Seaver had left the Hôtel de l’Ancienne Comédie for the Hôtel des Marronniers, a few streets away, closer to the Seine, at 21 rue Jacob. He had found a maid’s room on the seventh floor for ten dollars a month. “The only inconvenience was that the ancient red-tiled floor was roughly 20 degrees off the horizontal.”15 Bricks liberated from a nearby construction site propped up both bed and table. “As for the wooden chair that was meant to go with the table, I had solved that minor problem by sawing two inches off the front legs.”16 Richard Seaver needed to complement his stipend from the army to make ends meet. Like most of the literature students on the Left Bank, he tried to place a newspaper article here, a book review there, teaching English at Berlitz to make ends meet.
Seaver was paid in francs and therefore lived like a true Parisian. He was poor, but then everybody was poor on the Left Bank. “There was, we knew, a whole other world across the river, the world of diplomats and business men, of journalists and politicians, who lived high on the hog and experienced a whole other Paris than ours.” Seaver did not envy them, though. He wanted to become French, as did his friend Jack Youngerman, who had fallen in love with a former pupil of Richard’s. At just seventeen she was an “aspiring young dark-haired fine-featured Garbo look-alike budding actress, as bright as she was young.” She was Delphine Seyrig, a future French star known as much for her beauty as for her talent, her raspy voice, and her choice of original and challenging films and plays. A drama student and a close friend of the actor and director Roger Blin, Delphine Seyrig spoke perfect English. Her father, a leading archaeologist, had gone to New York as the cultural attaché of the Free French government during the war, along with Claude Lévi-Strauss, and she had spent her formative years, between the ages of eight and thirteen, at school in New York.17 She did not know it yet, but a few months later she would play a key role in introducing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to Richard Seaver,18 who in turn played a part in introducing Beckett’s works to the whole Anglophone world, leading to Beckett’s belated triumph and Nobel Prize.
Samuel Beckett had just turned forty-three. Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil had greatly enjoyed reading Sam’s latest play, Waiting for Godot, which he had finished writing at the end of January 1949, and she was resolved to interest the theater director Roger Blin in producing it for the stage, or at the very least for the radio. Roger Blin, a former pupil of Antonin Artaud, was an actor-director and manager of the Gaîté Theatre. One afternoon, Suzanne went to the theater to leave the manuscripts of Waiting for Godot and Eleutheria with Blin. The good news was that Blin wanted to produce Godot, the bad news that he was to lose the Gaîté Theatre. His three productions there had been critical successes but commercial failures. Still, Blin wanted to meet with the author. Lunch at the rue des Favorites was arranged. “The two men bonded. Blin’s love for Synge and Irish whiskey helped.”19 Godot would first be a radio play, but it would take some time.20
Sam and Suzanne were making ends meet, but they both felt exhausted. Their small flat on the rue des Favorites was becoming too noisy. The neighbors had acquired a brand-new radio, and Samuel was distracted by the now constant noise whenever he tried to write. Sam also had in mind a series of thirteen short pieces, which he thought of naming Textes pour rien (Texts for Nothing). And to write those “texts for nothing,” Sam needed a change of scenery. They heard that many decrepit farmhouses near Paris could be rented for very little. One afternoon they took the train from the Gare de l’Est to Ussy-sur-Marne, a village of five hundred inhabitants and one of the battlefields of the Great War. They wandered in the village and the nearby fields and set their sights on a run-down farm. They agreed with the owners to rent just one room on an annual lease for £6 a year. It was almost barren save for a bed, a table, a stove, and a chair, but it had a view over fruit trees and lilac bushes that were just in blossom. Frugality was their way to deal with the absurdity of life.
Six months later, his mother’s death, and his consequent inheritance, would make life more comfortable for Beckett, as would Suzanne’s encounter with the new head of Les Éditions de Minuit, Jérôme Lindon. Suzanne gave him Molloy to read: “I read it in a few hours, as I had never read a book before.”21 Lindon cabled Suzanne to say that he wanted to publish everything Beckett had ever written. This was the breakthrough Suzanne had worked so hard to achieve for her partner. With Roger Blin as his theater manager, Jérôme Lindon as his publisher, and Richard Seaver as his devout fan and promoter in English-language magazines, Samuel Beckett had at last been “discovered” and would soon be celebrated in the whole world.
THE MARSHALL PLAN’S FIRST BIRTHDAY
On the evening of April 15, 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, just back from Cagnes, where she had proofread the second volume of Le deuxième sexe, had absentmindedly switched on the radio on her little desk in the rue de la Bûcherie. She was writing to Nelson Algren and counting the days, less than four weeks now, until his plane would land at Orly on May 11.
Simone suddenly stopped writing—the speaker on the radio had caught her attention with a birthday tribute to the one-year-old Marshall Plan: “A great lifting of the heart goes from us toward the generous American people and toward their leaders,” said the speaker. There was no denying the positive impact of the Marshall Plan on everybody’s lives in France. Nelson had inquired whether soap was still so difficult to find in Paris. She had replied that with the Marshall Plan, Parisians had everything, even American fruit juices.22 France had turned the corner at last. The black market was expected to be officially declared extinct when milk, butter, cheese, oil, and chocolate would be available without ration tickets. This was probably only a matter of weeks away.
Although its effects were felt everywhere in France, the Marshall Plan had its home on Paris’s Right Bank. Its headquarters had filled every room of the former mansion of Talleyrand, one of the most influential diplomats in European history. This mansion, also known as the Hôtel de Saint-Florentin, with an oak-paneled salon that had come from Madame du Barry’s own Pavillon de Musique, was the property of the Rothschild family. They were grateful for the cash from the U.S. administration, especially after having lost a significant part of their art collection in the war, stolen by the Nazis. The magnificent neoclassical Hôtel de Saint-Florentin stood proudly at the corner of the rue de Rivoli and rue Saint-Florentin, practically on the place de la Concorde, one of the most regal squares of Paris, and one of its most dramatic, too.
Foreign journalists reporting on the Marshall Plan, like Theodore H. White, now had an aperitif routine: they met at the Crillon hotel, on the place de la Concorde. Their British counterparts had established this daily rendezvous of drink and gossip at dusk, in an attempt to decipher the day’s story. Theodore could not help mocking his British colleagues. The wartime spirit was cracking even between close allies. He divided the Brits into three groups: scholars, pomposities, and jollies.
Scholars lived on Île Saint Louis or the Left bank and wrote with enormous erudition seemingly with a goose quill pen. The pomposities were unaware that the Empire had perished. The jollies were workaday reporters who could invent, inflate or embroider any scrap of fact or gossip into overnight excitement beyond the talent of any American. The scholars sought history, the pomposities sought nothing and the jollies sought circulation for their masters on Fleet Street.23
Theodore H. White strolled every day from his flat on the rue du Boccador to his office at the Herald Tribune building on the rue de Berri and to the Marshall Plan headquarters, by way of the Crillon bar and back. This meant going up and down the Champs-Élysées many times a day. It was during those walks that Theodore H. White, the future chronicler of American presidential elections and presidencies, tried to define the very essence of the Marshall Plan.
He had to start with the idea of money. “In western culture, money conceals the idea of command.” What was novel about the Marshall Plan was that “the command quality of money, used on such a scale between nations, was bei
ng used for the first time not to kill but to heal.”24 For White the situation read like this: Europeans could neither command nor pay for what they needed to live decently. Worse, they had no wheat for bread, no cotton for clothing, no petroleum to fuel cars. “People were hungry; some starved; others stole; most hoarded; everyone cheated.” The U.S. Congress had agreed to help Europe one more time to save it from both starvation and Communism. On an economic level, the plan had worked without a glitch: by June 1949, “the tough mechanical, distribution and payments problems within Europe had been solved.”25
THE HAPPIEST SPRING OF OUR LIVES
On May 11, 1949, Simone de Beauvoir woke elated. This was the day. She chose to wear the white coat she had bought two years earlier in Chicago and hopped on the bus to the Gare Saint-Lazare to welcome the man she loved. Nelson had no difficulty spotting her. The train station was so filthy, covered with century-old grime and soot, that in her white coat Simone shone like the sun at the end of a dark tunnel. They embraced in silence for what felt like an eternity but must have been less than half a minute, then started talking. They could not stop. Simone had prepared a busy program of festivities for him, there were so many friends she wanted to introduce him to, all the people she wrote about in her letters—he felt he knew them intimately already. They kept talking over each other and laughed each time they did. In his trunks were chocolate for her mother, whiskey for Sartre, a flowered dressing gown for Simone. And many books and pictures he had had developed from their previous holiday together.
Algren had managed to finish his latest novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, just before setting off for a four-month holiday with his “French wife,” and he had landed in Paris at the beginning of the first Paris International Jazz Festival, which played every night to adoring jazz fans. Among the American musicians performing at the Salle Pleyel was a twenty-two-year-old black trumpeter named Miles Davis. It was his first trip abroad, and he was to perform alongside jazz luminaries including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sidney Bechet, and Claude Luter. One evening that May, Miles Davis crossed paths with the merry clique from Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He had never felt like this before, and never would again. “Paris changed the way I looked at things forever. I loved being in Paris and loved the way I was treated. Paris was where I understood that all white people were not the same; that some were not prejudiced.”26 Boris Vian introduced Miles to his Parisian friends, who treated him like the gifted musician he was. As for Juliette Gréco, she looked at him like a girl in love. She had watched his first concert from the wings with Boris and Michelle Vian, as she could not afford a seat, and had felt deeply moved by Miles’s talent and beauty. She fell for his silhouette: “I saw him in profile for a whole evening. A real Giacometti.”27 Human relations suddenly felt so simple. Miles fell for Juliette and for her friends. After a few days he had almost forgotten about his sweetheart Irene back in New York, their five-year-old daughter, Cheryl, and three-year-old son, Gregory. Miles and Juliette spent their evenings walking in the streets of Paris, hand in hand, going from one jazz club to another, café to bistro, friend to friend, without anyone staring at them. Juliette did not speak English, Miles did not speak French. “I have not a clue how we managed. The miracle of love,”28 explained Juliette years later. For Miles, such life and such freedom were intoxicating. “Juliette was the first woman that I loved as an equal human being.”29
Boris Vian introduced Miles to Juliette and also to Simone, Nelson, Jean-Paul, and Pablo, who was back from Antibes for a few days. One evening, as they were all having dinner late in a bistro on the boulevard Saint-Germain, Sartre said to Miles: “Why don’t you and Juliette get married?” Miles replied matter-of-factly, “Because I love her too much to make her unhappy.”30 At first, Juliette did not understand what he meant. Could it be that he was a womanizer and would not want to leave the mother of his two small children for her? No, it was simply a question of color. “If he’d taken me back to America with him, I would have been called names,”31 Juliette realized years later. In the 1950s, at the Waldorf in New York, where she was a guest, Gréco invited Miles to dinner. “The face of the maître d’hôtel when Miles came in was indescribable. After two hours, the food was more or less thrown in our faces.”32 At four in the morning, Juliette got a call from Miles, in tears: “I do not ever want to see you again here, in a country where this kind of relationship is impossible.”33 Gréco suddenly understood that she had made a terrible mistake. “I’ll never forget this strange feeling of humiliation. In America, his colour was made blatantly obvious to me, whereas in Paris I had never noticed it.”34
Those days of May and June 1949 went by so quickly. Like Miles Davis, Algren was living the happiest months of his life, but not exactly for the same reasons. Waking up every morning under the benevolent gaze of Notre Dame deeply affected this son of a Swedish convert to Judaism. Paris proved for him both a spiritual and an earthly experience. The fruit and vegetable market on the place Maubert, minutes from the rue de la Bûcherie, filled Algren with joy. He loved the French ritual of daily greetings: “Bonjour monsieur, comment ça va, très bien, merci, et vous, quel beau temps, au revoir, merci monsieur.” Absorbing those vignettes of Parisian life, Algren had whispered into Simone’s ear one late morning, “You see, in Chicago, people buy in silence.” Everybody loved Nelson in turn. Michelle Vian found him very attractive and became his personal interpreter; he liked her, too, and called her Zazou. Sartre greatly appreciated the whiskey Nelson had brought him, and Nelson warmed to the philosopher’s humor. Le petit Bost shared war stories while Olga listened to them, utterly charmed by the tall Chicagoan. There were tartine parties at the Vians’; dinners with Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis; evenings spent drinking whiskey and grapefruit gin with Richard Wright at the Montana bar in the rue Saint-Benoît; cocktail parties at Gallimard; a visit to the wax museum, the Musée Grévin; another to the van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume; and one evening listening to Yves Montand perform in a cabaret. There were studious afternoons, too, with Jean Guyonnet, his French translator, who found Chicago slang particularly hard to decipher and render into French.35 They would settle for hours on the top floor of the Café de Flore and discuss the semantics of the slums.
The release of the first volume of Le deuxième sexe felt like an unwanted distraction for Simone. Nothing could divert her attention from Nelson; she wanted to devote herself to him and to play the part of the dedicated wife36 for at least a few months in her life. There would be plenty of time to respond to the critiques of her book in the autumn when the second volume, even more brutally honest and graphic about sex, would no doubt stir even more controversy. For the time being, she was living a kind of honeymoon. In her studio flat on the rue de la Bûcherie there were maps spread on the floor and the bed. Algren wanted to visit Italy and North Africa. Late at night, in the shadow of Notre Dame’s spire, they made plans and drew up itineraries. Rome, Naples, Amalfi, Ravello, Sorrento, Ischia, Tunis, Algiers, Fez, Marrakech, and then Marseilles and Cabris in Provence.
Four months later, on September 13, when Simone took Nelson to Le Bourget airport to catch his plane back home, he whispered in her ear: “I have never been so happy, I have never loved so much.”37 On touching down at Idlewild Airport in New York, he learned that the reviews for his novel The Man with the Golden Arm were excellent. Ernest Hemingway had written: “Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful … Mr. Algren, boy, you are good.”38 Nelson would indeed never be so happy again, or so celebrated as a writer. Paris 1949 would remain for him a personal apotheosis never to be equaled.
While Simone and Nelson were cooing, Sartre had finally broken up with his “New York girl,” Dolorès Vanetti, who kept making demands on him. So Dolorès remained married to her doctor husband, and Sartre remained unmarried to all his mistresses. Dolorès remained in her flat full of African masks and artworks by Duchamp, Breton, Calder, and Delvaux and
would never talk about Sartre again. Jean-Paul, meanwhile, was busy making Michelle Vian laugh; everybody around him knew what it meant, except Boris, the soon-to-be-cheated-on husband.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FAREWELLS AND A NEW DAWN
THE END OF MARRIAGES
Before setting off to Rome with Nelson, Simone had seen Richard Wright and asked him whether he was certain this film project of his was really a good idea. Simone was very fond of the Wrights and had the feeling that his going to Argentina for several months, perhaps even a year, could be the end of them. There had been tensions, and Ellen Wright would not endure Richard’s dithering and existential malaise forever. In fact, Richard had not at all thought of Ellen or his daughters. He was going to become a movie star and had started a diet to look leaner and younger, as Simone had suggested. He had twenty years to shed; this made him laugh.
Cinema was the future for writers like them, he told Simone. Look at the young Norman, he said. Mailer had just relocated to Hollywood from New York with his mentor Jean Malaquais as his coscreenwriter. The film adaptation of The Naked and the Dead had just been released in Great Britain, where it had been praised and caused a scandal for its depiction of the reckless brutalities of American GIs during the Second World War; the sales had been prodigious, and the studios were assiduously courting Mailer. He had persuaded Montgomery Clift to play the part of Julien Sorel in what, he said, would be his first screenplay, an adaptation of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir. Norman Mailer, Jean Malaquais, and their wives swiftly moved from the Château Marmont to a seven-room house at 1601 Marlay Drive in the foothills just beyond Sunset Boulevard. On August 28, 1949, Susan Mailer was born; Malaquais was her godfather.1
Left Bank Page 34