Tete-a-Tete (31 page)

Sartre commented on the phenomenon in an interview with John Gerassi:

It was particularly amusing on those rare occasions—such as New Year's Eve—when they met as a group. Sartre said “vous” to Bost, Lanzmann, Beauvoir, and Olga, and “tu” to Wanda and Michelle. Beauvoir said “tu” to Lanzmann, and “vous” to everyone else. Bost and Olga said “vous” to each other, unless they were arguing, in which case it was “tu.” In his letters to Olga, Bost sometimes changed in mid-sentence: “Je vous aime. Je t'aime.”
³⁰

 

Claude Lanzmann was the archetypal “angry young man.” Beauvoir and Sartre were soon referring to him, with affectionate mockery, as “the Little Subject.” He was stubborn and willful, and at the same time he was prone to adopt the views of those he admired. When he was sad, he wept. When he was enraged, he was capable of fits of vomiting. “Sartre, most of my friends, myself—all of us were puritans; we kept our reactions under control and externalized our emotions very little,” Beauvoir writes. “Lanzmann's spontaneity was foreign to me. And yet it was by his excesses that he seemed near to me.”
³¹

Lanzmann defined himself first and foremost as a Jew. Nothing was more important to him. He felt proud to be Jewish, and outraged by the anti-Semitism to which his people had been subjected over the centuries. “I want to kill, all the time,” he told Beauvoir. Sometimes he would wake from a nightmare shouting, “You're all kapos!”

Despite Beauvoir's encouragement, Lanzmann eventually had to abandon his book. “He lacked the necessary perspective to write about himself,” she writes. “He began very well, but then came up against obstacles within himself.”
³²

Lanzmann no doubt attributed his “madness” to his difficult past. The eldest of three children, he was twelve when his parents separated. The children had witnessed violent domestic scenes. Their mother, Paulette, left for Paris, abandoning the three children to their father, who was then living in Brioude, a little town in the Massif Central. When Claude was fourteen, the war broke out. For long periods during the Occupation, the children did not know whether their mother was alive or dead.

Like their father, Claude and Jacques Lanzmann were both active in the Resistance. After the Liberation, the brothers went to Paris, while Evelyne, their young sister, stayed with their father and stepmother in Brioude. Claude attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he prepared for the entrance exam to the Ecole Normale, and made friends with his fellow students Jean Cau and Gilles Deleuze. Jacques studied art.

Claude Lanzmann says that it was in Paris, after the war, where he discovered the extent of French complicity with the Jewish genocide. He grappled with strong emotions. How could he stay in France among these people? While in high school in 1943, he had been hugely excited by
Sartre's
Being and Nothingness.
In 1946, Sartre's new book,
Portrait of the Anti-Semite,
marked him even more deeply. This man Sartre, who was not a Jew, appeared to understand Jews from the inside. His essay was also a brilliant analysis and denunciation of anti-Semitism. “It was because of that book that I stayed in France,” Lanzmann says today.
³³

On the weekends, Claude and Jacques spent considerable time in the small two-room apartment crammed with antique furniture, rare books, and surrealist art, where their mother Paulette lived with her second husband, the Jewish Yugoslav poet Monny de Boully. Once the young men were inside the door, the generous Boully would press gifts on them. Paulette would push a plate of food in front of them, draw up a chair beside them, and ply them with questions.

Throughout the war, the Boullys had been in hiding—camping in friends' cellars and attics, and constantly changing abodes. They often told the story of their closest scrape with death. One day, in June 1943, they ventured out to have lunch with their close friend Max Jacob, the poet. Passing Gestapo agents took one look at Paulette, who had a pronounced Semitic nose, and arrested them both. After a long interrogation, two officers took Boully away to examine his penis. In his terror, his penis had shrunk to the size of a peanut and was hidden in skin. He was in fact circumcised, but the officers, who were not medical men, let him go. The Boullys were miraculously saved. Max Jacob was not so fortunate. He died a year later, in Drancy.
³⁴

On Saturday evenings, the Boullys held a salon in their cluttered apartment in the Rue Alexandre-Cabanel. Painters, writers, and intellectuals, including Cocteau, Aragon, and Paul Eluard, came to drink and talk in that cozy, smoky place. Food remained scarce in the postwar years, but the hospitable Paulette always managed to provide something to eat. Claude and Jacques Lanzmann were nearly always there with their friends. “We were formidably narcissistic young men,” Olivier Todd remembers. “We had the view that if you knew someone important, you were important too.”
³⁵

Paulette, who was hugely ambitious for her children, particularly her eldest son, was known by all and sundry as “The Mother.” She had a pronounced stutter. According to Serge Rezvani, a young artist friend of Jacques Lanzmann's, this gave her a fascination she knew how to manipulate:

At the age of sixteen, Jacques and Claude's sister, Evelyne, came to Paris and lived in the maid's room upstairs in the Boully home, under the roof. Claude had visited Brioude with his philosopher friend Gilles Deleuze in tow. Claude idolized Deleuze, and in no time Deleuze had become Evelyne's new god. She moved to Paris to be near him. They were briefly lovers. When he rejected her, she stopped eating and began to waste away. After some months of this, her mother and stepfather gave the handsome young Rezvani some money and implored him to take her out and cheer her up.

In the time-worn Jewish tradition, the Boullys were matchmakers. As Serge Rezvani describes it, he and Evelyne were put under intense pressure. Although they were not in love, they found themselves marrying. Evelyne was eighteen; Rezvani was nineteen.

Claude Lanzmann and his friends were always hatching wild schemes to make money. In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir writes with amusement that as a twenty-year-old senior at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Claude Lanzmann “rented a cassock and went around knocking on rich people's doors and collecting money.”
³⁷
Rezvani writes that Claude took the train to Deauville and stood at the door of a casino, hoping to charm some cash out of inebriated winners, and that he used to joke about marrying some “rich old biddy.”
³⁸
Jacques Lanzmann admits that all three Lanzmann children used to steal from Monny de Boully, who was already very generous toward them.
³⁹
Jacques remembers Claude writing to Cocteau pretending he had a lung disease and requesting money for treatment. Cocteau wrote back recommending a doctor and kindly offered to pay the bill. Nothing came of it.
⁴⁰

Jean Cau came up with the idea of writing to famous writers and asking to become their secretary. He sent off a dozen or so letters. To the astonishment of his friends, he got a reply, just one. In the spring of 1946, when the new existentialist craze was at its height and Jean-Paul Sartre was as famous as a film star, Jean Cau, at the age of twenty-one, became his secretary.

Lanzmann had to make do with the more modest job of rewriter at the conservative tabloid
France Dimanche.
It paid well and had the virtue of leaving him time for serious writing, but Lanzmann chafed with frustration. He felt he was just marking time.

Jean Cau was in Sartre's employ for six years before he was able to organize a lucky break for Lanzmann, and have him invited onto the editorial board of
Les Temps modernes.
A few weeks later, in a euphoric mood, the two friends had a wager. Which of them would be able to seduce Simone de Beauvoir?

“He won,” Jean Cau told Olivier Todd. “So much the better for me.”
⁴¹

 

If the affair with Simone de Beauvoir was begun as an opportunistic bet, those who knew him well agree that Lanzmann was quickly caught up in his own game. His brother, Jacques, and his future wife, Judith Magre, do not have the slightest doubt that Claude loved Simone de Beauvoir. “He may not have been
in love,
” says Judith Magre, “I can't say. But I know he
loved
the Beaver. It would always remain a very, very deep attachment.”
⁴²

At the age of twenty-seven, Lanzmann, had entered a new world. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were internationally famous, with a sexy whiff of scandal about them. Whenever they walked into a café or restaurant, people recognized them. “Imagine what it was like for me to meet Sartre after the war, having discovered him during the war,” Lanzmann says. “He was a rocket, he dazzled with life and intelligence…. He made ideas look easy. He was never abstract.”

Lanzmann admits that there were dangers for Sartre's young acolytes. “Sartre's word was like the word of an evangelist…. He used to severely demolish people. And that induced a certain laziness of judgment in others…. It was enough that Sartre said: ‘He's a bastard' or ‘he's a dog.' We didn't make the effort to look beyond that.”
⁴³

Lanzmann does not feel that Beauvoir had the same crushing effect. On the contrary, she spectacularly opened up his horizons. She was forty-four, in the prime of life, and full of vitality. With her, he discovered the pleasure of travel, setting off in a car with maps and guidebooks, and exploring new places. He was astounded by her appetite for the world. He had never seen anyone work as hard as she did, and had never known anyone with such a capacity for happiness. When she said she would do something, she did it. “She was the most reliable person you could possibly imagine.”

Beauvoir loved him deeply—Lanzmann calls her
“une grande amoureuse”
—and yet she never curtailed his liberty. From the beginning, Beauvoir insisted that he go out with other women as well, and he did. “You could tell her everything,” he says. “She almost never made moral judgments. Well, not with those she loved. Her first reaction was to force herself to understand, and to put herself in the shoes of the other person.”

It was a shock for Lanzmann to discover Beauvoir's vulnerability. “I saw her sobbing so many times,” he remembers. “Suddenly a storm of emotion would come over her. She would almost suffocate with sobbing. It was frightening.” He accepts her own explanation, that she could not come to terms with the idea of mortality.

Claude Lanzmann was used to his mother interrogating people. Nevertheless he was astounded by Beauvoir and Sartre's “tell everything” policy. Beauvoir expected the same of him, and Lanzmann was not always in the mood. Occasionally he would snap at her, “This is impossible!” He preferred things to come out in their own time, he says, maybe a couple of hours later, after a glass of wine or whiskey.
⁴⁴

For the Easter vacation in 1953 they went to Saint-Tropez with Sartre and Michelle. Beauvoir and Lanzmann stayed in the Hôtel de l'Aïoli, along with Sartre. Michelle and her two children stayed nearby, in a house on the square. (Boris Vian had leased the house for ten years, and he allowed Michelle to go there with the children.) At night, Michelle was unable to leave the children, and the two men took turns eating with Beauvoir. There were no tourists in the town that week, Lanzmann recalls, and only two restaurants were open, next door to each other on the port:

After dinner, the three of them would meet at the Aïoli, for drinks by the wood fire. Just before midnight, Sartre would disappear to phone Michelle and Wanda. Every day, wherever he was, even if he was exhausted, Sartre called his women at around midnight. Lanzmann would sometimes overhear bits of his conversation. “It was more or less the same talk for each one,” he recalls. “‘My little darling,' he called them. But the intonation was a bit different in each case.”