While speaking to Stevens over lunch at Lucy’s, Simone could not help looking around her, observing the “garish elegance of women, the platinum blondes dressed in candy-pink and baby-blue.” Overabundance is an American disease, she wrote. “One suffers here from too much noise, too much perfume, too much heat, and too much fake luxury.”35
* * *
After driving to San Francisco, Sacramento, Reno, and Las Vegas with George Stevens, Simone left on a three-week bus tour of the United States with Nathalie. She took the Greyhound coach to Santa Fe, New Mexico, the first stop on her tour. She was relieved to find a little bit of Europe’s mess and flesh there. “Streets are bent and have no right angles, thank God. Very few cars; people are walking in the sun. Women are not showing their perfect and thin long legs like on the West Coast.”36Another twelve-hour bus ride through deserts and cactuses, and Simone arrived in San Antonio, Texas. There she found lunchrooms for “colored men” and for “white ladies,” and although she had been expecting to find such places and signs, “something weighty has suddenly fallen on our shoulders.” This weight would never leave her throughout her journey in the South.
In New Orleans, Simone and Nathalie stayed in a big, luxurious hotel, an “enclave” that didn’t suit Simone. “You could live a whole life without ever going out: florists, candy vendors, booksellers, hairdressers, manicurists, stenographers and typists are at your service. There are four different restaurants, bars, cafés and dance floors. It’s a neutral zone, like the international concessions in the middle of colonial capitals.” As soon as they checked in, Simone ventured out with Nathalie. They wanted to eat Creole food and listen to “real jazz.” After dinner, they stopped at the Absinthe House at 240 Bourbon Street, at the corner of Bienville Street in the French quarter, supposedly one of the residences of the pirate Jean Lafitte. “There are three black musicians on piano, guitar and bass. Suddenly, we’re transported. The band does not try to please or dazzle anyone; it plays the way it feels like playing.”37
In the small audience, listening religiously to the music, two young white men kept looking at Simone and Nathalie, who were sipping big Zombies cocktails, and finally introduced themselves. Simone was rather taken with one of them, a twenty-two-year-old Italian music student, and listened to him speak passionately about not only jazz but also Stravinsky, Ravel, and Bartók. “Of all the young people I’ve met in America, he’s the first one who really seems young.” Talking all night and parting as dawn rose over Bourbon Street, the new friends agreed to meet again the next evening and find new black jazz haunts. The black musicians at the Absinthe House had slipped them addresses.
On their second night in New Orleans, the weather proved even more extraordinary than the evening before: “a pearly-grey fog shedding an extremely bright light, so that at two in the morning you’d have thought it was dawn,” with “air as humid as in a greenhouse.”38 That night, the four European friends experienced jazz as never before. “In those modest bars, jazz reaches real dignity. This is jazz as a way of life, as a reason to keep on living. Jazz immediately pierces its listener and transfigures life. If those black musicians’ life is often an arduous and tormented one, it is because instead of keeping death at bay like other artists, they precisely achieve the marriage between death and existence.”39 She wrote to Sartre, “it was the most poetic evening of my life.”40
On April 1, her third day in New Orleans, Simone walked for hours in the streets to soak up the city. At one point she found herself in the black quarter and was met with hostile looks. She spent the evening at a university colleague’s home; he had organized a party in her honor. There, everybody talked of the “reds” and seemed frightened by them. “The epithet ‘red’ is a rather elastic one. Every day, whether in the working or intellectual and political classes, I sense a slow erosion of freedom.”41 On April 2, Simone and Nathalie hopped on a Greyhound coach for another fifteen-hour journey through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, all along the Gulf of Mexico. “Wherever we stop, we can smell hatred in the air: the arrogant hatred of the whites, and the silent hatred of the blacks.”42
Back in New York on April 10, Simone spent her afternoons and evenings with a small group of four or five young writers. Among them were her jazz chaperone Bernard Wolfe and Calder Willingham,43 a twenty-four-year-old “Fred Astaire lookalike” who had just published a scandalous novel, End as a Man, about homosexuality in a military school in the South. Simone could now draw comparisons between the daily lives of young writers across the Atlantic Ocean.
They hardly go out to have dinner and hardly travel through America. Their interiors are as modest as French writers’ ones, their bathrooms though are comfortable and modern and they all have a fridge, which says much about the higher standard of American living. However, their real piece of luxury is their record players. Jazz is as vital to them as bread. Their days are much more solitary and dull than ours in Paris. They do not have cafés to meet their friends, exchange ideas, relax, and be stimulated. Parties are a social obligation where nothing meaningful is said.44
She made brief trips to Philadelphia and Boston to give talks and meet people. Her lectures at Smith and Wellesley colleges, which “smelled both like a monastery and a clinic,” left her unsure of young American women’s dreams and aspirations. At Harvard, she realized that students were taught only very specialized subjects. “America produces linguists, chemists, mathematicians, sociologists, but does not train and shape minds.”45 Simone was surprised to see that philosophy, divided into specific categories such as psychology, logic, and sociology, was taught as hard science. As a result, the academic life seemed “divorced” from the intellectual life of the nation. “In France, writers have often taught at universities whereas in the US no writer has started their career as an academic. There does not seem to be any bridge between culture and life, which is most preoccupying. American youth prefers pretending that politics is for experts and specialists.” She heard Harvard and Yale students talk coolly about the next war with Russia, completely resigned to it, even speaking about it with “positive tones that send a chill down your spine.”46 As left-leaning students, they confessed to her that they dared no longer say they were liberals for fear of being labeled Communists. “If I stayed, I’d become a Communist,” she wrote to Sartre.
FRENCH COMMUNISTS STIR UP DISCONTENT
In the letters he sent to her in America, Sartre had told Simone about the strikes that had started to paralyze France sporadically, and his feeling was that they would grow in intensity. He was right, and they would last for seven months. Strikes had begun at the recently nationalized Renault car factory just outside Paris at the end of April 1947. Among the thirty thousand or so Renault workers, more than half were members of the Communist trade union, the CGT.47 At first the French Communist Party, part of France’s tripartite government, did not support the strikes. But with inflation running at 51 percent, the average wage increasing by only 19 percent, and food still being rationed, the Communists decided to leave the government headed by Paul Ramadier, and to fully engage in insurrectional tactics and strikes throughout the country. As the weeks passed by, strikes extended to the other car manufacturers Citroën and Peugeot, to Michelin, to the railway services, to department stores and banks. Officially the main reason for the strikes was inflation, the high cost of living, and low wages, but nobody was fooled. They were politically motivated, a very clear expression of the Cold War within Western Europe.
As always, Janet Flanner gave her own idiosyncratic view to her American readers: “For the past months, France has been in the undignified position of an elderly lady doing the splits, her Right leg extended in one direction, her Left in the other, while everyone wondered how long she could hold it.”48 With the Gaullists, and André Malraux especially, blowing on the embers of fear over the Communists’ action in the strikes, political tension was rising in Paris. Malraux, in a low and conspiratorial voice, looking over his shoulder and l
eaning heavily toward his interlocutor, had (again) spread rumors that Russian tanks were on their way to Paris. “In less than a week the Communists are going to take over Paris, or try to, by fire and blood,” he told friends including the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos.49
In Beauvoir’s absence, Sartre was developing his theme on committed intellectuals, or intellectuels engagés. In February 1947 he had started a long series in Les Temps modernes called “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” [What is literature?], another magisterial essay on the situation writers faced in 1947 and on their moral, intellectual, and political duties. In the May issue, he compared the figure of the writer in France, America, and Britain.
The French writer is the only one who has remained a true bourgeois, having got used, after 150 years of domination, to a language filled with and broken by “bourgeoisisms.” The American writer, on the other hand, has often had other jobs before becoming a writer. He or she doesn’t see in literature a way to proclaim his or her solitude but an opportunity to escape it. To their eyes, the world is new, and everything remains to be said. In Britain, intellectuals make up an eccentric and rather cantankerous caste with little contact with the rest of the population. They haven’t had our luck. Because of the Revolution, we are feared by our political class. In Britain, intellectuals don’t scare anyone, they are considered an inoffensive bunch.
In Bwlch Ocyn, Arthur Koestler felt this acutely. He also suffered from depression, writer’s block, and mood swings. Koestler was obsessed with the thought that the Soviet army was only a few months from invading France. The recent implosion in France of the tripartite coalition born of the war was the sign for Arthur that the end was nigh. Mamaine kept writing to her twin sister to get some of her exasperation off her chest. On May 22, “K still can’t get back into his work. It is over two months since he was working properly so you can imagine the state he’s in.” Five days later: “K interested (fascinated) by mysticism. Not back to his usual self. He bewailed the collapse of all his heroes, and said how awful it was to have nobody to look up to. His cynicism and pessimism and mauvais caractère are so overwhelming.” The visit of his mother, whom he hated, did not improve the general mood. “K’s mother when she was here, one day said: ‘I see you have all the books of that Dr. Freund.’ K: ‘You mean Dr. Freud.’ ‘Yes, I used to know him well when I was seventeen. Tante Lore sent me to him as I had a nervous tic. He massaged the back of my neck and asked a lot of annoying questions. I stopped going.’ The idea of how different Arthur’s, and consequently my life would have been had his mother not stopped going to Freud is extremely fascinating.”50
GEORGE MARSHALL AND HIS PLAN
On June 5, 1947, the day Albert Camus’ La peste (The Plague) hit the bookshops in Paris, the U.S. secretary of state, George Marshall, was delivering a low-key yet historic speech in front of fifteen thousand Harvard graduate students. In fact, he had cunningly chosen the future elite of the country as his first public audience for his plan to help Europe’s economic recovery. “I need not tell you gentlemen that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people,” he began. He made a few matter-of-fact statements about Europe’s dire economic condition: “Europe’s requirements of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.”51
* * *
The aim of Marshall’s plan was simple: to prevent another worldwide economic depression of the kind the world lived through after 1929 by supporting Europe’s economic reconstruction. After lengthy hearings in Washington, the Economic Cooperation Act was passed by a vote of 329 to 74. The act that would become known as the Marshall Plan was signed on April 3, 1948, by President Truman. The financial aid would include Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and former enemies Germany and Italy. During the life of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. Congress would pump $13.3 billion into European economies, providing much-needed capital and materials for Britain and the Continent’s recovery. The plan was beneficial to the U.S. economy in that it created markets for American goods by sustaining reliable trading partners. The plan was supposed to last four years and to terminate at the end of June 1952. In order to be eligible for assistance under the act, European partners had to individually sign an agreement with the U.S. government that bound them to the act’s purposes: currency stabilization, trade cooperation, trade barrier removal, economic self-sufficiency, and industrial modernization. The Marshall Plan would later lay the foundation for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the future European Economic Union.
* * *
Not once in George Marshall’s speech at Harvard were the words “Communist” or “revolution” uttered. However, Marshall had thought it important to add: “our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” The C word might have been omitted, but never was there a clearer plan to entice Europeans into rejecting Communism, to contain the red evil by inducing them to embrace capitalism instead.
* * *
On hearing about Marshall’s plan on the BBC, the British minister for foreign affairs, Ernest Bevin, reached immediately for his telephone and dialed his French counterpart, Georges Bidault. They agreed to call an emergency European conference in Paris with a view to accepting the Marshall Plan and discussing the terms. It was a historic opportunity that neither Britain nor France would want to miss. As feared and yet expected, Stalin soon made it clear that neither the Soviet Union nor any of its “allies” in the Eastern bloc would accept American aid. Eastern European countries were coerced into rejecting the Marshall Plan and accepting Soviet aid instead, making them even more dependent on Moscow’s goodwill.
The former Time magazine foreign correspondent Theodore H. White became fascinated by Marshall’s proposal. It certainly had all the hallmarks of a “good story,” as hacks would soon call it, a story worth reporting and investing time in, one that would undoubtedly keep giving over the next few years. Struggling in New York to have his articles published, blacklisted by former employers who feared his overliberal sensitivity, White was starting to think that perhaps he should leave America and resume his career as a foreign correspondent. The problem was that he could not go back to China and he did not know anything about Europe. He knew, though, that he would love “to cover the Marshall Plan and how America was to save Europe from Communism.”52 He had always been fascinated by the exercise of American power, and in that sense the Marshall Plan promised to be the greatest adventure there was.
CHAPTER NINE
LOVE, STYLE, DRUGS, AND LONELINESS
HUSBANDS, LOVERS, AND FRIENDS
The tall, handsome, and brooding Nelson Algren, of Jewish, Swedish, and German descent, whom Simone de Beauvoir had briefly met in Chicago on February 21, 1947, was about to distract the French philosopher from her incessant analyzing. She had spent only an evening and an afternoon with the thirty-eight-year-old novelist, who was struggling to write his third book, but it had left its mark on her. Algren had taken her to West Madison Street, also called the Bowery, on a tour of the city’s downtrodden to meet the “bums, drunks and old ruined beauties.” At a “sordid dance hall,”1 ancient, ugly, and very poor couples danced, losing themselves, happy, as if time were suspended. Beauvoir, stunned, found the scene moving and beautiful. In America, Algren told her, “beautiful and ugly, grotesque and tragic, good and evil, each has its place. Americans do not like to think that those extremes can mingle.” Algren then put her in a taxi, kissing her “clumsily but very seriously and intently.”2 Algren had found in Beauvoir a kindred
spirit.
Sartre had asked Simone to delay her return to Paris by a week: Dolorès intended to fight her ground and would not budge. Little did Sartre know that she in fact hoped to stay indefinitely and replace Beauvoir in Sartre’s heart. Simone jumped at the opportunity and flew to Chicago to see Algren for three days, and even persuaded him to accompany her back to New York so they could stay together longer. In New York, Algren was the tourist and Beauvoir his guide. Having traveled little outside Chicago, except during the war, when he was stationed in France, Algren was bewildered to see New York and its colorful laundry hanging from the fire escapes, tailors for fat gentlemen, and they tattoo parlors. Together they toured the “ghetto” of the East Side, and they fell in love. On May 11, 1947, Algren slipped a cheap Mexican ring onto Beauvoir’s finger, and she told him she would wear it till the day she died.3
Meanwhile, on the Paris boulevards, Sartre could be seen with Dolorès Vanetti at a showing of Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine), a forceful, anguished, uncompromising, and beautiful film about Italy’s homeless and hungry children after the war.4 Sartre and Dolorès were both deeply moved by it. Sartre, rather smitten with Dolorès, did not know how to persuade his lover to go back home, but neither could he ask Simone to delay her return a second time. They had written to each other every two days those last four months and Sartre was not prepared to break his life arrangement with his soul mate for Dolorès, no matter how much he loved his American girl.
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