Left bank 50s

Hepburn sings at the top of her lungs to Gershwin’s jazz and leads a wild dance in a smoky cellar in Saint-Germain where bohemian youth rub shoulders with Americans enjoying the GI Bill, budding philosophers and avant-garde artists. With Funny face, Stanley Donen immortalized in Hollywood Technicolor what Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau or Capa had captured in black and white in the immediate post-war period: the insatiable thirst for life of a liberated Paris.

I spent a few days in that Paris, immersed in the captivating pages of Left Bank. Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-50. I wandered along this “left bank” of Agnès Poirier, a journalist born in the City of Light and trained in London, who paints a portrait of a resolutely free generation. Uncovering the various “crime scenes” where the heroes and heroines who populate her book lived in the 1940s, Agnès Poirier writes as one “enters a house on fire” (p. 5), caught between the fires of war, political and romantic passions, heated debates and vigorous frolics, revolutionary dreams and bitter failures.

Her book is a fresco that exposes the tangled links between art, thought and politics at the end of the Second World War. After 1944, everything was inevitably political, she says: artists and intellectuals were convinced that culture and artistic creation had a decisive role to play in the reconstruction of a traumatized world. Agnès Poirier reveals to us the political, artistic, moral and sexual incandescence of this time, without omitting the intellectual irresponsibility of those who rushed with ardor and irreverence towards the future.

Towards other freedoms

The main engine of the actors of Left Bank is their tenacious will to be free; free to speak and think, to create and live as they please. The book is about that: an inflexible desire for emancipation, the affirmation of a liberation that is at once artistic, political, existential and sexual.

It all began in the turmoil of the debacle, the shame of the Nazi Occupation. The author introduces her characters (the total cast includes at least thirty-two), those who had chosen to stay in Paris and who lived “in transit” (p. 52), caught in a somnambulistic existence, between Resistance, arrests, disappearances and assassinations. A pivotal moment, the war polarizes the actors of the intellectual scene: the collaborationist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and the resistance fighter Jean Paulhan cohabit in the same corridor of the Gallimard publishing house; Gerhard Heller, in charge of the Propaganda Staffseeks to protect the authors he admires (Sartre can show Huis Clos at the Vieux-Colombier in 1944); the teenagers Juliette Gréco and Simone Signoret eke out a living dreaming of bright futures.

The first pages of Left Bank tell the story of the constitution of a complex intellectual-artistic network. The reconstruction of conversations and encounters in Parisian neighborhoods offers a plethora of real-life effects that highlight the transatlantic cosmopolitanism of the Left Bank. It also highlights the utopian search for a political “third way” – neither communist nor Gaullist – with its share of uncertainties, dreams and ambivalences. Mixing the biographical and the historical, Agnès Poirier describes the uncompromising aspirations of a Camus, who vigorously campaigns for a humanist socialism in Fight. The small group of Saint-Germain vibrates as much with its agreements as with its disagreements, but it finds itself in its fight against the “lukewarm hearts”.

The battle is not only fought in the public political sphere; it is taking place in the heart of the private sphere. Without shying away from her pleasure, Agnès Poirier transcribes the waltzes of the multiple lovers. All the characters embrace an anti-bourgeois polyamory. Living in cramped hotel rooms, they all reject the family institution (the accumulation of property and children), marriage and its gender assignments. We are struck by their fierce defense of abortion, notably by Sartre who spoke openly about it in Modern Times and financed many operations that were illegal at the time. Agnès Poirier shows the links between her characters, as well as the sexual fluidity that animated their relationships. This was not done without pain or hypocrisy (the men were often married with children, but collected mistresses). Nor without criticism, of course. The communists liked to denounce the “bourgeois decadence” (p. 185) of the existentialists.

Philosophies of existence

For those who had been through the war, for women perhaps even more than for men, it was a question of killing one’s destiny in order to move towards freedom. It was in the cafés of the Left Bank that existentialism was born, this philosophy which decreed inseparable the theory of knowledge and the theory of life and which, conscious of the power of the human being to perpetually create himself, had a phenomenal success. The Florists (followers of the Café de Flore, because it is warm there in times of rationing) very quickly acquired an international aura and, at the dawn of the 1950s, were already assured of a lively succession embodied by Bardot, Sagan and the young filmmakers of the New Wave.

This art of living born in cafés, boxes in cellars and hotel rooms did not fail to attract many American writers, journalists and artists. The novelist Richard Wright found in Paris a freedom that his country did not offer him. The same for Miles Davis who, alongside Claude Luter and Boris Vian, scoured the crowded caverns where Hot Jazz competed with Be-bop. Paris was a party with overflowing energy. Artists and intellectuals were carried by a vitality fueled by unbridled consumption of alcohol, coffee and a clever cocktail of drugs – tobacco, sleeping pills, amphetamines and stimulants constituted real “work tools”, transforming creators and thinkers into “working machines” (p. 185).

However, the existentialists were also committed intellectuals. Simone de Beauvoir, who lived like a man, far from feminine servitude, began her research which would lead to the scandalous publication of Second sex. Harassed by Catholics, Communists and Gaullists, Sartre decided in 1948 to found his political party, the Democratic and Revolutionary Rally, in order to defend a non-communist socialism and unify the left-wing factions. The adventure ended in failure: the much-desired third way was not embodied in politics, but left a legacy that, according to Agnès Poirier, still survives today.

Neither fiction nor academy

In At the existentialist café (Albin Michel, 2018), Sarah Bakewell points out that “ideas (political and philosophical) are interesting, but people are much more so.” Indeed, Left Bank exudes an affection for the destinies of those who animated this historic moment with enthusiasm. Under the pen of Agnès Poirier, we feel a deep attachment to certain characters and even a certain tenderness in the description of their journey.

I will quote the heroic Jacques Jaujard, director of the Louvre who organized the safeguarding of the museum’s works, in particular The Mona Lisawhose wanderings we follow. Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for the New Yorkercarefully examines the evolution of a generation in the making. The forgotten Édith Thomas, archivist and writer who discovers the happiness of sapphic love with Dominique Aury, lover of Jean Paulhan. Finally, the tragically faithful Mamaine, tormented wife of the flamboyant but violent Arthur Koestler. Agnès Poirier claims a text that is neither fiction nor an academic work, but an Anglo-Saxon story: entertaining, pleasant to read and accessible to the greatest number. She exploits the romanticism of now mythical existences. We delight in the slightly sensationalist and cleverly edited adventures of these extraordinary beings.

One question remains, however: what remains, in the author, of the commitment so ardently defended by those who populated the Left Bank for a decade? Agnès Poirier assumes a certain withdrawal – the facts seem to present themselves –, but does this objective distance not contradict the claimed “collage” (p. 4), as well as with the commitment of those she stages and one of whose first demands was to affirm their own subjectivity? The fact remains that one of the greatest qualities of this book is that it makes you want to delve back into the works of these fiery characters.