Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50

by Agnès Poirier

Overview

An incandescent group portrait of the midcentury artists and thinkers whose lives, loves, collaborations, and passions were forged against the wartime destruction and postwar rebirth of Paris.

In this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and ultimately triumphant eras, Agnès Poirier unspools the stories of the poets, writers, painters, and philosophers whose lives collided to extraordinary effect between 1940 and 1950. She gives us the human drama behind some of the most celebrated works of the 20th century, from Richard Wright’s Native Son, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Saul Bellow's Augie March, along with the origin stories of now legendary movements, from Existentialism to the Theatre of the Absurd, New Journalism, bebop, and French feminism.

We follow Arthur Koestler and Norman Mailer as young men, peek inside Picasso’s studio, and trail the twists of Camus's, Sartre's, and Beauvoir’s epic love stories. We witness the births and deaths of newspapers and literary journals and peer through keyholes to see the first kisses and last nights of many ill-advised bedfellows. At every turn, Poirier deftly hones in on the most compelling and colorful history, without undermining the crucial significance of the era. She brings to life the flawed, visionary Parisians who fell in love and out of it, who infuriated and inspired one another, all while reconfiguring the world's political, intellectual, and creative landscapes.

With its balance of clear-eyed historical narrative and irresistible anecdotal charm, Left Bank transports readers to a Paris teeming with passion, drama, and life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250231468
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	638,429
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Born in Paris, Agnes Poirier has lived and worked in London for the last twenty years, and writes in both English and French. Her work has appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Times and The Independent on Sunday. She advises the Cannes Film Festival on British films and is currently a regular panel member of the British Broadcasting Corporation's Dateline London.

Table of Contents

Chronology xiii
Cast of Characters xv
Map: Paris Left Bank xvi
Introduction 1

I. War Was My Master
1. The Fall 9
2. The Choice 23
3. The Fight 46
4. The Desire 73

II. Modern Times
5. A Philosophy of Existence 95
6. Lust and Emancipation 116
7. A Third Way 136

III. The Ambiguities of Action
8. How Not to Be a Communist? 157
9. Love, Style, Drugs, and Loneliness 177
10. Action and Dissidence 189
11. “Paris’s Gloom Is a Powerful Astringent” 213

IV. Sharpening the Senses
12. “They Owned Art While We Were Just Full of Dollars” 229
13. Stimulating the Nerves 240
14. Anger, Spite, and Failure 252
15. Vindicated 266
16. Farewells and a New Dawn 278

Notes 293
Acknowledgments 315
Index 317

Editorial Reviews

"Carefully combing through an impressive amount of material, Poirier assembles the history of a decade. . . .As Poirier hops across arrondissements, she manages to create the feeling we're peeking into the windows of her subjects, looking at buildings that still stand, at inhabitants long gone." -The New York Times

"Poirier's hugely enjoyable, quick-witted, and richly anecdotal book is magnifique." -The Times (London)

"Weighty thought and earthy behaviour are the twin engines behind Agnès Poirier's briskly entertaining ride through France's most mouvementé decade." -The Sunday Times (London)

"Left Bank reads as an erudite and deeply satisfying gossip column, in which each story is more incredible than the last." -The New Republic

"Poirier does not miss a trick in her lively accounts of the intense discussions and adulterous liaisons that centred on the Café de Flore or the nearby nightclub Le Tabou; but her real achievement is to contextualise these politically and culturally. . . .An entertaining and well-written story" -The Spectator

"Agnès Poirier’s Left Bank is a remarkably exhilarating read." -Literary Review (UK)

"[A] delightful account of the writers, artists and painters who shared beds, cigarettes and column inches on a few streets in the 1940s" -The Economist

"Sartre, along with his life-long paramour Simone de Beauvoir, stands at the centre of Poirier’s book. Around this charismatic pair orbit the other stars in the Left Bank constellation (writers, artists, models and musicians), in a series of intellectual, political and erotic entanglements whose internecine complexity the author unpicks with great relish and flair." -The Financial Times

"A detailed chronicle of a decade alive with intellectual and political ferment. [Poirier] offers a gossipy, well-informed cultural history of her native Paris, beginning in 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, and ending in 1949, with the Marshall Plan in effect to help the continent recover. Organizing the book chronologically, she follows the lives of artists, writers, musicians, publishers, and performers—mostly French and American—deftly creating "a collage of images, a kaleidoscope of destinies" from memoirs, histories, biographies, and the writers' own prolific work. . . . An animated, abundantly populated history of dramatic times." -Kirkus

"I loved this dramatic reconstruction of the complicated and passionate life of Left Bank intellectuals during the Nazi occupation and Poirier does not shy away from exposing the joy and pain of experimental living or from exploring with sensitivity the moral ambiguity of living through the Occupation, especially complex for journalists and writers. I found it compulsive reading as the book gathers momentum with vivid descriptions of the post-war uncertainty." —Anne Sebba, author of Les Parisiennes: Resistance, Collaboration, and the Women of Paris Under Nazi Occupation

"A tour de force, Left Bank weaves together so many people, ideas, trends, occurrences, and above all Parisian places, into a tapestry of fascinations – a distillation of the essence of an amazing time...the best of its kind I have ever read." —A.C. Grayling, author of The God Argument

"A brilliant recapturing of a fascinating era. Artistic and intellectual Paris — 1940-50 — comes vividly and memorably alive in these pages. A tremendous achievement". —William Boyd

From the Publisher

11/13/2017
French journalist Poirier (Touché: A French Woman’s Take on the English) attempts to capture life on the Left Bank during the desperate occupation years and tumultuous postwar period through the “kaleidoscope of destinies” of its leading intellectuals and artists. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre play a central role in Poirier’s narrative, drawing other writers and philosophers into their extensive professional network as well as their prolific, and sometimes messy, romantic entanglements. Poirier skillfully describes how, after the liberation of Paris, once-tight Resistance allies fragmented into cadres of Communists, right-leaning Gaullists, and adherents of Sartre’s idealistic “Third Way.” Amid the ongoing infighting, African-American artists such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Eartha Kitt, and Richard Wright were welcomed in Paris and performed freely there. Though the artists, musicians, and writers are the primary focus here, there’s a quiet admiration for the men—including a Nazi bureaucrat—who went to great lengths to save major art works and literature from destruction or seizure prior to and during the occupation. The tight focus on high-profile figures and relative absence of working-class Parisians results in the work feeling distant and limited, almost decontextualized from daily struggles in the city. Nevertheless, Poirier humanizes the extraordinary men and women of the Left Bank, unraveling the complicated stories behind a breathtaking number of literary, philosophical, and artistic masterpieces in a singular, heartbreaking era. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-10-10
A detailed chronicle of a decade alive with intellectual and political ferment.London-based journalist Poirier (Touché: A French Woman's Take on the English, 1997), a panel member of the BBC's weekly program Dateline London, offers a gossipy, well-informed cultural history of her native Paris, beginning in 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, and ending in 1949, with the Marshall Plan in effect to help the continent recover. Organizing the book chronologically, she follows the lives of artists, writers, musicians, publishers, and performers—mostly French and American—deftly creating "a collage of images, a kaleidoscope of destinies" from memoirs, histories, biographies, and the writers' own prolific work. While some of her cast of characters (Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier) have minor roles, others are more prominent, notably Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, along with their many lovers. The decade saw the publication of some of the most influential books of the 20th century, including Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which catapulted the philosopher to international fame; de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which became a bible for feminism; Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, which revealed the author's bitter disillusionment with communism; and Samuel Beckett's iconoclastic play Waiting for Godot. These writers, and many others, shared their ideas in print—in the journals Les Temps Modernes, founded by Sartre and de Beauvoir; and Combat, edited by Camus—and also when they met at cafes, bars, restaurants, galleries, and theaters. Living in cheap hotel rooms or chilly apartments, they spent little time at home. Romantic liaisons were as passionate as debates over the future of Europe. "For Paris existentialists," Poirier writes, "friendship seemed as complicated as love. Fallings-out and reconciliations came in quick succession, politics and sex playing a central part." By 1948, Paris had become "the capital of sin and moral ambiguity," attracting hordes of Americans (Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, James Baldwin), some funded by the GI Bill.An animated, abundantly populated history of dramatic times.

Kirkus Reviews