What a Year in Paris Can Do for You
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

The avant-garde (how old-fashioned that term sounds now) was very much in the air in the postwar decades, and everything avant-garde was still mostly connected to Paris. Even at its shabbiest, compared to anywhere else in Europe, it was still glorious. Legends lived there: Gide, Stein, Picasso, and… Edith Piaf! We’d memorized films like Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet in revival at what used to be called “art houses.” The news from liberated France was not only the “New Look” (narrow shoulders and long, full skirts as opposed to the wartime fashion of square Joan Crawford shoulders and trim, knee-length skirts). A mind-blowing new philosophy, Existentialism, drew a huge crowd for a lecture at NYU (this was before I dropped out).

Our generation’s pantheon of writers included James Joyce, Henry Miller, and D. H. Lawrence, whose gamekeeper in the still-banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover set women in search of the earthy male who would give them an orgasm. In my Freudian therapy group—where I was trying, like many of my gay friends, to go straight—all the women were frigid; but only my later self could have told them that none of my lesbians friends had that problem. Our reading list included Proust, Wilhelm Reich’s Function of the Orgasm (1942), and the Kinsey Report. Jean Genet had yet to be translated. Such was the “modern” canon for Jackie, Susan, and Angela, as well, when they were in Paris.

Leaving aside the GI’s who were just using the GI Bill as a means to live abroad, most of the real students—the ones who went to classes—were living on the periphery of Paris at the Cité Universitaire, and rarely mingled with us. Everybody I knew, the gay and bohemian crowd, lived around artsy St. Germain-des-Prés in the small, cheap hotels. We hung out at the gay café La Reine Blanche rather than the more literary and dignified Café de Flore across the boulevard, where Jean-Paul Sartre had his table upstairs. This is the world that everyone I knew headed for. So the chaperoned year abroad hardly seems typical—Susan Sontag, at least, was beyond that.

Many Americans, gays and lefties alike, were driven into exile by the puritanical climate and conservative politics of the time. To be sure, homosexuality was underground in Paris, but there was a live-and-let-live tradition that didn’t exist in most of the U.S. France was a haven of freedom, especially for African Americans. I met James Baldwin in Paris in the late 40’s, and there’s no doubt that Jimmy was accepted there in a way that he’d never experienced in the States. He was hanging out with rich white boys, even Southerners who’d never known blacks socially before and were having a unique experience—and were willing to pay for it (often with their white asses, too). He showed them the hot spots in Paris. In fact, he lived off them when he was broke, as he usually was.

Later on, in 1963, it was the same sense of liberation for Angela Davis when she went over for her year abroad, even though she also identified with the Algerian population, who were treated like shit. (I also happened to be there at that time on a Guggenheim.) Still, it was a mixed picture—the French accepted anyone from the colonies of any color who was what they called “evolué” and who spoke the language reasonably well and fit into French cultural life.

Even if the Marshall Plan, the brightest idea of the Cold War, “saved” France from communism, France never joined the postwar witch-hunt that the U.S. was going through, with the horrors of HUAC and Joseph McCarthy. Significantly, in France, communism remained a part of the political spectrum, not a subversive movement as in the U.S., where the effects of the witch-hunt are still apparent in the debased discourse that passes for political debate, the hysteria against ideas and critical thinking—and in the curious hostility toward France that shows up in American politics even today.

A   NEW BOOK by Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, explores the impact of a year in Paris on three prominent American women who made the trip in the postwar era. While Kaplan, a French professor at Yale, explores the intellectual journey that each woman made, she doesn’t mind dishing the dirt on their lives abroad, and we’re soon on a first-name basis with them: Jackie, Susan, and Angela.

Jackie

When Jackie went in 1949 with her Seven Sisters classmates, she got a berth on a liner—a far cry from my bunk on a converted troop ship—befitting her patrician upbringing, which included a French nanny. And she spent her year hobnobbing with people of her own class. She boarded with an aristocratic family and seemed hardly aware that it was Existentialist Paris she was going to. Her closest brush with bohemia was a meeting with the upper-class George Plimpton, who later founded The Paris Review.

With revealing documents still sequestered in the Kennedy Library, Jackie’s story is the least interesting of the three. But it’s hard not to speculate about sexual liaisons that year in Paris, despite the saintly image that she cultivated, what with her pious head scarves in church. (Gore Vidal would later rip that veil away.) Anyway, if she had been like other Seven Sisters college girls of the time, virginity would have ruined her reputation. A friend of mine at Barnard back then told me that nobody she knew would admit to being a virgin. We’ll never know, unless someone spills the beans. In any case, after her return to the States—unlike Sontag, who abandoned marriage and convention—Jackie went the other way and opted for respectability and got married. Though that was hardly the end of the story.

You have to admire how she and Jack brought to the White House a new sense of style, a great relief after Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower. (Of course, Eleanor and Franklin were the pinnacle of class.) Beyond her decorating skills, Jackie made the White House welcoming to high culture. It was Jackie who invited high bohemia (essentially, the New York Jewish intellectuals) into the White House.

To bring her up to the level of the brilliance of Sontag and philosophy professor Angela Davis, Kaplan makes much of Jackie’s prowess as an editor at Random House later in life. Be that as it may, a life devoted to power shopping isn’t really compatible with hyper-intelligence. Not to mention moral intelligence, and I think it was pretty crass of Jackie to steal Aristotle Onassis from Maria Callas. Jackie’s French indoctrination mainly led to her redecorating the White House and outshining Jack when the presidential couple arrived in Paris. He later joked that “I’m the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”

Susan

With Susan Sontag, we move into what was familiar territory for me, since Susan and I were both in the orbit of Alfred Chester in the 1960’s. She sat at his feet in her quest to transform herself from philosophy student to creative writer, and I was around as his best friend. She started moving out of our circle when her essay “Notes on Camp”—incorporating ideas from W. H. Auden’s essay on Oscar Wilde from the previous winter and discussions about it with Alfred—appeared in Partisan Review in the Fall 1964 issue, and the rest is history.

Unlike Kaplan’s other two subjects, who were part of academic programs abroad, Susan Sontag was on her own in Paris in 1957, picking up the language and going to a lot of movies, with minimal attendance at the Sorbonne. Thus, the book can concentrate on her coming-out adventures, mostly with the arch-bohemian—and still alive, though no longer lesbian—Harriet Sohmers Zwerling (who appeared in the recent documentary Still Doing It, about older women who refuse to give up sex).

The background to this stormy affair is this: in 1949, Harriet was working in the Berkeley Co-op Bookstore when she spotted this ravishing teenager browsing the shelves. Harriet, who had recently come out at Black Mountain College, put the moves on Susan by recommending Nightwood (1937), by Djuna Barnes. This led to a torrid affair that ended when the precocious Susan left to continue her academic studies in Chicago, where she married her philosophy professor, Philip Reiff. Harriet was by now living in Paris, and when the newlyweds arrived on their honeymoon, Susan looked up her former lover. But Harriet was off in Ischia, luckily for the marriage.

Back home, Susan continued her pursuit of a doctorate and gave birth to a son, but in 1957 she left her husband and infant son for a year’s fellowship at Oxford. Disliking the atmosphere there, she departed to hook up with Harriet in Paris, where the latter was working for The International Herald Tribune as a translator. This time they connected, and thus began her “educational” year in Paris, which forms the most interesting part of the first volume of Sontag’s diaries, Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947–1963. (Harriet’s side of the story is told in her own diary of the affair, which was published in the Brooklyn Rail in the late 50’s.)

Upon returning to the States in 1959, Harriet moved in with Sontag, now separated from her husband for good. But unbeknownst to her, Susan was now having a passionate affair with Cuban fabric designer and later playwright Irene Fornes, a former lover of Harriet’s, and suddenly Susan ordered Harriet to move out so Irene could move in. Harriet was shattered, since she too was in love with Irene. So painful was this incident, she later reported, that she turned against women altogether and switched to heterosexuality.

Susan went on to become one of America’s handful of public intellectuals (a slim category that included Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky), putting her money where her mouth was by going to Hanoi and dodging bullets in Sarajevo. To this day, Hispanic friends tell me, she is worshipped as a goddess in Latin America, especially in Brazil. Although after her death many people were astonished to learn that she was a lesbian, of course her friends all knew, and she was even outed before her death in the unauthorized biography Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock (2000).

Susan always actively supported gay causes, though the question of why she never came out has been widely discussed. I always said—it was hard not to be a little bitchy about Susan—that she was hoping for a Nobel Prize, which would have been complicated by her being openly lesbian. This theory is confirmed by her announcement at the age of five that winning a Nobel was her goal in life, as reported in the newly published second volume of her diary. And, in fact, she very nearly did win it in 1993—but Toni Morrison received it in that year instead.

Angela

Learning a foreign language, especially French, is a difficult feat for most Americans, but not for Angela Davis, what with her roots in the Black Bourgeoisie, which continues to inculcate a love of French from an early age. For them, speaking French is an escape from the daily realities of American racism, which is built into the English language. I realized this in 1947 when I went to a dinner party in Oak Bluffs, a black resort on Martha’s Vineyard, where my hostess, who was chattering in French with all her other guests, people of color, expressed her surprise that I couldn’t join in.

Each of the three subjects of this book became heroines to the French, but it’s clear that Kaplan has chosen Angela Davis to wear the halo on her head. By becoming a Black Panther, she fulfilled the Existentialist ideal of acting on one’s beliefs, culminating with her arrest and highly publicized trial, an episode that Kaplan really sinks her teeth into. Actually, similar to the guilt-by-association charges, the standard attack on liberals in the 1950’s, it was only because she belonged to an active communist group that charges were brought against her for materially assisting—buying the guns for—a shootout that killed three people. But the racism of the charge was the assumption that blacks buying guns was more dangerous than whites doing so (which they do by the millions, in fact).

The drama of the world effort to save Angela Davis made her an iconic figure equal in stature to the other two women in this book. But then she disappeared from the limelight, as they never did. Having a position on a philosophy faculty was her goal and, for a black woman, necessary for safety’s sake. It was long after this most spectacular chapter of her life was over that Angela Davis came out, but by then she was no longer in the headlines.

Edward Field’s latest book of poetry, his twelfth, is titled After the Fall: Poems Old and New.