Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940–50 by Agnès Poirier (review)

This work aims to evoke the artistic world of Paris during the 1940s by following the lives of prominent individuals, most of whom are familiar to the Francophile reader. The text is driven by anecdotes about the creative, political, and personal pursuits of figures who became the postwar cultural elite. Attention to the history of the decade is secondary to the details of lived experiences. Typical of the work's approach is the focus on Simone de Beauvoir, a constant presence throughout the decade. In 1940, as German tanks entered Paris, Beauvoir headed south to accept the hospitality of friends, as did Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett. Soon, she and others returned to Paris to resume their work. Her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre was central to her life, although the two lived in different hotels and each had other lovers. Attention to romantic pairings is pervasive throughout the work. Seductions, liaisons, and marital infidelities abound. After the Liberation, Beauvoir and other intellectuals sought to invent new political structures to replace the Third Republic. She and Sartre launched Les Temps modernes, which fostered a new school of thought termed Existentialism. Social and intellectual interactions took place at the Café de Flore and Brasserie Lipp. Beauvoir, like many others, traveled to the United States soon after the Liberation. On her second trip, in 1947, she met novelist Nelson Algren, and the two fell in love. For the rest of the decade he remained her great passion and a rival to Sartre in importance. She described Algren's four-month trip to France in 1949 as the happiest period of her life. By then she had rented her first home, a fifth-floor maid's room, with a view of Notre-Dame. She painted the walls and ceiling red, hung objects from her travels from the ceiling beams, and decorated with works by Léger and Picasso. Meanwhile, a new generation was coming of age, signaling the approaching importance of film. François Truffaut and Brigitte Bardot were adolescents destined to become dominant figures of their era. Women voted for the first time in 1945 and began to assert themselves. Beauvoir published Le deuxième sexe, a controversial study of the situation of women. American writers arrived in great numbers. Art Buchwald, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer were young and ambitious, able to live comfortably on the stipend of the GI Bill. A penniless James Baldwin came to escape the injustices of his native land. Richard Wright, already a successful writer, greeted and befriended him. In the end, intellectuals failed to achieve their loftiest political goals. By 1950, the Cold War was a political reality. Overall, this work is a popular rather than scholarly undertaking, consisting of engrossing vignettes drawn from secondary sources. The fast-paced narrative provides an entertaining look at the personal lives of intellectuals and artists who survived the Occupation and launched the cultural rebirth of Paris.