WANTED: NEW BLOOD FOR A NEW POLITICS
It was a time to take a position, as Les Temps modernes had stated in its inaugural issue. French women had cast their vote for the first time in the first national election since before the war in October 1945, and Albert Camus had called for readers of Combat to vote for the non-Communist socialists for want of a better choice. He admired Charles de Gaulle but was wary of a general’s meddling with politics in time of peace. He supported many of de Gaulle’s choices and policies but could not resolve to trust the party behind him. Camus wished, in fact, to find a new path, midway between the reformist nationalism of de Gaulle and the Communist Party’s internationalism. He dreamt of a humanist socialism, of new blood in politics, a fresh, harsh, and pure new elite coming from the Resistance to rule over an old country. He dreamt of social justice and of individual freedoms. Many in France shared the same dream; unfortunately, no party represented their aspirations. The non-Communist socialists were too divided, exhausted, and compromised a party to represent this new democratic élan.1 So Camus advocated a complete renewal of the political class at the helm of the country; he deeply disliked the old generation of politicians, even the courageous ones like Léon Blum who had been persecuted by the Vichy government. He called the old guard of politicians “coeurs tièdes” (“lukewarm hearts”).2 The younger one was, the purer and less compromised. Camus wanted a virile and virtuous République. Beauvoir and Sartre agreed with him.
However, this political independence not only was challenging to define beyond “neither Communist nor nationalist,” it was also difficult to achieve. The idea was not that new. It had reemerged in Europe in the 1920s and more recently, in 1938, an obscure British politician and future prime minister named Harold Macmillan had even theorized his own version in a book titled The Middle Way. Stuck between a rock, the Gaullists, and a hard place, the Communist Party, the Third Way, as desired by free-spirited Left Bankers such as Camus, was in fact brave and even revolutionary in a country that was traditionally so polarized. The challenge was to consider social democracy as the only desirable and possible revolution. Its powerful detractors, on both sides of the political divide, accused Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus of being empty, nihilistic even. The Communists branded them traitors, attacked them for having abandoned the ideals of the Left, and for promoting a soft-faced capitalism. And the Gaullists hated them for betraying the enlightened bourgeoisie and playing into the hands of the Soviet army. For Camus, those criticisms did not stand up. He was not promoting a tired compromise between left and right, socialism and capitalism, but a complete renewal of social democracy. Camus considered himself a Dur (tough), not a Mou (soft), and to resist the pressure and comfort of belonging to either camp, while fighting off their constant ferocious attacks in the press, demonstrated real fortitude. In fact, looking at the first free elections’ results since before the war, Camus had reason to be quietly optimistic. It seemed as if the French electorate was split equally. This meant paralysis, to start with, but for Camus it also showed there was room for a third force to expand. Camus, Beauvoir, Sartre, and their friends would from now on dedicate themselves, body and soul, to enabling that alternative force to rise.
The world, and especially London and Washington, had also waited with a keen interest for the election results, or “with unusually flattering attention,” as Janet Flanner put it. What did France choose? It first decided, overwhelmingly, to kill the Third Republic and its 1875 constitution and to create a Fourth Republic. And whom did the French choose to write their new Republic’s constitution: the Socialists, the Communists, or the Gaullists? The Socialists, an eclectic mix of worn-out and fresh politicians who spent more time bickering than agreeing among themselves, wanted, on the whole, a radical change, but not a revolution. The Communists, powerful, respected for their role in the Resistance, and disciplined, wanted a revolution, and the nationalization of credit, in other words, the end of the Banque de France. The Gaullists, or the rightist Popular Republicans, wanted a more modest change. French voters chose the three of them almost equally. As Janet Flanner put it to her New Yorker readers: “France’s Fourth Republic is starting out like a woman with three hands, two Left and one Right, the Communists and the Socialists being on the side closer to her newly reawakened revolutionary heart and the Popular Republicans on her other, purse-carrying side.”3 In other words, what France now had was a National Assembly incapable of agreeing on the nature of the country’s future institutions, and a head of government, General de Gaulle, increasingly frustrated by party politics.
Nevertheless, three months later, on January 20, 1946, the news of Charles de Gaulle’s resignation came as a shock to everyone, even for his opponents. It was clear that the Gaullists, favoring a Fourth Republic with two chambers and an executive power led by a president, would never be able to agree on future institutions with the Communists and the Socialists who wanted one chamber with all the powers and no president. Disillusioned by party politics, France’s savior retired, leaving “French morale in a state of empty gloom.”4 Yet perhaps, as Sartre thought, this was in fact a great service the general was doing his country. With de Gaulle off the scene, France could perhaps move on and try to go forward. Except that a quiet malaise, made up of the disillusion that had set in since the high hopes of the Liberation in the summer of 1944, was gnawing at people. The ambitions and spirit of the Resistance were losing ground. With de Gaulle gone, who would contain the rise of the Communist Party, which since the election had become France’s first party by a small margin?5 De Gaulle’s party vowed of course to continue his oeuvre and to keep defending his ideas even with him gone; however, Washington was especially concerned.
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN THE ARTS WORLD
The Communist Party not only was France’s first political party, it had also a kind of spiritual power over the youth and the intelligentsia. It was a conscience, and a magnet. Many argued it was like a church, albeit an atheistic one, and a church that controlled its image. It had perfected the arts of propaganda and was successfully courting renowned public figures to bolster its image. Great artists of international fame had joined ranks and become fully fledged party members. Picasso’s decision to join in October 1944 had a considerable impact in France and abroad.
A year later, his fellow painter Fernand Léger’s decision to join had a similar impact. The sixty-five-year-old mustachioed painter and master modernist had sailed on a liner from New York to Le Havre at the end of 1945, wondering how he would find the French capital after his six-year absence.6 He had taught at Yale University during his American exile and had decided to keep on teaching art students, but this time in his own personal university, in the studio he had managed to keep through the war at 86 rue Notre Dame des Champs in the 6th arrondissement, a hundred yards from the Luxembourg Gardens’ giant sequoias he so loved. Two hundred fifty ex-GIs on the GI Bill of Rights program, which allowed them to study abroad and receive a monthly stipend, quickly enrolled to be his students.7 They were eagerly awaiting the return of the Tubist in chief, as he had once been called by the Parisian art critic Louis Vauxcelles.
Had Léger felt he needed to join the Communist Party to compensate for his absence during the war? Was it a case of bad conscience, or true conviction, or perhaps both? Just as it had with Picasso, the Party used the news to maximum effect; it reverberated widely, making headlines worldwide. Here was yet another famous artist bestowing some of his genius and talent upon the Communist cause. In truth, both Picasso and Léger were greater than the Communist Party, and each was to remain very much his own man, but their joining nevertheless had an impact on other artists, young people, and public opinion at large.
The Party was intent on invading every nook and cranny of public life, and the art world was at the forefront of its battle of ideas. The idea of Communist art (and Communist artists) as the only morally acceptable kind was gaining some ground within a small clique of Communist leaders in both Paris and Moscow. The party clearly intended to take advantage of the commotion of the immediate postwar art world to start occupying the ground.
In 1946, “the art world was caught in powerful cross-currents: Individual vs. Community, Pessimism vs. Optimism, Disillusion vs. Engagement, Abstraction vs. Figuration, Insurrection vs. Conservatism, Colour vs. Monochrome, Canvas vs. Mural, Instinct vs. Reflection, Body vs. Mind, Archaism vs. Modernity, Realism vs. Unrealism.”8 If Communists and the Left in general took center stage in the arts world, the public conversation about the arts was still, however, a fluid one in which politics did not loom too heavily. “War had touched everyone without exception and divergences in art were based on one’s conception of the individual’s place in the world, rather than on one style vs. another.”9 Everybody seemed to agree that culture and the arts had to play a major role in rebuilding a free world on new foundations. The résistants had written a manifesto in 1944 in which access to culture was proclaimed as a fundamental human right, and this still enjoyed a broad consensus.
The French poet Louis Aragon, the Communist Party’s supremo of all things artistic, and of propaganda, liked docile artists. Léger and Picasso, too flamboyant and too independent, could never be told what to say, think, or paint. Aragon was thinking of grooming morally irreproachable young artists for the promotion of the Communist cause. Two of them in particular, the painters André Fougeron and Boris Taslitzky, had perfect credentials: they were both former résistants, and Taslitzky had been imprisoned at Buchenwald. Aragon was playing with the idea of welding aesthetics with morality, and he needed malleable artists to shape it. He had even started, very discreetly, putting his idea into practice through the curation of new arts exhibitions in Paris, as a way of testing the water.
Simone de Beauvoir had made a note not to miss the opening of the Musée d’Art Moderne’s new exhibition on February 15, 1946. Called “Art et Résistance,” it opened in Paris before touring the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain. The visit left a strange aftertaste. Instead of art produced during the war, it displayed a disparate selection of artworks especially commissioned for the show, and shockingly it completely overlooked Abstract art. Aragon and the Communist Party were, in fact, behind this. How could you show the ties between art and the Resistance after the fact! Mad and dishonest, thought Beauvoir. Picasso, Bonnard, and Matisse, who had been amicably nudged to do so, were officially supporting the exhibition. With such patronage, Parisians had flocked to see it. How could Matisse endorse such a travesty, Beauvoir wondered? Had it simply been a case of being nice to people who had asked nicely? Or, like his friend Picasso, had the seventy-six-year-old maestro had other things on his mind? In 1946, Matisse’s oeuvre was mutating. He seemed to be breaking away from everything he had done before. Attracted by much bigger spaces, by light, his work gave out a primitive joie de vivre. His paper cutouts, serigraphies, and tapestries all celebrated a golden age, turquoise-blue sky and indigo-blue sea, birds, and light. “He shared with his times a taste for the transcendental.”10 Both the Catholic Church and the Communist Party were trying hard to capture this new artistic effervescence, which could be defined as a quest for a new transcendence, a new spirituality.
The Catholic Church had not exactly shone during the war, and here was an opportunity to renew its image. Unlike the Communists, the Church was not looking to impose a new aesthetic, but it wanted to embrace modernity and be seen as relevant to the times. A Dominican Father in particular, Pierre Couturier, had spent his life questioning the Church’s artistic choices and advocated a revolution of mentalities, no less. “Believing the Church should open its doors to non-believer or non-Christian artists, and that creation itself was an act of faith,”11 he commissioned art from Bonnard, Léger, Braque, Matisse, and two Russian and Jewish artists, Lipchitz and Chagall, for the redecoration of the church at Assy, near Chamonix. A few months later, Abbot Morel had also organized an exhibition of “Sacred Art” at Galérie René Drouin and had chosen to exhibit modern artists without any ties to Christian circles: Bonnard, Rouault, and Braque.
The Catholic Church was embracing abstract art with surprising honesty and real curiosity at a time when the Communist Party was rejecting it, trying instead to debase art with ideology and morality, which didn’t go unnoticed. These developments were frequently reported on, and in great detail.
Denise René’s art gallery and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles set up in 1946 were the epicenters of abstract art in Paris. There, debates, schisms, and confrontations were taking place almost daily. René was not afraid of controversies and polemics: from a family of résistants, she had sheltered the first clandestine meeting of the CNR (Comité National de la Résistance) in 1943 in the basement of 124 rue de la Boétie in the 8th arrondissement. As they always were these days, Les Durs (the tough) were at war with Les Mous (the soft). Aragon was lying in wait. In fact, abstract art was divided within itself and also had to withstand continuous attacks from the omnipotent Communist press. Paris art galleries and newspapers’ arts pages had become the scenes of critical carnage.
The artists who could spar with the Communists, and call their bluff, were the Surrealists. They belonged to the older generation who, even though in their fifties, still had vigor. They were not, however, above reproach. Parisians hadn’t forgotten the many Surrealists who had gone into exile in New York during the war. And if some of them denounced the nature of Stalinism, many also chose to remain in the United States. Roberto Matta, Victor Brauner, Francis Picabia, André Masson, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, and Max Ernst either stayed in America or became American citizens.
The artistic and cultural effervescence and battle of ideas seething in Paris was watched and followed closely by foreign observers. In London, Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, had translated and published Les Temps modernes’ manifesto, written by Sartre, and made it his own and his generation’s. A few months later, a Horizon special issue about France came out, introducing Left Bank thinkers, some for the first time in translation, to an English readership. For the people at Horizon, “France stood for civilisation itself.” Connolly had made no bones about the “lassitude, brain fatigue, apathy and humdrummery of English writers” and artists. Paris by contrast “blazed with intellectual vitality and confidence. Its writers, galvanized by four humiliating years of occupation, now stood ready to ignite the torch that would light the way to freedom, choice and rational reform.”12It was true that London had withdrawn from intellectual debates and its intelligentsia were happy to leave Paris the honor of holding the torch. Philip Toynbee tried to explain the feeling among the British intelligentsia in his dispatches from London in Les Temps modernes: “We do not have any philosophy. These days, our lack of fanaticism is the evidence of our apathy.”13 A few months later, Toynbee added: “Things have come to a point where France and Flaubert are playing as big a role for British intellectuals as Russia and Stalin for the Communists.”14
This “symbolic handover” from London to Paris gave Sonia Brownell both power and purpose. She had already made herself indispensable in the Horizon office—it was at her prompting that Connolly had rushed to meet Simone de Beauvoir a year earlier—but she would soon commission new authors and new pieces. She worked closely with Peter Watson, the coeditor of Horizon, a homosexual and a French speaker, two qualities for which she usually fell. She was not the only one. The photographer Cecil Beaton was pursuing Watson even though he thought he had the “charming face of a codfish.”15 Peter was also sleek, subtle, and a smooth operator, but he had vision, too. He was the one who commissioned Horizon articles in Paris on artists barely known in Britain, like the Swiss painter Balthus and the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. He had persuaded Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to report on the contemporary art market and the art critic Michel Leiris to write about his friend Alberto Giacometti. Through Leiris, Watson commissioned Giacometti to make a chandelier for his home, or perhaps for the office in Bedford Square—he had not decided yet where he would hang it.
COMMUNISM THE ITALIAN WAY
On matters of art and politics, Beauvoir and Sartre were increasingly at loggerheads with Communists; there could be no ideological entente with them. They could go on arguing, but they had reached an impasse. This was a difficult and even painful situation: their relationship with Communism felt essential to these two bourgeois who had chosen to betray their own class. Neither Beauvoir nor Sartre was, however, ready to bargain their freedom, esprit critique, and independence for the sake of acceptance into the Communist fold. They had recently met Italian Communists such as Elio Vittorini, the editor of the monthly review Politecnico, and had felt a real affinity: “At least with them, you could talk!”16 They decided to prepare a special Italian issue of Les Temps modernes, in which they would explain why Italian Communism was so much more inclusive and less dogmatic than its French counterpart. The new friends all agreed to meet in Milan over the summer.
At the end of June 1946, Beauvoir and Sartre were on the night train bound for Italy. They were firmly set on understanding why Italian Communism seemed so much more inclusive and flexible than its French counterpart. They were also going to Italy to do book signings, give talks, and, if at all possible, enjoy a little sightseeing.
After their publisher Bompiani publicly put some distance between himself and the Existentialist couple, whom he as a conservative now deemed too controversial, Elio Vittorini, their new friend, contacted the other big Italian publishing house, Mondadori. The opportunity was too good to be missed and the keen publisher sent his own son, Alberto Mondadori, to give Sartre and Beauvoir a substantial advance in cash to seal their partnership. Mondadori senior also instructed his son to be the philosophers’ chauffeur, and to offer to drive them wherever they liked in his brand-new cabriolet. Beauvoir and Sartre greatly appreciated the gesture and asked Alberto to drive them to Venice, then Florence, and, finally, Rome.17 There they met the writer and painter Carlo Levi, whose first novel, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli), had just appeared. Depicting his forced exile by the fascist regime in the Basilicata region, the deep south of Italy, the novel triggered a national debate about the extreme poverty of the Italian south. After reading a few pages, Beauvoir decided to publish extracts in the autumn issues of Les Temps modernes.
Simone de Beauvoir soon developed a clear analysis of the political difference between the French and Italian Left: “In France, national unity, having been achieved through the fight against foreign occupants, consequently weakened after peace had returned, with Right and Left going their own ways.” Nationalism had in fact proved a shaky foundation for national unity.
In Italy, the nationalists were the fascists. Everyone who had fought fascism wanted democracy and freedom. All non-fascists had the same aims, which were based on principles, rather than events, and therefore survived after the war ended. In Italy, liberals, socialists and Communists were all fighting together against the nationalist Right and in favor of the end of monarchy and a new republican constitution. The sincerity of the Italian Communist Party’s republican and democratic positions was never in doubt.18
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 had tainted French Communists. For two years, until Hitler broke the nonaggression pact, French Communists were of two minds about resisting the German occupants. Their hesitation made people suspicious, and they never could wash the opprobrium away, even after wholeheartedly committing to the Resistance and indeed becoming its most active members between 1941 and 1944. The non-Communist French Left always had their reservations about them, and their suspicion, once the war over, came back with the force of a boomerang. Who were the French Communists taking their orders from? Was the umbilical cord with the Soviet Union more important than that with France?
The Italian Communists, having fought Fascism since the early 1920s, were not stained by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in the way their French counterparts were. Besides, Antonio Gramsci, one of their leaders and thinkers, who had been incarcerated by the fascists in 1926 (“We must stop this brain from functioning”) and died of illnesses contracted during his imprisonment in 1937, had somehow created “a dazzling synthesis between Marxism and Bourgeois Humanism.”19 In France, the Communist Party was going in the opposite direction: taking its orders from Moscow and the Comintern, abiding by the Stalinist dogma. Retractors claimed they were serving the interests of the Soviet Union and not France.
The rising tension within the French Left between non-Communists and Communists had in fact claimed its first victims within the editorial team of Les Temps modernes: Raymond Aron had slammed the door and left to join Combat. Aron considered Les Temps modernes too lenient with the Communists, while Sartre and Beauvoir considered Aron too much on the Right.
Churchill, now retired, had spoken frankly three months earlier in his famous Fulton Speech in the United States of “these anxious and baffling times.” A shadow had fallen upon the editorial committee of Les Temps modernes and the Paris Left Bank, as indeed it had “upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.”20 Churchill had spelled out what everyone was feeling.
Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies … From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent … Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.21
In July, Beauvoir and Sartre parted ways in Milan. Simone kept only a rucksack and sent the rest of her books and clothes back to Paris. She was so much looking forward to hiking in the Dolomites.22 Luckily, le petit Bost would be able to join her later; she was elated to discover a new mountainous region of Europe. Meanwhile, Sartre was off on a three-week holiday with Wanda Kosakiewicz. He did not intend to be idle for three weeks, though: this would be a working holiday. He had two plays in mind that he wanted to write fast: Morts sans sépulture (The Victors) and La putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute).
AMERICA: I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU NOT
Between the beginning of 1945 and the summer of 1946, Sartre had visited the United States twice. He had stayed for almost six months in total, had a New York girlfriend, and had extensively toured the country and lectured at the most prestigious universities. Simone de Beauvoir would soon follow in his footsteps. He had met many people and made many new friends. Some of the American writers Sartre had met had even settled in Paris, like Richard Wright, one of many black American writers and artists to make the journey to France in the late 1940s. American artists were also following him back to Paris.23 Alexander Calder was aboard the first transatlantic direct flight from New York, which TWA had started operating a few months earlier.
Sartre had written Calder’s forthcoming exhibition catalog. He had spent only two afternoons in his Roxbury studio in Connecticut and yet it was as if he had lived among Calder’s work all his life. Or perhaps the little peacock mobile Calder had given Sartre, made of cuts from flattened license plates, allowed Sartre to spend more time in Calder’s universe and understand it better than most. “Sculpture suggests movement, painting suggests depth or light. Calder suggests nothing. He captures true, living movements and crafts them into something. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves. They simply are: they are absolutes.”24 And to conclude: “Calder’s mobiles are at once lyrical inventions, technical, almost mathematical combinations and the tangible symbol of Nature, of that great, vague Nature that squanders pollen and suddenly causes a thousand butterflies to take wing.”25
Sartre was fascinated with America. The young man in him had fed on American literature, films, and jazz. Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, to name but a few, held no secrets for him. He loved Americans and America and, especially, American popular culture, which he knew intimately, but his love and fascination were typically lucid.
He felt compelled to share his America with French readers, warts and all, in Les Temps modernes’ first double summer issue of 1946. Its publication, with many specially commissioned pieces from avant-garde American writers and an uncompromising introduction by Sartre, had created quite a stir.
I saw men chased within the heart of their conformist happiness by a nameless obscure malaise. Those men are tragic precisely because they fear to be tragic, because they lack tragedy in and around them. In America, there is the myth of equality and there is racial segregation; there is the myth of freedom and there is the dictatorship of public opinion; there is economic liberalism and those faceless multinational companies which cover a whole continent don’t belong to anyone, but operate like a state within a state. In America, there are a thousand taboos that ban love outside marriage and there are those thousands of used condoms littering the back courtyards of university campuses, there are all those cars, lights switched off, parked by the road, there are all those men and women who need a stiff drink before making love, in order to copulate and forget all about it. Nowhere will anyone find such a discrepancy between myths and men, between life and its collective representation.26
“In this special issue,” stated the introduction,
our aim has been to show men and women. Every one of them feels close to what he or she criticizes or praises. None thinks they say anything bad against America. In France, if one reveals an injustice, it is seen as a criticism of France because one sees her in the past or as unmovable. For an American, to reveal an injustice is to pave the way toward reform because he or she sees their country with eyes set on the future. Every article in this issue is like a human face, an anxious face, but a free and moving one. This is what we have wanted to offer readers who haven’t crossed the Atlantic Ocean yet and who don’t know the strange softness faces take, in New York, when the first lights are switched on over Broadway.
This special issue was, in fact, a love letter to America. However, a love that was honest. The issue also included articles by American writers who attacked European arrogance in dealing with America. In fact, Sartre liked nothing more than being contradicted by intelligent voices. An article on comic strips by David Hare27 deciphered the new American comic hero: “The war has created a new American hero, superman, superhuman, and violent, in many ways antipoetic and vulgar. However, this is the product of an irresistible imagination, force and invention, but never of intelligence.” In his review of American art in the twentieth century Clement Greenberg saw that the most influential period of American art history had just taken place during the war, through the symbiosis between young American painters and artists in New York and exiled French Surrealists such as Matta, Ernst, Duchamp, Breton, and Tanguy. Greenberg thought that in 1946, “apart from Alexander Calder, a product of the Paris school, no American artist has international stature.” In a few years, Action Painting, embodied in the works of Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, a result of the symbiosis Greenberg described, would change this.
Richard Wright finished reading Les Temps modernes’ special U.S. issue at the Paris American Hospital, where his wife, Ellen, had been taken for an appendectomy. Although not life threatening, her condition was serious enough, and they had decided to go back to New York for a while. Their flat on the boulevard Saint-Michel was too small, and it was a short lease anyway. Before packing, Wright had just enough time to send an enthusiastic note to Sartre, who had given him the manuscript of the play he had written on holiday, La putain respectueuse. Sartre wanted to know Wright’s opinion as his play dealt with race relations in America and was inspired by the case of the Scottsboro Boys. In the 1930s, nine black teenagers had been wrongly accused of the rape of two white women on board a freight train heading to Memphis.28 Wright thought Sartre had admirably captured the essence of racial segregation and was awed by Sartre’s artful synthesis and powerful dialogue: “Black man: ‘When white men who don’t know each other meet to talk, you can bet a black man is about to die.’”29
Wright had gotten so used to Parisian color-blindness that he felt all the more shocked to be back in New York. In Greenwich Village, where the family lived, “there were several violent incidents when gangs of Italian youths took it upon themselves to punish interracial couples.”30 As a result, Wright never allowed Ellen to take his arm in the street. Also, perhaps because of Paris’s less comfortable life, Wright was taken aback by how much a new materialism was reigning over the entire country. “In France, people were interested in your opinions, not your income.”31 He felt that the liberal spirit of Roosevelt had completely disappeared.
Wright was trying hard to be positive and turned to the city’s cultural events as a way to escape. He was very much looking forward to meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson. The photographer was busy preparing the first retrospective of his work for the Museum of Modern Art, which was opening five months later. Like Camus, Cartier-Bresson had declared to the U.S. authorities that he did not hold Communist sympathies. That was an outright lie, and his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art would indeed completely, and intentionally, overlook that essential detail. His philo-Communism was, however, key to understanding his work. Cartier-Bresson was a fellow traveler of the French Communist Party and would vote Communist in every election for the next ten years.32
Among the French writers and intellectuals who had visited the United States after the war, Albert Camus cut a singular figure. America had left him indifferent. He had confided to his diary on board the Oregon, a cargo freighter with a few passenger cabins, that on finally entering New York Harbor after a ten-day journey, he had felt nothing. “Manhattan’s skyscrapers are against a background of fog. My heart is calm and dry and I feel I’m watching a spectacle that does not affect me.”33
His indifference turned sometimes to bewilderment. His five weeks of lectures had been five weeks of bafflement. Americans seemed so alien to him, friendly yet forgetful, hospitable yet indifferent, engrossed in frivolous things, afraid of seriousness. He had learned very quickly that “the secret to conversation is called small talk, the art of saying nothing meaningful.”34 He had wondered in his diary whether one was “among madmen or the most reasonable people on earth; if life was as easy as they say here or as foolish as it seems; if it is natural that they hire ten people instead of one, without improving the service; if Americans should be called modest, liberal or conformist.”35
He had marveled at the cultural differences between New York and Paris, between America and France, from the shape of doorknobs to the popularity of vitamin pills. He had made notes about everything he had found strange: “large consumption of scotches and soda in the cultural milieu; the luxury and bad taste, especially in neckties; the love of animals; the habit of drinking fruit juice in the morning; millions of windows lit up at night; hot baths; vitamins; drugstores serving bacon and eggs.”36 America would remain an oddity for him, a mystery he was not much interested in cracking.
THE BOOK THAT BEAT THE COMMUNIST PARTY AT THE BALLOT BOX
April 1946 had come early and the weather was so mild that Simone de Beauvoir wore neither stockings nor a coat.37 Over lunch one day, her mother told her about that book everybody was reading at the moment, by a certain Hungarian ex-Communist named Arthur Koestler. His book was Le zéro et l’infini (Darkness at Noon). Simone had read it before it reached the bookshops, on New Year’s Day 1945. It had come out a few months later and had been an instant success: seven thousand copies had sold in its first month of release, fifty thousand by April 1945, a quarter million by May 1946, and the number would reach half a million by the end of the year, Koestler’s greatest publishing triumph anywhere.38 After lunch the sun was shining and she did not want to go back to the hotel. She walked straight to Le Bar Vert on the rue Jacob to see Jacques-Laurent Bost. Unlike Juliette Gréco, Simone was not so fond of the place:39 it had nice posters but awful red tables and green walls, so green it made her feel almost sick. Here, too, everyone was discussing Koestler’s book.
Newspapers had announced in their gossip columns that Simone and Sartre were deserting the Café de Flore once and for all for the basement bar of the Hôtel du Pont Royal. “Let’s celebrate!” she had told Bost when the news broke, just before taking him to have an ice cream at the Flore: now that people thought she was not going anymore, perhaps she could go back and enjoy peace again. There they had bumped into Giacometti and Tristan Tzara discussing Darkness at Noon. Giacometti was the only one talking about it with intelligence, she had thought.40 When Beauvoir thought of Koestler’s intensity as a writer, she thought writing was probably a little like sex for him—or, as she had said, “There are days, just after I have worked very hard for days on end, when I feel like those flatfish washed onto the rocks after they have fucked too much, moribund, emptied of their substance.”41
May 5, 1946. Referendum day had come. Would the French say yes or no to the new constitution cooked up by the Communists? The new constitution the French were being asked to vote on was championed by the Socialists but disapproved of by the Gaullists and General de Gaulle, who still exerted a great influence despite his withdrawal from political life. It was based on the concept of an all-powerful parliamentary regime with one chamber and little executive counterbalance. On the day of the vote, Simone had to close her window—Parisians were arguing on the pavement below and she could not work. She had missed the deadline to register to vote and would not be able to cast a ballot. She felt rather ashamed. Sartre had forgotten to register too. But as he kept telling her, “the important thing is not to vote; it is to know how one would vote.” This was Sartrean rhetoric in all its glory: witty but questionable.
The result came as a surprise to foreign observers and to the French themselves. Fifty-two percent of the electorate voted against it. It was seen as a rebuff for the Communists. Washington was pleased and the Gaullists were both relieved and content, but now what? On the day after, a Monday morning, Beauvoir could not find any newspapers left at the kiosk. She heard from her newsagent that the Catholic writer François Mauriac had argued that the most important factor in tipping the vote against the Communists had been the publication of Darkness at Noon.42 Could books make or unmake elections? She certainly hoped so.
However influential he was, the celebrated and powerful Koestler would find himself challenged as soon as he set foot in Paris a few months later, in October 1946, at the time of a second referendum on a second draft for a constitution. After checking in at the Hôtel Montalembert, which stood right next to the Hôtel du Pont Royal, Koestler went to buy a copy of Les Temps modernes at the news kiosk. In its October issue, Sartre had given Merleau-Ponty free rein to attack Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and his latest book, a collection of essays, The Yogi and the Commissar.
Koestler arrived at a time when Camus was getting back into the journalistic fray, after completing La Peste, which would be published the following year. Camus felt Sartre and Beauvoir were not challenging Communist positions enough, while Camus’ lecturing tone increasingly irked the philosophers. “Combat is too much into morals and not enough into politics,” Sartre had told Camus, now back at the editor’s desk of Combat. Unlike Sartre and Beauvoir, who felt at ease grappling with the many contradictions of their times and deciphering them like mathematical equations, Camus preferred to disengage from them when they proved too murky or too complicated. Camus did not like hesitation; he needed certainty. “Simone, why are you against French clarity?” he had asked Beauvoir.43 The situation was far from clear; it was complex. She thought that Camus’ thinking was too shortsighted and that he was protecting himself by refusing to answer difficult questions. It was easier to hide behind moral principles than get oneself dirty in the mud of ideas and politics. Their relations had remained very friendly, but “shadows were looming on the horizon.”44
The last three months of 1946 were to prove very volatile, contrarian, and exciting. The Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault, who had written an essay on American sexuality in the special U.S. issue of Les Temps modernes, had helped the Gaullist Resistance rebuild the network of French press agencies in North America during the war. He was still well connected and, on seeing how much Beauvoir wanted to follow in the steps of Sartre and Camus in America, suggested arranging a tour of university talks for her. “Am simply dying to go,” she had replied.45 Beauvoir’s tour would prove even easier for Soupault to organize, as his essay had caught the eye of Time magazine with its shocking rudeness and made him an instant celebrity in the literary circles of the East Coast. Jacques-of-All-Letters Philippe Soupault, one of the founding fathers of surrealism, examined love-in-the-U.S., shuddered at what he saw, reported in the French review Modern Times that “Americans consider a love affair in the same light as a crime.” The fear of love, he observed, produces nervous disorders, and “there are more maladjusted people in America than in any other country in the world.”46
Critical successes and catastrophes came in quick succession. On October 23, the first night of Koestler’s play Bar du crépuscule was a “disaster,” according to Sartre, and a “God-awful flop,” according to Mamaine. On October 25, Calder’s opening exhibition was a triumph, with Matisse, Cocteau, Picasso, Braque, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, among many others, flocking to view those “little fiestas” of mobiles, which Paris had never seen before. Simone, who was meeting Calder for the first time, stood in a corner and observed both the mobiles and their creator. This “big, corpulent and bellied man with fat cheeks adorned with thick white hair reminded us all of the laws of gravity,” and therefore also of the miracle of his creations. After Sartre introduced Calder to Beauvoir, the sculptor took a little packet from his pocket; it was a brooch with a spiral he had made especially for her.47 She would wear it often for decades to come.
Two weeks later, on November 8, Sartre’s play Morts sans sépulture opened at the Théâtre Antoine. Was it a success or a failure? It was a proper scandal, the proportions of which frightened even its thick-skinned author. The play was about collaboration and resistance and featured a torture scene. People shouted “Shameful!” during the performances and fistfights broke out in the stalls. On the opening night, Raymond Aron left at intermission, supporting his wife, who had fainted during the torture scene. “It seemed clear that the bourgeoisie did not want to be reminded of certain bad memories”48 that it had managed to sweep under the carpet. Sartre was drinking more these days; whiskey helped him cope with his celebrity and the Communists’ constant attacks on him as a philosopher and as a man. However, he could not get away from photographers, especially from the new gossip magazine France Dimanche, whose editor sent its latest recruit, Anne-Marie Cazalis, to spy on Sartre’s mother with history’s first paparazzo, the twenty-six-year-old Italian Walter Carone. Having failed to secure an authorized portrait of Sartre’s mother, France Dimanche ordered Cazalis and Carone to go back and be less courteous: they were to press the doorbell, spring up like jack-in-the-boxes, shoot a picture, and take to their heels or they would lose their jobs. They did just that, and the next day Sartre discovered a picture of his startled-looking maid Eugénie in the newspaper with the caption AN EXISTENTIALIST’S ANXIOUS MOTHER.
Koestler was in Paris not only to make new friends; he also intended to try to convince the Left Bank movers and shakers, and key French politicians, that there was no greater threat in Europe than Communism. Could the Gaullist Koestler, the liberal non-Communist Camus, and the Existentialists Sartre and Beauvoir reconcile their views or find a common ground other than seduction, sex, and alcohol? Koestler certainly felt impatient with the younger generation who had embraced Communism, but Camus promised to be his ears in Paris and to defend him.
The night of December 12, 1946, Boris Vian and his wife, Michelle, were giving a tartine party. Everybody was talking about the new novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I’ll Spit on Your Graves) by Vernon Sullivan, a black American writer. Its sex scenes had landed its publisher in court. Raymond Queneau, standing in the corner of the kitchen, nursing a whiskey in his right hand, was staying strangely silent. Vernon Sullivan did not exist and he knew it. Boris Vian had invented him. He had been so disappointed by the failure of his first novel that he had decided to trick both his publisher and his readers. On appearing only as the great Vernon Sullivan’s translator, Vian had been deluged with translation work offers, among them books by Raymond Chandler, no less. Camus’ arrival at eleven o’clock put an end to the Vernon Sullivan conversation. He was not in a good mood. He had just read another attack by Merleau-Ponty against his friend Koestler in Les Temps modernes and he was incensed by it. Sartre came to Merleau-Ponty’s defense, which upset Camus even further. He put on his coat and slammed the door. Sartre and Bost ran into the street after him but it was too late; Camus had jumped into a cab. The friends would not talk for three months.49
Camus had returned to the helm of Combat to support his idea of a Third Way in French and world politics. He refused both soulless American capitalism and Stalinist dictatorship. He might have considered himself “a man without a kingdom,” “a man without a party,” but that did not mean he lived in Utopia. There was another way, and he explained it in a series of articles titled Ni victimes ni bourreaux (Neither Victims nor Executioners). He firmly intended to win Sartre and Beauvoir to his cause, but for the time being he was sulking. He was also in a bad way: he had fallen in love with a young singer and had asked Sartre to write a song for her. “He was handsome, attractive, people fell for him, and he thought himself omnipotent,”50 diagnosed Beauvoir, harshly but perhaps accurately.