ZHDANOV AND HIS DOCTRINE: THE GLACIAL AGE
At the end of September in 1947, when Beauvoir landed back in Paris at six in the morning after spending two weeks with Nelson Algren in Chicago, she popped two pills and gulped down four cups of coffee to stay awake. Back to work. As it happened, Beauvoir had touched down in Paris only a few hours before Andrei Zhdanov developed the fateful principles of what would be known as the Zhdanov Doctrine, a riposte to the Truman Doctrine articulated in Washington six months earlier and a response to George Marshall and his famous plan.
Zhdanov had been appointed by Stalin as the head of the newly founded Cominform, a bureau controlling the cultural policy of the Soviet Union and coordinating all the Communist parties in Europe. Zhdanov had established for the whole Eastern bloc the canons of the only acceptable art possible, a kind of universal conception both positivist and pseudoscientific in which every symbol represented a determined moral value. His cultural policy had to be strictly and ruthlessly enforced, with censorship and punishment for all dissenters. In the USSR, composers such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev would soon have to repent publicly for their too “hermetic” music, while the poet Anna Akhmatova would be expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers for being “half harlot, half nun”1 and condemned for “eroticism, mysticism and political indifference.”2 Editions of her poems were withdrawn from sale and destroyed.
Zhdanov also ordered the Communist parties of Western Europe to drum up insurrection on behalf of their working classes. The Cold War was not only pronouncing its name loud and clear but entering the Glacial Age. As Zhdanov had presented it, the world was now divided into two blocs, the “imperialist and anti-democratic” one controlled by America and the “anti-imperialist and democratic” one led by the Soviet Union.
Party member Édith Thomas finished reading Zhdanov’s full speech in Le Monde on October 7, 1947, while finishing her coffee at the Café de Flore, where she was about to meet her colleagues from Éditions de Minuit. “Cézanne had been for the Nazis the product of Judaeo-freemason decadence, and now, for the Stalinists, he was the expression of bourgeois rot. What a load of bollocks,”3 she wrote that day in her diary. A hundred yards away, at Marguerite Duras’ flat on the rue Saint-Benoît, Edgar Morin was burying his head in his hands, and for the same reason. What was the way forward for former résistants like him who had become Communists only to fight fascism and change the world for the better? To obey blindly and without thinking the Party’s new lines, decided in Moscow, or to abandon politics and return to private passions? Or…? Thomas and Morin were not alone in feeling paralyzed, completely torn apart.
Louis Aragon and Laurent Casanova, a former charismatic résistant whose wife had died in Auschwitz and who was now in charge of the Communist Party’s relationship with the French intellectuals, had drawn up a kind of “death list” of intellectuals. Attacks had to be concentrated on Malraux, Gide, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Mauriac, Aron, Wright, and Koestler.4 No holds were barred. The Communist press had free rein to attack them in any way it deemed necessary.
The Cold War turned intellectual discourse in France into permanent adversarial theater. It was extremely hard for anyone to keep cool when the Communists’ paroxysmal tactics had transformed the public debate into a never-ending psychodrama. Some, however, still believed in a radical Third Way.
Beauvoir and Sartre both hated “the lies of Communism and of anti-Communism”5 and were resolved to expose both camps’ contradictions and bad faith. They did not quite believe in the old Socialist Party, “very corny, very old and weak,” but they started meeting some Socialist Party members to discuss a rapprochement between Existentialists and Socialists. “It is the only chance left for us, squeezed as we are between the conservative Catholic Left and the Communist Party,”6 Beauvoir wrote to Algren.
Richard Wright had been rather taken aback by the French Communists’ attacks against him and his novels. On the other hand, he felt it was almost a rite of passage. He was now a real Left Bank intellectual, he could show his scars, he joked with Beauvoir and Sartre when they came to his Neuilly apartment for dinner at the end of September. Beauvoir particularly enjoyed the Wrights’ company, listening to Bessie Smith records and drinking brandy. One evening, as she left, she pleaded with them: “You must really come back to the Left Bank.” They reassured her. The Wrights had their eyes on a beautiful flat just next to the Luxembourg Gardens; they were planning to move very soon.
Albert Camus had decided not to spare his Communist friends any longer. They might have fought together in the Resistance but they were going astray, and Camus had resolved to say it and write it loud and clear. Arthur Koestler had for a long time urged him to be more vocal. So had Mamaine. In a letter to her sister, she had deplored French anti-Stalinists’ fearfulness. “Now I do wonder why it is that even anti-Stalinist French writers such as Malraux and Camus, who have done enough to put themselves definitely in the anti-Russian camp, don’t go the whole hog while they’re about it and denounce Russia à haute voix as K does. They do, it is true, attack Russia indirectly but a) rarely by name and b) always with some counterbalancing attack on the US.”7
However, unlike the doomsdaymongers Malraux and Koestler, Camus did not think that war was imminent or that the Red Army was a few months away from rolling down the boulevard Saint-Germain. Camus was certainly worried about the state of the world, but he thought that instead of preparing for the worst, it was better to wake up public opinion and offer alternatives.
“THE FIRST APPEAL TO INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC OPINION”
One rainy morning in October 1947, Camus’ secretary at Gallimard, Mademoiselle Labiche, left a pile of letters on his desk. The one on the top came from the editor of the monthly Left-leaning review Esprit, founded in the early 1930s. Esprit was about to publish a manifesto, “the first appeal to international public opinion,” and needed the support of intellectuals like Camus.8 “We all know that the new world order cannot be national or continental, western or eastern, it must be universal,” stated the magazine. Camus called Sartre, who agreed to take part. The third solution, third force, Third Way that these intellectuals had kept searching for in the years after the war was taking shape in Left Bank minds and from there to the wider world. When the appeal was published in Esprit’s November edition, it made wide ripples, at least within Western Europe. “Bloc politics” did nothing to guarantee peace, for “armed peace is no peace,” argued the signatories. The idea of a united and independent Europe as a counterbalance and counterpower to the bloc politics was emerging, a Europe that would adopt non-Communist socialism and divest itself of its colonies.9
Koestler could not keep away from Paris any longer; he needed to be there, to take part in the effervescence and try to weigh in and influence people. On their first day back in Paris on October 1, Arthur and Mamaine met the novelist turned General de Gaulle’s right-hand man André Malraux and his wife, Madeleine, at the bar of the Plaza Athénée hotel, where they ate caviar and blinis, balyk and soufflé sibérien, and drank too much vodka. Malraux confided that “in using his reputation as a man of the Left to help the reactionaries, he was taking a big gamble.”10 It was true and brave of him: he had placed all his hopes in Charles de Gaulle and the Gaullist movement and wanted it to transcend the traditional right versus left, conservatives versus progressives divide.
Early the next morning, despite a slight hangover, Arthur and Mamaine, buoyed by the Paris air, took a walk from their room at the Hôtel Montalembert to the Café de Flore.11 Beauvoir was there and the three friends fell into each other’s arms. They decided to spend the morning together. After their coffee and tartines, and a little glass of dry white wine, they set off to see an exhibition of paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec that had just opened at the Jeu de Paume. All was well in Left Bank land, old friends reunited, and united, it seemed, against the Cold War, everybody being “sincere, simple and friendly”12 and not “arrogant and conceited,” as had been too often the case. All was well—until they had dinner at Albert and Francine Camus’ new flat on the rue Séguier on October 7.
The atmosphere was very amicable to start with. Mamaine and Arthur had carefully chosen the best food on the rue de Buci and arrived with a cold roast chicken, a lobster, and some champagne. Sartre and Beauvoir had brought “many bottles of brandy and wine,” and Francine had cooked some delicious dishes. Koestler, however, wished to talk about politics. The friends, hoping to enjoy, for once, a politics-free evening, began by gently dodging his questions. The evening turned sour only when Koestler’s friend Harold Kaplan and his wife rang the bell. Koestler did not know that Sartre and Beauvoir were convinced Kaplan was “a kind of spy” for the American government. “We all loathe him,” Beauvoir wrote to Algren immediately after the dinner. “He is Jewish yet Anti-Semitic and he hates negroes,” she observed, adding, “Koestler likes him because he’s anti-Communist, I think it becomes as bad as being a Communist when the only reason you like somebody is because he is anti-Communist.” Kaplan, feeling the tension, departed early. This triggered a fierce discussion between Sartre and Koestler over who Kaplan really was and what cause he really served. Alcohol did not help, and Koestler stormed out with a drunken “Now we are enemies.”13 Mamaine wrote about the incident to her sister: “Later in the evening, when all had drunk quite a bit and the Kaplans had left, Sartre started attacking Kaplan in violent terms. K got so cross that he let fly at Sartre and said who are you to talk about liberty when for years you’ve run a magazine which was communisant and thus condoned the deportations of millions of people from the Baltic States and so on? Sartre was a bit taken aback by this. We left.”14
Beauvoir and Sartre were probably right about Harold Kaplan’s being a kind of agent. Kappy, as Koestler called him, had passed the exams to become a Foreign Service officer, and he had become, in effect, a diplomat attached to the American embassy. However, according to Kaplan himself, he had a certain freedom to work and report back as he pleased. “The embassy understood that I was somehow special and let me run a kind of unofficial cultural centre from home”15 in his vast and gorgeous flat just above Matisse’s studio on the boulevard du Montparnasse. Officially, he worked in tandem with the embassy’s cultural and press officers; his turf was the Paris literary scene and everybody who was part of it. Kaplan’s wife would have preferred for him to follow in the steps of his friends, such as Saul Bellow, and become a writer rather than, as Kaplan put it himself decades later, “a passionate Cold War warrior.” His job could easily be considered within the realm of the CIA cultural activities of the time, including attempting to influence Europe’s present and future elite and win them to the American administration’s cause. “My job was to find out who the most promising writers, scientists, artists and intellectuals in France were and to offer them to study and travel in the United States. The idea was to make new friends.”16 Decades later it would be called Soft Power; at the time of the Cold War, it was rather more than persuasion.
The morning after their argument at the Camus’ apartment over Kappy, Arthur wrote an apologetic letter to Sartre to which the Existentialist in chief replied in warm and friendly terms, so all was well in the end. Like Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, and many others, Koestler was indeed trying to promote a Third Way and to save the Left from Stalin, at least when sober. The entire reason for his presence in Paris was to launch various projects, both editorial and political. Over time, though, he leaned further and further toward the Gaullists, thanks to his friendship with Malraux, and this irritated Beauvoir and Sartre hugely.
NORMAN MAILER FOLLOWING THE WASHINGTON TRIALS FROM A PARIS CAFÉ
Norman Mailer, having just delivered the manuscript of his war novel The Naked and the Dead to publisher Rinehart and pocketed his advance, sailed to Le Havre with his wife, Bea, and arrived in Paris the day Koestler and Sartre parted company. Norman had planned to stay in Paris for a year, to learn French and write and party no end, all at once. According to his biographer J. Michael Lennon, “It was one of the happiest seasons of his life, shadowed only by his anxiety about the future.”17 The Mailers were not living on a grand scale in Brooklyn—far from it—but they did not expect to be so uncomfortable in Paris. Along with the strikes, there were electricity shortages and a generally gloomy atmosphere. They shivered through their first few weeks while staying at the Hôtel de l’Avenir, 65 rue Madame in the 6th arrondissement, a hundred yards from the Luxembourg Gardens. When they first saw their bed, the young couple looked at each other with wide eyes: a pull-down bed! As for the bathroom, it was along the hall, rudimentary, to say the least, and had to be shared with all the other hotel guests.
One evening, after coming back from one of his first French classes at the Sorbonne, Norman found a note slipped under his door. A friend had found them a three-room apartment. Their future flat was not very far, standing at 11 rue Bréa, a little street linking the boulevard Montparnasse and the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The place was a typical turn-of-the-century sandstone five-story building, and although the façade had not been cleaned since its construction in the 1870s it felt terribly Parisian. They went to visit the next day, and neither the red wallpaper nor the orange rug nor the bathtub in the kitchen managed to dent their joy. At less than one dollar a day it was a great find, exactly where they wanted it to be, and, besides, the gas stove worked.
The Mailers began classes at the Sorbonne in early November. Every morning, wearing layers of woolen sweaters, they walked through the Luxembourg Gardens toward the boulevard Saint-Michel and the Sorbonne, all the while conjugating subjunctive verbs and kissing. Along with several hundred other ex-GIs, the Mailers had enrolled in the Cours de Civilisation Française, designed to garner American tuition dollars. If they flunked, they’d lose the $180 a month from the GI Bill.18 Compared with French students and young writers, they were well off.
The Mailers made friends very quickly, starting with other GI Bill students. Some had briefly served at the end of the war, some had just been in military training in the United States but not deployed. There was a young Jewish man from Brooklyn, Mitchell Goodman. A scholarship student at Harvard, Goodman had not been deployed overseas during the war but had traveled to Europe following the war and met the poet Denise Levertov, whom he had just married in Paris. There was a friend of Norman’s from Harvard, Mark Linethal, who had served as a navigator during the last months of the war and been taken prisoner by the Germans, before being liberated by the Russian army. Linethal was in Paris with his wife, Alice Adams, a writer. And there were the aspiring writers Stanley and Eileen Geist, who lived with the rich Americans on the Right Bank. In Paris, Norman and his friends embraced politics in a new way, both vigorously and rigorously. In other words, more seriously than they had ever done before. When he arrived, Norman was a “naïve fellow-traveler,” a “liberal with muscles,” to use the social critic Dwight Macdonald’s expressions.19 Paris would change Mailer, his politics, and his writing, for better and for worse.
For ten days, at the very end of October and early November, Mailer often left the flat early to stop at the news kiosk right at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel and the rue Soufflot on the way to the Sorbonne and sit at the café opposite to read the account of the Washington trials. The French press had called it “épuration à Washington” to reprise the French term for “purge” used in 1945 for the hunting of Nazi collaborators. French journalists were following closely the nine-day hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington into alleged Communist propaganda in the motion picture industry, and they reported back every word. In fact, many of Hollywood’s most talented were singled out for having once felt sympathy to the Communist cause, usually at the time of the Great Depression of 1929, and thus for being “un-American,” a concept that would never be defined.
French correspondents in Washington covering the event were fascinated by the fact that for some, including Walt Disney and a few other staunch American Republicans, voting Democrat was akin to being a Communist. The House Un-American Activities Committee had, since its creation in 1919, been principally concerned with pro-German and then pro-Nazi sentiments and propaganda in the United States and had asked for stricter immigration and deportation laws against such propagandists. In 1945 it had turned its attention to Communist sympathizers considered to be in positions of influence in American society.
The witch hunt started in the glare of the world’s media; four hundred seats had been reserved for the public, and a hundred twenty journalists were present at the hearings, which were broadcast on the radio. At home, sometimes in the middle of the night owing to the time difference, Americans on the West Coast gathered around the radio, as they had during the war. Would some of the glitziest stars of the silver screen admit to their liberal sins? Gary Cooper, called as a witness and very ill at ease, testified before Ginger Rogers’s mother and Walt Disney, both red-baiters advocating a purge of liberals in Hollywood. The Committee for the First Amendment, composed of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, and Gene Kelly, among others, was set up to support those incriminated. Many witnesses refused to answer the question “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” citing their rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Ten screenwriters and directors, later known as the Hollywood Ten, were charged with the crime of contempt of Congress. Hollywood studios had agreed to abide by the committee’s diktats, so the Ten all lost their jobs, but it also meant that nearly three hundred artists working in Hollywood felt the urge to go and work in Europe, Charlie Chaplin, Irwin Shaw, and Orson Welles among them. They no longer enjoyed living and working in a country where blacklists and fear were now permeating the whole society and getting hold of newspaper editors, theater and radio directors, and publishing houses.
A FAILED INSURRECTION
After the French Communists’ attempt at a popular insurrection through general strikes had failed to spark a revolution in 1946, the Communist Trade Union (CGT) chose increasingly violent tactics against the police. The government retaliated by creating a specific riot police also known as the CRS (Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité) to control protesters’ violence. In early December 1947, Communist militants went as far as to sabotage and derail a train they thought full of riot police, with devastating results: sixteen dead and fifty badly injured. Suddenly frightened, the Communist Party secretly negotiated the end of the strikes with the government in exchange for freedom for four of their saboteurs.20 The Communist trade union CGT consequently imploded, with a substantial minority leaving to set up the reformist and non-Communist FO (Force Ouvrière), with the financial help of American trade unions and the recently created CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).
The French Communist Party had played with fire and been burned. Les Temps modernes, in its December 1947 issue, was quick to point to the Communists’ contradictions and bad faith, and to admonish them in no uncertain terms.
L’Humanité [the official daily newspaper of the Communist Party] has been telling us for some time that we must choose between freedom and fascism, but since it attacks every single other political movement, it is in fact saying very clearly that we must be either Communists or Fascists. To say this at a time when the RPF [Gaullist Party] is getting more and more popular and the Communist Party is in relative decline at elections, it is precisely like pushing every undecided non-Communist toward the RPF. This reckless attitude is a provocation. To declare war on a so-called “American party” and include in it 70 percent of French citizens is asking for a backlash. More than ever, we ask the question: Is a reasonable socialism possible today? And which one exactly? In our European countries, is there any room for anything other than the clash of the world’s two big armies?21
Sartre and Beauvoir were refusing bloc politics and increasing the urgency of the political debate both in France and in the Western world.
The same week as Les Temps modernes was confronting the Communists’ incendiary and fruitless tactics, Sartre’s essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” was released in America. The Partisan Review writer Lionel Abel, who had met Sartre during his American tour, was left reeling. “The effect it had was quite sensational. It was more talked about than any other intellectual effort of the period.”22 In his essay, Sartre stated clearly that anti-Semitism was not an opinion that could be discussed and argued about, analyzed as true or false; it was a crime. For Abel, “the tenacity of your anti-liberal opponent forces a certain degree of anti-liberalism on you. To act, whatever your commitment to clarity, you may have to begin to think darkly.”23 And this proved an incredible discovery.
Across the Atlantic and over the Channel, another hero of Lionel Abel’s had started to think darkly too. Back in his drafty, damp little cottage in north Wales, Arthur Koestler was in a foul mood, with Mamaine trying to bear it calmly. “Am afraid he’s starting a period of very bad temper. I just try to shut my eyes and ears and withdraw into my shell. I feel pretty dismal,”24 she wrote to her sister Celia. The weather was as dreadful as ever: extremely cold inside, snow outside, and despite new heating pipes and new stoves the house felt icy. There had been one small improvement, though: the purchase of a “radiogram with automatic change,” which meant they could listen to the Third Programme of the BBC every evening. This however did not much raise Koestler’s spirits. He was nagging all the time, making life difficult for his partner and secretary. In fact, Koestler had come back from Paris hurt and deeply annoyed by Sartre and Beauvoir’s snub. He would get his revenge, he swore, albeit a literary one. He had an idea for a futuristic fantasy piece about the “Existenchiks,” in which le Petit Vieux Ivan Pavelitch (Sartre), leader of the Existenchiks, and Simona Castorovna (Simone de Beauvoir) and other friends play their parts. Koestler asked Mamaine whether her sister Celia, an editorial assistant at a new monthly and trilingual magazine in Paris called Occident, might be interested in publishing it. “It is pretty violent politically but will make the fame of any mag which publishes it,”25 Mamaine wrote to Celia.
He was writing it with such fury, it would have no real plot and the basic idea would never be fully realized. It did however make Camus laugh when he received the first draft and even gave him an idea. Like Koestler, Camus had a lot to get off his chest, and he secretly started penning a satirical story about Sartre and Beauvoir, which he titled “L’Impromptu de Philosophes.”26
Koestler was in fact not finished with Paris and politics, quite the opposite—he was planning to go back and settle there. He had just persuaded the editor of the British newspaper the Observer to send him there on assignment for a few months to write about France.
Koestler’s title for his eight-thousand-word satirical piece on Parisian Existentialist life under Communist rule was “Heroic Times.”27 He had fiddled with Beauvoir’s nickname for a long time and changed it from Castorovna to Bovarovna. Before mailing the manuscript to Paris, Arthur Koestler had read the first lines one last time: “Entering the house of Gallimardov, Miss Bovarovna had a slight palpitation of the heart. Twice, between the former Café de Flore and the bar of the Pont Prolétaire (formerly Pont Royal), she had fallen into the cordons of the Liberty Police.”28
SOCIALIST REALISM VS. EXISTENTIALIST ARTISTS
The Zhdanov Doctrine had reached Paris, and Aragon was implementing it to the letter. He had imposed Socialist Realism as the only acceptable art form, promoting talents he had carefully groomed for the purpose. The painter André Fougeron was one of them and would from now on become the French Communists’ official artist. Fougeron’s reign would last as long as Stalin lived, which was another five years. In the meantime, his fellow Party member Picasso could not help but laugh at his paintings. Inevitably, positions polarized and arguments became more strident in the arts, reflecting political points of view. Campaigns in the powerful Communist press glorifying Socialist Realism were astonishingly aggressive against the enemy, Geometric Abstraction, heir to the pioneers Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich and considered bourgeois art.
In the arts, too, Existentialism was offering an alternative. It called itself the Informel movement. This “open” representation in free gesture fed discussions of the new painting and sculpture with echoes of Sartrean “authenticity.” It rejected political diktats. Informel, Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, and Lyrical Abstraction were emerging at the same time on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet, Wols, Hans Hartung, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Pierre Soulages were the artists who defied party politics.
And of course there was Giaco, as Simone called him. A Surrealist before the war, Giacometti was now his own man and had declined to exhibit alongside his old Surrealist friends at the Galérie Maeght in the summer of 1947. Having rekindled his relationship with Matisse’s son Pierre, the celebrated gallery owner in New York, Giacometti had agreed to show his latest work, tall, thin figures cast in bronze. There was one condition, though: he wanted Sartre and nobody else to write the catalog’s preface.
Beauvoir had urged Algren, who had never heard of him, to go and see his exhibition in New York. She had introduced Giaco in this way:
A friend of us is a sculptor, we see him often and he may be the only one we always see with pleasure. I admire him as an artist immensely. Twenty years ago he was very successful and made much money with kind of surrealistic sculpture. Rich snobs payed expensive prices, as for a Picasso. But then he felt he was going nowhere. He began to work all alone, nearly not selling anything. He works 15 hours a day, chiefly at night, and when you see him, he has always plaster on his clothes, his hands, and his rich dirty hair. He works in the cold with hands freezing, he does not care. Now, I think he has really achieved something: I was deeply moved by what I saw yesterday.29
In his studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron in the 14th arrondissement, “a kind of hangar, big and cold, without furniture or stove, just walls and roofs,”30 Beauvoir had seen the first cast of the six-foot-tall L’homme qui marche (Man Walking). Accompanied by Sartre, she had moved silently around the wiry, spindly man in midstride, his right foot jutting forward, and had felt a strong emotion, one that would soon resonate across the world.
That same evening, after bidding Simone goodnight, Sartre sat at his desk overlooking the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church. He filled his rosewood pipe, arranged a few sheets of squared paper, held his fountain pen between his index and middle finger, and began to write.
One doesn’t need to stare very long at Giacometti’s antediluvian face to understand his pride and will to place himself at the world’s beginning. He doesn’t care about Culture and does not believe in Progress, at least Progress in the arts; he doesn’t consider himself more “advanced” than his chosen contemporary, the Altamira caveman. At this stage of extreme youth of nature and men, neither the beautiful nor the ugly exist yet, neither taste nor people of taste, not even criticism: everything is waiting to be created. For the first time, the idea comes to man to carve the figure of a man in stone. Here is the model: man. Neither dictator nor general nor athlete, he doesn’t have the dignities and glittery trimmings that will seduce future sculptors. It is only an indistinct figure of a man walking on the horizon.31
For Sartre, the fact that Giacometti neither believed nor followed any dogma in art, life, or politics was the source of his creative power, and his genius.
SARTRE: PARTY LEADER
By the beginning of the year 1948, Sartre had resolved to take political action even further. Signing manifestos, writing essays and editorials, producing plays, editing a magazine, giving lectures and talks throughout Europe, speaking to the nation for an hour every week on the radio,32 supporting causes, helping new voices to be heard and published—the prodigiously prolific and indefatigable intellectual engagé already had a number of commitments, but he was now ready to cross the Rubicon: he would make the ultimate radical pledge and found a political party.
The idea came from David Rousset, the author of the eight-hundred-page Les jours de notre mort (The Days of Our Death). A chillingly detailed and lucid account of the machinery of Nazi concentration camps, the first by a former prisoner ever published,33 the book had earned Rousset considerable prestige in France and abroad. At thirty-five, he struck anyone he came across by his sheer physicality. Call it charisma or personality, Rousset looked half ogre and half pirate. A tall man who had regained his ample prewar girth, he had only one eye, and many of his teeth were missing, none of which he bothered to replace. Together with Georges Altman, a fellow résistant and editor of the non-Communist socialist daily newspaper Franc-Tireur, Rousset asked Sartre to join forces to create the RDR, Rassemblement Démocratique et Révolutionnaire (the Democratic and Revolutionary Alliance), and present as many candidates as possible at the next elections. The RDR would appeal to “everyone who does not think that war and totalitarianism are inevitable.” “The idea was to unite the non-Communist Left under one banner and to promote an independent Europe”34 as a bridge between the two blocs, the United States and the USSR. Sartre dived headfirst into the adventure and momentarily left Merleau-Ponty at the helm of Les Temps modernes. He had a political party to create and also a play to finish and produce.
Beauvoir had little time for this new political adventure of Sartre’s even if she fully supported him. She was feverishly trying to wrap up the research and writing of her “very short essay,” which had now grown to become a voluminous study of women’s situation, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex). She was also more interested in the play he was writing for the Kosakiewicz sisters. Wanda had demanded that Sartre write her a leading part and he had kindly obliged. Les mains sales (Dirty Hands) would prove to be one of his finest plays.
The RDR, Sartre’s party, quickly became the talk of the town. The press conference to launch it, attended by more than a thousand people, including many French and foreign journalists, was followed just a week later, on March 19, by the party’s first public meeting. Four thousand members of the public turned up at the Salle Wagram, Paris’s biggest concert hall. “People were enthusiastic, applauded and gave money and their names to become members of the party. But then, what now? There is a possibility to do something, indeed, but things go too quickly,”35 wrote Beauvoir to Algren a few hours later. The Communists, sensing the danger, increased their attacks against the Existentialist couple. Many Communist newspapers such as Action and Les Lettres françaises published salacious stories about their private lives, alluding to orgies. The Communists were clearly afraid of the RDR.
The RDR did indeed seem to be gaining in popularity. While not a member, Albert Camus publicly gave it his support. Raymond Aron was a Gaullist and an editorialist for the conservative daily newspaper Le Figaro, but he still wrote favorably about the RDR. He had just published a very sharp essay, “Le Grand Schisme,” in which he argued that “French intellectuals on the Left fear above all not to be seen as revolutionary.” Their attraction to Communism came from the “bad conscience they felt in front of men of action, i.e., Bolsheviks, who alone have the capacity to change the world.”36 If Aron was critical, and an incisive observer of the French Left, he was, however, well inclined toward the RDR, and he truly admired Sartre’s energy at fighting both the Gaullists and the Communists. Richard Wright also joined forces with the RDR and so did André Breton. Le Monde chose to support it too. A strong and independent Europe was at the heart of “L’alternative,” stated one of its editorials.
“DEADLY FALLACIES”
Koestler, back in Paris, had attended a few Gaullist rallies and was seeing a lot of Malraux, “now official chef de propaganda of the Gaullists.”37 Arthur was helping him raise money, for he thought it important to strengthen the left wing of the RPF. Malraux did not beat about the bush: “I desperately need between ten and fifteen million francs,” he had told Arthur. That was for his anti-Communist propaganda. Arthur called on his friend Guy de Rothschild and was straightforward with him: Could he cough up the money? Guy was not sure his family could give so much, but he nevertheless invited both men to dinner. Mamaine went with them and just watched, as everyone else did, even Koestler, Malraux being Malraux, master of his own pyrotechnics. “Malraux was more extraordinary than ever. He spoke for four hours non-stop. Usual brilliance,” summarized Mamaine in a letter she wrote the same evening to her sister. Malraux spoke with his “strange, indirect tenacity,” “his somber eyes apparently seeing nothing but his own thoughts.”38 However, this made Arthur increasingly ill at ease: “Malraux has now given up his line on de Gaulle being un homme de gauche and K says that despite Malraux’s new job, his left wing has clearly lost to the right wing of the Gaullist movement.”39 It took another three months for everyone else to realize this. As Janet Flanner later shared with her New Yorker readers: “Malraux is now the General’s right-hand man. There is no left-hand de Gaulle man.”40
To the editor of the Observer, who was eagerly awaiting Koestler’s take on French politics and growing impatient, Koestler replied sternly: “I don’t think I can write the articles. You see, I can’t write the only things worth saying.”41 Koestler had chosen his camp, the Gaullists, and yet he was already disillusioned with them, though he couldn’t actually say it. Terribly frustrated, and quarreling with Mamaine all the time, he let her go to Italy while he set off for New York to give a series of lectures at the invitation of the former antifascist, but now firmly right-wing, International Relief and Rescue Committee. Koestler had not realized quite how famous he was in the United States and quite how polarized American politics had become. The FBI initially blocked Koestler’s entry to the States on account of his being a staunch Communist, but the American ambassador in Paris had urgently briefed J. Edgar Hoover that that was not the case anymore, quite the opposite. The FBI’s files were seriously in need of updating. This first trip to America, following in the steps of Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir, was an eye-opener for Koestler.
Koestler tailored his talks around one theme: the dilemma of the radical. He often summarized the issue in this way:
The Communists today present the same dilemma to France as the Nazis to Germany in 1930: whether democratic privileges should be extended to a party which aims at the destruction of democratic privileges. The dilemma is complicated by the fact that, while Nazism frankly professed its intention to abolish democracy, the Communists pose as its defenders; their disenfranchisement could only be justified by indirect evidence and deduction by analogy.42
Unlike Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and many others in Paris, Koestler refused to put Stalinism and American Imperialism in the same bag. For him, “deadly fallacies” were hindering the “Babbitts of the Left” from understanding the true nature of the Communist threat. Above all, he rejected the “false equation: Soviet totalitarianism is bad, American imperialism is bad, there is nothing to choose between them.”43 One had to choose the lesser evil. There would be Pax Americana or there would be no pax. His words certainly fell on fertile ground in the United States, but he was dismayed at the general feeling of hysteria, rising in intensity as he made his way from New York to Washington and from Washington to Hollywood. In a letter to Mamaine he confided: “It is quite impossible to give you any impression. It is a kind of delectable nightmare. Five times a day I am telling myself this is a country where I want to be forever, five times a day that I would rather be dead than live here.”44 In fact, annoyed at being used by his very conservative hosts for their right-wing red-baiting maneuvers, Koestler tried to cut his trip short. After talks in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston, he returned to New York. There were farewell parties with Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, whom he swore he would seduce one day. On his last night, he toured Harlem’s jazz clubs with Marlene Dietrich on his arm. He did not know what he enjoyed more that evening: speaking German all night or peering closely into those piercing blue eyes.
THE THIRD SEX
After a trip to her native New York, Janet Flanner had sailed back to France just before the launch of the RDR and was following its eruption on the European political stage with much attention. “Two of the best known literary figures, Jean-Paul Sartre and David Rousset have founded a political party, heaven help us. Sartre’s political ideas are less clear, if more optimistic, than his novels. His talent, his scholarly mind, his French essence, and his hypersensitivity to Europe’s dilapidation give momentary importance to his political hopes. The Sartre-Rousset party declares that it expects to collect, in the next six months, a hundred thousand followers. If words were all, its followers should number millions, from all over this earth.”45 Janet had lived in France for more than twenty-five years now, and, as veteran foreign correspondents often do, she sometimes viewed her favorite topic, France, with a world-weary eye.
At fifty-six, she had finally reached that most French stage in life, the phase of being blasé. She had just been made a knight of the Légion d’Honneur and was wearing the bright red ribbon on her lapel, but somehow she felt both parvenue and frustrated. She was tired of journalism. She was tempted to tackle the Paris Commune of 1871 in a proper book, but would she stick to it? “I have manufactured journalism for nearly a quarter of this century; nowadays everyone manufactures. Few create. If an individual knows the difference, and I do, the failure to create leaves only one conclusion: one has manufactured,”46 she confided to her ex-lover and secretary Solita. Her private life was also a source of conflict and pain, and she was trying to restore some order to it. Early in 1948, her lover Natalia Danesi Murray had settled back in Rome. Janet had decided to divide her time between Natalia in Rome and her old lover Noeline in Paris, spending nine months a year with Noeline and the rest of the year with Natalia. With all this talk about a Third Way in politics, she wondered whether there could not be a third sex, too. She had half-humorously asked her very old and very liberal mother in a letter, “Why can’t there be a third sex, a sex not dominated by muscle or the inclination to breed?”47 Janet had in fact invented for herself a “third sex” in the public world: she signed her articles with the androgynous pen name Genêt. “Neither masculine nor feminine, passive or active, Genêt was androgynous, anonymous, invented. The persona offered Janet security and identity; it gave her a form, a discipline, even what she later called a formula.”48
Samuel Beckett had finally found his stride, and as for sex, he was happy with Paris’s filles de joie (prostitutes)—much happier, it seems, than with Suzanne, his companion, sister, mother, and best friend. Beckett looked at politics, the Existentialists, and the new party in town, the RDR, from afar, or rather from the other side of Montparnasse Cemetery, in his spartan one-bedroom flat on the rue des Favorites. The “siege in the room” was going on and he seemed to be taking some pleasure from it. He had now written four novellas in French: La fin, L’expulsé, Premier amour, and Le calmant (The End, The Expelled, First Love, and The Calmative). He was thinking about a second play, too. He had a title in mind and asked Suzanne what she thought of it. What about En attendant Godot? She looked puzzled. Waiting for Godot? And who was this Godot? Of course, Beckett could not tell her. He mumbled something about a wordplay on “God.” He would later confide to his friend Con Leventhal the real origin of the title. Beckett often went to the rue Godot de Mauroy, in the 9th arrondissement, popular with prostitutes. One day a girl asked if he needed her services; when he turned down her offer, she replied sarcastically, “Oh yeah, and who are you waiting for, then? Godot?”49
Nobody had wanted to produce his first play, Eleutheria, which Suzanne kept mailing to theater directors, but this did not bother him. He had recently met Matisse’s son-in-law, Georges Duthuit, an art critic and the editor of a new magazine, Transition. He had found in him a kindred spirit and a partner with whom he could engage on matters of art and artists. And also an employer. Beckett was tired of giving English lessons and his allowance from his brother was decidedly meager. He lived on forty francs a week, half of which went to rent, and Suzanne’s dressmaking jobs were not always enough to make ends meet. Georges Duthuit gave him interesting translation work and provided him with a new social circle. From now on, Beckett would get a regular income, contributing every month to Duthuit’s magazine and its English sister edition (catering to the young literary Anglophones now thronging the Left Bank). Beckett translated authors such as Sartre or Apollinaire—what more could he ask for? Besides, thanks to Georges, he also stopped being a hermit and allowed himself to have a social life, going to editorial meetings organized by Duthuit in his flat at 96 rue de l’Université, just off the boulevard Saint-Germain. Georges and his wife, Marguerite Matisse, the leaders of a little circle, were presiding over Tuesday lunches attended by Informel artists such as Nicolas de Staël and Bram van Velde but also the twenty-four-year-old Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle whose future wife, the young American Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, would soon fascinate Beckett.
DISSIDENCE IN LITERATURE AND FILM: LA RUE SAINT-BENOÎT AND ANDRÉ BAZIN
In January 1948, Elio Vittorini, a well-known Fascist intellectual, published an open letter to Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian Communist Party, questioning the Zhdanov Doctrine and Stalin’s cultural policy. Vittorini was a translator of William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, head of the influential monthly review Politecnico, and a great admirer of Sartre and Beauvoir. In his letter, published in the French review Esprit, he argued that art and culture should be left out of politics. Artistic creativity should be autonomous and free. The review was hoping to stir up the same debate within French Communist circles. The young Communists around Edgar Morin, Marguerite Duras, her ex-husband Robert Antelme, and her second husband, Dionys Mascolo—known as “la rue Saint-Benoît”—embraced Vittorini’s cause and brought it to Commissar Aragon, hoping to influence the Party’s policies. La rue Saint-Benoît was thus gaining a reputation for being a den of young “Communist reformists”; the contradiction in terms would not become obvious to them until a couple of years later. Marguerite Duras’ flat, the group’s epicenter, was “one of those houses out of the Russian novels of the period of the intelligentsia, where one sees coming in or going out, at every instant, three ideas, five friends, twenty papers, three indignations, two jokes, ten books, and a samovar of boiling water.”50 It was a beehive in which Duras was the queen, a beautiful queen. Her fellow writer Claude Roy remembered her vividly: “She had an abrupt mind, a baroque and often droll vehemence, an infinite capacity for fury, appetite, warmth and astonishment.”51 Duras, Mascolo, and Morin had actually managed to publish a long interview with Vittorini in Les Lettres françaises.52 They thought they could persuade their elders in the Party to yield some ground, at least as far as culture and the arts were concerned. But no matter how hard they tried, they failed. Artists were soldiers like any other Party member and they had to obey the Party line blindly, pronounced Aragon. Though this was the end of the argument, Vittorini’s letter had far-reaching repercussions in Paris and would prove as decisive as the Yugoslav prime minister Tito’s excommunication a few months later.
Along with the Vittorini affair, the Czech coup in February 1948 had also contributed to shake many Communists’ faith in the Party and in Stalin, and young intellectuals and writers like those of la rue Saint-Benoît could not fail to notice “the growing resemblance between the Nazi enterprise and the Stalinist one.”53 Edgar Morin and Marguerite Duras may still have felt like Communist missionaries but they were not blind, nor were they deaf. “We belonged to the Party but also to the Left intelligentsia. Ideas flowed freely and whenever we met Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus and Rousset, we chose to discuss rather than vaticinate.”54
For longtime foreign Paris residents and visitors, it was obvious that the rigidly dogmatic Communism of the 1940s suddenly no longer countenanced the vague, revolutionary liberalism of the 1930s, when it was possible to combine individual fantasy and Party membership. “The Communist Party boys have no nonsense about them these days. Their papers brand Existentialism and the intellectual life of Saint-Germain-des-Prés as the ultimate expression of bourgeois decadence. You won’t catch them compromising their orthodoxy by taking an apéritif in this enemy territory,” wrote John L. Brown, in charge of the “Paris column” for the New York Times Magazine. The tribe of la rue Saint-Benoît would eventually have to choose sides, even if they would have preferred not to.
Artists were not the only ones to see their world invaded by dogma and they were not the only ones having to position themselves for or against; art critics too had to choose sides. The thirty-year-old André Bazin, a rising star of cinema criticism, was one of them. Bazin had embraced the Resistance motto “Culture is a human right and should be freely accessible to all” with passion. More than a critic, Bazin was also an educator and a youth leader. Through Travail et Culture [Work and Culture], a Communist-leaning association and a magazine, he was setting up film clubs in factories and in schools, in France but also in Germany and Algeria, and writing about films. For Bazin, presenting and explaining great works of art to the working class would help emancipate them from purely commercial cinema ventures. Bazin was eclectic in his choice of collaborations with publications and wrote for many magazines such as Esprit, Les Temps modernes, and the newly created La Revue du cinéma. A champion of Italian Neorealism and Orson Welles, he wrote and spoke about films in a radically new way, forcing his readers and listeners to consider cinema seriously on a par with literature and philosophy. Cinema was not frivolous, he argued, it was meaningful and was taking part in the social changes of the times.
In his review of Citizen Kane for Les Temps modernes, he discussed Orson Welles’s genius: “Flaubert didn’t invent the imperfect, nor André Gide the pluperfect or Camus the past perfect, but the way they use them belongs to them, and to them only. If Orson Welles has not discovered the tracking shot, he has however invented its meaning.”55 In praising Orson Welles, André Bazin was aiming his review against Georges Sadoul, the Communist Party’s official film critic, as the party was anti-Welles, too free a talent.
Tensions rose, especially at Travail et Culture, where Bazin’s love of American cinema, his overriding interest in aesthetics, and his criticism of some Communist films put him at odds with his more militant colleagues. Bazin had not quite officially positioned himself against Socialist Realism in cinema, but the time would come when he could no longer remain silent. It took great courage to make a stand as Stalinists not only were very intimidating but also controlled a good part of French culture and the many jobs attached. For the time being, though, Bazin decided to dedicate his energy to setting up ciné-clubs aimed at the youth, who were rightly more interested in cinema as an art form than as a political discourse. Ciné-clubs popped up everywhere, showing classics but also premieres of recent works, with panel discussions, public debates, and dedicated journals such as La Revue du cinéma.
Sixteen-year-old François Truffaut, spurred by the ciné-club mania that was gripping Paris, ventured to set up his own ciné-club called Cinémane, a “Cinema Club for Film Addicts,” in the Latin Quarter. At the time, he already had a police record for petty thefts and had run away from home. In books and films he had found a refuge from an unloving mother and a harsh upbringing. One afternoon, Truffaut went to complain to Bazin that one of Bazin’s ciné-clubs was interfering with his own. They ended up speaking about films all afternoon. Bazin was amazed by Truffaut’s encyclopedic knowledge and by his enthusiasm, which matched his own. When Bazin learned that Truffaut’s father, having finally traced the teenager, had arranged for his arrest by the police, he intervened. “I was imprisoned at the minor delinquents’ centre of Villejuif, south of Paris,” recalled Truffaut. “At the time, the place was half lunatic asylum, half remand home. André Bazin literally saved me.”56 Bazin began a campaign to free the young Truffaut. He contacted Truffaut’s parents, who agreed to his early emancipation, and persuaded the police and the child psychologist to release him into his care. Bazin found Truffaut a job at Travail et Culture: the teenager wrote notes on the films being released every week and organized screenings in factories at lunchtime. François Truffaut was truly saved.
Richard Wright often went to the ciné-club screenings of the Latin Quarter, especially since he and his family had moved back to the Left Bank. He had found a spacious eight-room family flat a stone’s throw from the Luxembourg Gardens and the boulevard Saint-Germain. It stood on the fourth floor of 14 rue Monsieur le Prince, an 1850s stone and brick building with a tall wooden door adorned with two feminine figures, one a libertine woman, the other a studious jeune fille. The building looked across to the aged limestone walls of the Sorbonne’s École de Médecine. The composer Camille Saint-Saëns had lived there in the 1880s.
Their visitors, whether French or foreign, were amazed by the opulence of the Wrights’ home, at least compared with how most Parisians lived. Soon-to-be Paris resident Chester Himes, another fellow black American writer whom Richard Wright helped, just couldn’t believe his eyes when he first set foot at the Wrights’.
Their flat occupied the entire 4th floor and to me it appeared sumptuously furnished. The first room to the right of the entrance foyer was his book-lined study, with two large modernistic paintings, dozens of copies of his own books, several typewriters, his desk, a tape recorder, and overstuffed leather armchairs. Beyond it were the dining room, the living room, the master bedroom, and at the back, the bath, all overlooking the street. On the other side were a storeroom, pantry, kitchen, nursery and children’s bedroom.57
Ellen Wright was expecting their second child, and the decision had been made that they would not return to live in the United States. Paris was the family home now. The Wrights had even decided to invest in the ultimate luxury: central heating.
Richard Wright was happy in Paris, basking in literary success and enjoying the friendship of the most prominent French and European intellectuals while conducting brief affairs with a string of women. However, he had felt unable to start work on a new novel for nine months now. Wright convinced himself he needed to find the perfect café before he could begin to write again. He had rigorous criteria: soft electric lighting, sunlight at the right time, and not too intrusive a patron. He settled on the Monaco, a slightly shabby café at the south end of the rue de l’Odéon, next door to Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop and Sylvia Beach’s flat. The clientele was both local and international and he liked the mix. He had also negotiated a new delivery date for his next novel with his American publisher, Harper and Brothers, so all was well. Yet despite all this he would not, could not, start writing. He spent more and more time going to the ciné-clubs of the Latin Quarter. The particular brand of cinephilia raging in Paris had gripped him in the same way it had gripped the young François Truffaut.
In fact, Wright did not want to write yet another novel; what he wanted was to make a movie. Since Orson Welles and Roberto Rossellini, two leading lights of cinema, had contacted him a year earlier about adapting Native Son to the screen, Wright had dreamed of taking part one way or another in moviemaking. After all, Sartre had written a few scripts already that had been made into films, and even Simone de Beauvoir had been contracted to write dialogue, all of which was better-paid work than writing novels. When Rossellini wrote to Wright to say that he had to give up on adapting Native Son because a film criticizing the United States at the beginning of the Marshall Plan was simply impossible to produce in Europe,58 Wright felt terribly frustrated.
Still, life was sweet for any American living in Paris. One could now buy in shops nearly anything one wanted, and if the average Frenchman did not have the means of paying for it, Americans did. Many important items were still rationed for the French. Except for doctors and taxi drivers, the French did not get a drop of gasoline. However, because the government needed tourist dollars, “gasoline flowed in fountains for American tourists, as well as for abashed American journalists (French journalists got none), for whom the liberated franc made life nice and cheap anyway.”59 Janet Flanner enjoyed telling her New Yorker readers about how Parisians lived. It certainly made folkloric reading for Americans now used to such a high standard of living and to modern comfort: “Parisian adults had had no butter ration since Christmas and in April 1948 their quarter-pound monthly coffee ration was to be skipped, but they received a government Easter present—a rationed tin of sardines, at thirty times the pre-war price.”