Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [186]
Capote also visited Colette, who received him from her bed ‘à la Louis Quatorze at his morning levée’. He described her ‘slanted eyes, lucent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl; a spare and clever face powdered clown-pale; her lips, for all her considerable years, were a slippery, shiny, exciting show-girl red; and her hair was red, or reddish, a rosy bush, a kinky spray’. She asked him what he expected from life. He told her that he did not know what he expected, but he knew what he wanted, which was to be a grown-up person. ‘Colette’s painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. “But that,” she said, “is the one thing none of us can ever be.”’
One of the first writers to migrate to France after the Liberation, as opposed to those who arrived in uniform, was the black writer Richard Wright, author of Black Boy and Native Son. Thanks to the combined efforts of Gertrude Stein and Claude Lévi-Strauss, then French cultural attaché in Washington, he arrived in Paris with his wife, Ellen (who was white), and their daughter, Julia, in May 1946.
The State Department had been very reluctant to give him a passport, but once in Paris – where he was an honoured guest – they could hardly ignore him. Nevertheless, Wright was seen as a distinct liability. At an official reception at the American Embassy given a few days after his arrival, he was told, ‘For God’s sake, don’t let these foreigners turn you into a brick to hurl through our windows!’
Wright could not get over the welcome accorded to him by the French. He was made an honorary citizen of Paris, and his French publisher, Gallimard, threw a party in his honour at which the guests included Roger Martin du Gard, Michel Leiris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paulhan and Marcel Duhamel. His move to Paris had been made to gain a better perspective on the core of his fiction: the racial problems of America. He acted as a consultant for Présence africaine and Sartre’s Les Temps modernes, and in 1948 he became active in Sartre and Rousset’s Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire.
James Baldwin, another black writer living in Paris, was deeply indebted to Richard Wright, who did much to help him in the first stages of his career as a writer. Yet Baldwin’s feelings towards Wright were complex, almost Oedipal, and they spilled out in an essay for Zero magazine called ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’. Baldwin argued that the protest novel was flawed because its essential humanity was obscured by politics. Wright took this as a personal attack on Native Son and was bitterly hurt. The relationship between the two writers never recovered, even though Wright continued to bail the impoverished Baldwin out of debt from time to time. Baldwin managed to survive only by scrounging off friends and hustling in gay bars, yet Paris helped himgain confidence. He was treated as an American writer, not a black, and like many foreign writers he found that in France writing was respected as a profession.
The largest contingent of left-bank Americans in the late 1940s were young soldiers who had become students under the GI Bill of Rights. Once the franc was devalued, their twenty dollars a week provided just enough to live on. A number of them were in a belated state of rebellion against the stupider indignities of military discipline and became attracted to radical politics. The French Communist Party, through its Maison de la Pensée Française, made special attempts to win over foreign students in Paris, especially Americans. The American Embassy was concerned by this development and kept an eye open, but there was little it could do, except pass the matter on to the FBI and CIA.
From the spring of 1948, Paris saw a very different American influx with some 3,000 new residents, all of them under the umbrella of the