Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 By Agnès Poirier

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Author: Agnès Poirier

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An incandescent group portrait of the midcentury artists and thinkers whose lives, loves, collaborations, and passions were forged against the wartime destruction and postwar rebirth of ParisIn this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and ultimately triumphant eras, Agnes Poirier unspools the stories of the poets, writers, painters, and philosophers whose lives collided to extraordinary effect between 1940 and 1950. She gives us the human drama behind some of the most celebrated works of the 20th century, from Richard Wright’s Native Son, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Saul Bellow's Augie March, along with the origin stories of now legendary movements, from Existentialism to the Theatre of the Absurd, New Journalism, bebop, and French feminism.We follow Arthur Koestler and Norman Mailer as young men, peek inside Picasso’s studio, and trail the twists of Camus's Sartre's, and Beauvoir’s epic love stories. We witness the births and deaths of newspapers and literary journals and peer through keyholes to see the first kisses and last nights of many ill-advised bedfellows. At every turn, Poirier deftly hones in on the most compelling and colorful history, without undermining the crucial significance of the era. She brings to life the flawed, visionary Parisians who fell in love and out of it, who infuriated and inspired one another, all while reconfiguring the world's political, intellectual, and creative landscapes. With its balance of clear-eyed historical narrative and irresistible anecdotal charm, Left Bank transports readers to a Paris teeming with passion, drama, and life.

At this time of writing, The Audiobook Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 has garnered 8 customer reviews with rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Not a bad score at all as if you round it off, it’s actually a perfect TEN already. From the looks of that rating, we can say the Audiobook is Good TO READ!

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Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café was a glib, shallow book on an important topic and era. Agnès Poirier’s book, Left Bank, overlaps with it in many ways, especially since both books emphasize the work, lives, and thought of the “Existentialists,” a far too inadequate word to use, by the way, since it rarely escapes from its cheapening by people who have read little or nothing of it. Both books suffer by substituting gossip for intellectual history. In fact, Left Bank reads more like the work of a gossip columnist than an intellectual historian. I have read few books quite like it. It is obsessed with addresses. It pretends to all sorts of knowledge about what people whom she never met felt like and thought at moments when no one could know. She just assumes she has a right to tell us this is what X or Y was thinking, what mood they were in, what motives or reasons they were contemplating for this or that act. It is great mess of a book, a woefully erratic journey through the period, not narrated in any significant way but assembled out of the loosest connections, like a meal, a chance remark, an address (again and again), the most haphazard of links, in short. It depends, unsuccessfully, on chapter titles and subtitles to make some order out of this hash. (Where are her editors?) It is full of the author’s easy judgments which substitute for a lack of any real probing into work or character. (She pretends to inhabit artists’ minds all the time. She is particularly, oddly hard on Saul Bellow.) The book lacks any real theme or thesis. And, most peculiarly, it seems uninterested in the work of the many, many people who roam so randomly through its pages. That is what most puzzles me about it. It is almost as if Poirier had never read a word any of these writers had written, never had looked at any of the artists’ paintings, never watched a film. I don’t mean to say she hasn’t. But nothing is ever discussed or treated or interpreted in any way that might suggest otherwise, though she does occasionally cite this or that fact from the work that might as well have been picked up from a newspaper article, as for example when writing about The Second Sex by mentioning mostly its passages on abortion and how daring they wre. For a further, perhaps more important example, I would refer a reader to what she has to say about Sartre. Has she ever read Being and Nothingness? Nausea? The Road to Freedom? The many, many important essays Sartre published during this decade? One must presume she has. There is the occasional citation. But every such reference is at best superficial and, for anyone who knows even just a bit about him, common knowledge. Of Heidegger, Husserl, Kojeve, Hegel, Marcel, and so on there is not a word that counts for anything and more often no mention at all. But, if you want to know what wine he was drinking, whom he was sleeping with, whom he was friends with or opposed politically, you might very well a juicy tidbit or two here. The book throughout dwells on Existentialism as if it were a sort of café society (see Bakewell for the same sort of baleful attitude), in particular the Cafe de Flore. It is a bit like interpreting the importance of, say, American Abstract Expressionism by writing about the Cedar Bar. This is, I repeat, a glib, gossipy, shallow, superficial, ill-organized, intellectually empty, judgmental, and finally tedious book, dull precisely because it never probes deeper than a chatty, sometimes slightly catty journalist. I would add that its treatment of the broader history of the time, both in and out of France, is equally empty of anything except the commonplaces and headlines. I read it to the end only because I kept hoping for some sort of shape and sense coming to it all. But none ever appeared. Poirier often quotes Janet Flanner, though not often enough since those quotations, each time they appear, clarify so much of what Poirier’s prose and thought lack: a sense of a moment not as the occasion for gossip but for an understanding of the world that goes deeper than the ordinary, that makes it live in all its nuance and complexity, that reveals why it matters. Should one wish to find some sense of what, say, existentialism was all about, why it was important, both historically and intellectually, why the disagreements between Camus and Sartre mattered philosophically, and so much more, one would learn nothing from reading this book. It is not philosophy that intrigues Agnès Poirier. Rather, it is more what people said to one another and (conjecturally) what they were feeling as they ate, in difficult times, a good or mediocre dinner; it would seem, so much would seem to depend a lot on the quality, even the vintage of the wine.

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