Left Bank Read online

  All of them—male and female, artists and thinkers—set new codes and standards, achieved a string of undeniable successes, and left behind a litany of failures. Tony Judt addresses the latter in the academic work Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944–1956.2 His resentment and frustration pour from the pages like those of a spurned lover. Paris intellectuals had so much power bestowed on them by circumstances and their own genius and yet failed, in his view, to change the world. “This contrast, the failure of French intellectuals to fulfil the hopes invested in them by their admirers, together with the influence exerted by the French intellectual life in other Western countries, had a decisive impact on the history of post-war European life.” Tony Judt, himself shaped by French thinking, would never forgive Sartre & Co. for having let their contemporaries down when they needed them most. He even called his book “an essay on intellectual irresponsibility.”3 That they were expected to change the world in the first place raises the question: How did they arouse so much wild hope? Left Bank is as much about postwar Parisian intellectual irresponsibility as about political, artistic, moral, and sexual incandescence.

  Though Left Bank offers a narrative of Paris between 1940 and 1950, it is not a work of fiction, nor is it an academic analysis; it is a reconstruction, a collage of images, a kaleidoscope of destinies based on a variety of sources and documents. Memory is a perilous terrain. Archives, for instance, provide facts but may not reveal the whole picture. Meeting in the flesh and interviewing some of the actors and witnesses of the period proved essential, but also frustrating. One says only what one wants to say, and one’s truth is not the whole truth. Autobiographies and memoirs are the same: they are often as interesting for what they conceal as for what they reveal. Journals, diaries, and correspondence, written as events took place and not tampered with or rewritten years after, are almost as reliable as archives, like a stream of consciousness unpolluted by afterthought. However, objectivity and neutrality do not exist in personal recollections and relationships. As Richard Seaver, an American student in Paris in 1948 who introduced Samuel Beckett to the Anglophone world, wrote in the preface of his autobiography The Tender Hour of Twilight: “Time is not kind to the harried mind, filling it each passing day with the detritus of the moment, like silt at a river’s mouth slowly covering the earlier levels and slyly reconstituting the terrain.”4

  I was therefore left cross-checking information through a multitude of sources, press cuttings, interviews, archives, photographs—as many and varied documents as I could lay my hands on. My days at the French National Library, also known as the Très Grande Bibliothèque, proved illuminating too—not only because of what I found there, but also because of the architectural experience it provides for researchers. It is probably the only truly Stalinist building in Paris with its crushing scale, Kafkaesque maze of corridors, some of them leading nowhere, and metallic doors as heavy as gravestones—and thus offers the unexpectedly perfect setting for the study of postwar culture and politics.

  Paris being Paris, many places have not changed since the 1940s, and I tried to find those “crime scenes,” as I thought of them, hoping to capture the atmosphere of the time and to lay my hands on objects that had been touched by the ghosts I was stalking. Many of our protagonists lived in decrepit and cheap Left Bank hotels; those are still here today, but many have been transformed into luxury boutique lodgings. Except one: La Louisiane,5 family-owned since the time of Napoleon. Beauvoir lived there for five years, between 1943 and 1948, and so did Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Juliette Gréco, and many others. There may be free wifi today,6 but the rooms at La Louisiane have not changed much since the 1940s. I booked myself in and slept between those evocative walls, reliving Beauvoir’s words:

  Thursday, May 16, 1946. Spring is coming. On my way to get cigarettes, I saw beautiful bunches of asparagus, wrapped in red paper and lying on the vegetable stall. Work. I have rarely felt so much pleasure writing, especially in the afternoon, when I come back at 4:30 p.m. in this room still full of the morning’s smoke. On my desk, sheets of paper covered in green ink. The touch of my cigarette and pen, at the tip of my fingers, feels nice. I really understand Marcel Duchamp when, asked whether he regretted having abandoned painting, he replied: “I miss the feeling of squeezing the paint tube and seeing the paint spilling onto the palette; I liked that.”7

  I never expected the past to assault, as it were, my every sense. I had expected a joust of ideas, endless intellectual disputes, but not for the past to materialize so clearly that I could touch it, smell it, even taste it.

  For me, writing this story has been rather like walking into a house on fire. The live fire of the war, the furnace of emotions, the passion of politics, the spectacular fallings-out, the brutal sex, the nerve-racking frustrations, the insane and beautiful ideals, the plotting of big schemes—so many failures and some remarkable achievements. The subjects of this book might have failed in the end to prevent the Cold War from becoming the new world order; they did, however, set up many standards by which we still live, three-quarters of a century later.

  PART I

  WAR WAS MY MASTER

  JULY 1938–AUGUST 1945

  Our story does not begin in the stifling hot summer days of 1944, with the rumble of Allied tanks advancing along Parisian boulevards, the tears of joy pearling down young French women’s faces, and thousands of complete strangers kissing in celebration. It would be tempting to start then, but it would also be misleading. To understand the absolute elation of the summer of 1944, one that is difficult to put into words almost seventy-five years later, we need to feel the profound pain that preceded it, both mental and physical. And the sense of unbearable shame that accompanied it. To understand the ecstasy of those days, one cannot avoid looking into the haggard eyes of Parisians in May and June 1940, nor can one escape confronting the cataclysmic days before the brief war that led to the fall of France and the Nazi occupation.

  Postwar Paris writers, artists, and thinkers cannot be fully appreciated without plunging first into the turmoil of Nazi occupation, which not only formed them but also informed their actions and thinking throughout their lives. Each experienced the war differently, but all endured it one way or another—whether at its epicenter, Paris, or at a distance, stranded in Vichy France or North Africa, or, in the harshest possible way, in prisoner-of-war or concentration camps in Germany, under the bombs in London, or by proxy, vicariously riveted to the news on the radio in the safety of New York, or finally by resolving to put an end to it through active combat. All of them were somehow reborn, their characters redefined, in those years of the war, and they later adopted Paris as their home precisely because of what they had been through.

  Years later, three overlapping generations of renowned Paris residents could individually say: “War was my master, and Paris my school of life.”1

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE FALL

  ON THE BRINK

  Queen Elizabeth was wearing an ankle-length white satin dress, long white silk gloves, a white satin pochette, and a wide-brimmed white hat. She was walking slowly, with French president Albert Lebrun, in a tailcoat, top hat, and white gloves, a few feet behind. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England’s official state visit to Paris, in July 1938, was intended to impress Hitler by reaffirming the strong alliance between Britain and France. Newsreel operators placed along the route of the royal cortège filmed the black limousines approaching the Louvre, followed by mounted Republican Guards in full regalia, their elaborate sabers with inlaid brass scintillating in the sun. Britain’s monarchs had chosen to pay a visit to the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, to show the world that the Entente was still Cordiale and everything was as it should be. Except that Germany had annexed Austria just four months earlier.

  The newsreel shows six men hovering around the royal party as they pass a series of early Impressionist paintings. Jacques Jaujard, the deputy head of the French National Museums, was among them. Tall, dark-ha
ired, and slim, he was, at forty-three, a dashing albeit austere figure.

  Jaujard did not believe in appeasement, he never had. While he showed the queen around the Louvre’s Grande Galerie,1 very few knew that he had already started to plan the evacuation of France’s entire public art collections for when, not if, the Germans would invade Paris. He had supervised the expatriation of the entire Prado Museum’s collection from Madrid to Switzerland, to shelter it during the Spanish Civil War. He had already begun to elaborate contingency plans for this war, writing up lists and ordering thousands of wooden cases made to precise measurements.

  There were very few people in the summer of 1938 who felt personally concerned by Germany’s aggressive policies against its eastern neighbors, let alone who were preparing actively for war. Untroubled by the worries of a grown-up man spending his days and nights thinking how best to preserve the world’s cultural heritage and thousands of years of civilization from a very uncertain future, the youth of Paris were more preoccupied by emulating their idol Charles Trenet, “Le Fou Chantant” (“the Singing Fool”), as the twenty-four-year-old musical prodigy was known. In the summer of 1938, Paris’s teenagers wore blue shirts and white ties and hats just like Trenet, the man who made France swingue.

  One of their philosophy teachers at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly, the plush western suburb of Paris, also felt completely unconcerned by world events. Like his pupils, the thirty-three-year-old Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed listening to Charles Trenet. What he enjoyed even more was shattering social conventions. But war? War was not on his mind. He liked taking his students to cafés to discuss literature, something that was simply not done in 1938; nobody before had dared to breach the revered distance between a pupil and his teacher, and question the concept of hierarchy so directly. Sartre also liked to lend his pupils his personal books. Through this strange-looking man with a terrible squint, a buoyant intelligence, and a contagious laugh, they discovered the writing of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Faulkner.2 Sartre was himself about to be published for the first time by the prestigious publisher Gallimard. He called his first novel La nausée (Nausea),3 an unsavory title. Le Figaro and other conservative newspapers deemed it unpleasant, too bleak, nihilistic even, but all recognized the undeniable talent of its author.

  La nausée was dedicated to “The Beaver,” a word play in English on the name of his best friend, sparring partner, and lover, Simone de Beauvoir. “Beauvoir” sounds like “beaver” in English pronunciation, which is castor in French. In other words, Simone de Beauvoir became for her close friends “Le Castor” by way of English. Le Castor was, just like Sartre, a brilliant thirty-year-old philosophy teacher, though rather more beautiful. They lived together—that is, they lived in the same shabby hotel, the Hôtel Mistral, 24 rue de Cels, just behind Montparnasse Cemetery, though not in the same room.

  Beauvoir and Sartre were attractive teachers and great listeners and never passed moral judgments. Unsurprisingly, their students became their most ardent admirers, often developing a crush on them. Instead of scolding them, Beauvoir and Sartre returned their affection. There were the very blond sisters Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz, there was Jacques-Laurent Bost, called “le petit Bost” as he was the youngest of a family of ten children, and there were Bianca Bienenfeld and Nathalie Sorokine. They were all infatuated with Simone. Beauvoir and Sartre had agreed that their relationship was essential while other relationships they might have on the side were to remain contingent. Their life together, and not together, formed ripples in an ever-growing pool. New entrants to Beauvoir and Sartre’s circle usually accepted the premises of their contingent relationships with their mentor-lover, and an astonishingly large number would remain on friendly terms after passion had consumed itself. Then they often fell for another member of the group. Transparency was not universally shared between the members of what would be later known as the “Sartrean family,” and many small secrets allowed such a system to work. For instance in 1938 and 1939, while she was in love with Bost, Beauvoir was having a passionate affair with Bianca (Bost knew about Bianca but Bianca did not know about Bost). Sartre then started courting Bianca in January 1939 after Beauvoir had ended her affair with her. Beauvoir and Sartre were not only lovers and mentors; they also provided for these student-lovers of theirs. They worked hard and paid for everyone’s lodgings and food. Their world was one of knowledge and foreplay in which politics and world affairs played the tiniest of parts. They were philosophers and thought of themselves as above politics.

  Samuel Beckett did not have much time for politics either. He had just turned thirty-three and liked sleeping till noon. On April 18, 1939, he wrote to his friend Thomas MacGreevey back in Dublin: “If there is a war, as I am sure there must be soon, I shall place myself at the disposition of this country.”4 Beckett wanted to be useful; he had time on his hands and had not yet found his voice. He was living in the shadow of another Irish writer, James Joyce, for whom he had briefly worked as secretary, and he was at pains to actually produce something he thought worthy. There was of course Murphy (1938), a novel that he had written in English and that he’d have loved his friend Alfred Péron, an English teacher, to translate into French, but when the two young men met every Tuesday for lunch, they ended up playing tennis rather than talking about work. Apart from Murphy, Beckett had a few poems (some in French) and some translation work to show, but not much else. He read a lot, though, and along with his admiration for this French philosophy teacher’s book Nausea, which he thought “extraordinarily good,”5 he liked the work of an older writer, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, particularly his novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night). Beckett lived very modestly on his occasional translating and teaching income, supplemented by a monthly allowance from his brother Frank in Ireland. At least if there was a war, he could be of some use.

  While Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Samuel Beckett were either happily ignoring world affairs or envisaging what their future role in a war could be, Jacques Jaujard was already fully engaged in action, following his instinct. He had confided to Laure Albin Guillot, a sixty-year-old celebrity photographer, that he would soon do an inventory of the museum’s art collection, a rearrangement of some kind. The terms remained purposely vague. Whether he privately told her the extent of his plans is uncertain. Perhaps he wanted one of the most talented French photographers of the 1930s to immortalize artworks that might soon be destroyed or vanish forever.

  He could have asked another, younger photographer, the thirty-one-year-old Henri Cartier-Bresson, known at the time only as Henri Cartier. Cartier-Bresson was the well-known name of Parisian industrialists and he did not want his comrades in the Communist Party to realize that he was the son of grands bourgeois. However, Jaujard might have been wary of asking the official photographer of the Communist newspaper Ce Soir, edited by Aragon, especially as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had just agreed to sign a pact of nonaggression. Besides, Henri Cartier was busy working for the film director Jean Renoir. Since 1936 he had been enjoying his role as Renoir’s assistant director, not only on Communist propaganda documentaries but also films such as La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), which portrayed a world on the brink—the world of the pleasure-seeking French bourgeoisie oblivious to the world around them.6

  On August 24, 1939, the day after the Soviet foreign minister Molotov and his German counterpart von Ribbentrop had signed the pact that gave Hitler free rein to attack the West, Jacques Jaujard ordered the Louvre to be closed for three days. Officially, for repair. In fact, for three days and three nights, two hundred Louvre staff, students from the Louvre art school, and grand magasin employees from La Samaritaine carefully placed four thousand world treasures in wooden cases. Luckily, The Wedding at Cana by Veronese could be rolled around a cylinder. So could Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. But Delacroix’s Crusaders, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and all the Rubenses were too fragile and had to be hauled on a
special open truck made to transport set designs and murals from France’s state theater company, the Comédie-Française. The Raft of the Medusa, weighing nearly one and a half tons, stood in the open-air truck covered only by a giant blanket.

  Masterpieces were categorized in order of importance: a yellow circle for very valuable ones, a green circle for major artworks, and a red circle for world treasures. The white case containing the Mona Lisa was marked with three red circles. In a letter to the curator who was in charge of traveling with La Joconde but did not yet know the full burden of his responsibility, Jaujard broke the news by telling him: “Old friend, your convoy will be made of eight trucks. I have to tell you that the Chenu truck which will be departing from 5 rue de la Terrasse, with the plate number 2162RM2, contains a case with the letters MN written in black. It is the Mona Lisa.”7 Leonardo da Vinci’s finest work was traveling in an ambulance specially fitted with elastic rubber-sprung suspension.

  Private cars, ambulances, trucks, delivery vans, and taxis were requisitioned. A convoy of 203 vehicles transporting 1,862 wooden cases set out one morning in late August to eleven castles in France where they would wait, anonymous and secure, for what would come. Grand châteaux on the Loire such as Chambord and Cheverny were used, but Jaujard also requisitioned more inconspicuous and privately owned estates conveniently “lost” in the French countryside, far from any strategic locations. Every convoy had a curator and staff attached to it. Their mission: to look after the art collections in their new homes for as long as it was necessary. Whole families were displaced and relocated. For those dedicated museum employees, it was an adventure that would last more than five years.