EVERYBODY’S PROTEST NOVEL
Young, angry North American men with accounts to settle kept washing up on Paris’s shores. After his friend Eugene had left America by jumping into the Hudson River,1 twenty-four-year-old James Baldwin chose Paris instead of death. Had he stayed in New York, he, too, would have gone under: “I had to get out. I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.”2 His one-way plane ticket to Paris was his safe-conduct to life. Baldwin might have had only forty dollars in the pocket of his jacket when he landed in Paris on November 11, 1948, but to his surprise he already had friends there. One of them, Asa Benveniste, a Parisian Sephardic Jew from Istanbul and a poet turned typographer and book designer, left lunch at Deux Magots with Richard Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre to greet Baldwin at the Gare des Invalides.
Benveniste took Baldwin straight back to the boulevard Saint-Germain to give him a first whiff of Parisian life, and to finish lunch. Richard Wright, an old acquaintance of Baldwin, had helped the young man get his first writing grant in 1945, $500, which had been “one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me,”3 he commented at the time. It had kept him alive, it had launched his literary career, and it had saved him from despair. Always generous with fellow black writers in need, Wright was more than happy to keep helping Baldwin get published, this time in Paris. Sartre had already left the table when they arrived. George Solomos was still there. Also known as Themistocles Hoetis, he was the Greek-American editor of Zero, a brand-new English-language literary review whose ambition was to publish simultaneously in Paris and New York. Themistocles, a B-17 radioman during the war, had hoped to interest Sartre and Wright in contributing to the first issue of his magazine. Wright had readily accepted but had added: “Why don’t you also ask young Jimmy here to write a piece for you?” Little did Wright know that Jimmy’s essay, published in Zero’s first issue in spring 1949, would end their friendship once and for all. Baldwin was about to bite the hand that fed and helped him. His first Parisian essay was an attack on Richard Wright and everything he represented. Sons had to kill fathers, and Paris was the place to commit literary patricide.
As a book reviewer in New York, a position he owed to Richard Wright’s help, he had had to read all the books, or “tracts” as he called them, about black and Jewish issues. The color of his skin had made him an expert, it seemed, on the discriminated in the United States; this left him feeling extremely resentful. Why was he not asked to review books by Koestler or Sartre? “Most of the books I reviewed were Be Kind to Niggers, Be Kind to Jews, while America was going through one of its liberal convulsions.”4 He channeled these frustrations into the essay, which he titled “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Berating the genre, he wrote, “Those sorts of books do nothing but bolster up an image. As long as I was a victim they could pity me and add a few more pennies to my home-relief check. That essay was the beginning of my finding a new vocabulary and another point of view.”5 It was also his way to shove Richard Wright off his pedestal as the founding figure of the protest novel.
Paris seemed an ideal place for bridge burners like Baldwin. He had read too much Balzac to think of Paris as the most courteous and peaceful city in the world. “Whenever I crossed Place de la Concorde, I heard the tumbrels arriving, and the roar of the mob, and where the obelisk now towers, I saw la guillotine.”6 Baldwin had no intention of acting in a civil way; he would operate his own literary guillotine. His obsession with and rage against Richard Wright sprung from his own “explosive relationship”7 with himself and America. As he put it later: “At the time, most of all, I could not deal with me.”8
Moreover, Baldwin was poor. His first forty dollars lasted just two days. After that, he lived off the generosity of friends and lovers. He was not idle, though. The young man had so many pent-up emotions and so many things he needed to get off his chest that he wrote tirelessly what would become his first novel, not surprisingly a son and father story, Go Tell It on the Mountain. He immediately elected the upstairs floor of the Café de Flore as his writing hole, like Beauvoir before him. And he wrote, for himself and for others. He accepted every commission from any editor with a review, even from the American embassy’s gazette Rapports France-États-Unis. This helped him to practice writing, eat, and pay the rent.
He found a room at 8 rue Verneuil, in a hotel owned by a Corsican family known for being very understanding with its lodgers and managed by the arthritic Madame Dumont. They not only tolerated the eccentricities of their young penniless bohemian tenants, but also accepted that they paid whenever they could. Jazz could be heard in the hotel’s corridors around the clock. When Mme Dumont wanted to sleep, she simply switched off the entire building’s electricity.
As Richard Seaver, a fellow lodger at the Hôtel Verneuil, recalled, the place “reeked of cabbage and urine. The tenants living in the attic rooms had to climb five flights of rickety stairs, mostly in the dark because that great electricity-saving convention the French had devised, the minuterie—literally ‘the minute-long light switch’—here lasted at most ten seconds before plunging the climber once again into Stygian darkness.”9 It was a typical Left Bank hotel, with small and dimly lit rooms and scuffed and peeling Art Nouveau flowered wallpaper. In one of the attic rooms, “a four poster bed occupied a goodly portion of the room, whose only other furnishings were a bulky armoire, and in front of the window, a small wooden table bare except for a vintage typewriter.”10 Typewriters were the only valuable items in Left Bank hotels and were particularly prized by burglars.
Like almost all his contemporaries on the Left Bank, James Baldwin lived a double life. There had always been two sides to him: “the high school writer and the boy preacher. How to reconcile the elegantly dressed and mannered expatriate with the uncompromising and brutal spokesman for the downtrodden of black America?”11 He started being a regular guest at the homes of liberal, white, mostly Jewish middle-class Americans living in Paris such as the Kaplans and the Geists. The Kaplans and the Geists were generous matchmakers and extraordinary passeurs of talents; they enjoyed introducing their French friends, writers and artists, to their foreign counterparts. A year earlier, they had engineered the lifelong friendship between Norman Mailer and Jean Malaquais, and they were now educating Baldwin in the same way, by introducing him to Albert Camus, Raymond Queneau, Sartre, and David Rousset. Stanley and Eileen Geist also fed the perpetually hungry young man and expanded his literary horizons. “Apart from Shakespeare and the Bible, Jimmy has read little else,”12 confided Geist to Saul Bellow one evening. That was not exactly the case, but Geist suggested Jimmy read Henry James. Baldwin was amazed to find in Henry James a kindred spirit. Here was another homosexual American expatriate in Europe who wrote in order to remain sane.
In January 1949, Jimmy fell seriously ill. Madame Dumont nursed him for three months. The “great matriarch” used folk remedies. She had to climb up five flights of stairs every morning to make sure Jimmy was still alive. “I went through this period where I was very much alone, and wanted to be.”13 All he could do was lie in bed, reading Dostoyevsky and Henry James and writing his first angry piece for Zero.
“PARIS IS SAVAGE”
Saul Bellow was angry too, feeling as unsettled as ever. Every morning he walked to the Hôtel de l’Académie, 32 rue des Saints-Pères, where he wrote most days in the hotel’s smallest room. He was careful always to scrutinize the terraces of the nearby cafés, the Flore, Le Rouquet, and Lipp in particular. He almost never stopped to greet people he knew; he far preferred to observe them, his piercing gaze hidden by the brim of his Borsalino hat. Bellow never missed an opportunity to report on what he had seen, though, in his letters to colleagues. His tone was almost always mocking, whether commenting on friends or foes.14 Of his fellow Chicagoan Lionel Abel, who had arrived on the Left Bank on Christmas Eve 1948, he sneered: “You should see Abel in Paris!! C’est assez cocasse [It is rather funny]. Dress coat, monocle. Works the restaurants.”15 In fact, Bellow had passed Lipp the day before and through the window had seen Abel having lunch with Sartre and Beauvoir. Envy was probably what Bellow felt. He kept repeating that he found the Paris Existentialists dubious and felt contemptuous of, as he saw it, their naively pro-Communist and anti-American line; the truth, however, was that he would have liked to be part of their inner circle.
Jealousy, along with the fear of rejection and of failure, consumed Bellow. Instead of going out of his way to socialize with Parisian intellectuals, he preferred to engage within a reassuring Chicago crowd while bitching about them: the Kaplans; the Geists; Lionel Abel; William Phillips, the editor of Partisan Review in Paris on a Rockefeller grant; all the Partisan Review contributors flocking to Paris such as Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell; or even the Chicago painter Jesse Reichek, with whom he played casino in the café Le Rouquet on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Saul was still furiously working on “The Crab and the Butterfly,” not knowing what to think of it. “I don’t know how good it is but it’s a book, and it’s my vocation to write books and I follow it with the restlessness of true egomania,”16 he wrote to his friend Henry Volkening at the end of February 1949. Bellow thought that what he was writing was “dark and funny”; it was neither. In fact, his arrogance hid a profound malaise that he tried to forget, more often than not, in the arms of French women, his only contact, it seems, with the indigenous population. In fact, Harold Kaplan and Saul Bellow shared a beautiful young mistress named Nadine with an impeccable pedigree. The twenty-one-year-old blonde with long wavy hair and blue eyes was the latest offspring of a well-known family of senators, magistrates, and entrepreneurs, the Raoul-Duvals. Her older brother Claude was a war hero. He had joined de Gaulle in London as early as June 1940 and had carried out seventy-six missions as a pilot in the RAF. Nadine was the gentile dream. Saul had met her at one of the Kaplans’ lavish soirées in their top-floor apartment on the boulevard Montparnasse. Among the fine furnishings, the piano, the hovering servants in white gloves, Nadine looked like a golden trophy that Saul did not mind sharing. To Nadine, Saul never mentioned his wife or his son. In his delirious denial he even suggested that they elope to Africa.17
Bellow was busy trying to cope with a culture that escaped him, and which fascinated and irritated him in equal measure. “Paris is savage,”18 he wrote to his agent, David Bazelon, in January 1949. “Wonderfully beautiful but savage in an unexpected quarter; in its calculating heart.” He also often felt contempt for his competitors, all the other American writers in Paris. Bellow had met James Baldwin at yet another party at Kaplan’s and, on sensing his simmering talent perhaps, he had felt compelled to dismiss him in a letter to his agent. “One sees a lot of collapsed Americans here. There’s Jimmy Baldwin who seems to be down and out and is sponging mercilessly. He does not do a great deal. Whenever I pass the Flore or Deux Magots, he’s in company, drinking beer.”19 James Baldwin was simply incubating. He would emerge, as the writer the world would soon discover, a few months later. “Throughout 1948 and 1949 I just tore up paper,” later acknowledged James Baldwin. “Right around 1950 I remember feeling that I’d come through something, shed a dying skin and was naked again. I certainly felt more at ease with myself. And then I was able to write.”20
Lionel Abel was a more congenial settler than his friend Bellow. As a translator, he had embraced both the French language and culture while a student in America, and had been able to observe close up the French exiles in New York during the war. His curiosity for his new home was not fraught with anger or scorn. He absorbed everything he saw and heard with benevolent neutrality and amusement. Everything surprised him, in fact: the layout of Paris, “the color and oddity of its shops and signs, its comfortably graying 19th century architecture, and the profound mixture of places for business and places to live in.”21 He found Paris as beautiful as it was strange. “It is a city that must have been designed for meeting others. Chance meetings had taken in Paris the power of design.” In a small and battered black-leather notebook Abel had the addresses and telephone numbers of Sartre, Camus, the composer René Leibowitz, the painter Jean Hélion, and, of course, André Breton. Life would do the rest and introduce him to everybody else, he thought. And it did.
The philosopher Jean Wahl, “a sixty-year-old fairy with a twenty-five-years-younger wife,”22 according to his former student Simone de Beauvoir, who did not like him much, introduced Lionel Abel to the intense-looking Romanian philosopher Lucien Goldmann. This Marxist theoretician knew a thing or two about capitalism: he owned a string of decrepit studio flats and rooms on the Left Bank that he rented out. Lionel chose “one room and a half” at 49 rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, in a medieval “old house with a winding staircase of crumbling stone.”23 To wake up every morning in the shadow of the Pantheon was a transcendental experience for Abel. Goldmann, although busy writing Hidden God, which Roland Barthes would later brand “the most fertile and finest critique” of Marxism, still had time to look after his tenants. Besides, he was a benevolent capitalist when it came to rents. He charged Abel only four dollars a month.
Lionel was a keen observer. Unlike his friend Saul Bellow, he did not study people in order to gossip about and ridicule them; he did so in order to better understand them and assimilate into his new environment. He quickly understood that he had to stand for something. As Lucien Goldmann had told him, “In Paris, you can’t just walk in a café, flash white teeth and say, ‘I’m Lionel, the American.’” “In the small community of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, one lived in a kind of moral mirror in which one saw one’s own actions and also the manner in which others responded to these actions.”24
Lionel also understood very well that there were times for performing in front of that special crowd, and times for working. Without an iron discipline, the trompe l’oeil indolence of café life in Saint-Germain-des-Prés could easily distract innocent aspiring artists and writers and nip their careers in the bud. Some of the brightest stars of the Left Bank managed to see people at night and in the daytime, and to work. Sartre and Beauvoir had an unflinching discipline. They worked from nine in the morning until one in the afternoon, had lunch and saw people until five, then went back to their desks until nine at night, after which they would have dinner and often go out. They stuck to their routine, even on holidays. As for love, Sartre rigorously allocated different weekly slots to his cohort of mistresses. Lionel Abel decided on a schedule that was not too harsh on himself: he would work in the mornings and socialize in the afternoons and evenings.
DISILLUSIONED AND RESTLESS
On the evening of January 27, 1949, a chilly wind was blowing through the narrow, serpentine streets of the 5th arrondissement, but Simone braved the Siberian cold to celebrate with her friend Dick Wright, whose wife had just given birth to their second child, a daughter named Rachel. They went to have “couss-couss”25 in their favorite Algerian joint on the rue Galande. She found her friend happy but “awfully tired.”26 “He does not seem to work much,” she wrote to Nelson Algren the day after.
Richard Wright had hungrily embraced the role of public intellectual, but he had found it increasingly difficult also to exist as a writer the way he used to in New York. He kept postponing the date he would hand in his next manuscript to his American publisher, Harper and Brothers. So far, foreign editions of his books were selling well and royalties kept pouring in, but one day this would stop and he knew it. What he was trying to write in Paris was in fact his own Camusian L’étranger—he had even chosen this very title, The Outsider, for it and written a hundred thousand words—but as he confided to a friend, the book “had frozen on him.”27 He felt deeply unsatisfied. He wished he had been freer, just like Beauvoir and Sartre. He was trying to find causes for his writing block, and domestic life was an easy culprit.
The same week, Beauvoir bumped into Boris Vian. He, too, had just had a second child with his wife, Michelle. A disaster. Neither of them was fit for parenthood. Luckily, grandparents had stepped in again, but tensions were palpable between Michelle and Boris. Boris was trying to forget his marital problems and mortality by spending his nights playing the horn in jazz clubs “for American tourists,”28 as Beauvoir sarcastically pointed out. Michelle wanted Boris to be a “serious” writer, interested in politics and engagé, but Boris had no time for seriousness. He knew he was slowly dying. Why should he waste time being serious? He cared only for his own brand of poetical fiction, and for jazz. The rest was futile. In fact, Michelle wished Boris were more like Sartre, whom she found increasingly charming. She often bumped into him whenever she visited the office of Les Temps modernes, for which she occasionally worked, providing English translations.
Many people in Paris seemed exhausted and disillusioned. The city was smothered in snow, and Parisians felt numb with cold. At the end of February 1949, Sartre and Beauvoir had dinner with Camus, but a certain lassitude had overcome them all. As Simone confided to Nelson in a letter, “everybody was nice and friendly but we had nothing more to say to each other. Camus, though he is not for de Gaulle or the Communists, disagrees with us on almost every topic. He took the Garry Davis affair very seriously. He cannot stand failure.”29 Camus was depressed. Unlike Sartre, he found it increasingly difficult being the butt of personal and political attacks. He secretly admired Sartre for being so robust and stoical.
Helped and supported by the Gaullists, Claude Mauriac, François Mauriac’s son, had launched a monthly review, Liberté d’esprit. In its first issue of February 1949, Roger Nimier, a twenty-three-year-old right-wing novelist who would soon marry Saul Bellow’s lover Nadine Raoul-Duval, had attacked both Camus and Sartre with below-the-belt viciousness.30 Nimier had written on the tensions on the international stage: “France is probably not going to go to war considering Sartre’s shoulders and Camus’ lungs.” Hurt, Camus had wished he could just withdraw from sight. Even after finding a large and comfortable four-bedroom flat for his family at 29 rue Madame in the 6th arrondissement, a few yards from the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens, all he could dream of was to escape somewhere he could write and breathe unconstrained. He now received a hundred letters every week and his assistant at Gallimard, Suzanne Labiche, could not cope with it all. Would he attend the celebration of the eight hundredth anniversary of the City of Munich as a guest of honor? Could he sign a petition in favor of Henry Miller, accused of pornography? Could he meet Jean Renoir, interested in adapting L’étranger for the screen? Would he agree to go on a lecture tour of South America this summer?
Anything, as long as he could find himself alone, away from the Parisian tumult for a while, away from his depressive wife, away from duties, away from attacks from the Communists or the Gaullists. How he wished he could retreat far away, hidden, alone, in a hotel. “The place where I most enjoy living and working, and where I would not mind dying, is a hotel room,” he wrote in the preface of his first collection of essays published in 1937, L’envers et l’endroit (Betwixt and Between). “I have never been able to adapt to what is called home or domestic life (which is most of the time the exact opposite of the inner life); bourgeois happiness bores and scares me.” Against his doctor’s advice, he told Miss Labiche to accept the invitation to South America and committed to a two-month lecture tour there. He reassured his wife Francine by promising that he would join the family on his return and go straight to Cabris, a village of three hundred inhabitants just north of Cannes where André Gide and Jean Marais often stayed. Albert and Francine both had fond memories of sunny, quiet Cabris, where they had once been happy.
Richard Wright was as restless and dissatisfied as Camus. Now that he had found the perfect café to start the day, a café that was neither too chic nor too modest and was only a few yards down his street, he thought he could put his house and head in order. Le Monaco was this perfect blend of localism and internationalism. Elderly locals played belote as the sun set, sipping their Pernod, just as Saul Bellow did at Le Rouquet a few streets away, while at the other end of the zinc bar stood black Americans, Swedes, British, Swiss, and Canadians animatedly speaking English in half a dozen accents. Le Monaco opened at seven, and until nine, when American students started pouring in on their way to the Sorbonne, only artisans, employees, and locals occupied the place. Richard Wright observed these different crowds, of all races and social milieux, with attention, trying to find literary inspiration.
One morning, as he was making his way to Le Monaco, his concierge handed him a cable. He tore it open while walking. It was from John Fischer, his editor at Harper and Brothers in New York. Fischer was asking him to contribute an essay to a volume of autobiographical sketches by prominent ex-Communists. Arthur Koestler and André Gide had already accepted, the book would be tentatively, or rather wishfully, titled The God That Failed, and the release date was already planned for September 1949. The cunning thing, argued Fischer, is that Richard did not have to write his contribution. Why not use his 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay, “I Tried to Be a Communist”? Good idea, thought Wright. Although he had vowed never again to write for or against Communism, as he “felt that being anti-communist was as much a case of psychological slavery as being communist,” the times sadly called for ever-clearer battle lines to be drawn. A few days later he told Sartre about the offer. Sartre jumped at the opportunity: Les Temps modernes would beat the Americans to it and publish Wright’s essay in French in the July 1949 issue. Richard Wright distractedly consented. His mind was already far away. Something else had come up. He had received another cable, this time from Buenos Aires. He had not told Ellen yet.
Wright had confided in Beauvoir instead. “Have you ever heard of somebody named Pierre Chenal?” he asked her one afternoon as they bumped into each other on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Of course she had. Chenal had made a few French films in the 1930s with leading stars such as Louis Jouvet. She remembered that he liked plots with a social twist. “Doesn’t he live in Argentina now?” Simone asked. Pierre Chenal, born Philippe Cohen in 1904, had fled Paris in 1940 and found refuge in Chile and then in Argentina, where he kept making films through the war. “He does and has written to me: he wants to adapt Native Son to the screen, and to start shooting in six months.” Simone stared back at Richard. “Six months!” Chenal would use the theater adaptation Orson Welles had made in 1941. “And wait. There is more. He wants to recreate Chicago and South Side black homes in a studio in Buenos Aires. And he wants me to star in it.” Simone laughed: “But the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is twenty and you are forty! You’ll have to start losing weight. No more couss-couss!” She suddenly stopped laughing: “Have you told Ellen?” “I have not. Chenal wants me to join him in Buenos Aires in August. I shall be gone at least nine months, perhaps more.” Simone pursed her lips and said “I see.”31
Richard Wright had providentially found an escape route. He would become a movie star. No more writer’s block. He had dreamed of cinema for such a long time and now the opportunity was presenting itself on a plate. His marriage would perhaps never recover, but that was a risk he selfishly thought worth taking. Besides, he was tired of being attacked constantly, by the Communists and now by the same black writers he had helped, like James Baldwin. The younger guard were aiming at their idols, just as the young French Hussars,32 as they would soon be known, were aiming at Camus and Sartre.
I CHOSE FREEDOM: COMMUNISM ON TRIAL
Sartre was obsessed with the Russian defector Victor Kravchenko. When he and Simone had lunch with Lionel Abel at Brasserie Lipp on the first day of the Kravchenko trial, on January 24, 1949, there was little else they discussed. Victor Kravchenko had been an official in the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington, D.C., when he defected in 1944. He went on to write I Chose Freedom, which was published in 1946 and in which he denounced and revealed many of the atrocities of Stalin’s regime, among others the prison and labor camps. I Chose Freedom was an instant success both in the United States and in Europe, and especially in France. The powerful Communist Lettres françaises organized a riposte and attacked Kravchenko twice, accusing him of lying and of not having written the book.33 Kravchenko filed a complaint in France for criminal libel. Branded “the trial of the century” by the press, this libel suit put the Soviet system in the dock for the first time. Moscow took it very seriously, as did Kravchenko’s supporters. The night before the trial started, Kravchenko had appeared at a rally at the Société de Géographie, 184 boulevard Saint-Germain, almost opposite Brasserie Lipp. “A first night rather than the opening of a trial!”34 snorted Les Lettres françaises. With movie cameras, photographers, and journalists from the whole world, the rally did indeed have the air of a film premiere. However, what was to follow across the next ten weeks would be fierce.
Victor Kravchenko did not elicit much sympathy even in non-Communist quarters such as Les Temps modernes, not even from Arthur Koestler, who was staying with Mamaine at the Hôtel Montalembert while they completed the purchase of their house near Fontainebleau. Koestler, just like Beauvoir and Sartre, followed the trial closely. They even attended some of the hearings. None of them trusted Kravchenko, but they could see how the French Communist Party behind Les Lettres françaises was being assisted by Moscow, which transported intellectuals and former colleagues by the planeload to testify against their former comrade.
Kravchenko’s lawyers struck a decisive coup when they called to the witness box Margarete Buber-Neumann, a tall, strong forty-eight-year-old survivor of both the Soviet Union’s Siberian gulag and the Ravensbrück concentration camp under the Nazis. She corroborated every point of Kravchenko’s allegations. Buber impressed everyone she met. Beauvoir was fascinated by her dignity during her testimony, her lack of self-pity, and her clarity. Her presence was electrifying, her calm and perceptiveness extremely powerful. She exposed the totalitarian cruelty that had killed her husband and cost her seven years in concentration camps in a dispassionate and even-handed way. Koestler was so taken by her that he and Mamaine invited her to stay at their new home for a few days before she traveled back home to Sweden, where she had found refuge after the war.
The couple’s house, Verte Rive, was full of boxes in rooms otherwise empty apart from two beds. They discovered several major snags that they had not been aware of, such as a leaking septic tank “emitting a pungent odour,” but Greta paid no attention to such trivial details, and Koestler and Mamaine forgot about it all during her stay. In their living room, with its fireplace and view over the river, Mamaine had quickly laid out two Moroccan rugs and an Algerian carpet that she had bought the week before at the Arts Ménagers exhibition in Paris.35 Seated in their two Chesterfield armchairs, Koestler and Mamaine listened to their guest for hours. “We had Greta Buber stay with us for two days, which was absolutely fascinating. She has a manic desire to talk about her seven years in the camps. She gets it off her chest by talking about it.”36 Before Greta traveled back to Stockholm, Koestler pressed her to keep bearing witness and to keep writing. She had just completed her memoirs Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler,37 the first of many books on her unique experience.
There was no longer any denying the facts and the existence of work camps in Soviet Russia. On April 4, 1949, Kravchenko won; he could thank Greta Buber. The defector’s victory gave Moscow one more reason to step up both pressure and propaganda.
“THE THIRD FARCE”: THE END OF SARTRE’S CAREER AS PARTY LEADER
By now Sartre had reached satanic star status, with the Vatican and the pope officially banning the reading of his books by Catholics. Attacked on all fronts, Sartre managed to withstand storm after storm. He was too big to fall. Blows were getting fiercer, though. Malraux, the Gaullist propagandist in chief, blackmailed Gallimard, demanding that it stop financing and publishing Les Temps modernes. Malraux was threatening to reveal certain things Gaston Gallimard had done during the Occupation, such as commissioning an elegiac essay on Hitler.38 Gallimard reluctantly relented, but another publisher, René Julliard, stood up in his place: Les Temps modernes had only to cross the street, from the rue Sébastien Bottin to the rue de l’Université, to find a new home. The Catholics, the Gaullists, and the Communists kept attacking Sartre and the Existentialists, but to no avail. Meanwhile, tensions were simmering within the RDR: for how long could they still occupy the political middle ground? David Rousset was ever more ardently anti-Communist, while Sartre was passionately anti-Gaullist. Could they work together in the long run?
In March 1949, Sartre was busy convening his own party’s congress, the organization of which he was personally financing. Despite a promising start, the party was not drawing crowds and new members. Rousset had just returned from a trip to the United States, pro-American as ever. He told Sartre that what was needed was to stir the RDR more firmly against the Communists; Sartre opposed that course. On April 30, during the party’s congress, David Rousset asked the members to vote on the direction the RDR should take; his motion received a vote of no confidence. The party was broken up, the neutralist attempt had failed, and that was the end of the RDR. There was no Third Way—at least in practical politics.
After dinner with Beauvoir, Sartre returned home, not exactly defeated but more thoughtful than usual. He went to his study and switched on the light on his desk. He took out his brown carnet and wrote: “The RDR has imploded. Tough. New and definite lessons in Realism. One doesn’t give birth to a movement. Circumstances only appeared to favour its creation. It did correspond to an abstract necessity, defined by an objective situation; however, it didn’t answer an actual and real need in people. This is the reason why, in the end, they didn’t support it.”39
Sartre slept well that night, and in the morning, when his secretary Jean Cau knocked at his door at ten o’clock, he asked to see the schedule for his next trip, this time to Mexico. He was leaving in a few days, a good way to turn the page on the RDR. As he later put it, “we assassinated the RDR and I left for Mexico, disappointed but serene.”40 Sartre was putting a brave face on things. The end of the RDR was the end of a dream. Could Sartre hold the fort alone, and how long could he hold it? Everyone around him seemed to accept that they had to choose sides, the lesser of two evils, as they told him. For some it was Gaullism, for others it was Communism; for some America, for others the Soviet Union. His intelligence and thirst for freedom above all urged him to keep fighting. The end of the RDR may have left Sartre “serene,” but it deeply transformed how he felt about politics, which he withdrew from as an active player. No more party membership. From now on, there would be only literature. Sartre was preparing a long portrait of the poet and thief Jean Genet, his protégé, whom he wanted the world to discover; he had also accepted to do a series of interviews with the young Vietnamese Marxist philosopher Tran Duc Thao. And there was Les Temps modernes, which he felt he had neglected for too long. From now on, his political action would exist purely through writing.