Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

Beauvoir did not believe for a moment that Hollywood, or screenwriting in general, was the way forward for talented writers like them. More like a trap, albeit an alluring one, of course, with more money and more glamour than in publishing. Simone would look after Ellen, she told Richard. She had also bidden farewell to Camus, who had escaped Parisian domestic life and a growing dissatisfaction with politics for a tour of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile; and to Sartre, on his way to Mexico, also for a lecture and book-signing tour. Difficult to say which of the two famous French writers was walking in the other’s steps. However, in Argentina, where his plays were being produced and L’étranger and La peste had just been released in translation, Camus was known as “el numero 2 del existencialismo.”2

  With Beauvoir, Camus, Sartre, and Wright deserting Saint-Germain-des-Prés to go on their respective adventures, some of those left behind found life in Paris increasingly difficult. Summer 1949 would mark the time when relationships and marriages started silently unraveling. Francine Camus was slowly slipping into depression, Ellen Wright was wringing her hands at her husband’s selfishness, and Mamaine, the future Mrs. Koestler, had been flown to a nursing home in Hampstead, London, for her mysterious bouts of severe asthma.

  When she returned to Verte Rive after a few weeks of complete rest, Mamaine was feeling much better but still rather frail. Despite her precarious health, Arthur Koestler, who was working “on a secret novel,” The Age of Longing,3 could not suppress his habitual physical violence. When they argued, which was often, he beat Mamaine. Nobody called it domestic violence or abuse in those days. In a letter to her sister, Mamaine rather matter-of-factly wrote: “Arthur struck me a stunning blow on the head (for the third time).”4 The English rose thought that such treatment came with the “job” of being the wife-in-waiting of an influential public figure and world-famous writer.

  Other unpleasantness came with her particular job of being Arthur Koestler’s other half. Arthur was about to hire Cynthia Jefferies, a twenty-two-year-old South African escaping from an abusive relationship with an older man. Koestler had finally agreed to marry Mamaine, and the date was fixed for April 1950, but this did not stop him from making the young and impressionable Cynthia his occasional mistress as well as his secretary. Mamaine’s health would slowly deteriorate as time went by. Four years after their marriage, aged only thirty-seven, Mamaine died suddenly. Koestler wrote to a friend, “I killed Mamaine.” Cynthia replaced Mamaine at Arthur’s side, only to know a tragic end herself thirty years later.5

  The combative and independent-minded English muse Sonia Brownell had finally married out of despair. After the love of her life, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, refused to divorce his wife for her, Sonia decided to accept George Orwell’s latest proposal. He had been extremely ill at a sanatorium in Cranham, Gloucestershire, in the spring of 1949, but had managed to finish writing his novel 1984, whose female lead had been inspired by Sonia.6 Her decision to marry Orwell had to do with her own deep unhappiness, but George found in her strength and tenderness. She did not love him the way she had loved Merleau-Ponty, but “the pact between them grew from mutual honesty, humour and compassion.”7 Sonia’s Parisian friends learned with dismay that she was about to marry a figure whose reputation as an arch-anti-Stalinist was already beginning to filter through France. However, they recognized his talent as a writer, and the reviews for 1984, in both Britain and the United States, were extraordinarily good; they also shared her pain when they learned that her wedding had taken place in Orwell’s hospital room at University College Hospital, London, on October 13, 1949. On a flying visit to London to have a bronchoscopy, Mamaine was among the very few who attended the ceremony. Everybody was trying their best to be as merry as possible, but Sonia’s friends knew she was going to be more nurse than wife—not a happy prospect for such a young, beautiful, and vibrant woman.

  Both the nursing and the marriage proved brief, however, lasting only three months until Orwell’s death on January 21, 1950. To her detractors, who would accuse her all her life of being Orwell’s black widow, she would forever be Sonia Orwell, but to her friends she would remain Sonia Brownell, the friend and translator of many writers whom she always observed with a tender smile, a glass of bitter Campari in her hand. Two months after Orwell’s funeral Sonia headed back to Paris, to be looked after by her friends. She soon found a way to spend as much time in Paris as she possibly could, working as an editor and talent scout for the British publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson and the Swiss publisher Skira. Actively contributing to the international fame of Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Norman Mailer, Michel Leiris, and Marguerite Duras, she struck everyone she encountered with her “melancholy that sparkled like crisp white wine.”8

  NEW WAVES

  The mass exodus of the Left Bank’s greatest minds in the summer of 1949 left many vacancies to be filled. A much younger generation, still in their teens, fed by Existentialism from an early age, were seething with impatience to live life to the full, to experiment with it and to play an active part in the Parisian turmoil of life, arts, literature, and politics. Interestingly, they favored the Right Bank over the Left Bank; it was their way to distinguish themselves from their glorious elders. For the young and rebellious François Truffaut, 1949 had been eventful, the end of an era and the beginning of a new one—at least he had hoped so. The angry seventeen-year-old cinephile had reached rock bottom: he had contracted syphilis. Too many visits paid to a brothel sheltered behind a chic neo-Gothic façade at 9 rue Navarin, near Pigalle, was the reason for it. Although rather proud to share the same affliction once suffered by his favorite poet, Charles Baudelaire, he was, however, much luckier. Thanks to daily shots of penicillin administered in his buttocks, the young François finally recovered. His mentor André Bazin hired him at his magazine Travail et Culture. François, at last in a steady job, learned how to run a successful and innovative movie club and how to write film criticism. He was Bazin’s assistant and grateful friend, a kind of younger brother, too. He helped with Bazin’s endless cinematic projects, such as the first staging of a film festival in Biarritz called the “festival of doomed films,”9 audaciously aimed at competing with the Cannes Film Festival. Jean Cocteau and Bazin had come up with the idea of promoting films that were not purely commercial but were true artistic endeavors and works of art. Truffaut hopped on the night train at the beginning of July 1949 and found a bed in the dormitory of the Biarritz Lycée, used as the festival’s main hotel for its not too important guests. There he met Cocteau and bumped into a group of committed cinephiles, slightly older than him: among them, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard. La Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave, was born there and then, on a Biarritz beach. The films on show included The Lady from Shanghai and The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles, Jour de fête by Jacques Tati, The Long Voyage Home by John Ford, L’homme du sud (The Southerner) by Jean Renoir, The Shanghai Gesture by Josef von Sternberg, and Ossessione by Luchino Visconti—magnificent films that would inform and shape the imagination of generations of cinemagoers, critics, and film directors.

  The summer heat was slaughterous, but in the plush 16th arrondissement some children of the bourgeoisie were working hard. The nearly fifteen-year-old Brigitte Bardot had just been chosen by the editor of Elle as the magazine’s mascot or favorite jeune fille. Her posture was superb, her innocence and modesty breathtaking. Brigitte dreamed of becoming a ballerina at the Paris Opéra and was training intensively at a dance school. Every day, after her classes at the Lycée, her governess took her for a rigorous two-hour ballet lesson that she often left with bloody feet. One of her slightly older schoolmates, Leslie Caron, had passed the entry exam to the national ballet school, the Conservatoire. A few months later Leslie would be spotted by Gene Kelly for a “Gershwin film project.” “A what?” Leslie had laughed. “An American in Paris,” came the answer.

  Brigitte Bardot wanted to be like Leslie Caron and dance through life. A young photog
rapher named Roger Vadim had noticed her on the cover of Elle and asked her to audition for a small part in a film. After asking her parents’ permission, Brigitte accepted the offer. In fact, she did not care much for cinema, but she did care for this tall, dark stranger who did not look at her as if she were a complete idiot, the way her ruthless mother, Anne-Marie, had always done. The audition did not lead anywhere, and Brigitte kept working hard at her pirouettes and entrechats. For a while.

  Roger Vadim had in fact seduced the teenager. And Brigitte, the daughter of the 16th arrondissement Catholic right-wing bourgeoisie, fell for the Saint-Germain-des-Prés bohemian dilettante with an absolute passion, the one she had so far dedicated to her dancing. A few months later, at the beginning of 1950, Brigitte gave up all pretense of becoming a professional dancer. She would, however, always retain the body of a dancer, the grace and demeanor that so mesmerized people wherever she entered a room. She would simply become a phenomenon of a sexual, social, moral, and philosophical nature, “a thing of mobile contours,”10 as the New York Times would soon declare, one that Simone de Beauvoir would later study and write about. French intellectuals understood that there was much more to Bardot than just the lovely curves of a young star; she embodied this new generation, children of Existentialism, who were going to live free at all costs. Free of prejudices, free from morality, free from social constraints. François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard would soon shoot in the streets of Paris with a camera on their operator’s shoulder or placed at the back of a convertible car, without any authorization, while Bardot would soon entrance the world with her body moves.

  In an essay about Bardot,11 Simone de Beauvoir immediately saw in the teenager a product of Existentialism. Beauvoir would present Bardot as the first and most liberated woman of postwar France. Beauvoir wrote: “Her flesh does not have the generosity that symbolizes passivity. She walks, she dances, she moves. In the hunting game, she is both hunter and prey. Males are an object for her, as much as she is an object for them. This is precisely what hurts males’ pride.”12

  Bardot’s naturalness seemed more perverse than any kind of sophistication. Bardot was offering the Western world a new kind of woman. “To despise as she does jewels, makeup and high heels is to refuse to transform oneself into an idol. It is to assert oneself the equal of men.”13

  Bardot would refuse to be “a good wife” and “a good mother.” She fell in and out of love, married four times, broke hundreds of hearts, stayed, left, gave birth to a boy, and discovered she was not cut out for motherhood, leaving her son to be brought up by his father. But she was not acting out any rebellious impulses. As Beauvoir put it: “Desire and pleasure seem to her truer than precepts and conventions. She does what she pleases and this is what is so troubling.”14 Looking at Bardot’s posture and gaze in this light, it is easy to see why she became an Existentialist icon.

  Françoise Sagan, ten months younger than Bardot, was another daughter of the Paris bourgeoisie, and an heir to Left Bank thinking. She lived with her parents at 167 boulevard Malesherbes in the patrician 17th arrondissement. She usually spent the summer at the family house at Hossegor near Biarritz, but that summer of 1949 she had insisted on going first to visit the Picasso exhibition organized by the Communist arts center Maison de la Pensée Française. It was Picasso’s own selection of his previous two years’ production: sixty-four canvases in total. Françoise, née Quoirez, had always wanted to become a writer. Literature would provide her nom de plume, Sagan. She found it in her favorite author, Marcel Proust. Boson de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince de Sagan, a famous dandy in the nineteenth century, had inspired the character of the Duc de Guermantes and Baron Charlus in À la recherche du temps perdu. “Françoise Sagan.” She liked the ring to it. She, too, would be a dandy in her own way. For the time being, though, with her friend Florence, daughter of André Malraux, she spent her free time listening to Billie Holiday and reading—Sartre, Beauvoir, Stendhal, and the young American literary phenomenon Carson McCullers, with whom she’d share the same talent for writing and living too fast.

  The young Sagan, too, was keen on freedom and pleasure: the pleasure of reading and the new one of writing. This gave her happiness and the headiness of freedom. In the summer of 1949 she was timidly but already feverishly discovering the key to her future existence: joy. Sagan would become the virtuoso of a new hedonism. She discovered that she was attracted to young women and older men, and was resolved to make love for pleasure and nothing more. Monogamy, an alien concept, served only to enslave people, she thought. Three years later, her first novel, Bonjour tristesse, would prompt an international scandal and millions of sales throughout the world. Paris Match would brand her the new Colette, and the future Nobel Prize writer and critic François Mauriac declared her “a charming little monster.” With her royalties she would buy, in cash, her first sports car, a black XK140 Jaguar, and never look back.

  Sagan and Bardot, adolescents in the summer of 1949, were just a few months away from international fame. The two faces of a new France, they were about to become the emblems of a generation that would speak as fast as they would drive, and whose lightness of being and nonchalance, paired with a dazzling intelligence and beauty, would become a blueprint for generations to come. They were the offspring of Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus.

  * * *

  They were the France that had not been responsible for the war, having had to live through it only with their children’s eyes. They had been young hostages of the war but now wanted to forget it all, and if possible at full speed. Their generation showed more casualness than their elders and behaved even more freely and dangerously. France’s economic recovery provided them with new desires they could now fulfill.

  * * *

  Future icons, they were also about to invent a new style: loose hair bleached by the sun over a Breton-style top, a pair of blue jeans, walking barefoot or in espadrilles with a cigarette between the lips, oozing impudence. Jean Cocteau, the eternally young poet and mischief maker in chief, would soon look at them with as much awe as irritation: “Today’s youth possesses an incredible cheek, an immodesty that resembles genius. Great genius. Too much genius. A machine gun of genius. This youth could also do with some talent.”15 However, in the summer of 1949, Truffaut, Bardot, Sagan, and the new waves they represented were still gathering and hadn’t yet crashed on French shores.

  “I NOW KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR BOSS’S VAGINA”

  Simone de Beauvoir, feeling invincible after four blissful months spent with Nelson Algren—as it happened, the last truly happy moments they would ever share—was ready to confront her many critics, some of them old friends, and to enter a new stage in her life. The second volume of Le deuxième sexe, just released, had unleashed the furor of many a Parisian male, even in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and with this book, Beauvoir was going to be at last considered worldwide as an equal to Sartre and Camus.

  Had Simone gone too far with Le deuxième sexe? For the first time, through a meticulously researched work and accessible philosophy essay, a female writer was showing how men oppressed women. The forceful central argument developed in book 1, subtitled “Facts and Myths,” had focused on the fact that men had managed to confine women to the role of Other while they remained the Subject. Women were therefore relegated to being the Object, hence their subordinate position in society. Looking at biology, psychoanalysis, and history, she had found numerous examples of women’s “inferiority” taken for granted but never had she found a convincing justification for it. Beauvoir had also shown how myths and mythology imprinted human consciousness to the detriment of women, weaving tale after tale about the “eternal feminine.” In book II, subtitled “Woman’s Life Today,” she analyzed very concretely women’s situation through their sexual education from infancy to adulthood.

  * * *

  She had certainly been direct in making the points she wanted to make, and had liberally used the words “vagina” and “c
litoris.” Her matter-of-fact tone had greatly shocked and her straightforwardness had been deemed obscene. In her chapter on sexual initiation she had written: “Erection is the expression of his need; sex, hands, mouth, man’s body is erected toward his partner, but he remains at the heart of this activity.”16

  Woman’s eroticism is far more complex and expresses itself by the opposition between two organs: clitoris and vagina. All her life, woman retains this erotic autonomy (clitoris): the clitoral spasm is on a par with the male orgasm, a kind of intumescence which can be reached in a quasi automatic fashion; however, it is via her vagina that woman is penetrated and fecundated. It becomes an erotic center only by the intervention of a male and it always constitutes a kind of rape.17

  Beauvoir was simply trying to prove that women are not born “feminine,” but are conditioned by society into accepting a passive, dependent, objectified existence, deprived as they are of subjectivity and the ambition to emancipate themselves through financial independence and work. Whether daughter, wife, mother, or prostitute, women are made to conform to stereotypes imposed by men. For Beauvoir, only through work, and thus economic independence, can women achieve autonomy and freedom.

  * * *

  At Les Temps modernes, but also at her flat on the rue de la Bûcherie, Beauvoir received thousands of outraged letters, some signed, many anonymous. “People branded me a nymphomaniac, an abortion-fiend, a lesbian, frigid.” Even the great writer François Mauriac, two years away from receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote to a younger male friend of Simone: “I now know everything there is to know about your boss’s vagina.” Albert Camus, trying to rest in the Alps after his exhausting and disappointing South American book tour, was simmering with rage. He accused Simone of demeaning French men and making them look ridiculous. Albert was macho, he hated being judged by women, intelligent women in particular. Saul Bellow was also among those males who felt threatened by an intelligent woman like Beauvoir. His love-hate feelings for France, his resentment at not having been able to impress Parisian intellectuals, inspired these lines to his friend Alfred Kazin: “Stendhal would do as I do, that is feed Simone’s literature on sex to the cat to cure her of heat.”18 The right-wing and Gaullist press hated The Second Sex, the Communists ridiculed it, and the Vatican put it on its banned books list. None of this surprised Simone. Janet Flanner, however, was among her few allies. To her New Yorker readers, Flanner warned: “Le deuxième sexe, a long, thoughtful work by Madame Simone de Beauvoir on the peculiar, even awkward place in civilization that first nature and then man have put the human female, is a serious, provocative study, unlike any ever produced by a French femme de lettres before.”19