Left Bank by Agnes Poirier

 ‘Left Bank’ by Agnes Poirier, publ 2018

This book is about Paris from the Second World War to 1953 as the place where artists and writers were working and meeting, and also drinking, taking drugs and having many sexual liaisons.
Poirier packs in an immense amount of research and detail which can fascinate but in the end the complex array of infidelities becomes wearisome.
Surprisingly the RAF dropped leaflets of a poem by Eluard entitled ‘Liberty’ during the nazi occupation. Somehow Sartre escaped from a German prison with false ID. Picasso managed in a time of scarcity to find enough bronze to cast 150 sculptures. All the paintings from the Louvre were successfully moved to safe locations. Existentialism emerged.
The film ‘Casablanca’ came out in 1942 -  a film I realised only at third viewing shows  political refugees escaping war.
Eventually de Gaulle walked triumphantly up the Champs Elysee with the rejoicing liberated crowds, although fascist snipers killed 300 people. Hundreds of returned  emaciated prisoners were placed in requisitioned hotels and had to be  fed at first small amounts as they recovered.
Jazz thrived.  The communists were very influential and many had been very brave in the resistance. Through the  Marshall Plan the USA helped Europe,  seeing it as an entity, and sending ex GI troops on grants to enjoy studying in Paris. Black people like Miles Davies, enjoying life with Juliet Greco, found racial hatred so much less prevalent than at home.
Sartre started a third way political party, the ‘ Democratic and Revolutionary Alliance’ which eventually petered out. Garry Davis publically gave up his citizenship and called for World Government. Stalin’s death camps were revealed.
Simone de Beauvoir published ‘the second sex’ which many of the men including Camus rejected as it showed how women were in need of their own liberation.
Maurice Chevalier was a collaborator. Koestler violently abused his wife.
There were witch hunts in America against those suspected of communist sympathies- Walt Disney and Ginger Rogers being on the Republican extreme of anti leftwing people.

There is a helpful digest of events and a list of the people who figure in the book with their dates.

I think it gives a vivid flavour of the times and flows well despite some absurd sentences occasionally where the author cobbles her vast researches together, not differentiating between the relative importance of her detailed pieces of information. There are a few photographs of people.

I learnt things and found writers new to me to seek out such as Irwin Shaw.

Some escaped, some collaborated with the Nazis, some fought them and others just voiced educated opinions and indulged their appetites.. Reading about them raises the question of how you would yourself act and how to decide who to trust in such perilous times.

Mary Fletcher