Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (28 page)

Those who gathered around Sartre became loosely known as
la famille Sartre,
in the same way that young writers and actors who gathered round Jacques Prévert were known as
la bande Prévert
. Prévert was famous as a scriptwriter; between 1936 and 1946, he worked on a series of scripts for the film-maker Marcel Carné – among which were
Les Visiteurs du soir
and
Les Enfants du Paradis
. But he never had much success with his poetry until 1945, when Gallimard published
Paroles
. Prévert’s limpid, irreverent, light-hearted verses hit post-war Paris like a breath of fresh air. They were set to music and sung in the street, and within a few years Gallimard had sold over 100,000 copies. Paul Boubal, the
patron
of the Flore, felt that Prévert and his friends had sown the seeds of the Saint-Germain phenomenon (at least in his own café); but Simone de Beauvoir rather disapproved of
la bande Prévert,
because they were politically uncommitted.

While waiting for the Liberation, Simone de Beauvoir gave badly cooked little dinners in her ‘toothpaste-pink’ hotel room, with at least half the guests sitting on the edge of the bed. Sartre talked of founding a magazine with Beauvoir, Camus and Merleau-Ponty, and this took shape in the autumn of 1945 when the first issue of
Les Temps modernes
was published.

Despite the bleakness of his philosophy, Sartre could be very engaging. One who knew himwell at that time described him as ‘overflowing with charm, I have seldom known anyone as amusing, as sympathetic and as generous’. He was always the first to support a good cause and help struggling artists. He organized a benefit evening for the artist Antonin Artaud, as well as giving himmoney. Very often, not wanting to hurt the pride of those he helped, he arranged for funds to be given in a roundabout way: financial help for the novelist Violette Leduc was always channelled through Gallimard, and paid as ‘royalties’ on her own work.

Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre was far more emotionally taxing than she ever dared admit. Sartre had nicknamed her ‘Castor’, the French for beaver. (Others referred to her as Notre Dame de Sartre, or La Grande Sartreuse.) At moments she could still look beautiful, but her seriousness and suppressed anxiety about Sartre had started to mould her face into that of an old maid. He had always dominated her, making her put up with his compulsive philandering – what she termed ‘
désordres amoureux
’. She remarked to a friend that ‘Sartre had a rather diabolical side to him: he conquered young girls by explaining their souls to them.’

In spite of the parties and the drinking, most members of
la famille Sartre
seemed to be finishing books to be published after the Liberation. The upstairs room of the Café de Flore often looked like a classroom, particularly in the winter of 1943–4: at one table, Sartre was at work on
Roads to Freedom,
Beauvoir was writing
All Men are Mortal,
Mouloudji was writing
Enrico,
and Jacques-Laurent Bost
Le Dernier des métiers
. They read each other’s manuscripts, and usually gave them the attention that work from a friend deserved.

Merleau-Ponty, however, wanted Sartre to read his manuscript as a philosopher, not as a friend. He left it with hardly a word, and Sartre, who was as usual very busy, glanced over it in a cursory way and made congratulatory noises. This was not good enough for Merleau-Ponty. Sartre recalls the incident: ‘He discovered my bolthole, and confronted me there. I suddenly found him standing in front of me, smiling, the manuscript held out. “I agree with what you say,” I babbled. “I’m very glad,” he said without moving. “You should still read it,” he added patiently. I read, and I learned, and I ended fascinated by what I was reading.’

Raymond Queneau, poet, novelist and philologist, was – with Merleau-Ponty – one of the most distinguished members of Sartre’s circle. Queneau, who was a senior editor at Gallimard, led a scholarly life oppressed by the most profound despair; yet this never seemed to affect his conviviality, his infectious laughter, his passion for jazz and his fascination with logic and mathematics.

Michel and Zette Leiris were also part of the group. Michel Leiris was a novelist and ethnologist, while Zette managed the gallery of her brother-in-law, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer, who lived with themsecretly during the Occupation. Their apartment, which had often concealed other Jews and members of the Resistance, was on the Quai des Grands Augustins, overlooking the Seine. Paintings by Picasso, Miró and Juan Gris hung on its walls above good French bourgeois furniture. They had many friends among the artists of the Left Bank, including André Masson, Giacometti and Picasso, whose studio was literally round the corner; and it was in their apartment that Picasso’s play
Desire Caught by the Tail
was first performed in a reading on 19 March 1944, over three years after it was written.

Camus was the presenter, with a large stick to thump the floor to indicate changes of scenery, which he described. The play was evocative of ‘avant-garde works from the 1920s’;, as the list of characters shows. Michel Leiris had the main part – le Gros Pied. Other readers included Jean-Paul Sartre as le Bout-Rond, Raymond Queneau as l’Oignon, Jacques-Laurent Bost as le Silence, Zanie de Campan as la Tarte, Dora Maar as l’Angoisse Maigre and Simone de Beauvoir as la Cousine. Picasso and his friends put it on for their own amusement, but ‘
la fine fleur de l’intelligentsia parisienne
’ was breathless in anticipation of a major event. By seven o’clock the Leirises’ salon was packed.

Picasso’s little comedy, almost an exercise in nostalgia, served only to underline the obvious. Surrealism as a movement was as good as over before the war, having virtually exhausted its potential to subvert received thought, and foundered on the political split when Aragon, Éluard and others felt that only Communism had the answer. One day in the Flore, Sartre asked Queneau, a former Surrealist, what he thought was left from the movement. ‘The impression of having had a youth,’ came the reply.

In May 1944, shortly before the Liberation, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were sitting in the Flore when they heard a voice. ‘
C’est vous, Sartre?
’ They were confronted by a tough, shaven-headed character with a broken nose. This was Jean Genet, described by his biographer as ‘the Proust of marginal Paris’. Genet may have had a ‘distrustful, almost aggressive look’ as a result of the toughness of a life in reformatories, on the street as a male prostitute and in prison, but ‘his eyes knew how to smile, and his mouth could express the astonishment of childhood’.

In the autumn of 1945, Simone de Beauvoir in a cinema queue on the Champs-Élysées met ‘a tall, blonde, elegant woman, with an ugly face bursting with life’. She assumed she was a woman of fashion but in fact this was the unpublished novelist Violette Leduc, who was living off her wits and strength as a ‘suitcase-bearer’, bringing back to Paris hefty cases full of butter and meat from Normandy, which she sold to black-market restaurants.

A few days later, Violette Leduc came to Simone de Beauvoir in the Café de Flore bringing the manuscript of her novel,
L’Asphyxie
. On being advised to change the ending, she disappeared and did exactly as she was told. Beauvoir was so impressed with the final result that she passed it to Camus, who was then on the editorial committee at Gallimard, and he accepted it immediately for publication. The only drawback was that Violette Leduc became completely infatuated with Beauvoir, who found that she had to lay down very strict rules if their friendship was to continue.

Violette Leduc struck up a close
entente
with Jean Genet, and these two outsiders provided a great deal of voyeuristic interest to Sartre and his friends. The one person with whom Leduc clashed temperamentally was Nathalie Sarraute, the novelist who had hidden Samuel Beckett during the Occupation. Leduc tried to get on with Sarraute, but their almost chemical incompatibility was made worse by jealousy: Sarraute was indubitably Sartre’s protégée, while Leduc’s position with Castor was far less secure.

The autumn of 1945 saw the great existentialist boom, although Sartre and Beauvoir were irritated that the label was automatically attached to anything they wrote. In September Beauvoir’s novel of the Resistance,
The Blood of Others,
enjoyed both critical and commercial success. Over the course of the next couple of months came two volumes of Sartre’s
Roads to Freedom
and the first number of
Les Temps modernes
. Sartre’s lecture, ‘
L’Existentialisme est-il un humanisme
?’, on 29 October 1945, was packed out; hundreds could not get into the hall, and women fainted in the crush.

Les Temps modernes
wielded a tremendous influence. The title was partly inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s film
Modern Times,
but the name was principally intended to stand for an era of intellectual change. Its editorial committee alone was enough to guarantee attention, for it included Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, Merleau-Ponty as philosophy editor, and Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau for poetry and literature, as well as Raymond Aron and Jean Paulhan, the grammarian, who was the only one with any experience of running a literary review. Malraux was invited to join but refused, partly, one suspects, because he was abandoning the radicalismof his youth. Considering Beauvoir’s dislike of him – ‘he takes himself for Goethe and Dostoyevsky at the same time’ – it was just as well that he stayed out.

Gaston Gallimard agreed to back the publication and to give it office space; three of its editors – Paulhan, Camus and Queneau – were on Gallimard’s own editorial committee, to say nothing of the others who were his authors. The first problem was to secure a paper ration. Beauvoir and Leiris went to see Jacques Soustelle, de Gaulle’s Minister of Information, but he was reluctant because Raymond Aron, who had turned against the General, was on their committee. In fact, Aron was to leave not long afterwards because of an ideological dispute.

Simone de Beauvoir saw
Les Temps modernes
as the showpiece of what she called the ‘Sartrian ideal’. Almost immediately, however, she found herself swamped by manuscripts and besieged by earnestly ambitious young writers. It seemed as if half the young men on the Left Bank had been working on equally gloomy, pseudo-existentialist novels of the Resistance, because that was what was expected of them.

The theatre in France during the last two years of the Occupation had certainly proved itself alive, even if many leading members of the profession found themselves under clouds of varying sizes at the Liberation.

Parisian audiences had been educated to the avant-garde in the 1920s, and in the years before the war the playwrights Anouilh, Giraudoux, Salacrou and Cocteau had already prepared the ground for what is seen as the post-Liberation theatre.

Sartre’s first play,
The Flies,
was performed in 1943. So too was Giraudoux’s
Sodom et Gomorrhe,
although it was produced without France’s greatest actor-manager, Louis Jouvet, who had taken his company into a nomadic exile in South America. One of the great successes had been Jean-Louis Barrault’s production of Paul Claudel’s
The Satin Shoe,
but Sartre and Beauvoir felt unable to judge the play objectively, so sickened were they by Claudel’s ‘
Ode au maréchal
’. Early in 1944, Jean Anouilh’s
Antigone
appeared, then shortly before the invasion of Normandy Sartre’s
Huis clos
was put on at the Vieux-Colombier. This play about hell, which Brasillach went to see before going into hiding, was the most influential. The notion that ‘Hell is other people’ passed into international currency.

More plays from the existentialist group followed over the next two years. In 1945 Albert Camus’s
Caligula
received great acclaim, while Simone de Beauvoir’s
Useless Mouths
was regarded as too mechanical. Then Sartre returned in the following year with
Men Without Shadows
and
The Respectful Prostitute
at the Théâtre Antoine, where his most politically important play,
Dirty Hands,
would follow. But while Sartre headed back towards realism with issues and moral dilemmas, the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ of Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, all influenced by Pirandello, was about to wander off in a very different direction.

Without doubt, the greatest success of the immediate post-war theatre was Jean Giraudoux’s
The Madwoman of Chaillot
at the Théâtre de l’Athénée. Written during the Occupation, shortly before Giraudoux’s death early in 1944, it was produced by Louis Jouvet at the end of the following year. Even if the story today may seem a curious piece of radical chic fantasy (an inspired madwoman, in a sort of modern court of miracles, manages to trick the exploiters of Paris by playing upon their greed and to imprison them in the city’s sewers), Jouvet’s direction, Christian Bérard’s sets and the acting were superb. When the play opened in December 1945 and, for a long time to come, the little theatre was packed with both the
beau monde
and bohemia.

The world of painting and sculpture was also undergoing a period of intellectual and political ferment. When the Salon d’Automne opened on 6 October 1944, it was called the ‘Salon de la Libération’. All painters deemed collaborationist were banned, including Derain, Van Dongen, Segonzac, Despiau, Belmondo and Vlaminck.

In an unprecedented mark of respect to a foreign painter, a special section entitled ‘Hommage à Picasso’ showed seventy-four paintings and five sculptures. On the morning of 5 October, the day before the opening of the exhibition, the front page of
L’Humanité
was not, as usual, devoted to the advances of the Red Army. Instead, across five columns, its headline declared:

PICASSO

THE GREATEST OF ALL LIVING ARTISTS