An incredible book Left Bank Art,
A beautiful account this one of a decade that writing it was just fertile, would be outrageously reductive. I start to tell you that I love this book so badly, maybe because there is a lot of freedom. These creatives created a new movement, the existentialism, but at the same time they lived their existences in freedom and excesses, as it happens in most cases. Not only: Paris influenced a lot the intellectual dialogue and nothing, nothing would have returned after the war at the old normality but a new course, new ideas, a different dimension of society, couple, politics would have started to be taken in consideration. I was thinking that after all it was normal: repression created more freedom in every sense and what it was repressed was now set free in every sense. The war created monsters and after the war, intellectuals tried their best for giving a new direction at a lost society still shocked by what lived during that past years.
Four years of occupation, Paris after the war researched peace, and mainly, what these creatives tried to do, they could be playwrights, writers, sculptures, painters, artists, was to re-create a new beauty in the world after all the horror seen and felt during the war. War is oppression, war is suspension of all freedoms and war is fear.
After the war these artists created the New Journalism, the Theater of the Absurd.
After 1944 policy became central in the existence of artists of the Left Bank. Paris was seen as a sweet refugee: these artists thought that an European Union could be great, fighting for the right or abortion and divorce. They discovered the so-called Third Way.
They largely used drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. The picture of the artist is plenty respected. The editor of Elle became a government minister; Mona Lisa after the war returned at the Louvre.
But what happened during the war? Hemingway was now an established author, and new artists discovered him, Steinbeck, Faulkner. Sartre published La Nausée dedicated to his lover Simone de Beauvoir.
You musn't imagine that this couple was closed. It was open. People entered, consumed their passion and then they all remained friends. No dramas. This situation was called The Sartrean Family. Samuel Beckett in the while wanted to be helpful in case of a war, seeing it still idealistically. Who did not see war as distant, but started to act with precision and method was Jacques Jaujard. He decided to remove from Louvre all that art that would have interested the enemy for safest places.
Picasso's life during these years was complicated. He had a mistress with which he had a daughter, and at the same time he started a relationship with Maar. Anxious about war, he wrote, painted for de-stressing his mind by this horrible thought.
Sylvia Beach was the owner of Shakespeare and Company. With Adrienne, her companion, they formed the so-called Odeonia. The author writes that it was "A kingdom of culture, international fraternity and tolerance." Germans in 1940 enter in Paris.
Picasso found that with the arrival of Germans and war there was lack of food, coal for his studio and no fuel for his car. Everyday was an adventure for the painter although he preferred to stay in Paris than any other place in the world. A habit he had was to spend some time at the Café de Flore. A new trend started to take place, at the Café de Flore. Poor artists, jobless ones, they could be actors sculptures, writers, started to use just their first name for introduce themselves to the rest of the other ones.
On autumn 1940 all cars were prohibited and food rationing became a reality. Cafés became the pale idea of the abundance they served in the past. Sartre, prisoner in Germany was missed so badly by Simon de Beauvoir. Beauvoir at the same time that period went to bed two times per week with Nathalie Sorokine and on saturday nights with Jacques-Laurent Bost. Bost had a new lover, Olga.
At the same time a list of banned authors were removed from all the bookstores: Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud and more. Banned books were destroyed.
Back to Paris Sartre met again at the Café des Trois Mousquetaires Simone de Beauvoir for organizing a resistance group. Bruller writes The Silence de la Mer published in 350 copies.
Sylvia Beach decides of closing forever Shakespeare and Company. Not only: life with Adrienne becomes always more difficult because of lack of food and ration tickets.
Wine, coffee, chocolate possible only at the black market, which meant high prices. She is taken prisoner to the zoo in the Jardin d'Acclimation.
Picasso in the while lost all his hair, Sartre knows Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir's first novel is released. Scandalous play, the book reported her relationships with the sisters Kosakiewics Olga and Wanda and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Gerhard Heller was the censor of French Literature, but soon without his uniform he could enjoy La Ville Lumiere. He loved to being there; he would have loved to interact with the writers in Paris. He didn't officially knew Camus but thanks to a friend of him, Junger they did all the impossible for translating The Outsider. At the same time the same Heller published a memoir 30 years after the end of the war where he remembered that terrible years.
1944 was the time of somnambulism writes the author. "Sleepwalkers carrying their fate over their shoulders."
While people was always more sad, Picasso interacted a lot with Cocteau, the poet. He smoked opium, he didn't mind officially of war and tried all his best for being mundane.
Jean Paulhan escaped the horror of Auschwitz also thanks to Gerhard Heller. The Comité Nationàl des Ecrivains was in crisis and Edith Thomas stopped to receive writers. Many had been arrested. At the same time in 1944 French Resistance organized a mobilitation. Germans went in panic.
Cartier-Bresson was so excited because he could tell to the world via photos what was going on in Paris. France was set free and Jean-Paul Sartre one of the witnesses of the event. Ernest Hemingway was with the saviors and he called once arrived at Rue de L'Odeon her friend Sylvia Beach.
After these events no doubts that french journalism became the center of intellectual life and most philosophers became journalists as well.
Samuel Beckett and Janet Flanner once the war was over returned to Paris but what it was special was the arrival of the first free spring: the one of 1945. The atmosphere was not anymore tense, but relaxed and people could enjoy the fact that a horrible experience was over.
American movies started to be a pleasant novelty in Paris and the death of Roosevelt meant for French People a real devastation. Although war was over Beauvoir noted that "The war is finished but it remains in our arms like a cumbersome and big corpse and it seems that there is nowhere we can bury it."
Paris didn't wait. The end of the war meant new connections between minds of various fields, and expansions in every possible direction and disciplines.
After that Cartier-Bresson immortaled the most important moments of the liberation of Paris from the occupants, now it was the turn of the people who made that historical moment: Jean Paulhan, Edith Piaf, Simone de Beauvoir, Christian Dior, Picasso. Paul Valery obtained a state funeral because he joined the Resistance. Valery had this honor after the state funeral of Victor Hugo, one of the most beautiful mind and intellect the Humanity has known.
Sartre and Beauvoir started to work on Le Temps Modernes a magazine that once released made history and created a lot of reflections. Intellectuals reflected also about their personal choices during the war: passivity and what it meant for the war that was coming to the horizon, or when war was a reality, for the historical moment.
The journal started to be well-known in all Europe and North America as a fresh and fertile reality.
Not only: this magazine didn't have success just because guided by beautiful minds, but because editors interacted every week with readers thanks to readers conferences as they called these encounters.
Problems started when Sartre confessed that his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir was open.
If Sartre maybe was "damaged" more than Beauvoir, the lady didn't mind and organized a beautiful vacation in the French Alps with her two female lovers, and Bost. Richard Wright in the USA was happy: Le Temps Modernes published one of his short story.
Sartre visited in the while various American Universities for introducing them the word Existentialism.
Although joyous and excited for these American trips, Sartre saw with lucidity the American society and situation. Americans had created a society that passed through: "Happiness, progress, realism, optimism, triumphant motherhood and freedom."
Wright once in Paris discovers how modestly and uncomfortably Parisians live.
Sartre and Camus took advantage of the students and groupies, all very young lovers falling on their footh. Camus falls attracted by Simone de Beauvoir and her intelligence although it was her intelligence to scaring him to death.
At the same time Communist Party became a solid reality, while the Catholic Church not brilliant during the war tried to adopt a new imagine.
Bompiani, italian publishing house distanced itself from the position of Sartre and Beauvoir, while Mondadori immediately saw the business.
Sartre writes his first hymn to America accompanied by critical positions of American writers regarding France and Europe. That man was a mind and loved good opinions expressed by intelligent people.
"In France people were interested in your opinions, not your income" wrote once Richard Wright.
Arthur Koestler found an attack against him in one of the issues of Les Temps Modernes, where these intellectuals at the same time tried to imagine another future with less capitalism and an aconomic collectivism considered a fairer system. Capitalism in its hypocrisy, wrote the writers tried to defend freedom and rights, when, de fact, it was and it is an economical system granting a lot just at a bunch of people. It was impossible to be Anti-Communists or Communists, wrote the authors. Anyway, these minds were soon considered traitors for their positions by the Communists.
If war was concluded in Europe, France was ready for another war in Indochina as reported by the journal. Simone de Beauvoir in America thanks to Richard Wright said: "The cult of elegance implies a system of values that I do not accept." This lady bought a very expensive dress and fell in tears because of this expense. Although Simone de Beauvoir was known by rich french people and she interacted with them she hasn't never paid any kind of attention regarding fashion. Simone found good humus in New York, drinking, smoking cannabis and talking with American intellectuals.
While Simone is in America Sartre writes her that strikes started to paralyzing France. Simone understood that in America: "Beautiful and ugly, grotesque and tragic, good and evil, each has its place." While Simone in USA found another lover in Nelson Angrel, Sartre in Paris was spotted with Dolores Vanetti during a showing of Vittorio De Sica's Sciuscià.
Once returned in Paris, although the couple as said before very open, Simone would have desired that Dolores was gone, once there. Simone fell depressed. Lovers were lovers but then situations had to return to their normality, thought Simone.
For existentialists played a big part, as we see politics and sex. Sartre and Simone happily together continued to create new lovers in their students. The news spread in the entire world and and a generation was classified as "Indigent, indecent."
A journalist wrote: "These poverty-strucken young people live in squalor and ask you to pay for their drinks. It is a youth revelling in the most vulgar sexuality."
This news created a certain tourism and people fell attracted by this life-style.
Simone considering the love-story that left strained Sartre with Dolores continued to take sleeping pills, amphetamines, mixing them with alcohol and tobacco, but also Sartre was a drug addicted.
He loved to drug his body with orthedrine a free "upper" and benzedrine and corydrane drinking liters of tea and coffee and smoking heavily. Other drugs he loved to take: Luminax, Leviton, Tranquidex, Psychotron, Lidepran. They stimulate the brain and these habits were also passed at the younger generation with which as we have seen they interacted a lot.
In 1948 Sartre was a man pretty known also politically: he took action, entering in politics with the support of Albert Camus as well.
In the while in Italy something else happened: 1948 Elio Vittorini said clearly in the french magazine Esprit that to him art and culture should be left out of politics and artistic creativity autonomous and free. Translator of Faulkner and Steinbeck, Vittorini opened a dialogue. The Catholic church banned Sartre's books. Sartre's political party collapsed and he returned in Dolores's arms, ending, this time forever, his relationship with her.
Beautiful, electrifying, a document of ten years that changed the world and indicated a new way of living.
I am more than sure that, if you love France, Paris, the mythical Left Bank, you will fall in love for this book written by Agnes Poirier with great competence, and brilliantly.
I thank Bloomsbury for the copy of the book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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