16. Farewells and a New Dawn

0.      Lennon, Norman Mailer, p. 119.

0.      This introduction both surprised and dismayed him: he was no lieutenant of Sartre.

0.      “In The Age of Longing he deals not only with the Bolshevik mind, once again fellow-traveling with the human spirit, but with a number of other peculiarly conditioned minds—among them the democratic, the French, the religious, the literary, the apostate and the American,” writes the critic Richard H. Rovere in the New York Times, February 25, 1951, in a very favorable review of the book.

0.      Mamaine Koestler, Living with Koestler, p. 112.

0.      Although twenty-two years younger than Arthur Koestler, and in perfect health, Cynthia decided to commit suicide beside the terminally ill Koestler on March 1, 1983.

0.      Spurling, Girl from the Fiction Department, p. 93.

0.      Ibid., p. 96.

0.      According to the French writer and poet Georges Limbour.

0.      Festival du Film Maudit.

0.    The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote in 1958 about her part in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman: “In fact, it is not what Mademoiselle Bardot does in bed but what she might do that drives the three principal male characters into an erotic frenzy. She is a thing of mobile contours—a phenomenon you have to see to believe.”

0.    Simone de Beauvoir, “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” an essay first published in Esquire magazine in August 1959.

0.    Ibid.

0.    Ibid.

0.    Ibid.

0.    Jean Cocteau, Le Passé défini (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), vol. 4, July 1955.

0.    As serialized by Les Temps modernes in its May 1949 issue, no. 43.

0.    Ibid.

0.    A letter to Alfred Kazin dated January 28, 1950, quoted in Atlas, Saul Bellow, p. 154.

0.    Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, January 25, 1950.

0.    Ibid., p. 266.

0.    She had first titled it Les survivants [The survivors], then Les suspects [The suspects]. Sartre had suggested Les griots [The griots]. Claude Lanzmann, Simone de Beauvoir’s new young lover, came up with Les mandarins (The Mandarins). Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 2, p. 36.

0.    Le Prix Goncourt, on December 6, 1954. On hearing the news during a trip to Rome, Albert Camus, ill and feverish, wrote in his Carnets on December 12, 1954: “I came across a newspaper. I had forgotten about the Parisian comedy. The farce that is the Goncourt Prize. I hear I’m the hero in it. Filth.”

0.    Histoire d’O was published in 1954 and translated into English for Olympia Press in 1965 by Richard Seaver, who took the pseudonym Sabine d’Estrée. Eliot Fremont-Smith, the New York Times’s book critic, wrote in 1966 that Story of O fractured “the last rationale of censorship, our late and somewhat desperate distinction between ‘literary’ pornography and ‘hard-core’ pornography,” and described the book as “revolting, haunting, somewhat erotic, rather more emetic, unbelievable and quite unsettling.”

0.    Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, January 25, 1950.

0.    Ibid.

0.    24 rue du Boccador was a special place to live. The twenty-eight-year-old Belgian film producer Raoul Lévy lived directly opposite Theodore White on the third floor. He was producing his first film and was about to trick the Paris police force into turning out for riot call as extras. A few years later he would produce his friend Roger Vadim’s film And God Created Woman, with the young Brigitte Bardot. There were other colorful neighbors: the mistress of the most important jeweler in Paris; the British arms salesman who sold outworn American combat aircraft to shadowy regimes; and a Spanish Republican veteran, Germain, the building’s concierge. A few months later, Irwin Shaw and his wife, Marian, arrived there.

0.    White, In Search of History, p. 333.

0.    Ibid., p. 332.

0.    Ibid., p. 334.

0.    This last paragraph is a tribute to the writer Irwin Shaw and an article he wrote titled “Remembrance of Things Past” (formerly titled “Paris! Paris!” and originally appearing in the American magazine Holiday in 1953): “The city is quiet on both sides of you, the river wind is cool, the trees on the banks are fitfully illuminated by the headlights of occasional automobiles crossing the bridges. The bums are sleeping on the quais, waiting to be photographed at dawn by the people who keep turning out the glossy picture books on Paris; a train passes somewhere nearby, blowing its whistle, which sounds like a maiden lady who has been pinched, surprisingly, by a deacon; the buildings of the politicians and the diplomats are dark; the monuments doze; the starlit centuries surround you on the dark water … You turn, hesitantly, toward the girl at your side…”