Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [132]
The nascent Cold War had also begun to affect literary life. Arthur Koestler, who was living in Wales at this time, came to Paris on 1 October 1946 to attend the rehearsals of his play Twilight Bar, produced as Bar du Soleil by Jean Vilar at the Théâtre de Clichy.
One day very soon after his arrival he visited the Hotel Pont-Royal and went over to Sartre in the downstairs bar to introduce himself. ‘Bonjour, je suis Koestler.’ The famille Sartre found him full of life and interested in everything – Sartre, especially, became fond of Koestler – but his competitive bumptiousness, encouraged by his great success with Darkness at Noon, which had sold nearly 250,000 copies in France, rather irked them.* Simone de Beauvoir soon had another reason to be irritated when, after one of the many nights on which she had drunk too much, she woke up in Koestler’s bed.
She and Sartre had another unpredictable evening with Koestler some time later. On 31 October, Koestler and his beautiful companion, Mamaine Paget, whom he married not long afterwards, took them out to dinner at an Arab bistro with Albert and Francine Camus. Sartre had to give a UNESCO lecture the next day, so hoped for an early bed. But after dinner they went on to ‘a little dancing with blue and pink neon lights and men with hats on dancing with girls with very short skirts’. Mamaine described ‘the engaging spectacle’ of Koestler ‘lugging Castor (who has I think hardly ever danced in her life) round the floor’ while Sartre, with a similar lack of experience, ‘lugged Mme Camus’.
Koestler insisted that they all go on to the Schéhérazade nightclub, a White Russian establishment which German officers had loved during the Occupation. The combination of Russian Tzigane music, almost total darkness, vodka, champagne and zakouski combined to make his guests forget the next day’s commitments.
Koestler seemed to find the Schéhérazade an appropriate spot for launching into an anti-Soviet tirade. The more they argued, the more they drank. Soon only Camus and Mamaine Paget were comparatively sober, the rest were very drunk, especially Sartre. At four in the morning, Koestler persuaded them to go on to a bistro in Les Halles, where they had soupe à l’oignon, oysters and white wine. Sartre became even more drunk. He kept pouring pepper and salt into paper napkins, then ‘folding themup small and stuffing them in his pocket’.
At eight o’clock in the morning, half-blinded by the sunlight, Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre found themselves in a pitiful state, weeping dilute vodka, on one of the bridges over the Seine. They wondered out loud whether to throw themselves in. Yet despite only two hours’ sleep, Sartre managed to write and deliver his lecture.
Koestler was feeling under threat at the time. He had become a major hate figure for Stalinists, and, like all lapsed party members, he was vilified even more than a committed fascist. He returned to Wales almost immediately after the night at the Schéhérazade. Not long afterwards, Les Temps modernes published Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s attack on Koestler under the title ‘Le Yogi et le Prolétaire’. In this piece Merleau Ponty, professor of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, set out to excuse the 1936 Moscow show trials on the grounds that the Soviet Union, isolated and threatened, could only save its revolution at the cost of a monolithic firmness; ‘objectively’, in the Marxist-Leninist sense of the term, opposition was treason. ‘He subordinated morality to history, much more resolutely than any existentialist yet,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir in a revealing passage. ‘We took this leap with him– without yet letting go – conscious that moralizing was the last defence of bourgeois idealism.’
Camus was outraged by the article and by the decision of the editorial committee to publish it. An argument broke out