Modern Mind

witnesses from Russia, with NKVD help, including Kravchenko’s former wife, Zinaïda Gorlova, with whom, he said, he had witnessed many atrocities. Since Gorlova’s father was still in a prison camp, her evidence was naturally tainted several times over. Despite this, faced by her ex-husband in the witness box, she physically deteriorated, losing weight almost overnight and becoming ‘unkempt and listless’. She was eventually taken to Orly airport, where a Soviet military aircraft was waiting to fly her back to Moscow. ‘Sim Thomas’ was never produced; he did not exist. The most impressive witness for Kravchenko was Margarete Buber-Neumann, the widow of the prewar leader of the German Communist Party, Heinz Neumann. After Hitler achieved power, the Neumanns had fled to Soviet Russia but had been sent to the labour camps because of ‘political deviationism.’ 38 After the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, in 1940, they had been shipped back to Germany and the camp at Ravensbrück. So Margarete Buber-Neumann had been in camps on both sides of what became the Iron Curtain: what reason had she to lie?
    The verdict was announced on 4 April, the same day that the North Adantic Alliance was signed. Kravchenko had won. He received only minimal damages, but that wasn’t the point. Many intellectuals resigned from the party that year, and soon even Albert Camus would follow. 39 Sartre and de Beauvoir did not resign, however. For them, all revolutions have their ‘terrible majesty.’ 40 For them, the hatred of American materialism outweighed everything else.
    After the war, Paris seemed set to resume its position as the world capital of intellectual and creative life, the City of Light that it had always been. Breton and Duchamp were back from America, mixing again with Cocteau. This was the era of Anouilh’s
Colombe,
Gide’s
Journals
and his Nobel Prize, Malraux’s
Voices of Silence,
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s
Les Gommes;
it was again, after an interlude, the city of Edith Piaf, Sidney Bechet, and Maurice Chevalier, ofMatisse’s Jazz series, of major works by the
Annales
school of historians, which are considered in a later chapter, of the new mathematics of ‘Nikolas Bourbaki,’ of Frantz Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks,
and of Jacques Tati’s
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.
Coco Chanel was still alive, and Christian Dior had just started. In serious music it was the time of Olivier Messiaen. This composer was splendidly individualistic. Far from being an existentialist, he was a theological writer, ‘dedicated to the task of reconciling human imperfection and Divine Glory through the medium of Art.’ Messiaen detested most aspects of modern life, preferring the ancient grand civilisations of Assyria and Sumer. Much influenced by Debussy and the Russian composers, his own works sought to create timeless, contemplative moods, and although he tried serialism, his works frequently employed repetition on a large scale and, his particular innovation, the transcription of birdsong. In the decade and a half after the war, Messiaen used adventurous techniques (including new ways of dividing up the piano keyboard), birdsong, and Eastern music to forge a new religious spirit in music:
Turangaîla
(Hindu for ‘love song’), 1946—1948;
Livre d’Orgue,
1951;
Réveil des Oiseaux,
1953. Messiaen’s opposition to existentialism was underlined by his pupil Pierre Boulez, who described his music as closer to the Oriental philosophy of ‘being’ rather than the Western idea of ‘becoming.’ 41
    And yet, despite all this, the 1950s would witness a slow decline in Paris, as the city was overtaken by New York and, to a lesser extent, by London. It would be eclipsed further in the student rebellions of the late 1960s. This was as true of painting as of philosophy and literature. Alberto Giacometti produced some of his greatest, gauntest, figures in postwar Paris, the epitome for many people of existential man; and Jean Dubuffet painted his childlike but at the same time very sophisticated pictures of intellectuals and animals (cows mainly), grotesque and gentle at the same time, revealing mixed feelings about the earnestness with which the postwar Parisian philosophical and literary scene regarded itself. Lesser School of Paris artists like Bernard Buffet, René Mathieu, Anton Tapiès, and Jean Atlan all sold embarrassingly well in France, much better than their British or North American contemporaries. But the hardships