Left Bank
Page 40
29. Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 148.
30. Saul Bellow, “A Revolutionist’s Testament,” New York Times, November 21, 1943.
31. Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 142.
32. On a postcard to Sam Freifeld, quoted in Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 139.
33. In a letter to Monroe Engel, October 25, 1948. Saul Bellow: Letters, p. 64.
34. Bellow, “The French as Dostoevsky Saw Them.”
35. As Malcolm Cowley described it in Exile’s Return, his memoir of Paris literary life between the wars. Quoted in Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 137.
13. Stimulating the Nerves
1. White, In Search of History, p. 261.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 263.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 264.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 265.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 266.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 269.
12. As well as Trieste and West Germany, states under Allied military occupation.
13. White, In Search of History, p. 278.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid..
16. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, June 14, 1948, p. 88.
17. White, In Search of History, p. 278.
18. Ibid., pp. 272–73.
19. Ibid., p. 273.
20. Ibid., p. 272.
21. Beauvoir, La force des choses, p. 231.
22. Ibid., p. 231. “Clochards et clochardes assis sur le trottoir en escalier buvaient des litres de vin rouge, ils chantaient, dansaient, monologuaient, se querellaient.”
23. Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man, p. 235.
24. Ibid., p. 237.
25. Ibid., p. 240.
26. Rowley, Tête-à-tête, p. 194.
27. Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man, p. 266.
28. Geneviève Seneau, “Salle commune,” Les Temps modernes, no. 25, October 1947.
29. Lennon, Norman Mailer, p. 2.
30. Ibid., p. 112.
31. As described by Time magazine in an article published on January 10, 1949.
32. Buchwald, I’ll Always Have Paris, pp. 29–30.
33. Ibid.
34. Albert Einstein, Einstein on Peace, edited by Otto Nathan (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 704.
35. December 15, 1948.
36. Buchwald, I’ll Always Have Paris, p. 33.
37. In January 1949, Davis opened an international registry of world citizens; 750,000 people from more than 150 countries registered. When he went back to the United States in 1950, he came back as an immigrant, without legal documents.
14. Anger, Spite, and Failure
1. Eugene Worth, James Baldwin’s best friend, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge in New York in 1946.
2. James Baldwin, “The Art of Fiction No. 78,” Paris Review no. 91 (Spring 1984), interview by Jordan Elgrably.
3. Quoted in Rowley, Richard Wright, pp. 315–79.
4. Baldwin, “Art of Fiction.”
5. Ibid.
6. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial Press, 1972), p. 39.
7. Baldwin, “Art of Fiction.”
8. Ibid.
9. As recalled a year later by Richard Seaver, The Tender Hour of Twilight, chapter 2, p. 10.
10. Ibid.
11. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Arcade, 2015).
12. Fabre, La rive noire.
13. Baldwin, “Art of Fiction.”
14. Although he would later defend himself from this personal shortcoming. In a letter to his friend Julian Behrstock written on January 19, 1996, he felt the need to say “I’m just chronicling, not bitching.” Bellow, Letters.
15. In a letter to his agent, David Bazelon, on January 25, 1949, in Bellow, Letters, pp. 76–77.
16. On February 27, 1949. Bellow, Letters, p. 77.
17. Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 141.
18. Ibid., p. 73.
19. On April 10, 1949. Bellow, Letters, p. 80.
20. Baldwin, “Art of Fiction.”
21. Abel, Intellectual Follies, p. 160.
22. Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man.
23. Abel, Intellectual Follies, p. 165.
24. Ibid., p. 166.
25. Ibid., p. 264.
26. Ibid., p. 204.
27. Toru Kiuchi and Yoshinobu Hakutani, Richard Wright: A Documented Chronology 1908–1960 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), p. 251.
28. Ibid., p. 265.
29. Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man, p. 270.
30. Todd, Albert Camus, p. 686.
31. I have phrased this exchange between Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir based on her memoirs: Beauvoir, La force des choses, and her letters to Algren, in Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man.
32. Les Hussards was a literary movement in the 1950s and 1960s made of young right-wing writers who opposed the Existentialists and Sartre in particular. They valued style above all. Roger Nimier’s novel Le hussard bleu in 1950 gave its name to this movement. The term was ironically coined by Bernard Franck in an article he wrote for Sartre’s Les Temps modernes.
33. Once in its edition of November 13, 1947, and the second in its edition of April 25, 1948.
34. Lottman, Left Bank, p. 271.
35. She tells her sister Celia in a letter dated Saturday, February 26, 1949, written from the Hôtel Montalembert, in Mamaine Koestler, Living with Koestler, p. 100.
36. Ibid.
37. Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler begins with her search for her second husband, Heinz Neumann, a well-known German Communist victim of Party infighting, arrested in Moscow and jailed in the Lubyanka prison in 1937. Margarete did not discover what had happened to him until 1961.
38. Which, luckily for Gallimard, was never published. Source: Claire Sarti, Paul Eluard’s grand-daughter, in conversation with the author in Paris.
39. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 275.
40. Lottman, Left Bank, p. 281.
15. Vindicated
1. Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 144.
2. Remarks by Saul Bellow to Padgett Powell’s graduate class in fiction writing at the University of Florida, Gainesville, February 21, 1992.
3. Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 144.
4. Ibid.
5. Saul Bellow, “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story,” New York Times, January 31, 1954.
6. Bellow, Letters, p. 80.
7. Conceived as a tetralogy, but Sartre never finished the fourth part. He wrote only two chapters, which were published in Les Temps modernes later in 1949.
8. As summarized in Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, April 28, 1949, p. xx.
9. Abel, Intellectual Follies, p. 133.
10. James Salter, Burning the Days (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 239.
11. Ibid., p. 240.
12. Florence Gilliam, France: A Tribute by an American Woman (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1945).
13. Catalogue of exhibition Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France 1948–1954, National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, 1993.
14. Still standing at 10 rue des Beaux-Arts, in the 6th arrondissem
ent.
15. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, p. 16.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 32.
18. Ibid., p. 34. “Delphine Seyrig asked if I’d like to come to the recording by Roger Blin of Beckett’s Godot at Club d’Essai de la Radio, rue de l’université.”
19. Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 406.
20. February 1952, part of Godot broadcast on radio, which helped secure a grant for Roger Blin’s theater production of it a year later.
21. Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 410.
22. Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man, p. 275.
23. White, In Search of History, pp. 270–71.
24. Ibid., p. 275.
25. Ibid., p. 286. White continues on the subject of Britain: “By June 1949, the tough mechanical, distribution and payments problems within Europe had been solved; at which point the planners ran into the insoluble problem—which was England. Of the first 18 months of the Marshall Plan it can be written that the USA saved Western Europe and discarded England.” White adds on page 291: “In the summer [of] 1949, one could sense that the shove was on. On the week-end of September 17–18, the British dropped the value of the pound from $4.03 to $2.80. I went on Monday 19th, boarding the Golden Arrow out of Paris. But in London, I found that the British had set out on the long road leading off and away from the mainstream of world affairs with complete, affable and cheerful indifference. The world was distant. Whether Labour had managed or mismanaged the pound meant nothing here.”
26. Miles Davis, The Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1990).
27. Conversation with the author on January 7, 2014.
28. Interview by Philippe Carles, translation by Richard Williams, published in the Guardian, May 25, 2006.
29. George Cole, “Miles Davis: His Love Affair with Paris,” in the Guardian, December 10, 2009.
30. Interview by Philippe Carles, translation by Richard Williams, published in the Guardian, May 25, 2006.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 250.
36. Simone de Beauvoir fantasized about Nelson Algren being her “Beloved Husband,” as she called him in her letters. She wore the cheap wedding ring he made for her until the day she died and was buried with it.
37. Rowley, Tête-à-tête, p. 199.
38. Earl Rovit and Arthur Waldhorn (eds.), Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 136.
16. Farewells and a New Dawn
1. Lennon, Norman Mailer, p. 119.
2. This introduction both surprised and dismayed him: he was no lieutenant of Sartre.
3. “In The Age of Longing he deals not only with the Bolshevik mind, once again fellow-traveling with the human spirit, but with a number of other peculiarly conditioned minds—among them the democratic, the French, the religious, the literary, the apostate and the American,” writes the critic Richard H. Rovere in the New York Times, February 25, 1951, in a very favorable review of the book.
4. Mamaine Koestler, Living with Koestler, p. 112.
5. Although twenty-two years younger than Arthur Koestler, and in perfect health, Cynthia decided to commit suicide beside the terminally ill Koestler on March 1, 1983.
6. Spurling, Girl from the Fiction Department, p. 93.
7. Ibid., p. 96.
8. According to the French writer and poet Georges Limbour.
9. Festival du Film Maudit.
10. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote in 1958 about her part in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman: “In fact, it is not what Mademoiselle Bardot does in bed but what she might do that drives the three principal male characters into an erotic frenzy. She is a thing of mobile contours—a phenomenon you have to see to believe.”
11. Simone de Beauvoir, “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” an essay first published in Esquire magazine in August 1959.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Jean Cocteau, Le Passé défini (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), vol. 4, July 1955.
16. As serialized by Les Temps modernes in its May 1949 issue, no. 43.
17. Ibid.
18. A letter to Alfred Kazin dated January 28, 1950, quoted in Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 154.
19. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, January 25, 1950.
20. Ibid., p. 266.
21. She had first titled it Les survivants [The survivors], then Les suspects [The suspects]. Sartre had suggested Les griots [The griots]. Claude Lanzmann, Simone de Beauvoir’s new young lover, came up with Les mandarins (The Mandarins). Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 2, p. 36.
22. Le Prix Goncourt, on December 6, 1954. On hearing the news during a trip to Rome, Albert Camus, ill and feverish, wrote in his Carnets on December 12, 1954: “I came across a newspaper. I had forgotten about the Parisian comedy. The farce that is the Goncourt Prize. I hear I’m the hero in it. Filth.”
23. Histoire d’O was published in 1954 and translated into English for Olympia Press in 1965 by Richard Seaver, who took the pseudonym Sabine d’Estrée. Eliot Fremont-Smith, the New York Times’s book critic, wrote in 1966 that Story of O fractured “the last rationale of censorship, our late and somewhat desperate distinction between ‘literary’ pornography and ‘hard-core’ pornography,” and described the book as “revolting, haunting, somewhat erotic, rather more emetic, unbelievable and quite unsettling.”
24. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, January 25, 1950.
25. Ibid.
26. 24 rue du Boccador was a special place to live. The twenty-eight-year-old Belgian film producer Raoul Lévy lived directly opposite Theodore White on the third floor. He was producing his first film and was about to trick the Paris police force into turning out for riot call as extras. A few years later he would produce his friend Roger Vadim’s film And God Created Woman, with the young Brigitte Bardot. There were other colorful neighbors: the mistress of the most important jeweler in Paris; the British arms salesman who sold outworn American combat aircraft to shadowy regimes; and a Spanish Republican veteran, Germain, the building’s concierge. A few months later, Irwin Shaw and his wife, Marian, arrived there.
27. White, In Search of History, p. 333.
28. Ibid., p. 332.
29. Ibid., p. 334.
30. This last paragraph is a tribute to the writer Irwin Shaw and an article he wrote titled “Remembrance of Things Past” (formerly titled “Paris! Paris!” and originally appearing in the American magazine Holiday in 1953): “The city is quiet on both sides of you, the river wind is cool, the trees on the banks are fitfully illuminated by the headlights of occasional automobiles crossing the bridges. The bums are sleeping on the quais, waiting to be photographed at dawn by the people who keep turning out the glossy picture books on Paris; a train passes somewhere nearby, blowing its whistle, which sounds like a maiden lady who has been pinched, surprisingly, by a deacon; the buildings of the politicians and the diplomats are dark; the monuments doze; the starlit centuries surround you on the dark water … You turn, hesitantly, toward the girl at your side…”
INDEX
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Abel, Lionel
Abetz, Otto
abortion
Abstract art
Abstract Expressionism