I CHOSE FREEDOM: COMMUNISM ON TRIAL
Sartre was obsessed with the Russian defector Victor Kravchenko. When he and Simone had lunch with Lionel Abel at Brasserie Lipp on the first day of the Kravchenko trial, on January 24, 1949, there was little else they discussed. Victor Kravchenko had been an official in the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington, D.C., when he defected in 1944. He went on to write I Chose Freedom, which was published in 1946 and in which he denounced and revealed many of the atrocities of Stalin’s regime, among others the prison and labor camps. I Chose Freedom was an instant success both in the United States and in Europe, and especially in France. The powerful Communist Lettres françaises organized a riposte and attacked Kravchenko twice, accusing him of lying and of not having written the book.33 Kravchenko filed a complaint in France for criminal libel. Branded “the trial of the century” by the press, this libel suit put the Soviet system in the dock for the first time. Moscow took it very seriously, as did Kravchenko’s supporters. The night before the trial started, Kravchenko had appeared at a rally at the Société de Géographie, 184 boulevard Saint-Germain, almost opposite Brasserie Lipp. “A first night rather than the opening of a trial!”34 snorted Les Lettres françaises. With movie cameras, photographers, and journalists from the whole world, the rally did indeed have the air of a film premiere. However, what was to follow across the next ten weeks would be fierce.
Victor Kravchenko did not elicit much sympathy even in non-Communist quarters such as Les Temps modernes, not even from Arthur Koestler, who was staying with Mamaine at the Hôtel Montalembert while they completed the purchase of their house near Fontainebleau. Koestler, just like Beauvoir and Sartre, followed the trial closely. They even attended some of the hearings. None of them trusted Kravchenko, but they could see how the French Communist Party behind Les Lettres françaises was being assisted by Moscow, which transported intellectuals and former colleagues by the planeload to testify against their former comrade.
Kravchenko’s lawyers struck a decisive coup when they called to the witness box Margarete Buber-Neumann, a tall, strong forty-eight-year-old survivor of both the Soviet Union’s Siberian gulag and the Ravensbrück concentration camp under the Nazis. She corroborated every point of Kravchenko’s allegations. Buber impressed everyone she met. Beauvoir was fascinated by her dignity during her testimony, her lack of self-pity, and her clarity. Her presence was electrifying, her calm and perceptiveness extremely powerful. She exposed the totalitarian cruelty that had killed her husband and cost her seven years in concentration camps in a dispassionate and even-handed way. Koestler was so taken by her that he and Mamaine invited her to stay at their new home for a few days before she traveled back home to Sweden, where she had found refuge after the war.
The couple’s house, Verte Rive, was full of boxes in rooms otherwise empty apart from two beds. They discovered several major snags that they had not been aware of, such as a leaking septic tank “emitting a pungent odour,” but Greta paid no attention to such trivial details, and Koestler and Mamaine forgot about it all during her stay. In their living room, with its fireplace and view over the river, Mamaine had quickly laid out two Moroccan rugs and an Algerian carpet that she had bought the week before at the Arts Ménagers exhibition in Paris.35 Seated in their two Chesterfield armchairs, Koestler and Mamaine listened to their guest for hours. “We had Greta Buber stay with us for two days, which was absolutely fascinating. She has a manic desire to talk about her seven years in the camps. She gets it off her chest by talking about it.”36 Before Greta traveled back to Stockholm, Koestler pressed her to keep bearing witness and to keep writing. She had just completed her memoirs Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler,37 the first of many books on her unique experience.
There was no longer any denying the facts and the existence of work camps in Soviet Russia. On April 4, 1949, Kravchenko won; he could thank Greta Buber. The defector’s victory gave Moscow one more reason to step up both pressure and propaganda.
“THE THIRD FARCE”: THE END OF SARTRE’S CAREER AS PARTY LEADER
By now Sartre had reached satanic star status, with the Vatican and the pope officially banning the reading of his books by Catholics. Attacked on all fronts, Sartre managed to withstand storm after storm. He was too big to fall. Blows were getting fiercer, though. Malraux, the Gaullist propagandist in chief, blackmailed Gallimard, demanding that it stop financing and publishing Les Temps modernes. Malraux was threatening to reveal certain things Gaston Gallimard had done during the Occupation, such as commissioning an elegiac essay on Hitler.38 Gallimard reluctantly relented, but another publisher, René Julliard, stood up in his place: Les Temps modernes had only to cross the street, from the rue Sébastien Bottin to the rue de l’Université, to find a new home. The Catholics, the Gaullists, and the Communists kept attacking Sartre and the Existentialists, but to no avail. Meanwhile, tensions were simmering within the RDR: for how long could they still occupy the political middle ground? David Rousset was ever more ardently anti-Communist, while Sartre was passionately anti-Gaullist. Could they work together in the long run?
In March 1949, Sartre was busy convening his own party’s congress, the organization of which he was personally financing. Despite a promising start, the party was not drawing crowds and new members. Rousset had just returned from a trip to the United States, pro-American as ever. He told Sartre that what was needed was to stir the RDR more firmly against the Communists; Sartre opposed that course. On April 30, during the party’s congress, David Rousset asked the members to vote on the direction the RDR should take; his motion received a vote of no confidence. The party was broken up, the neutralist attempt had failed, and that was the end of the RDR. There was no Third Way—at least in practical politics.
After dinner with Beauvoir, Sartre returned home, not exactly defeated but more thoughtful than usual. He went to his study and switched on the light on his desk. He took out his brown carnet and wrote: “The RDR has imploded. Tough. New and definite lessons in Realism. One doesn’t give birth to a movement. Circumstances only appeared to favour its creation. It did correspond to an abstract necessity, defined by an objective situation; however, it didn’t answer an actual and real need in people. This is the reason why, in the end, they didn’t support it.”39
Sartre slept well that night, and in the morning, when his secretary Jean Cau knocked at his door at ten o’clock, he asked to see the schedule for his next trip, this time to Mexico. He was leaving in a few days, a good way to turn the page on the RDR. As he later put it, “we assassinated the RDR and I left for Mexico, disappointed but serene.”40 Sartre was putting a brave face on things. The end of the RDR was the end of a dream. Could Sartre hold the fort alone, and how long could he hold it? Everyone around him seemed to accept that they had to choose sides, the lesser of two evils, as they told him. For some it was Gaullism, for others it was Communism; for some America, for others the Soviet Union. His intelligence and thirst for freedom above all urged him to keep fighting. The end of the RDR may have left Sartre “serene,” but it deeply transformed how he felt about politics, which he withdrew from as an active player. No more party membership. From now on, there would be only literature. Sartre was preparing a long portrait of the poet and thief Jean Genet, his protégé, whom he wanted the world to discover; he had also accepted to do a series of interviews with the young Vietnamese Marxist philosopher Tran Duc Thao. And there was Les Temps modernes, which he felt he had neglected for too long. From now on, his political action would exist purely through writing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
VINDICATED
“LIVING LIKE THE SALAMANDER IN THE FLAMES”
With some reluctance, Saul Bellow accepted Anita’s repeated request to move the family home to the Left Bank in the spring of 1949. Their lease on their flat on the rue Marbeuf was coming to an end, and Anita was very keen to transfer to the Existentialist watering hole; she also probably wanted to be able to monitor her philandering husband more closely.
Bellow was not so happy to have his wife and son so close to his writing den and bachelor pad; he had enjoyed being a family man on the Right Bank and a single writer on the Left Bank. He complied, though, to buy domestic peace. He found a short rental at 24 rue de Verneuil, where the Geists now lived, just next to the Hôtel Verneuil. In the spring of 1949, this small street of refined bourgeois discretion and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings was taking on a distinctly American air.
Saul was plowing on, as ever unsatisfied. He now lived only a few hundred yards from the Hôtel de l’Académie, a very short distance to walk from his new flat to his study. To break the monotony he alternated the routes, either through the rue de Beaune and rue Jacob, or turning right into the rue des Saints-Pères at the end of his street. With the regularity of a metronome, he passed the same people on their way to work in the morning, including the street sweepers, who carried brooms and special square wrenches that allowed them to open the sidewalks’ water taps and let little streams gush out and wash away the dirt along the gutters. On sunny days, the water reflected the light brightly and offered a striking vision of shimmering silver running down the streets.
On the first bright day of spring 1949, the Paris street cleaning system gave Saul Bellow the breakthrough that would lead him directly to the Nobel Prize in Literature. This was a revelation of a transcendental nature, he wrote to his friend Julian Behrstock, a former journalist who had found a cozy job at UNESCO in Paris: “One day, I saw the water trickling down the street and sparkling as it trickled.”1 Or, as he would explain it to students decades later: “Every morning in Paris they would flush the streets with water and divert the current with strips of burlap. One morning I watched the current being diverted and thought, ‘Why do I have to be tied down to this awful thing which is killing me?’”2 Saul had in fact started writing a new book while trying to finish “The Crab and the Butterfly” and it “was bothering the life” out of him. He was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
“The free flowing rivulet triggered an epiphany.”3 Bellow had found what he had been searching for, the way to write his other book, the form he would make his own: exuberance, long sentences, the profusion of adjectives, the seemingly effortless cascade of prose in his distinctive American idiom. “In the water flowing down a Paris street he found a visual analogue for his style.”4
The more he lived in Paris, the more he was obsessed with his hometown of Chicago, but as he himself put it: “I also discovered that in Chicago I had for many years been absorbed in thoughts of Paris.” He had been a longtime reader of Balzac and of Zola, and he knew the city at which Rastignac had shaken his fist, swearing to fight it to the finish, the Paris of Zola’s drunkards and prostitutes, of Baudelaire’s beggars, and the children of the poor whose pets were sewer rats. The Parisian pages of Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge had taken hold of his imagination in the 1930s, as had the Paris of Proust. As he said, the place had moved in on him.
The two cities were telescoping in his mind and perhaps the sparkling, trickling water in the Paris gutter led him quite naturally and organically from one to the other and allowed him to bridge a gap. Paris in 1949, with its cold statues and its streams of water running along the cobbled stones, had transported him to Chicago before the Depression and to the novel that would become The Adventures of Augie March. From that morning on, the words just flowed from him onto the paper, untamed and unabashed. Across the street from his hotel room pneumatic drills were at work on the concrete of a hospital whose construction had been abandoned at the outbreak of the war. The noise did not disturb his thoughts, though. He lived in it “like the salamander in the flames.”5 Augie March was spilling out of him.
On April 10, 1949, he wrote to his agent, David Bazelon, “This is the best thing I have ever written.”6 For once he had nothing to complain about.
FRENCH STYLE: STYLE AS SUBSTANCE, STYLE IN ACTION
In his “room and a half” in the shadow of the Pantheon, Lionel Abel was spending most mornings devouring Sartre’s La mort dans l’âme (Iron in the Soul), the third installment of his Roads to Freedom trilogy,7 which was being serialized in Les Temps modernes. In it, Sartre “grieved, like an author and a man, for the loss of someone he loved, with all her faults; he grieved for France after her rapid fall in 1940.”8Abel was not the only one hooked on it; Janet Flanner, too, was mesmerized.
They both found his style unlike any other; “hypnotic” was probably the best word to describe its effect on readers. Whether in his essays, his literary biographies like the one he was writing about Jean Genet, or his novels, Sartre never let his words rest. Reading Sartre often felt like watching a breathless chase or a daring high-wire act. For Abel, the “piling up of tautologies in an ecstasy of analysis” was at the basis of “Sartre’s prolixity.” It had many effects. “When we have been told the same idea some 25 times in 25 different ways, we are clearer, first of all of its meaning, and in addition we feel the intense interest in it of the writer. The reader feels his emotion. So we can say he has invented a rhetorical and literary use for a philosophical habit of mind.”9
What Lionel Abel was grappling with was style as substance and style in action. It had always been easy to dismiss French style as a case of artifice and shallowness over gist, but what Abel and many young foreign artists and writers in Paris discovered was style as life: a way of living, a way of writing, a way of looking at things, and a cultural curiosity and appetite that was not academic. They also found in Paris a style of argument and a characteristic taste for formal play. French style was not so much a matter of pleasure, but something more enduring, as the U.S. Army pilot turned novelist James Salter discovered during his first trip to Paris a few months later: “a ranking of things, how to value them.”10 What Paris provided was an education, “not the lessons of school but a view of existence: how to have leisure, love, food, and conversation, how to look at nakedness, architecture, streets, all new and seeking to be thought of in a different way.”11
Beaux-Arts American students Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly had scrupulously followed their teacher’s advice when they had enrolled a year earlier: to spend their free time haunting the Louvre and other Paris museums to copy the masters tirelessly, to imbibe every detail until they could do it with their eyes closed.
They had accepted that France was a land where tradition is perhaps the greatest single factor of existence, reinforced by constant individual invention. The Beaux-Arts school was “extremely demanding, and academic to a high degree, the theory being that those who have originality, and an overwhelming impulse to express it, would be able to bring that originality to fruition, not by dashing off at a tangent in their immaturity, but by passing first through a severe discipline, which they were at liberty to modify or abandon, once they were trained in all its intricacies.”12
After months of digesting old and less old masters, from Byzantine art to Kandinsky and Picasso, they both set off to discover their own style with their new Parisian eyes. Paris had taught Ellsworth Kelly exactly what it would soon teach the budding writer James Salter: how to look at things and at people. In May 1949, Ellsworth quit figurative art and crossed the Rubicon toward abstraction. Observing how light dispersed on the surface of water, he painted Seine, made of black and white rectangles. Paris’s architecture slowly became the young artist’s basis for inspiration. His own epiphany took place not looking down at a Paris gutter like Saul Bellow, but looking up at the windows of the Museum of Modern Art in the 16th arrondissement, near the Trocadéro. “Instead of painting an interpretation of an object, real or invented, I found an object which I represented as it was. My first such object was my first real work of art, ‘Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris.’”13 He made it with two canvases and a wooden frame. His works of art would from now on be objects, with no signature, no name.
He still had not mustered the courage to go and meet the artists he most cherished, Jean Arp, Picasso, and Brâncusi, whose studios were open
to everyone, but he had learned from them invaluable precepts: the potential of chance as an ingredient in art, and of collage as a way of building an image. Ellsworth, going about Paris aimlessly, nose in the air, collected ideas in the form of sketches. He found inspiration in the underside of a bridge, a walled courtyard, the arch of a door, a building’s reflection in the water, street patterns seen from Notre Dame, stonework on the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois facing the Louvre, rows of chimneys on the sides of buildings, posters in the métro, and the grilles of pavements. Just like Saul Bellow, Ellsworth was uninterested in the romantic notion of Paris. For him, poetry came from Paris’s gritty urban details.
Very few people saw Ellsworth Kelly’s work in 1949, except for his new friends Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who stayed in the same hotel, the Hôtel de Bourgogne on the Île Saint-Louis. The American dancer and composer, both in their early thirties, introduced the shy young painter to Pierre Boulez, barely twenty-four and already the composer of a well-received sonata. All of them had an interest in chance, or “controlled chance,” as Boulez would put it, in their respective art. For Kelly, it was only the beginning of his six-year Parisian apprenticeship, but he was making great leaps toward his style. He was only eighteen months away from his first solo exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre,14 where Georges Braque stopped in his tracks in front of his The Meschers and paused for a long moment. Braque would later confide to the wife of the art gallerist Aimé Maeght that Ellsworth’s Meschers had given him a valuable idea for his Atelier IX, one of the great paintings of the postwar era.
FINDING GODOT
The young Ellsworth Kelly was also seeing a lot of his friends Jack Youngerman and the literature student Richard Seaver. Seaver had decided to take a break from the Sorbonne and learn life in the streets of Paris. He had not given up on his doctorate on James Joyce and Benjamin Constant, he just wanted to experiment and enlarge his knowledge of French culture in Paris’s open playground.
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