5. A Philosophy of Existence
1. Les Temps modernes has never ceased publication since its first issue of October 1945. The head of the publication today is Claude Lanzmann, one of its first contributors as a philosophy student.
2. Les Temps modernes, October 1, 1945, no. 1.
3. Ibid.
“Nous vivons une agonie. On passe de la paix à la guerre, en notre siècle, par un jeu continu de dégradés. La guerre en mourant laisse l’homme nu, sans illusion, abandonné à ses propres forces, ayant enfin compris qu’il n’a plus à compter que sur lui. C’est la seule bonne nouvelle.”
4. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 65.
5. Rowley, Tête-à-tête, p. 169.
6. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 165.
7. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 48.
8. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 66.
9. Ibid., p. 61.
10. Ibid., p. 63.
11. La Croix, June 3, 1945, quoted in Les Temps modernes, November 1945, no. 2.
12. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 70.
13. Ibid., p. 74.
14. Les Temps modernes, December 1945, no. 3.
15. Les Lettres françaises, December 28, 1945.
16. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 88.
17. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), pp. 315–23.
18. Michel Fabre, La rive noire (Paris: Éditions Lieu Commun, 1985), p. 147.
19. Rowley, Richard Wright, p. 307.
20. Ibid., p. 323.
21. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 32.
22. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 32.
23. It eventually did, thanks to a preface by Sartre. Portrait d’un inconnu was published in Paris in 1948 by Robert Marin.
24. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 90.
25. “Opposite numbers to our zoot-suiters,” Janet Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 16.
26. A tartine is a slice of bread with butter. These parties were frugal, but there was alcohol aplenty.
27. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 51.
28. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 90.
29. Translated and published in the United States as The Other Kingdom in 1947, and in the UK as A World Apart in 1951.
30. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 95.
31. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 58.
32. Rowley, Tête-à-tête, p. 161.
33. Lionel Abel, The Intellectual Follies: A Memoir of the Literary Venture in New York and Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 116.
34. Ibid., pp. 118–19.
35. Rowley, Tête-à-tête, p. 161.
36. Les Temps modernes, no. 11–12, August–September 1946, special double issue USA.
37. Todd, Albert Camus, p. 549.
38. Rowley, Richard Wright, p. 330.
39. Ibid., p. 331.
40. In a letter to Dorothy Norman, quoted in ibid., p. 333.
41. According to the University of Chicago Press, which reissued the book in 2015.
42. Also translated as Foam of the Daze.
43. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 123.
44. Rowley, Richard Wright, p. 334.
45. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 57.
46. Ibid., pp. 57–58.
47. Rowley, Richard Wright, p. 337.
6. Lust and Emancipation
1. Claude Lanzmann, Le lièvre de Patagonie (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), p. 208.
2. Journal d’Édith Thomas, October 27, 1946, Fonds Édith Thomas, Archives Nationales.
3. Living with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler’s Letters 1945–51, edited by Celia Goodman (New York: Littlehampton Books, 1985). “Arthur arrived from Palestine … very brown, with a bag full of arak and brandy. Dined at Scott’s. Felt very elated and rather tight. A says he’d like to marry me but refuses to have children.”
4. L’étranger, under the title The Outsider, had come out on April 11, 1946, in a translation by Stuart Gilbert, a friend of James Joyce, and although the New York Times critic had been irritated by its “Britannic” quality, it had on the whole been deemed a fine translation and a “brilliantly told” novel. The Outsider gathered praise almost everywhere it was reviewed. Of course, it helped when personal friends wrote the reviews. The Italian philosopher and résistante Nicola Chiaromonte, whom Camus had helped to flee to Morocco in 1941, wrote a glowing review for the New Republic, calling it “admirable.”
5. Todd, Albert Camus, p. 559.
6. Ibid., p. 565.
7. Ibid., p. 572.
8. Ibid., p. 574.
9. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 152.
10. Householders had a seven-day supply for each person in the family for the entire winter; most were saving it for the week when they fell sick.
11. Camus is reported to have made this joke to Koestler, according to Olivier Todd.
12. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 153.
13. Olivier Todd, Camus’ biographer, does not think it happened: “Camus was too afraid of the kind of pillow-talk they might have had. He was afraid of intelligent women while clearly attracted to Beauvoir physically.”
14. Thinks Olivier Todd, Camus’ biographer.
15. The play had been universally panned by the American critics a year earlier. Vassar Chronicle’s Mary Walker, who had reviewed the play, had been prescient: “Here is Arthur Koestler’s first and, God willing, only play.” She had concluded her review by saying: “Koestler writes with the subtlety of a plough horse. Because he has done good work in the past, we may hope that this is not a swan song but merely the angry croaking of a dispossessed robin.”
16. Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009), p. 287.
17. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 155.
18. Mamaine Koestler, Living with Koestler, p. 40.
19. According to different sources, such as Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 157, and Mamaine Koestler, Living with Koestler, p. 43.
20. Manès Sperber was born in Austrian Galicia in 1905 in a Jewish Hasidic family. He joined the Communist Party in 1927 in Berlin, and immigrated to Paris in 1934. He left the Party because of the Stalinist purges in 1938 and started writing about totalitarianism. He volunteered for the French army in 1939 and had to flee to Switzerland when deportations of Jews started in France. He returned to Paris in 1945 where he worked as senior editor at Calmann-Lévy publishing house and as a psychoanalyst and writer. He was a close friend of Arthur Koestler.
21. Angie David, Dominique Aury (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2006), p. 400.
22. Journal d’Édith Thomas, November 7, 1941. Quoted in ibid., p. 393.
23. David, Dominique Aury, p. 397.
24. Journal d’Édith Thomas, October 27, 1946.
25. Letters from Dominique Aury to Édith Thomas, Sunday, October 27, 1946. Fonds Édith Thomas, Archives Nationales.
26. Journal d’Édith Thomas, November 2, 1946.
27. Ibid.
28. Journal d’Édith Thomas, November 28, 1946.
29. Cazalis, Les mémoires d’une Anne, p. 54.
30. Ibid., p. 17.
31. Ibid., p. 75. Phonet
ically, “Allo” resembles “À l’eau” (let’s go into the water).
32. Lanzmann, Lièvre de Patagonie, p. 203.
33. Ibid., p. 206.
34. Rowley, Tête-à-tête, p. 167.
35. Today called the Hôtel des Carmes.
36. In the preface written by Noël Arnaud to Boris Vian, Manuel de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1974).
37. Cazalis, Les mémoires d’une Anne, p. 84.
38. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 145.
39. Ibid., p. 147.
40. Étude de femmes published by Éditions Colbert and Le champ libre published by Gallimard.
41. Édith Thomas, Jeanne d’Arc (Paris: Éditions Hier et Aujourd’hui, 1947).
42. Édith Thomas, Les Femmes de 1848 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).
43. Dominique Aury, “Par delà tout espoir,” L’Arche, no. 13, February 1946, p. 157, as quoted in David, Dominique Aury, p. 399.
44. The then forty-nine-year-old avant-garde poet, performer, and essayist Tristan Tzara was one of the founders of the antiestablishment Dada movement. Antifascist, he was a Communist but distanced himself from the Communist Party, of which he was a member in the 1950s.
45. Mamaine Koestler, Living with Koestler, p. 27.
46. Ibid., p. 29.
47. Ibid., p. 28.
48. Cazalis, Les mémoires d’une Anne, p. 74.
49. Juliette Gréco, Jujube (Paris: Stock, 1982), p. 111.
7. A Third Way
1. Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, Histoire politique des intellectuels en France 1944–1954 (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 130–36.
2. Todd, Albert Camus, p. 530.
3. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 45.
4. Ibid., p. 52.
5. In the October 1945 elections, the Communist Party had garnered 27.1% of the votes while the Gaullists and the Socialists received 25.6% and 24.9%, respectively.
6. To salute Léger’s return home, Les Temps modernes asked Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who now lived with his stepdaughter and her husband, the art critic Michel Leiris, at the Quai des Grands Augustins, to write a long piece about the birth of Cubism for the January 1946 issue.
7. Laurence Dorléac, Après la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), p. 29.
8. Ibid., p. 11.
9. Ibid., pp. 11–12.
10. Ibid., p. 31.
11. Ibid., p. 33.
12. Hilary Spurling, The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002), p. 73.
13. Philip Toynbee, “Lettre de Londres,” Les Temps modernes, no. 4, January 1946. “Nous n’avons pas une philosophie. Nous sommes moins sujets que vous aux élans, aux enthousiasmes intellectuels passionnés. Notre manque de fanatisme n’est en ce moment que le gage de notre apathie.”
14. Philip Toynbee, “Lettre de Londres,” Les Temps modernes, no. 8, May 1946.
15. Spurling, Girl from the Fiction Department, pp. 56–57.
16. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 147.
17. Ibid., p. 145.
18. Ibid., pp. 147–49.
19. Ibid., p. xx.
20. Iron Curtain speech given at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946.
21. Ibid.
22. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 149.
23. Calder was preparing the opening on October 25, 1946, of “Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations” at Louis Carré’s gallery.
24. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les Mobiles des Calder,” in Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, exhibition catalog (Paris: Galerie Louis Carré, 1946), pp. 9–19. English translation by Chris Turner, from Jean-Paul Sartre, The Aftermath of War (Calcutta, India: Seagull, 2008).
25. Ibid.
26. Les Temps modernes’ first double summer issue of 1946.
27. David Hare was the young American painter who had seduced André Breton’s second wife, Jacqueline, during their stay in New York.
28. As explained by Ed Pilkington in the Guardian, November 21, 2013, after the Scottsboro boys received posthumous pardons: “The nine black boys entered into an altercation with some white youths as they were on the freight train passing through Alabama, on the night of 25 March 1931. When the train stopped at Scottsboro a posse of local white men boarded the train and took the teenagers captive; they also found two white women on board, who said they had been raped … Wrongfully accused of raping two white girls, the nine came close to being lynched by an angry mob, were rushed to trial in front of an all-white jury, and ended up serving many years in jail, eight of them on death row.”
29. La putain respectueuse.
30. Rowley, Richard Wright, p. 349.
31. Ibid.
32. The Budapest uprising in 1956 killed his affection for Communism. Assouline, Cartier-Bresson, p. 379.
33. “J’ai le cœur tranquille et sec que je me sens devant les spectacles qui ne me touchent pas.” Todd, Albert Camus, p. 549.
34. “Le secret de toute conversation ici est de parler pour ne rien dire.” Ibid., p. 559.
35. Ibid., pp. 559–62.
36. Ibid., pp. 562–65.
37. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 111.
38. Scammell, Koestler, p. 287.
39. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 113.
40. “2 mai 1946. J’ai entendu au moins cent discussions sur le Zéro et l’infini. La critique la plus juste c’est celle qu’en faisait Giacometti.” Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 115.
41. Ibid., p. 154.
42. Scammell, Koestler, p. 289.
43. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 154.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Time magazine, December 1945.
47. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 168.
48. Ibid., p. 160.
49. Ibid., p. 158.
50. Ibid., p. 159.
III. THE AMBIGUITIES OF ACTION
8. How Not to Be a Communist?
1. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 71.
2. Any of various alcoholic liquors of the Middle East, distilled from grapes, raisins, or dates and flavored with anise.
3. Quoted in Scammell, Koestler, p. 301.
4. According to the historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Staline (Paris: Flammarion, 1979).
5. Isaiah Berlin’s acceptance speech at the University of Toronto upon receiving his honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, November 25, 1994.
6. Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 35.
7. Ibid., p. 70.
8. Ibid., p. 100.
9. Ibid., p. 107.
10. Chebel d’Appollonia, Histoire politique, vol. 2, p. 14.
11. Claude Roy, Nous (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
12. Morin, Autocritique, p. 86.
13. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 163.
14. Scammell, Koestler, p. 304.
15. In a letter from Koestler to Camus, December 16, 1946, quoted in Scammell, Koestler, p. 303.
16. Quoted in ibid., p. 304.
17. Ibid.
18. Spurling, Girl from the Fiction Department, p. 81.
19. Ibid.
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