And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (54 page)

Then political reality stepped in. On December 12, 1941, in the first
rafle
of prominent French Jews, Goudeket was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Compiègne. By good fortune, one of Colette’s admirers was Suzanne Abetz, the German ambassador’s French wife,
who persuaded her husband to order Goudeket’s release seven weeks later. Subsequently, Colette also wrote a letter of thanks to Epting at the German Institute. Goudeket promptly acquired false papers to enter the unoccupied zone and was staying with friends in Saint-Tropez when the major Vél’d’Hiv’ roundup of Jews took place in Paris. In late 1942, he nonetheless returned home, and for the rest of the occupation he spent every night in a maid’s room above Colette’s apartment. Colette herself continued writing, publishing her much-loved
Gigi
in 1944, but she now went out little and increasingly complained about her health. When Paris was freed, the fact that she had initially written for collaborationist weeklies was soon forgotten. Colette remained Colette.

Certainly some writers experienced cold and hunger and others risked arrest and deportation, but for many the war was largely one of words. Indeed, not a few gave less importance to clandestine outlets than to publishing openly. This was the case with Jean-Paul Sartre. As early as the fall of 1940, a group of students from the École Normale Supérieure, Sartre’s old school, began publishing a tract called
Sous la Botte
(Under the Boot). “I had my father’s old Underwood,” Dominique Desanti, then twenty, recalled decades later. “I was the only one who knew how to type on a stencil. We’d distribute the sheets in the
métro
or outside factories. We’d take information from the BBC; we spoke about the French bourgeoisie, which had fled.”
³⁰

After Sartre was released from prison camp on medical grounds in April 1941, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty introduced him to these students and, together, they formed a group called Socialisme et Liberté (Socialism and Freedom), which briefly published a one-page newspaper under the same name. “For us, Sartre was already a great man,” Desanti said, pointing to his 1938 novel,
La Nausée
. But after a trip south, where Gide and Malraux refused to endorse Socialisme et Liberté, Sartre lost interest in the venture. In September 1941, he began teaching at the Lycée Condorcet, where he took the place of a Jewish teacher who had been dismissed months earlier. Meanwhile, the students persevered, even after one of their number was arrested and deported to Birkenau, where she died. One of the final issues of
Sous la Botte
, in mid-1942, carried an unsigned essay by Sartre denouncing the order that Jews wear yellow stars. But by fall 1942, the group had dispersed.

Sartre, who was initially excluded from the CNE by Decour, was
finally invited to join in early 1943, and in April that year he published an anonymous article for
Les Lettres Françaises
called “Drieu La Rochelle, or Self-Hatred.” He wrote two more short pieces for
Les Lettres Françaises
in 1944, but nothing for Éditions de Minuit. Rather, his focus was on his own writing, which included his existentialist tome
L’Être et le néant
, the plays
Les Mouches
and
Huis clos
and an unproduced screenplay.

Meanwhile, Simone de Beauvoir, having published her first novel, was suspended from her teaching post in June 1943 for “inciting a minor to debauchery”—more specifically, for seducing one of her students, Nathalie Sorokine, whose mother complained to the authorities. The following February, Beauvoir began presenting a series of programs on the history of the music hall on Radio Vichy, which had moved to Paris. By then, she was still further from the resistance than Sartre; she later explained that she felt no need to attend CNE meetings since she was represented by Sartre, who, in any event, considered them boring. But both found time to become Left Bank celebrities. In January 1944, the illustrated weekly
Toute la Vie
carried photographs of writers and artists in Saint-Germain-des-Prés cafés, with Sartre shown writing in the Café de Flore. In her memoir
La Force de l’âge
, Beauvoir painted a typical scene in the Flore: “Slowly, over the course of the morning, the room filled up; by the cocktail hour, it was full. Picasso smiled at Dora Maar, who was holding a large dog; Léon-Paul Fargue remained silent, Jacques Prévert chatted; there were noisy debates at the tables of the movie directors who, since 1939, met there almost every day.”
³¹
Sartre and Beauvoir lived in the Hôtel La Louisiane, on the nearby rue de Seine, but they did much of their writing in the Flore, with its wood-fired stove a particular attraction in winter.

In the spring of 1944, a new diversion appeared in the form of all-night parties, nicknamed
fiestas
, attended by many writers and occasionally by Picasso and Maar. “Amorous dissipation had little place in these saturnalia,” Beauvoir wrote. “It was above all drink that broke the routine. With alcohol, we did not hold back; no one among us objected to getting drunk; some made it almost a duty; Leiris, among others, applied himself with zeal and succeeded admirably.”
³²
Many years later, Sartre also remembered the parties fondly: “Because of the curfew, which lasted until six or even seven in the morning, we often partied until then so none of us would get caught sneaking home during the night. We started having these
fiestas
, as
we called them, just to have fun, not in conjuction with some illegal editorial meeting or whatever.”
³³
On the night of the D-Day landings, the
fiesta
was hosted by Charles Dullin, the director of the Théâtre de la Cité, and included Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, his actress girlfriend Maria Casarès, Michel and Louise Leiris and Raymond Queneau. “We played records, we danced, we drank and soon we were wandering all over the place as usual,” Beauvoir recalled.
³⁴

While Camus livened up the
fiestas
with his nifty
paso doble
, however, he was more seriously engaged with the resistance than Sartre. But his path to editorship of the clandestine newspaper
Combat—
linked to the resistance group of the same name—was long and winding. Born in 1913 in Algeria, then a French
département
, in the 1930s Camus was a struggling journalist of little means and poor health (he contracted tuberculosis in his late teens). He was twenty-one when he married Simone Hié, but the marriage soon floundered. In 1935, he joined the French Communist Party, but he was expelled two years later in one of its trademark purges. His point of stability was his friendship with Pascal Pia, a fellow journalist ten years his senior, who hired Camus for the newspaper
Alger Républicain
and later for
Le Soir Républicain
. But the French government closed both in January 1940, leaving Camus and Pia unemployed.

Then, thanks to vacancies created by journalists drafted into the army, both Pia and Camus found work in Paris in the mass-circulation daily
Paris-Soir
. The newspaper’s last Paris issue before Paris fell came out on June 11. Led by its powerful owner, Jean Prouvost, a small legion of executives, editors and reporters fled south, with Camus driving one of the cars in the convoy. By September, with Prouvost now running propaganda in Vichy’s Information Ministry,
Paris-Soir
was being edited and printed in Lyon. But even with its
pétainiste
line, it was struggling. Three months later, with the newspaper reduced to four pages, Camus was dismissed. He married Francine Faure, a pianist and longtime girlfriend, and went home to Algeria.

In his luggage, Camus carried three manuscripts, the fruit of several years’ work:
L’Étranger
, an existentialist novel;
Le Mythe de Sisyphe
, a philosophical essay; and
Caligula
, a play. His dream was that his “three absurds,” as he called them, could be published in a single volume and, while earning his keep by teaching in Oran, he worked to achieve this. But Edmond Charlot, a local publisher and friend, had neither the paper nor the money for such a large book.
So, in April 1941, Camus mailed the manuscripts to Pia in Lyon, who sent them to Malraux, who in turn recommended them to Gaston Gallimard. Because of the difficulty in communicating between Paris and Algeria,
^*
it would be months before Camus agreed to the inevitable—that the “absurds” would have to be published separately.
L’Étranger
came out in June 1942,
Le Mythe de Sisyphe
in October 1942 and
Caligula
in May 1944. And it was of course
L’Étranger
that made Camus the toast of literary Paris.

Camus himself, however, was still in Oran and was again ill. His Jewish doctor, Henri Cohen, whose practice would soon be closed by Vichy, ordered him to stay in bed until he could convalesce in a climate milder than Algeria’s. Finally, in August 1942, Camus moved to a property owned by his wife’s family in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a mountain village just seventy-five miles south of Lyon, which would become famous for sheltering thousands of Jews during the occupation. In the months that followed, while he worked on a new novel,
La Peste
(The Plague), and a new play,
Le Malentendu
, Camus’s health slowly improved.

Until then, he was largely an outsider to France’s drama. In the late 1930s, he had opposed the idea of war, a position taken by many on both left and right, and more recently he had expressed disgust at Vichy’s subservience to the Nazis. When he returned to France, he learned that Pia was now involved with Combat, a resistance group active in a broad stretch of eastern France. He met other members of Combat and occasionally attended meetings of Aragon’s southern CNE at the Lyon home of Tavernier, the editor of
Confluences
. Camus even obtained a pass to visit Paris in January 1943 and, when he returned there in June, he made a point of introducing himself to Sartre at the dress rehearsal for
Les Mouches
.

His health was still far from good, but he was restless and in November he moved permanently to Paris, taking a job as a reader at Gallimard. He remained something of an outsider, though, because until then he had spent little time in Paris and, unlike most of his new colleagues, he was not a graduate of either the Sorbonne or the École Normale Supérieure. He found a small room in a boardinghouse just three hundred yards from Gallimard and began working there under
the avuncular eye of Paulhan. But
L’Étranger
had won him admirers, and soon he was drawn into Sartre’s circle at the Café de Flore, directing the reading of Picasso’s play
Le Désir attrapé par la queue
at Leiris’s apartment in March 1944, even agreeing—then refusing—to direct Sartre’s new play,
Huis clos
.

Camus also attended some of the CNE meetings and wrote an essay for
Les Lettres Françaises
in May 1944. But a turning point came when Pia introduced him to the editors of
Combat
, the clandestine newspaper founded in December 1941 that now represented the United Resistance Movements. By early 1944, it was printing a remarkable 250,000 copies every two weeks in fifteen different locations and somehow distributing them across the rest of France, often by rail disguised as cargo. As a contributor and, later, as
Combat
’s editor in chief, Camus commissioned and edited articles and wrote at least two himself. His first, in March, was headlined “À guerre totale résistance totale” (To Total War Total Resistance) and reminded readers that every
résistant
becomes a role model: “Every Frenchman can choose: he will be for us or against us.” In May, a second article, “Ils ont fusillé des français” (They Shot Frenchmen), denounced the execution of eighty-six men after the resistance derailed a German troop carrier. By the spring of 1944, Camus had several lives: a member of Gallimard’s prestigious Reading Committee, an
habitué
of the Café de Flore and a
résistant
known in underground circles as Albert Mathé.

Another latecomer to the resistance was Marguerite Duras. Born and raised in Indochina, the setting for her most famous novel,
L’Amant
(The Lover), she was seventeen when she arrived in France in 1931 to complete her studies. At university, she met a young poet named Robert Antelme, whom she married in September 1939, three weeks after war was declared. By then, she had been working for over a year as a secretary in the Ministry of Colonies, but she left that job in November 1940. She was already intent on becoming a writer and, although both Gallimard and Denoël turned down her first novel,
Les Impudents
, it was eventually published by Plon in 1943. Duras also suffered the pain of losing her baby at birth in May 1942.

Antelme’s wartime career took a stranger path. He worked first in the Préfecture de Police in Paris and then as an information officer for Pierre Pucheu, Vichy’s minister of industry; when Pucheu took over the Interior Ministry, Antelme became his private secretary. Given Antelme’s later involvement in the resistance, his association
with one of Vichy’s most odious figures seemed all the more strange: Pucheu was accused of handing over French hostages to be shot by the Nazis and later executed by the provisional French government in Algiers.

Duras, on the other hand, found work with the Comité d’Organisation du Livre, the Vichy-created publishers’ association, and in January 1943 she became the secretary of its Nazi-approved committee assigning paper for new books. It was at the Comité d’Organisation du Livre that she met the collaborationist writer Ramon Fernandez, through whom she rented an apartment in his building at 5 rue Saint-Benoît, half a block from the Café de Flore. And it was at meetings of the paper committee that she met Gallimard’s representative Dionys Mascolo, who became her lover.
^*