the spirit of the times

SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRES

1945-1955 

Commentary © James A. Harrod, COPYRIGHT PROTECTED; ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

POINTS and other literary journals that emerged in Paris in the late 1940s did not come about as an isolated occurrence, rather they were an integral part of the changing cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and political climate of Paris.  The following essay is taken from the JAZZ IN PARIS – SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRES – 1946-1956 booklet published by Universal Music S.A.S, France ® 2004, All rights reserved.

It provides a snapshot of the changing times in Saint-Germain-des-Pres when POINTS emerged on the Paris literary scene.

EXISTENTIALISM

IS A CHECK SHIRT

Every man and woman who ever tripped - sometimes literally - down

the stairs into the Tabou was called an "existentialist" by journalists.

It didn't matter that very few of them had ever given so much as a

glance at the cover of Being and Nothingness, the opus that

comprehensively laid down the ins and outs of what was called

"Existentialism", a philosophical theory that created a lot of noise,

both rightly and wrongly. Its author, Jean-Paul Sartre, who was one

of the most visible figures in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and also lived

there, was to assume paternity for something that didn't concern him

in the least. He attributed the source of this confusion to Juliette

Greco and Anne-Marie Cazalis, who at one time were being plied with

questions on their way of life by a Samedi Soir journalist: they grew

tired of resisting and supposedly replied that they were

"existentialists". The famous text by Sartre published in Jazz 47,

which began with the rather unfortunate remark "Jazz music's like

a banana, it's to be consumed on the spot", should have been enough

to clear him of any possible connection with the music and the

crowds who were fanatical about it. All of which leads us quite

naturally to wonder why and how jazz could have found refuge in a

Quarter so foreign to the capital's nocturnal pleasures...

Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, Michéle Lèglise Vian, Simone de Beauvoir au café  Le Procope    

"In 1938, if you abandoned a noctambulist in Saint-Germain-des-

Pres after the 'brasserie Lipp' had closed for the night, he wouldn't

have found a single place open to accommodate his thirsty

distress." ① Things would change greatly after the inevitable

interlude imposed by the Occupation; and the Occupiers,

incidentally, were conspicuously absent from a neighbourhood that

lacked as many official buildings as it did pleasure-places. And the

spectacle of the Cafe de Flore's transformation into a poor boarding-

school prep room (thanks to a bunch of numbed intellectuals

absorbed by their writings and divided by their affinities) was

hardly enough to rate a mention in the attractions of Gay Paree. But

it's true that initiates might have seen some aspects of it as

entertainment. Mouloudji, who belonged to the class room and was

a friend to all of them, related: "I think I made efforts to get the two

groups to meet, but nothing happened after my initiative because,

just as the Sartre people were open, but outwardly closed, the

Prevert people were outwardly open but..." ②

After the Liberation, escapees from the October Group, with one side

united under Jacques Prevert, and Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul

Sartre and the editorial committee of the Temps Modernes on the

other, didn't change their habits in the slightest. Or at least not for a

while. Claude Luter: "Even so, it's true we saw an incredible number

of people turn up: painters, writers, actors, musicians... As for why

it happened there, I just don't know."③

Standing as surety for a long intellectual tradition, Saint-Germain-

des-Pres had always provided shelter for a number of writers. From

Alfred Jarry to Robert Desnos, Guillaume Apollinaire, Leo Larguier

or Paul Leautaud. Poet Antonin Artaud, when he was on leave from

the institution in Ivry, could wander the streets again. His

blistering pamphlet Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu had been

brought out by Editions K, one of the many confidential

publishing-houses established in the shadows of Saint-Germain's

belfry, as were several bookshops for refined literary tastes, among

them the Divan founded in 1921.

Intellectual pursuits which had until then remained secretly private

suddenly found themselves in the spotlight when Saint-Germain-

des-Pres was invaded by young people impatient to change

literature, theatre, painting, the cinema... the whole world in fact.

The Quarter lacked everything - money, in their eyes, counted for

less than an exchange of ideas - and so it seemed to have been made

for them. It was full of cheap little hotels (in those days that was

how everybody lived - apartments were out of one's reach),

restaurants that were inexpensive (Les Assassins, Le Petit St.

Benoit, Cheramy), and the cafes were picturesque and cheap. There

were cellars, too, and when they were unoccupied they cried out to

be put to use without fuss. "This sudden fad for the subterranean is

quite a curious tale. Did it come from habits picked up in the war

when there were air-raid warning's? Was it a desire to remain apart

from life, to be marginal? Was it the smell of forgotten wine, and old

furniture with woodworm? Was it a need to create a sort of distance

between adults and the young, the comforting feeling that goes with

knowing who to meet at what time and where? Probably all of those

at once, and for many other reasons, like fear and solitude." ④ Juliette

Greco provided her own answers to her questions.

A respectable number of eccentrics already populated the Quarter;

Armand Fevre, the last Bonapartist, strode along the riverbank in

half-pay uniform looking for a portrait of the Emperor; Raymond

Duncan wore a Greek tunic and Roman sandals, and lived in

Antiquity in his Akademia on the Rue de Seine; and with the wind in

his Karl Marx beard, 'Pere Ratier' tried to persuade passers-by to buy

a copy of Le Libertaire from him.

The most recent arrivals brought something called "wild-man music"

with them, jazz, and they "were provocative dressers. According to

Marc Doelnitz; "In the Jewish rag-trade at the flea-market in Saint-

Ouen we found donations sent by the New York Israeli community for

fellow-believers who'd been stripped of everything; it all immediately

went on the market... Mountains of check shirts, drainpipe trousers

that were often too short, socks in loud colours with horizontal

stripes, basketball boots... their modest prices seduced us

permanently."⑤ The sartorial mores (they were quite eccentric then) of

the new denizens of Saint-Germain-des-Pres found an echo in Boris

Vian's play Le Gouter des Generaux, Monseigneur Roland Tapecul's

lateness was justified by this line: "It so happens that it's impossible

to find violet socks in Saint-Sulpice at the moment, the young people

in Saint-Germain-des-Pres are buying them all."

Many others had something else in common with the young

generation: fitting a maximum number of intellectual pursuits,

generally those that weren't lucrative, into an extremely tight

perimeter. Jean Cocteau was all the more assiduous in his visits since

his friend and collaborator, interior decorator Christian Berard, had

set up home on the left Bank; when Cocteau made Orpheus, he

naturally called up Juliette Greco, Anne-Marie Cazalis and Roger

Blin, not to mention other cellar-rats who remained more

anonymous. When Andre Breton returned from America

accompanied by Benjamin Peret and Matta, he held his famous

assizes at the Deux Magots; Audiberti lived at the Hotel Taranne

opposite the Flore; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (according to Vian, "the

only philosopher who invites women to dance"), Albert Camus, Jean

Genet, Claude Roy, Tristan Tzara and the playwright Arthur Adamov

could also be counted among the familiar faces in the Quarter.

Between the Deux-Magots and the Cafe de Flore there was a

bookshop called La Hune. Its manager Bernard Gheerbrant

organised a symposium at the Lipp brasserie on a subject so topical

it was red-hot: Was La Chasse spirituelle really a recently-discovered,

previously-unpublished work by Arthur Rimbaud, or was it a

pastiche? The answer was the second alternative. It had been

concocted by actors Nicolas Bataille and Akakia-Viala as revenge on

those who'd seen their show based on Une Saison en enfer and

ordained that it didn't teach them anything about Rimbaud. On the

Rue des Beaux-Arts, Roger Cornaille founded another bookshop, Le

Minotaure, which kept film-buffs, Pataphysiciens and all kinds of

curious people happy for decades.

Artists didn't want to take a back seat; so many art-galleries opened

their doors too. Either working nearby or just strolling around in the

shadow cast by the belfry of Saint-Germain-des-Pres church, were

Atlan, Camille Bryen, Wols, Serge Poliakoff, Afro-American artist

Romare Bearden (who studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1950),

sculptor Giacometti, Yves Corbassiere (whose old chequered Renault

decorated the narrow streets of Saint-Germain) and cartoonist Jean

Boullet who, together with Boris Vian, designed a card sent to

announce the burial of check shirts.

Between 1950 and 1954, the film world was also well-represented by

Jacques Becker, Alain Resnais and Alexandre Astruc, who was to

illustrate his "camera-pen" theory in a film called Ulysse ou les

mauvaises rencontres, shot in 16mm at the Theatre du Vieux-

Colombier. Anne-Marie Cazalis remembered: "Everyone's willingness

was mobilised. Cocteau, who got up at 6 in the morning and locked

himself away in the prompter's hole, played Homer; Daniel Gelin was

Telemachus, and Simone Signoret was Penelope; Marc Doelnitz was

Odysseus, Juliette Greco, Calypso, France Roche and Francois

Chalais were Helen and Menelaus, and Yvonne de Bray was the

Pythia. Christian Berard - we'd spent all night looking for him

through a thick fog in that November 1948 so we could drag him

behind the round window of a flooded dressing-room - was a bearded

Neptune with a crown of seaweed. When we were filming the Cyclops

scene with Jean Genet, Anet Badel discovered that he, too, had a

basement."⑥ Not a single foot of film survived. On the other hand, the

Vieux-Colombier club became one of the temples of jazz in Paris.

© Alain Tercinet  - English translation by Martin Davies

① Guillaume Hanoteau, L’Âge d’or de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Denoël, Paris, 1965.

② Mouloudji, La Fleur de l’âge, Grasset, Paris, 1991.

③ Claude Luter in Catalogue de l’exposition Saint-Germain-des-Pres 1945-1950, Pavillon des Arts, Paris, 1989.

④ Juliette Greco, Jujube, Stock, Paris, 1982.

⑤ Marc Doelnitz, La Féte à Saint-Germain-des-Pres, Laffont, Paris, 1979.

⑥ Anne-Marie Cazalis, Les Mémoires d’uneAnne, Stock, Paris, 1976.