The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  Publishers are in a poor way at the moment, but it is unforgiveable that there should be no photograph of James Pope-Hennessy inside this book. There are two on the dust jacket, a horribly uncharacteristic one on the front which has been widely reproduced and in which he looks like a querulous old woman. Ideally, there should have been a frontispiece of the portrait Lucian Freud painted of him, one of those rare, jewel-like Freuds, when affection for his subject is not marred by a desire to preach; where the avenging puritan so evident in much of his work is momentarily absent.

  Peter Quennell has edited the book with a preface and notes which are all that could be needed or desired.

  A Lonely Business: A Self-portrait of James Pope-Hennessy, ed. Quennell, P. Book Choice (1981)

  Wonder Years

  Here they all are, from Josephine Baker to Brancusi, from Cocteau to Chanel, from Gamelin to Gide, the old familiar Parisians, some French, many from abroad. Vincent Cronin gives each one at least a paragraph, because for the under-seventies the names are not always enough. His thesis is that hundreds of talented writers, painters, sculptors and musicians, and a sprinkling of geniuses, made Paris a brilliant city of self-centred individualists, hardly conscious that they were rushing towards world war, to be followed by decades of colonial wars and a potentially dangerous cold war.

  One good and valid political idea came out of the First World War: self-determination. It was never tried. Even Clemenceau, who insisted that Germany must be encircled, described the new countries with their outlandish names as ‘an absurd hotchpotch’. Lloyd George pointed on the map to the Polish Corridor and said: ‘Here is where the next war will start.’ The Versailles and Trianon treaties could have been designed to ensure disaster. Disarmament was a farce; Germany offered not to re-arm if France would disarm. France declined. An attempt was made to outlaw bombers. England declined. (It ‘needed’ them for the North-West Frontier of India.)

  The truth is European countries were not wholehearted in advocating self-determination, even in Europe. They did not want it to spread to North Africa, the Middle East, India, Indo-China and elsewhere. All these anxieties are over and done with, but they seemed real at the time. Other anxieties have taken their place.

  The twenty years described in this book were just about perfect in Paris, if you could put the international situation out of your mind. It did not unduly worry painters, or nightclub proprietors, or the givers of fancy dress parties; there was gaiety, beauty, amusement and the joys of the intellect. This loveliest of cities was shabby, but not yet choked with traffic.

  The miracle of the last war is that Paris was not bombed. If you shut your eye to the outskirts it is very little changed and as beautiful as ever. It may not be a centre of great art now, but there is still a douceur de vivre hardly to be found elsewhere.

  War is no longer an option, there will be no more fighting on the beaches; the choice is between Europe and a radioactive desert. The Balkans must do as they please.

  Paris on the Eve: 1900-1914, Cronin, V. Evening Standard (1995)

  Dark Side of the Boom

  This is a clever scissors-and-paste book with a theme: Paris in the 30s had a flare-up of the best of everything—the best painters, sculptors, composers, writers, as well as the best dressmakers, cooks, restaurants and parties, the wittiest talkers and the most elegant ladies. All this gathered in the loveliest of cities.

  But there was a dark side. Dim and old-fashioned soldiers were controlled by vile politicians, some short-sighted, some wicked, while war threatened. Bernier hardly has words strong enough to condemn them.

  He finds one shining exception: Léon Blum. This mild, cultivated and charming individual became Prime Minister, waved his Popular Front wand, and everything changed overnight. The miserably paid workers had their wages raised, their hours cut, and holidays with pay became statutory.

  A few months later, unsurprisingly, ‘the budget deficit was growing alarmingly, a pause in the reforms had to be proclaimed. It was, Blum explained, not a retreat but a phase of prudent consolidation.’ The government fell.

  So much for politics, but most of the time Picasso, Brancusi, Stravinsky, Schiaparelli and Josephine Baker take the centre of the stage. They were none of them French, but they were all part of Paris. Daisy Fellowes was the best-dressed woman in the world, Princess Edmond de Polignac gave splendid musical evenings, Comte Etienne de Beaumont the most amusing parties. People loved fancy dress and they loved dancing, young, middle-aged and old. Elsie Mendl, a great party goer and party giver, was 80.

  At the end of this wonderful decade of great art, luxury and silliness, the politicians blundered into war, so that after the fireworks came the dusk. That is the thesis.

  Well, yes and no. Paris was never bombed, except by the Allies who had a go at factories on the outskirts. It was short of food and fuel but there was no English austerity after the war. There was a short, sharp, bitter civil war, after which it recovered speedily. The late 40s and 50s were the 30s over again. Picasso was painting, Cocteau being witty, Schiaparelli making lovely clothes—though Balenciaga was king of fashion—M de Beaumont giving grand parties, and Elsie Mendl, now 90, standing on her head every morning.

  There were new plays by Sartre, Marcel Aymé, Montherlant and Thierry Maulnier. Céline, Aragon and Paul Morand were writing their best books. Paris was fortunate, it survived. It is now ringed with ugliness, but the centre is relatively untouched. There will always be people willing to give madly luxurious parties and others delighted to go. Rather harmless, perhaps.

  In the 50s, just as in the 30s, some were terrified of war, and thought Soviet Russia about to invade. Maybe if Spain had been communist it might have tipped the scale—there was a massive communist vote in France at that time. Bernier’s high praise for the French Left reads oddly in 1993 after its striking electoral defeat, the French would not agree with him there.

  His source for high life is Janet Flanner, on the whole reliable; for politics the newspapers. He illuminates the Stavisky affair, which has close parallels with Robert Maxwell’s, except that Stavisky swindled rich corporations.

  Whizzing from the Chamber of Deputies to the Folies Bergère, from Picasso’s studio stacked with unsigned pictures to descriptions of pink ruffles edged with gold, it is recognizably Paris, even if dawn followed dusk. The style and the spelling are American. What on earth is a car ‘with a huge custom body’? Oh yes, of course, quite easy really.

  Fireworks at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties, Bernier, O. Evening Standard (1993)

  Paris after the Liberation

  The authors of this account of the Liberation describe the Paris of half a century ago. They give a balanced summing-up of political Paris, intellectual Paris, commercial Paris and silly Paris, with a slight bias towards the latter. They are probably right to do so, because there are several histories where the muddled story can be found. It is such a dismal tale that a little light relief in café society is in order. Essentially, it is the story of a civil war.

  François Mauriac is far from being the only writer to emphasise that civil war has been part of French life for hundreds of years; in his recently reprinted political diary he says it again and again. Perhaps it is tribal, Frank versus Gaul, as he seems to think. With the trauma of defeat and four years of enemy occupation, this Franco-Gallic war assumed a violent aspect of the Liberation. Even now, half a century later, it still surfaces from time to time. There will always be argument about the extent the Resistance movement during the war was Communist-led. So many lies were told at the time that even now it is anybody’s guess.

  De Gaulle was said by Bidault, his Foreign Minister, to love France and hate the French. De Gaulle himself was the object of intense love and bitter hatred. He loved myths, and one that was highly important in his eyes was that Paris was liberated by his small army and by the Parisians themselves. The Americans obligingly stepped aside, and the Germans were pulling out as quickly as they could in the summer of 1944. Parisi
ans were so happy to be rid of them and so intoxicated with joy at the arrival of French troops that there was an orgy of lovemaking, flag-waving and bell-ringing, a Te Deum at Notre Dame and General de Gaulle marching down the Champs Elyseés. A few shots were fired from roofs and windows, which made it seem more thrilling and realistic. The French then turned from the vanishing Germans and began killing and tormenting each other. De Gaulle stuck it for a few months and then retired to Colombey, where, as it turned out, he had to wait twelve years before returning to power.

  Who had collaborated with the enemy? There were plenty of obvious targets, but they shaded down from people who had denounced their compatriots to the Germans, to petrol-pump men who had not refused enemy custom, or artistes who had sung in nightclubs patronized by German soldiers. It was a prime time for settling private feuds in an atmosphere of terror and hatred. People went to bed at night far from sure they would not be dragged out at dawn and thrown into a filthy, overcrowded prison. It was easy to get away with murder if the motive was patriotism, and sometimes it seemed as if only the few who had been in London with General de Gaulle were quite safe, leaving fifty million or so at risk. Every Frenchman alive at that time has his Liberation story, if he can be induced to tell it.

  On a bigger stage, there was the developing American-Russian quarrel. What was to be done with Germany, defeated and in ruins? De Gaulle hated the Americans even more than he did the English, lumping them together as Anglo-Saxons, which, considering the ethnic composition of the US, seems bizarre. Americans had been rude to him during the war and he was in vengeful mood. But they were so powerful that his visit to Moscow hardly caused a stir. He hated every aspect of American civilization, but he was also deeply anti-Communist. What he craved was a great and powerful France; what he found was a bankrupt, half-starved country overrun by Anglo-Saxon armies on their way to crush Germany. Americans were bombing towns and villages in Normandy to smithereens.

  A few years later when I came to live in France, I asked friends how they fared during the occupation and its aftermath. One told me he had been sent a miniature coffin by the Free French, but nothing untoward happened. His mother dispatched a hamper of food from the country every week for four years. He went to the Gare d’Austerlitz and trundled it home. I asked whether, when shortages became acute, the hamper was ever stolen on the railway? Never, he said. Of course he could have lived where the goods came from, but Frenchmen would rather be hungry in Paris than bored elsewhere.

  Another friend, a member of the Académie Française, told me that even now, in the Nineties, the ‘Immortals’ are split down the middle, twenty a side. There is something reassuring about such a balance. However much they loathe each other’s opinions they manage to pretend to be making a dictionary which will purge the language of Anglo-Saxon words.

  The English love travel and hate foreigners. Do they dislike each other as much as the French do? We have never had occasion to discover the answer to that question.

  When a Great Nation Turns against Itself: Paris after the Liberation Beevor, A. and Cooper, A. Literary Review (1994)

  Paradise on Earth

  If my sister Nancy thought Paris an earthly paradise, it must be remembered that ten of the years she lived there were the 50s, an extraordinary decade the like of which we have never seen since. From the war years and Occupation, Paris splendidly recovered; disliking austerity and shabbiness it quickly resumed its addiction to fashion, luxury and delicious food, helped by a flourishing black market.

  In London the slogan was ‘Fair Shares’, which is nothing but a cruel illusion when poverty and riches live side by side. London seemed almost to revel in ‘shortages’, even paper was rationed (there were murmurs that it was all being hoarded to accommodate the many volumes of Churchill’s war memoirs) and Lord Berners was heard to complain that at the very entrance to a bookshop one was greeted by the cry: No Tolstoy! No Dostoyevsky!

  Paris rejected austerity. Far from rationing clothes, for example, dressmakers, led by Christian Dior, changed the fashion overnight, and decreed that each garment should consume many metres of silk, wool or cotton, thus giving a boost to the producers of these materials, as well as enchanting their clients, who had got so tired of their old clothes, and of clattering about in shoes with wooden soles.

  Marshall Aid seems to have been well spent on modernising public transport and putting an efficient welfare system in place. But the most exciting aspect of the 50s was that the arts flourished as never before. Picasso produced surprises as he did throughout the war, but now painters flocked to Paris. The theatre led the genial atmosphere of renewal which prevailed. There was an explosion of talent, led by Louis Jouvet, Montherlant’s thrilling play Le Cardinal de L’Espagne was in the repertory of the Comédie Française and his Port Royal at the Odeon, a play which gave the illusion that the audience was actually witnessing the drama of Jansenism, the nuns victims of the pitiless autocracy of Louis XIV. Sartre wrote his powerful Diable et le Bon Dieu, Julien Green a twentieth-century homosexual drama, Sud, in the romantic setting of the Deep South. Cocteau’s star actor was Jean Marais, Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault had their own troupe, and there were great beauties, Edwige Feuillère and Danielle Darrieux, as well as the irrepressible Arletty and the child-like quality of Zizi Jeanmaire. This constellation of talent performed on both stage and screen, in films like Les Enfants du Paradis.

  At the same time there were constant balls and parties given in sumptuous houses decorated by Georges Geoffroy. Much, though not all, of the money spent on these extravagances came from South and North America. Daisy Fellowes, Mona Bismarck, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Etienne de Beaumont, Patino, Beistegui were generous hosts.

  Novels and journals were written by Paul Morand, Montherlant, Sartre, Mauriac, an endless array of talent. Towards the end of this unusual decade, it was realised it was too good to last. As so often in human affairs, politics and war replaced gaiety and happiness. The terrible war in Algeria affected every French family. No more balls were given, a sombre cloud descended. General de Gaulle came back from his twelve years at Colombey. He ‘settled’ Algeria, but it never knew peace.

  Paris became hard working and serious, the Paris we know now. It is as beautiful as ever, but its elegant inhabitants wear blue jeans and fashionable black rags and tatters. The dressmakers floated away, leaving only their names behind. Could that decade of half a century ago ever again materialise? The décor is still in place.

  Unpublished (2003)

  Paris Intellectuals

  Paris is a haven for intellectuals in a way that London has never been. To make a comparison, you would have to imagine not only Parliament, the British Museum and the palace of the head of state, but also Oxford, Cambridge, and the major public schools, all gathered in London. Of course there are clever boys in the French provinces, but they make a bee-line for Paris as soon as they possibly can.

  Not many English writers live in London. They prefer the country, and go to London to see their publishers or agents, more than to see each other. The physical proximity of French writers and academics generates an abnormal amount of envy, hatred and malice, fuelled by the literary prizes which ensure the sale of novels which might otherwise languish. Television also plays a part in sales promotion, and Bernard-Henri Lévy is a popular performer, interviewing writers and intellectuals dressed in black and white to match his black hair and white face.

  He starts his adventure on the freedom road with a backward glance at the Dreyfus case, but it would be difficult for anyone not familiar with the Affaire to make out what happened. In his version, Conservatives, the Army and the Catholics sent an unfortunate and totally innocent man to prison on Devil’s Island. They undoubtedly did, but except for the few who were guilty of this injustice most people imagined Dreyfus had sold military secrets to Germany, a crime which appalled the patriotic French, terrified as they were of another war. By the time, owing to the efforts of Dreyfus’s brother and his powerful
allies Clemenceau and Zola, his innocence was as good as proved and the real culprit, Esterhazy, unmasked, France was in such a fever of fear and hatred between those who supported Dreyfus and those who condemned his supposed guilt that it was like a civil war. There was a famous caricature at the time of a dining room filled with a party of men in white ties and ladies in long gowns and jewels, all gesticulating, chairs broken, china and glass smashed. The caption was: ‘They had spoken of Dreyfus.’

  Proust’s description of the Prince de Guermantes, who had gradually become convinced that a terrible crime had been committed by the Army, backed up by the Church, and who seeks out his old friend Swann, a Dreyfusard from the beginning, to tell him of his change of mind, is one of the most moving scenes in his novel. Needless to say, Proust does not let the Guermantes off the hook. The Duchess makes her bad-taste joke when people say how unattractive Dreyfus is: ‘They’ll have to change victims.’ Words that echo through the Faubourg St Germain, finding itself on the wrong side in the bitter dispute. Since most of M. Lévy’s ‘causes’ are to do with nationalism, still so powerful after the demise of ideologies, he is right to start with the most famous of them all. He is more indulgent to nationalists of other climes.

  After the first war the surrealists were paramount among Paris intellectuals; some were communists and others were not. The Communist Party was never happy with its intellectual adherents, they were too unreliable. They went to Russia to see the workers’ paradise and admire the revolution, and often saw too much and came back disillusioned and wrote, like Gide in Retour de l’URSS, books denouncing the regime.