Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (53 page)

‘Such a polemic,’ commented Raymond Aron, ‘would hardly be understood outside France and Saint-Germain-des-Prés.’ There, more than anywhere else, progressive intellectuals continued to turn a blind eye to Stalinist methods. Some acknowledged them, but justified them. Others, like Simone de Beauvoir, acknowledged them and dismissed them as irrelevant. She argued that if you made an issue of them, you must be a supporter of American capitalism. She accepted that, though she disliked Kravchenko, the trial had undoubtedly proved that labour camps existed in the Soviet Union. Yet she revealed herself in a passage describing the American writer Richard Wright: ‘With his eyes shining from misguided fanaticism, he was breathlessly recounting stories of clandestine arrests, betrayal and liquidation – no doubt true – but one did not understand either the point or the scope of what he was saying.’

This new
trahison des clercs
was firmly in the Jacobin tradition: an intellectual terrorism justifying physical terror. Stalin’s regime might be pitiless, his apologists argued, but all revolutions had a terrible majesty. What mattered was that the Soviet Union’s stated philosophy was on the side of human justice. Against this, the United States offered no ideological or social programme except economic freedom, which simply meant the freedom to exploit others.

Those who were not sealed inside bubbles of morally vacuous theory might have fallen for the wartime appeal of a party of martyrs. But they could not blind themselves to the suspicion that the terrifying sacrifices which had fuelled the Soviet system had been wasted and were still being wasted. No Utopia could be built on a mass graveyard.

American Paris of the Montparnasse era had ceased to exist after the Wall Street crash of 1929, yet a certain pale renaissance occurred after February 1948, when the franc was devalued against the dollar. France once again became affordable for writers and anyone else with artistic pretensions. But the most conspicuous American presence in Paris at the end of the decade consisted of diplomats, soldiers and Marshall Plan executives.

For those cashing cheques at Morgan’s Bank in the Place Vendôme at the beginning of February, it was ‘like Christmas morning, strangers beaming at each other’. A hundred dollars bought over 30,000 francs. For those who cared about clothes, a Dior dress was within their grasp.

Arthur Miller, who reached Paris in the winter of 1947, formed a very different impression. He found a city which had been ‘finished’ by the war: ‘The sun never seemed to rise over Paris, the winter sky like a lid of iron graying the skin of one’s hands and making faces wan. A doomed and listless silence, few cars on the streets, occasional trucks running on wood-burning engines, old women on ancient bicycles.’

The Hotel Pont-Royal on the rue du Bac, where Miller stayed, was gloomy but cheap. The concierge wore a tail coat which was coming to pieces and ‘his chin always showed little nicks fromhaving shaved with cold water’. Once a day this prematurely aged man rushed home across Paris to feed his rabbits, the only source of meat for his family, as for much of the population. The ‘hungry-looking’ young prostitute who sat in the lobby all night watched passers-by ‘with a philosopher’s superior curiosity’.

Miller went off in search of Jean-Paul Sartre, having heard that he could be found in the Montana bar. Had he but asked, the frayed concierge and the philosophical prostitute could have told him that Sartre and his friends now met in the basement bar of the very hotel in which he was staying. Far more important to Miller’s work, however, was an evening watching Louis Jouvet in Giraudoux’s
Ondine
. The theatre was freezing, the audience wriggling their feet in their shoes and blowing on their hands. Jouvet himself was so ill that he sat throughout the play in an armchair, wrapped in sweater and muffler. Looking at the audience, Miller felt that ‘there really was such a thing as a defeated people’; Jouvet, however, managed to connect with them ‘in a personal way I had never experienced before, speaking to each of them individually in their beloved tongue. I was bored by the streams of talk and the inaction on-stage, but I could understand that it was the language that was saving their souls, hearing it together and being healed by it, the one unity left to them and thus their one hope. I was moved by the tenderness of the people towards him, I who came from a theatre of combat with audiences.’

Truman Capote also stayed in the Hotel Pont-Royal, in a tiny room on the top floor. ‘Despite the waterfall hangovers and constantly cascading nausea,’ he wrote, ‘I was under the strange impression that I was having a damn good time, the kind of educational experience necessary to an artist.’

Simone de Beauvoir was frequently seen in the hotel, since the
famille Sartre
had moved to its ‘leathery little basement bar’ after fleeing the tourists in the Café de Flore. Capote sensed that he was a figure of fun in their eyes; according to one friend, he felt ‘he was the victimof some intangible conspiracy of malediction’. Beauvoir had not liked Capote’s
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
and had little respect for ‘fairies’. She compared the tiny American, in his over-large white jersey and pale-blue velvet trousers, to a ‘white mushroom’; and laughed with the barmen who pointed out that his first name was that of the President of the United States, while his surname was the French slang for condom.

Capote replied in kind with his description of the Sartre clan in the Pont-Royal bar: ‘Wall-eyed, pipe-sucking, pasty-hued Sartre and his spinsterish moll, Beauvoir, were usually propped in a corner like an abandoned pair of ventriloquist’s dolls.’

Camus was the only one who was always kind to the young American. Capote, however, later claimed that one night Camus, the great womanizer, had suddenly succumbed to his attraction and gone to bed with him– a story impossible to deny, but unlikely.

Capote also visited Colette, who received him from her bed ‘
à la
Louis Quatorze at his morning levée’. He described her ‘slanted eyes, lucent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl; a spare and clever face powdered clown-pale; her lips, for all her considerable years, were a slippery, shiny, exciting show-girl red; and her hair was red, or reddish, a rosy bush, a kinky spray’. She asked him what he expected from life. He told her that he did not know what he expected, but he knew what he wanted, which was to be a grown-up person. ‘Colette’s painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. “But that,” she said, “is the one thing none of us can ever be.”’

One of the first writers to migrate to France after the Liberation, as opposed to those who arrived in uniform, was the black writer Richard Wright, author of
Black Boy
and
Native Son
. Thanks to the combined efforts of Gertrude Stein and Claude Lévi-Strauss, then French cultural attaché in Washington, he arrived in Paris with his wife, Ellen (who was white), and their daughter, Julia, in May 1946.

The State Department had been very reluctant to give him a passport, but once in Paris – where he was an honoured guest – they could hardly ignore him. Nevertheless, Wright was seen as a distinct liability. At an official reception at the American Embassy given a few days after his arrival, he was told, ‘For God’s sake, don’t let these foreigners turn you into a brick to hurl through our windows!’

Wright could not get over the welcome accorded to him by the French. He was made an honorary citizen of Paris, and his French publisher, Gallimard, threw a party in his honour at which the guests included Roger Martin du Gard, Michel Leiris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paulhan and Marcel Duhamel. His move to Paris had been made to gain a better perspective on the core of his fiction: the racial problems of America. He acted as a consultant for
Présence africaine
and Sartre’s
Les Temps modernes,
and in 1948 he became active in Sartre and Rousset’s Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire.

James Baldwin, another black writer living in Paris, was deeply indebted to Richard Wright, who did much to help him in the first stages of his career as a writer. Yet Baldwin’s feelings towards Wright were complex, almost Oedipal, and they spilled out in an essay for
Zero
magazine called ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’. Baldwin argued that the protest novel was flawed because its essential humanity was obscured by politics. Wright took this as a personal attack on
Native Son
and was bitterly hurt. The relationship between the two writers never recovered, even though Wright continued to bail the impoverished Baldwin out of debt from time to time. Baldwin managed to survive only by scrounging off friends and hustling in gay bars, yet Paris helped himgain confidence. He was treated as an American writer, not a black, and like many foreign writers he found that in France writing was respected as a profession.

The largest contingent of left-bank Americans in the late 1940s were young soldiers who had become students under the GI Bill of Rights. Once the franc was devalued, their twenty dollars a week provided just enough to live on. A number of them were in a belated state of rebellion against the stupider indignities of military discipline and became attracted to radical politics. The French Communist Party, through its Maison de la Pensée Française, made special attempts to win over foreign students in Paris, especially Americans. The American Embassy was concerned by this development and kept an eye open, but there was little it could do, except pass the matter on to the FBI and CIA.

From the spring of 1948, Paris saw a very different American influx with some 3,000 new residents, all of them under the umbrella of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), the executive arm of the Marshall Plan. When Paul Hoffman, the chairman of Studebaker, who had been appointed to oversee the Marshall Plan, outlined his staff needs to the Senate Appropriation Committee, he said: ‘We hope to hold our organization down to approximately 500 in the United States and approximately 1,000 in the eighteen nations in which we must be represented abroad’; but the task proved far greater and more complex than envisaged. There was also no shortage of applicants. Some 32,000 young Americans, imbued with idealism and the longing to live in Paris, came forward eagerly.

Averell Harriman, the Secretary of Commerce, had been at the forefront of persuading the American people, and especially the business community, that their self-interest and moral duty lay in helping Europe. The accompanying message was that Europe needed to learn American ways. ‘We have developed a system through which an American worker can produce many times more than a worker in any other country,’ said Harriman to the Pacific Northwest Trade Association in Seattle. ‘Less than half a million American miners produced last year 50 percent more coal than did two million miners in Europe.’ Yet the Marshall Plan proposal declared that it would be an ‘unwarranted interference with the internal affairs of friendly nations’ to demand that they adopt the American model of capitalism.

Harriman’s main objective was, in fact, strategic: he did not want to see a ruined Europe fall prey to Communism. Business leaders made it very clear through their lobbying offensive on Congress that the generosity of the Marshall Plan – up to 17 billion dollars to Europe over five years – should not be a one-way affair. American industry had to be allowed to profit, whether through the guarantee of increased export markets or the chance to dump excess stocks. This would lend some substance to the instinctive suspicion of many in Europe, mostly on the left but also on the right, that the Marshall Plan was America’s economic version of the Trojan Horse. (A public opinion poll in France showed that 47 per cent of the sample believed that the Marshall Plan was dictated by America’s need to extend its markets.) On the other hand, Jean Monnet, France’s greatest planner, defended it strongly, since to have continued with a ruined economy and severe social unrest would have allowed far less independence in the medium and long term.

Once the huge package of measures was sold to Congress, President Truman appointed Averell Harriman as the Special Representative of the Economic Cooperation Administration. His swearing-in took place just after the
John H. Quick,
the first American cargo ship full of Marshall Plan grain, had steamed out of Galveston, Texas. Within a few months, 150 vessels a day were crossing the Atlantic in a logistical operation that dwarfed any comparable movement during the Second World War.

Averell Harriman had already proved himself at almost everything he touched. As a rugged, good-looking and rich young man, he had rowed for Yale, skied superbly and excelled as an eight-goal polo player and member of the American team which defeated the Argentinians in 1928. He had been a highly competent chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad before Roosevelt had persuaded him to serve his country, most famously as United States ambassador in Moscow during the war. Now Harriman took over the Hotel Talleyrand on the corner of the Place de la Concorde as his headquarters in his battle to thwart Communism in Europe.

The announcement of the Marshall Plan may have been greeted by beleaguered European politicians like the distant trumpets of an army coming to its relief. But once the first tranche of 4.9 billion dollars was on the table to be divided between nations, Harriman needed all his experience of international dealings, all his toughness and all his self-control. He faced skirmishing and blocking actions in almost every direction: the British, who felt that they deserved special treatment after their wartime sacrifice, were trying to protect the status of sterling as a reserve currency; General Lucius Clay, ‘the Kaiser’, demanded that Germany be treated no differently from France; the French wanted no interference in the use to which they put the aid; and bureaucracy in Washington wrangled over every detail. * During interminable meetings, Harriman kept his temper by drawing vigorous doodles – then pushed hard at the crucial moment. His skin was thick enough to ignore the barrage of Communist attacks against ‘
La 5e Colonne américaine en France
’. Most important of all, his relations with Paul Hoffman in Washington were based on mutual trust, so no transatlantic dispute ever escalated into a civil war.