Her chapter on abortion triggered a strange phenomenon. People started queuing in front of Les Temps modernes’ office to ask the secretary, Madame Sorbet, for the details of doctors who would discreetly perform this illegal medical act. One particularly desperate young man braved the concierge at 11 rue de la Bûcherie early one morning, ran up the five floors, and hammered on her door. Simone opened it, half awake, wearing her Japanese kimono. He fell on his knees and asked her for the name of a doctor who would abort his girlfriend. “People saw me as a kind of professional procuress.”20
After a month of this daily diet of invective and abuse, Beauvoir left Paris with Sartre for Provence and the village of Cagnes. It was very warm for October, with a blazing autumn sun. Simone was keen to press ahead, to reconnect with fiction and start a new novel. She felt the need to write on the “disappointing immediate postwar period” after the elation of the liberation. Her novel would be set among Parisian intellectuals and dedicated to Nelson Algren. She would call it Les mandarins (The Mandarins).21 This roman à clef would also feature everyone she knew and had slept with, from Arthur Koestler to Nelson Algren, Jean-Paul Sartre to Albert Camus, Merleau-Ponty to le petit Bost, hiding behind false names. Nelson Algren would never forgive her, but she would receive France’s highest literary distinction for it.22
ADIEU COMMUNIST PARTY
Edgar Morin and Édith Thomas had reached a point of no return. They had finally decided to leave the Communist Party and burn their bridges with their youth and dreams, as Marguerite Duras had done before them. Édith had had to renounce so many things in just a year, including her passion for Dominique Aury, and now the head of the National Archives was about to commit political suicide. In the light of her clandestine activities for the Resistance during the war, Combat gave her a whole page to explain, in her own words, why she was leaving the Party. However, L’Humanité, the Party’s powerful daily newspaper, crucified her in a short and scathing article on December 19, 1949, announcing her “departure.” To half the French press she was now dead, invisible and unemployable. Like Edgar Morin, she was heimatlos, stateless. To the bourgeoisie they were Communists; to the Communists they were bourgeois. Edgar Morin was jobless almost overnight; as for Édith, her publisher’s doors slammed shut and the anthology on women writers she had been working on for months was postponed indefinitely. All that remained in her life were her work and her friendship with Dominique Aury. Dominique had been careful not to let Édith know of her brief and violent affair with Arthur Koestler, and she was being as ever very discreet about her relationship with Gallimard supremo Jean Paulhan; she had, however, confided to Édith that she was writing a secret novel, an erotic work of pornographic mysticism. Dominique had chosen the pseudonym Pauline Réage; the novel she was writing was Histoire d’O (Story of O),23 a story of female sadomasochistic submission in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade. The first hundred copies were seized by the police, and the book was consequently banned for years for obscenity, but it ended up selling more than one million copies a few years later and being translated into twenty languages. Jean Paulhan wrote the preface as if the author, his lover, were unknown to him. Dominique Aury would reveal that she was the author of Story of O only four years before her death in 1998.
AN IDEA WITH A PLAN: A EUROPEAN UNION
If most of the hopes laid at the feet of Paris intellectuals, writers, and artists just after the Second World War were partly dashed by the force of bloc politics, and their own ideological and moral ambivalence, it remains that seldom before had a generation tried so hard to reinvent themselves and reenchant the world. In the end, they may have failed to counteract the Cold War and to create a Third Way in world politics; however, they did leave an impressive legacy, one that is still felt today in many walks of life. They crushed bourgeois morality and elevated vaudeville to an art. Only the strongest of women survived, but those who did shook the old male order. Utopian plans such as world citizenship revived political audacity and pushed back the limits of political imagination. Their wizardry with words, images, and concepts revolutionized not only philosophy and literature but also film and modern art. Their irreverence paved the way for the next generation’s insouciance in a thriving France rediscovering the idea and reality of pleasure and wealth. And if there was no stopping Cold War politics, a new project for Europe would nonetheless soon take form.
* * *
Christmas 1949 in Paris had been the first in a decade without food restrictions, and Parisians spent all the extra money they had on food. Not for a quarter century had the food markets of Paris been fuller or more tempting. In the charcuteries Janet Flanner spent a long time studying “turkey pâté, truffled pigs’ trotters, chicken in half-mourning, whole goose livers, boar’s snout jelly, and fresh truffles in their fragile bronze husks.”24 In poultry and offal shops she was simply lost for words—“Strasbourg geese and Muscovy ducks, indescribable inner items and blood sausages”—before heading for the fish stalls, where she finally settled for some “costly deep-sea oysters and enormous, hairy sea spiders, to be buried in mayonnaise.”25
Janet’s compatriot the young Art Buchwald may have managed to get a job as a stringer for the entertainment weekly Variety, but he still could not afford hairy sea spiders in mayonnaise. He had a plan, though. The New York Herald Tribune had no entertainment column and he was going to suggest one to the editor Eric Hawkins, an Englishman who had been running the “Trib” for thirty years. Art got an appointment and lied through his teeth about almost everything: his credentials, his education, and his ability to speak fluent French. Still Hawkins said no and left for England for a holiday. Buchwald returned the next week to meet the deputy editor Geoff Parsons and said: “Mr. Hawkins and I have been talking about me doing an entertainment column, which would be generating more advertising.” His lies worked magic. Art was hired on the spot to write two columns, one on films, the other on Paris’s night life called “Paris After Dark,” for $25 a week. In his columns, Art cast himself as the clumsy American tourist in Paris who could not “shoot straight.” They caught on quickly and got people on both sides of the Atlantic talking. They would ultimately win Buchwald a Pulitzer Prize and were syndicated in more than 550 newspapers at the height of his career.
Art had never been a Left Bank kid, and as soon as he pocketed his first paycheck he moved to a maid’s room on the Right Bank, three floors above Theodore White’s flat at 24 rue du Boccador,26 a few minutes’ walk from the newspaper’s office at 21 rue de Berri, on the other side of the Champs-Élysées.
On a gray spring morning in 1950, Theodore White decided to walk to his meeting at 18 rue de Martignac in the 7th arrondissement, a street running along the Roman-looking Sainte Clotilde basilica. He particularly enjoyed the opportunity to cross the Seine at the place de la Concorde, toward the National Assembly. This would take him half an hour, just enough time to prepare for his interview. He had a meeting with the senior civil servant Jean Monnet. “A full-chested, round-faced, acid Frenchman with a needle-pointed nose,”27 Monnet was among the statesmen he met in his career who impressed him the most.
Jean Monnet introduced me to a craft which I have since come to consider the most important in the world: the brokerage of ideas. Monnet was a businessman by origin, cool, calculating, caustic; but he did love ideas and could sell ideas to almost anyone. Ideas were his private form of sport—threading an idea into the slipstream of politics, then into government, then into history. He talked about how and when to plant ideas like a gardener. He coaxed people in government to think. There were few counterparts to Monnet in other countries.28
Theodore White invented the phrase “idea broker” about Monnet in 1950; later he changed it to “power broker,” an expression that passed into general use.
Six weeks before the invasion of Korea, Jean Monnet placed on the agenda of world politics the idea of a United Europe, “an old idea but this time clothed with a plan.” France was ready to release its clamp on G
ermany’s steel production if Germany shared its resources with its neighbors. What Monnet was proposing was this: a new coal and steel community in which not only Frenchmen and Germans but Italians, Belgians, Netherlanders, and Englishmen would share resources, facilities, and markets. In other words, Monnet was suggesting the creation of a common market. Jean Monnet sold the idea to the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, who in turn sold it to the U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson.
Washington recognized that Jean Monnet, this businessman turned dreamer, turned planner, was the most imposing, though officeless, leader in his country. Monnet’s prestige in French politics was akin to that of George Marshall in American politics. He belonged to no political party and enjoyed the confidence of all (except the Communists). Thus only he had the temerity and prestige to present to both American and French governments the plan that would give flesh to an idea which, ultimately, both would have to accept as the substitute for a grand settlement of peace.29
That night, across the Seine, while packing for her two-month trip to America during which she would be reunited with Algren, Simone de Beauvoir was mulling over the idea of a United Europe. Her mind was distracted by thoughts of Nelson, whose latest letters had been rather aloof, by her burning desire to hold him in her arms, and by her worries about not being in Paris while great political events were taking place. She parted the red curtains, opened her window, and let in the fresh air of the spring night. She liked her view over the riverbank and Notre Dame. The city was quiet, the river wind cool, and the trees in full blossom, intermittently illuminated by the headlights of cars driving on the quais. She leaned slightly over the ledge: the local clochards were fast asleep on the little steps of the rue de l’Hôtel Colbert, their wine bottles lying empty in the gutter of this crevice of a street off the Quai Montebello. And as she placed a tube of Belladénal, a sedative, and a secondhand copy of The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald on top of the clothes in her suitcase, she looked once more at Notre Dame slumbering and “the starlit centuries surrounding her on the dark water.”30
Room 10, also known as the round room, at Hôtel La Louisiane, Paris. Inhabited in turn by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Juliette Gréco.
© Agnès Poirier
Jean Cocteau, Jean Marais, and their dog during the 1940s
© Patrick Mesner/Gamma-Rapho
Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso in Paris in 1943
Collection Valentine Hugo © Segalat/Gamma-Rapho
Miles Davis and Juliette Gréco in Paris in 1949
© Jean-Philippe Charbonnier/Gamma-Rapho
Claude Luter at the Club Saint-Germain in the 1950s
© Succession Willy Ronis/Diffusion Agence Rapho
Michelle Vian, Miles Davis, and Boris Vian
© Droits réservés Archives Cohérie Boris Vian
Richard Wright, Juliette Gréco, Anne-Marie Cazalis, and Janet Flanner at a concert given by Duke Ellington at the Club Saint-Germain, 1948
© Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho
Albert Camus speaking at a rally with Garry Davis in Paris, December 1948
© Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho
Arthur Koestler in the late 1940s
© Ergy Landau/Gamma-Rapho
Norman Mailer in 1948
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, LC-USZ62-42506
Saul Bellow in 1948
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre on a cruise ship in 1947
© Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho
Nelson Algren
© Apic/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Irwin Shaw
© Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Agnès Poirier with Juliette Gréco at her home in Saint-Tropez, January 2014
© Grégoire Bernardi
NOTES
Introduction
1. Brenda Wineapple, Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
2. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944–1956 (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
3. Ibid., p. 11.
4. Richard Seaver, The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), preface.
5. 60 rue de Seine, in the 6th arrondissement.
6. The password to the free wifi is (or was when I visited) PulpFiction.
7. Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), vol. 1, p. 132.
I. WAR WAS MY MASTER
1. Yvonne Baby, first woman editor of the daily newspaper Le Monde, a teenager during the war, the goddaughter of Alberto Giacometti. Yvonne Baby interview with Agnès C. Poirier in Paris on January 29, 2014.
1. The Fall
1. The first space in the Louvre to be open to the public, in November 1793.
2. Simone Signoret, La Nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975).
3. First published in France in 1938, it was translated into English in 1949 as The Diary of Antoine Roquentin (London: John Lehmann, 1949) and in 1965 as Nausea (London: Penguin Books, 1965).
4. Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 306.
5. Ibid., p. 307.
6. Needless to say, the film was not well received at the time of its release. It was heralded as a masterpiece on a par with Citizen Kane only after its rerelease in 1956.
7. Letter shown in the film documentary Illustre et inconnu, by Jean-Pierre Devillers and Pierre Pochart (Ladybird Films, France 3, 2014).
8. Le Figaro, September 24, 1939.
9. He wrote about it magnificently in Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth (Jonathan Cape, 1941).
10. Wineapple, Genêt, p. 161.
11. Villa Gerbier.
12. The MoMA held the first American Picasso retrospective, in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (MoMA Exh. #91, November 15, 1939–January 7, 1940). The exhibition included approximately three hundred works, some of which had never been exhibited before. Attendance at the museum peaked at approximately fifteen thousand visitors per week. Source: MoMA.org.
13. A Paris school of thought and historiography founded in the late 1920s, highly influential especially in Europe and Latin America. It stressed the importance of social scientific methods for historians, with a strong emphasis on social history.
14. She had opened her bookshop on November 17, 1919. It faced another bookshop, that of her lover Adrienne Monnier, at number 7 rue de l’Odéon.
15. Charles Glass in Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation 1940–1944 (New York: Harper Press, 2009), p. 32.
16. Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 315.
17. Ibid., p. 69.
18. Ibid., p. 73.
19. Speech in the House of Commons, June 4, 1940.
20. Ibid., p. 73.
21. An operation that required confirmation from the Irish side that the money was there. Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 315.
22. Glass, Americans in Paris.
23. A. J. Liebling, The Road Back to Paris (New York: Paragon House, 1980), p. 80. Introduction by Raymond Sokolov, his biographer.
24. Hazel Rowley, Tête-à-tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Chatto and Windus, 2006).
25. Glass, Americans in Paris.
26. Florence Gilliam, France: A Tribute by an American Woman (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1945).
27. As he referred to her in his correspondence to his friends.
28. Gilliam, France:
A Tribute.
29. “La ville sans regard.”
30. The American diplomat George F. Kennan tried to find the right metaphor: “Was there not some Greek myth about the man who tried to ravish the goddess, only to have her turn to stone when he touched her? That is really what has happened to Paris. When the Germans came, the soul simply went out of it; and what is left is only stone.” Extract from his diary written on July 3, 1940, and published in George F. Kennan, Sketches from a Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).
Left Bank Page 36