Paris, 1944: How Shall We Live?

The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

The dead are dead; for them there are no more problems. But after this night of festivity, we, the living, will awaken again. And then how shall we live?

                                                                           Simone de Beauvoir

When I was young my mother moved her study to the empty milk house on the old farm where we lived on a bluff above the Susquehanna. She had moved her books and papers and electric typewriter there in order to finish her dissertation, a task that had proven too much for her in a house with six kids. Always close to my mother, I used to visit her there while she worked, sitting quietly in the canvas chair beside her and studying the books on the shelves, the pictures on the walls. I remember there were prints by Ben Shahn (one of which I have above my desk right now) and the large, now-iconic image of the young Black Panther, Huey Newton, in a basket-backed chair armed with spear and rifle, the poster given her as a gift from her late friend and admirer (and the subject of her dissertation), the radical historian, militant, and suicide, Robert Starobin. I remember the pictures and I remember the books, can recall trying in vain to decipher their content from their titles alone. There was The Feminine Mystique, Fear of Flying, The Wretched of the Earth, Women, Race & Class, and by the door a thick paperback  copy of The Second Sex, a book I wouldn’t read for many years to come.

Even then, The Second Sex was not my first exposure to Simone de Beauvoir.  The first thing I read of hers was her short and sterling work, An Easy Death, a brave, nearly day-by-day accounting of her mother’s death. While I knew that de Beauvoir had written fiction as well I’d simply never read any, that is, until recently, when I picked up a copy of her prize-winning, semi-autobiographical  novel, The Mandarins.   

Opening in Paris in 1944, at the end of the Nazi Occupation, the novel follows a group of intellectuals--writers, philosophers, newspapermen, and activists--as they struggle to salvage the future from the ashes and rubble of war. Based in part on de Beauvoir’s own experience of that period in Paris in the restless company of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and her one-time lover, Nelson Algren (to whom she dedicates the novel), the story is more than merely anecdotal, more than a just paean to these brilliant, headstrong men. After all the author calls them mandarins (no doubt including herself), after the ancient Chinese order of bureaucrats, meaning also “esoteric” and “consciously superior”, if not pretentious, pedantic, effete. As much as the author clearly admired these men, as much as we all admire them today, she doesn’t pull any punches in telling this tale. For if these men, her characters, are brave, even visionary, they are also arrogant, chauvinistic, and vain.

The particular brilliance of this novel stems from the fact that we, the readers, are never locked too long inside the minds of these men, smart, prophetic as they are, but asked to see the story, first and foremost, through the eyes of a seemingly lesser player in the drama of Paris at the time, the psychiatrist, Anne Debreuilh, who serves as the novel’s governing intelligence and emotional keel. It is to her perspective, and to her own trials and tribulations--her relationship with her husband, an imperious Communist party leader; her work with her war-traumatized patients; and her affair with an American writer--that the reader is most closely, most poignantly wed. 

Yet what the author achieves with this novel, finally, is much more than that. Thanks to de Beauvoir’s extraordinary skill as a writer, to her exceptionally fine ear for dialogue, the reader is transported to Paris itself, in 1944, to sit amidst the crowded tables with these men and women and eavesdrop upon their heady, ever-provocative conversations about politics and war, about loyalty, women, and love. It is a rich, rewarding book that makes one wonder, some days, where such urgency and passion have gone.

Here, for those interested, is an engaging, if lengthy interview with Simone de Beauvoir from 1959: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGn0O2ECunk

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a highly influential French writer, feminist, activist, and intellectual who wrote novels, essays, biographies, as well as books on politics, philosophy, and social theory.  As a young woman, she was intellectually precocious, passing her baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, only to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she wrote her thesis on Leibniz. There she worked with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss.  It was while studying for the agrégation in philosophy that she met École Normal student, Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she formed a tumultuous, if enduring relationship. In 1954 The Mandarins was awarded the Prix Goncourt, the highest literary award in France. 

Peter Adam Nash

France, 1949

                                                                                                                             as night

                                                                               follows day

                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                                Pierre Moinot

Two men are found murdered in a little village in the Poitou region of western France, a baffling, inscrutable killing that infects the lives of its inhabitants who are suddenly forced to regard each other with suspicion and fear.  Set in the wake of WWII, in a region sacked and settled by marauding tribes since time immemorial (by the Celts, the Romans, the Vandals, the Visigoths, the Franks, the Vikings, and most recently the Nazis), this short novel is a powerful, often exceptionally tender depiction of the weight and trauma of the past.  Shifting between the perspectives of seven different villagers, male and female, young and old, the story that unfolds is distinguished by the author’s intimate knowledge of and abiding affection for these humble, rough-hewn folk—farmers, shepherds, and guildsmen—who, for all of their fatalism and poverty, are richly illuminated by their propensity, their capacity, to love.

In the opening section of the story an elderly woman named Maria, perhaps my favorite of the many characters, reflects upon a former lover of hers in a language and phrasing typical of Moinot: “Maybe the effect that he had on me, the stone, there, in my chest, maybe that was jealousy after all. But never a word. I would have gotten nothing but cajoling from him; he did not know how to hide what he tried to win forgiveness for.  And maybe I never, never forgave anything…” Moinot’s description of these people is never condescending, but he invests them with an intelligence—however unschooled—that is often blithesome, poetic: “Early in the morning, closing the little valley gate, Lortier gradually concealed behind one of the thick doors the image of his happiness: over there, in front of the house, Mo was folding a sheet with one of her girls and both of them were laughing because one of them had pulled too hard at the wrong time on the folded cloth, and the other had let it go; behind them a very old rosebush was studded with white blossoms, and the structure of the arbor bending into the flower and vegetable gardens marked off a verdant foreground.  At the center, the brilliant whiteness of the sheet contrasted dramatically with the golden stone of the old walls and seemed to reflect the sun into Mo’s gray hair so she appeared blond.  This timeless scene erased forever the wars, the murders, and the cruelties that the fortified house had withstood. Lortier gently closed the door again behind him, as though to protect it.”

While particularly adept at tracking the emotional lives of his characters, their fears and joys and failings, Moinot devotes a significant part of his power to describing the natural world around them—the plants and animals, the seasons and cycles to which these villagers are bound, quickening this otherwise dark and fallow tale with a lyricism that is often  sublime. The countryside of small farms and shallow valleys is alive with blackbirds and cuckoos, with calyxes and violets, with foxes and weasels and hares.  The characters themselves have a special affection for such georgic details, noting with pleasure, as they sit alone or cross a field or wood: “the vibrant trembling of the dragonflies”, “the little fox and badger trail”, “ “the perfect sphere of a leek flower gone to seed”. 

Described by Booklist as a “masterful literary thriller”, As Night Follows Day is nothing of the sort, that is, unless the thrill you seek is the thrill of language itself, in which case you will speak with wonder about this adroit and compassionate tale. 

Pierre Moinot, born in 1920, is the author of over a dozen novels as well as works for  the stage and television.  Friend of André Malraux and Albert Camus, Moinot was elected in 1982 to the prestigious Académie Française.  As Night Follows Day (Le matin vient et aussi la nuit, Editions Gallimard,1999) is published in New York by Welcome Rain Publishers.  http://www.welcomerain.com/

Peter Adam Nash