bridge burners like Baldwin. He had read too much Balzac to think of Paris as the most courteous and peaceful city in the world. “Whenever I crossed Place de la Concorde, I heard the tumbrels arriving, and the roar of the mob, and where the obelisk now towers, I saw la guillotine.”6 Baldwin had no intention of acting in a civil way; he would operate his own literary guillotine. His obsession with and rage against Richard Wright sprung from his own “explosive relationship”7 with himself and America. As he put it later: “At the time, most of all, I could not deal with me.”8

  Moreover, Baldwin was poor. His first forty dollars lasted just two days. After that, he lived off the generosity of friend
s and lovers. He was not idle, though. The young man had so many pent-up emotions and so many things he needed to get off his chest that he wrote tirelessly what would become his first novel, not surprisingly a son and father story, Go Tell It on the Mountain. He immediately elected the upstairs floor of the Café de Flore as his writing hole, like Beauvoir before him. And he wrote, for himself and for others. He accepted every commission from any editor with a review, even from the American embassy’s gazette Rapports France-États-Unis. This helped him to practice writing, eat, and pay the rent.

  He found a room at 8 rue Verneuil, in a hotel owned by a Corsican family known for being very understanding with its lodgers and managed by the arthritic Madame Dumont. They not only tolerated the eccentricities of their young penniless bohemian tenants, but also accepted that they paid whenever they could. Jazz could be heard in the hotel’s corridors around the clock. When Mme Dumont wanted to sleep, she simply switched off the entire building’s electricity.

  As Richard Seaver, a fellow lodger at the Hôtel Verneuil, recalled, the place “reeked of cabbage and urine. The tenants living in the attic rooms had to climb five flights of rickety stairs, mostly in the dark because that great electricity-saving convention the French had devised, the minuterie—literally ‘the minute-long light switch’—here lasted at most ten seconds before plunging the climber once again into Stygian darkness.”9 It was a typical Left Bank hotel, with small and dimly lit rooms and scuffed and peeling Art Nouveau flowered wallpaper. In one of the attic rooms, “a four poster bed occupied a goodly portion of the room, whose only other furnishings were a bulky armoire, and in front of the window, a small wooden table bare except for a vintage typewriter.”10 Typewriters were the only valuable items in Left Bank hotels and were particularly prized by burglars.