14. Anger, Spite, and Failure
1. Eugene Worth, James Baldwin’s best friend, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge in New York in 1946.
2. James Baldwin, “The Art of Fiction No. 78,” Paris Review no. 91 (Spring 1984), interview by Jordan Elgrably.
3. Quoted in Rowley, Richard Wright, pp. 315–79.
4. Baldwin, “Art of Fiction.”
5. Ibid.
6. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial Press, 1972), p. 39.
7. Baldwin, “Art of Fiction.”
8. Ibid.
9. As recalled a year later by Richard Seaver, The Tender Hour of Twilight, chapter 2, p. 10.
10. Ibid.
11. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Arcade, 2015).
12. Fabre, La rive noire.
13. Baldwin, “Art of Fiction.”
14. Although he would later defend himself from this personal shortcoming. In a letter to his friend Julian Behrstock written on January 19, 1996, he felt the need to say “I’m just chronicling, not bitching.” Bellow, Letters.
15. In a letter to his agent, David Bazelon, on January 25, 1949, in Bellow, Letters, pp. 76–77.
16. On February 27, 1949. Bellow, Letters, p. 77.
17. Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 141.
18. Ibid., p. 73.
19. On April 10, 1949. Bellow, Letters, p. 80.
20. Baldwin, “Art of Fiction.”
21. Abel, Intellectual Follies, p. 160.
22. Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man.
23. Abel, Intellectual Follies, p. 165.
24. Ibid., p. 166.
25. Ibid., p. 264.
26. Ibid., p. 204.
27. Toru Kiuchi and Yoshinobu Hakutani, Richard Wright: A Documented Chronology 1908–1960 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), p. 251.
28. Ibid., p. 265.
29. Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man, p. 270.
30. Todd, Albert Camus, p. 686.
31. I have phrased this exchange between Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir based on her memoirs: Beauvoir, La force des choses, and her letters to Algren, in Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man.
32. Les Hussards was a literary movement in the 1950s and 1960s made of young right-wing writers who opposed the Existentialists and Sartre in particular. They valued style above all. Roger Nimier’s novel Le hussard bleu in 1950 gave its name to this movement. The term was ironically coined by Bernard Franck in an article he wrote for Sartre’s Les Temps modernes.
33. Once in its edition of November 13, 1947, and the second in its edition of April 25, 1948.
34. Lottman, Left Bank, p. 271.
35. She tells her sister Celia in a letter dated Saturday, February 26, 1949, written from the Hôtel Montalembert, in Mamaine Koestler, Living with Koestler, p. 100.
36. Ibid.
37. Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler begins with her search for her second husband, Heinz Neumann, a well-known German Communist victim of Party infighting, arrested in Moscow and jailed in the Lubyanka prison in 1937. Margarete did not discover what had happened to him until 1961.
38. Which, luckily for Gallimard, was never published. Source: Claire Sarti, Paul Eluard’s grand-daughter, in conversation with the author in Paris.
39. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 275.
40. Lottman, Left Bank, p. 281.