Louisiana Anthology

Simone de Beauvoir.
America Day by Day 1947.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning with N. for a bus ride of about three weeks that will take me back to New York via the South. Tonight, it’s our farewell to Los Angeles. A screenwriter friend of I.’s has organized a party. Another friend who is a record dealer and jazz specialist has brought the most interesting pieces from his collection: old New Orleans blues, funerals, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong. Throughout the evening, a whole living history of jazz unfolds. I’m again explained the difference between the New Orleans style and the Chicago style; the explanation is never quite the same; but it’s necessarily analytical: how can you put into words what distinguishes Leonardo da Vinci from Luini or Delft Vermeer from Pieter de Hooch? It would take a lot of time in any case. When you hear the records, however, the two schools are clearly distinguished, even for a layman. While listening, we dine, we chat, we drink. At the end of the meal, S. arrives, whom I hadn’t seen since Death Valley. Today, he’s no longer dressed like a cowboy at all: he’s wearing a dark suit with a large white carnation in his buttonhole, giving him the look of a village groom. As soon as he sees us, he hugs N. and me passionately to his heart: how much fun we had! How grateful he is to me for allowing him to see Lone Pine again! I must return to Los Angeles so we can climb Mount Whitney. I’m very happy: I thought he had kept a pitiful memory of this expedition. But he felt like he had tasted freedom, that’s enough.

I also meet Wyler — the director of The Viper and Best Years of Our Life. He is Austrian by birth and speaks French very well; he comes across as much more European than American. He gives me interesting details about how his latest film was shot; among other things, there is a very beautiful moment where Danna Andrews, sitting in the cockpit of an old, half-demolished plane, recalls his past as a pilot; Wyler had first evoked these memories by superimposing them; then he deleted these images and kept only the background sound that accompanied them; finally, he refused even this help; he asked the single image of a neck, a window, a sky, to express both past and present; and he has indeed achieved this singular success: he has photographed the past in the present. I then talk with Man Ray, whose films and photographs I once loved so much. He, too, seems completely disgusted with Hollywood, where, of course, the poetic pursuits that interested him are impossible. He is married to a young, dark-haired woman who looks like an Arab; she wears black silk trousers with a brocade jacket, and she dances magnificently; I think she used to dance professionally. There are other very pretty women there. Time passes so quickly that I am quite surprised to learn that it is 2:00 a.m. But N. tells me that Hollywood parties are far from being like this one: generally nothing more insipid than these gatherings where no one has anything to say to anyone and everyone drinks while waiting for the time to leave.

March 29.

Black earth, tropical forests, Spanish moss, bayous: this is the last stop before New Orleans, where we will spend four days. I read Mark Twain’s A Journey on the Mississippi with passion as the bus rolls along, and at each river I ask: Is this the Mississippi? It is always the Mississippi, and it is never all of it: only a branch of this endlessly ramified delta.

Hearing me speak French, a woman approaches me at one of the stops. “Is that French you speak?” She invites me to sit next to her on the bus. She is from Brittany, but has been living on a farm in Louisiana for twenty years; she likes life here and she proudly shows me a photo of her daughter who is a university student. A little further on, a man speaks to me in a jargon I don’t understand and in which the word “gare” keeps coming up; I end up guessing that he speaks French too, the French that Louisiana inherited from the 18th century, and that he asks me if I have had brothers killed in the war. Our Greyhound is very different from the one that crossed, almost empty, the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Now, there are queues at the stations that all stretch to the heart of some city; The blacks, for whom often no shelter has been provided, wait outside, sometimes on benches, usually standing, until the superior race has settled into the bus: four or eight places are reserved for them on the back bench; they often only make short trips; they are inhabitants of these countrysides who travel from one village to another; when they ring to stop the car, it is with a mixture of bad humor and irony that driver and passengers watch them squeeze through the central aisle. The whites, of course, travel standing rather than sitting next to the blacks if by chance there is a free seat among them. Several of these whites speak an old French that is more unintelligible to me than English. In the villages we pass through, one reads above grocery stores, clothing stores, hairdressers the names “Mathieu, Debureau, Lefèvre, Boucher, Robert”; there are almost only French names. As night falls, the bus stops for dinner in a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River; we begin to hate these bus stations where they eat black meat, where the jukeboxes play Sinatra and Crosby, where the rest rooms are made up of stalls with no doors protecting them from prying eyes, where black people are herded into windowless cubbyholes. It is raining gently, but we go for a walk along a soggy path that runs alongside the river: to the right, to the left, we can see the tall, solitary forests that imprison its waters; under the wet sky, it is black, sad, and mysterious.

I look at the river, I think of Cavalier de la Salle, who died, assassinated by his men, for having confused the arms of this multiple and monotonous delta; coming from France with four ships to gloriously found Louisiana, he failed to recognize the authentic mouth of this “Father of Waters” which he had once already perilously descended and got lost with his companions on the barren coast. It was an agent of the Compagnie des Indes, M. de Biéville, who, in 1718, founded the city that in honor of the Regent was called New Orleans. His French namesake was scoured in his favor: archers under the orders of Law and his gang carried off women of easy virtue through the streets and no doubt even carried off honorable citizens in their carts. In 1763, Louisiana, which then included a large part of the Mississippi Valley, was ceded to Spain, which had recognized the Americans’ right to store their goods in New Orleans; in 1802, the colony was returned to France in exchange for Tuscany; Jefferson offered Talleyrand 50 million francs for New Orleans and Florida: he sold them the whole of Louisiana for 60 million, which guaranteed America free navigation of the Mississippi and allowed it to expand westward in complete safety.

For a long time we drive into the night. From time to time, lights come on, but it’s only a gas station lost in the middle of the delta. Miles and miles of humid night, bridges, dark waters, other bridges, other waters, the same night, and now finally the lights come together. Now there are avenues, crossroads, and other avenues and other crossroads, suburbs and other suburbs. And finally here is Broadway, here is Market Street: the great illuminated, teeming street that here bears the name of Canal Street. This city, tomorrow morning, will be New Orleans.

I ALWAYS feel crushed by the ghastly opulence of big American hotels. You could live a whole life without ever going out: florists, candy vendors, booksellers, hairdressers, manicurists, stenographers and typists are at your service. There are four different restaurants, bars, cafés and dance floors. It’s a neutral zone, like the international boutiques in the middle of colonial capitals.

But we only have to cross the street and we’re in the heart of New Orleans, in the French Quarter. The old colonial city was built in a checkerboard pattern, like modern cities, but its narrow streets are lined with one- or two-storey houses that are reminiscent of both Spain and France. They have the serenity of Anjou and Touraine, but the lovely, lacy wrought-iron balconies make me think of the balconies in Cordoba.

Exoticism here is no longer Mexican or Indian; it’s French. On the gravestones in the old cemetery, on the street corners above the shops, the French names have an antique sound. And here in the curio shops, instead of tomahawks and Indian masks, they sell oil lamps and Sèvres vases.

The French Quarter is like a hard white almond, but the generous, bruised pulp that expands around this pit has a headier taste. All afternoon we go on foot and by taxi along the broad, concentric avenues, by the canal, in the cemeteries, in the parks and on the Lakeshore.

I would like to walk for days along these lanes. They’re lined with those romantic houses whose gables, columns, porches and verandas I liked so much in San Antonio. Many of these homes are 100 years old, and time has covered their wooden architecture with a persistent plant life, turning them the colour of lichen and moss.

But we don’t want to miss the city and the secret of its nights. In the street of the Old Quarter, where we’re strolling towards evening, we see announcements for Mexican and Hawaiian bands, nude dancers and showgirls, but what we want is to hear real jazz played by black musicians. Or is there any real jazz left in America? I decide to call some people whose names I was given in Los Angeles.

I open the telephone book and discover 20 John Browns, 12 G Davids, and an equal number of B Smiths. I try one at random and hear surprised, mistrustful voices at the other end of the line. I try four or five times unsuccessfully. I give up. N and I will have to go it alone. With all the wisdom we can muster, we consult the little tourist guide they’ve given us at the hotel office.

Our first choice is a good one. We’re charmed by the restaurant in the Old Quarter where we go to dine. The room is decorated with naive paintings depicting boats rocking on an embossed sea, and hanging from the ceiling, there are miniature frigates with their sails and rigging. In the back the restaurant opens on to a dim patio where the tables are hidden among trees and discreetly lit by individual lamps. We’re served Créole cuisine in the grand style. From time to time we see the blue flame of a brandy dessert flickering in the night, the ice-cream slowly melting in the vapours from the burned alcohol, which tastes of cherries.

The French Quarter starts to liven up. Bellboys in braided uniforms are posted at the doors of nightclubs: bar doors are open, and we see whiskey shining on the counters; we can hear glasses clinking and phonographs playing from the street. Where should we go?

We enter Napoleon’s House, where we like the dark wood décor, but there’s no jazz. The owner is very friendly because we’re French, and we explain to him that we want to hear some good black jazz. His face darkens for a moment. The situation has been very tense between blacks and whites for some time now, and the blacks no longer want to perform for whites. However, he suggests that we try the Absinthe House.

This is supposedly one of the residences of the pirate Jean Laffite. The first room is a little bar whose wooden walls and ceiling are entirely covered with old calling cards and bank notes from countries around the world. In the second room, there are several tables and a platform with three black musicians on piano, guitar and bass.

Suddenly, we’re transported. This music is nothing like the music at Café Society or even the music in Harlem — the three blacks are playing passionately, for themselves. The audience is small and not very elegant. Actually, there isn’t really an audience, just a few old couples and a few families who are probably travelling through New Orleans and are so out of place here that no one takes any notice of them.

The band doesn’t try to please or dazzle anyone; it plays the way it feels like playing. If the bass player — a young black who’s only 18, despite his girth — sometimes closes his eyes in a trance, this isn’t servile mimicry: he’s just giving himself over to the music and the promptings of his heart.

Right next to the band, there are two very young white men with black hair who are listening with religious attention and laughing amicably with the musicians between pieces. They’re very different from the other customers and remind us of Dorothy Baker’s “young man with a trumpet” [in a popular Jazz Age novel]. They’re probably young people who are stifled by American civilisation and for whom black music is an escape. They look at us as much as we look at them, for our presence must also be somewhat unusual.

Meanwhile, we take great pleasure in drinking Big Zombies. This formidable cocktail was invented in New Orleans and was named after those living dead who are the heroes of so many thrillers and legends born in the South. I’m told that more than one civilised and cultivated adult in Louisiana or Georgia still believes in the existence of these tormented phantoms — the corpse must be stabbed in the chest with a sword to ensure that it goes to its eternal rest. The Zombie cocktail is considered so potent that in many places they’ll serve only one per customer. In reality, it doesn’t live up to its reputation, and we don’t feel its effects any more than we did in Los Angeles.

Our friendship with the dark-haired young men is progressing; we applaud together with the same enthusiasm, we exchange a few words, and they come to sit at our table. R is of Italian origin, C of Spanish. And the miracle is that R is precisely the young man with the trumpet that we imagined him to be. He’s from a poor family and five years ago he joined the navy, where he plays the trumpet in a military band. He still has one year to go, and he ardently wishes to become a musician. He’s studied a little at the conservatory in Philadelphia, which, for this reason, seems to him the most wonderful city in America.

He speaks passionately not only about jazz but also about Stravinsky, Ravel and Béla Bartók. He’s read only a little, but his favorite book is James Joyce’s Ulysses. He’s 22 years old. Of all the young people I’ve met in America, he’s the first one who really seems young.

In New York he could bring his trumpet and play with his black friends; here, it’s out of the question. And it’s equally out of the question to invite the musicians to have a drink at our table. We talk to them from our seats. They smile warmly at us because we’re French. Two of them have French wives who are descendants of black families from French Louisiana and speak an archaic French.

We chat with the musicians and ask them to play some old songs. We stay a long time, but we’d like to discover other places, too. The blacks beg us not to take R and C with us; they’re so happy to play for people who really love jazz and understand it. We’re given some addresses, and our new friends promise to be our guides the following evening.

We’re dazzled by our good luck: this boisterous night no longer intimidates us; we’ve won it over this time, we are part of it, not members of the sad herd of the excluded.

Absinthe BAR is almost identical to Absinthe House the same calling cards and bank notes on the walls of the bar, the same banal room with the same transient clientele. But instead of a band, there’s only a pianist, who plays well, though a bit too smoothly. At the neighbouring table there’s a half-drunk customer, whose hand meanders to the backs of our chairs. Such incidents never happen in America, and no sooner has N moved her chair away than the proprietor rushes over and throws the drunk out.

When we leave, he apologises profusely, urging us to believe that his customers are respectable and that we can feel completely safe in returning. We look into another bar, which seems to be a meeting place for the town’s artists and bohemians; we’re especially struck by the great number of homosexuals staggering up to the counter. There’s a sly one who has singled out a young couple, pretending to flirt with the wife but always managing to lean on the husband’s shoulder.

A young black woman, half-drunk, is at the piano, and she plays some old jazz very movingly. There’s a swarm of people who all seem drenched in alcohol, but drunkenness and vice are worn lightly here; the atmosphere isn’t heavy but seems fresh and gay — or is this gaiety in us?

The night is warm in the streets under a luminous grey sky. Gradually, the nightclubs close, but we have no desire to sleep when we’re still feeling so alive. We sit at the counter of a wretched bar that’s wide open to the night, where a dwarf with a caféau lait complexion is pounding frenetically on an old piano. Two tramps are dancing on the sidewalk. When they leave and the piano falls silent, we no longer have anything to do; we resign ourselves to returning to the hotel.

March 31.

We walk in the morning to the same places as the day before. At noon, we eat Créole cuisine in an old French restaurant. And we take the boat that goes up and down the Mississippi for a few miles. There are four levels, one above the other, and each one is a bar, a cafeteria, or a dance hall. At night, there’s a band, and people dance on the vast, waxed floor. During the day, they simply sit in leather armchairs, drink, and watch. To tell the truth, there isn’t much to see. The excursion is pleasant because of the sun, the sky, the noise, and the smell of the water, but the river flows between factories and warehouses that are nothing remarkable. The captain, seated in front of a microphone, mercilessly explains the landscape. It’s always a matter, as at Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, of delivering to tourists a nature that has been “conditioned,” “homogenized” by a human intermediary.

We dine in a patio different from the one we had the day before, but just as charming. The color of the sky above our heads surprises us: it is pearl gray, luminous like dawn, as if lit by some mysterious lighthouse. Once on the street, we understand: a soft fog envelops the city; the tall buildings on the other side of Canal Street have retreated several miles; they are distant, ghostly; the mist smothers the neon signs; but above the rooftops it forms a screen on which all the lights of New York reverberate dully; the sky is almost white, the air humid. It is a suffocating sweetness, close to storm and tears.

At the Absinthe House, we meet up with our friends. We are proud to have these friends and to feel complicit, not with the audience listening in a daze, but with the musicians. There are a lot of people this evening: a group of attentive students, bored couples, and happy parties. At one of the tables, an old gentleman begins to sing: a fresh, pink face under beautiful white hair, gold-rimmed glasses, a quiet assurance emanating from a well-stocked wallet, he belongs to a common and particularly detestable type. The orchestra accompanies him obligingly and he sings another song; I am indignant; the little Italian smiles; he explains to me that a member of the audience has the right to sing on the condition that he pays: it is all profit for the musicians. And I see, indeed, that the importunate singer is placing dollars on the piano; he has a funny way of loving music.

R. and C. wanted to take us to a dance hall reserved for blacks where they have their entrances, but it is Holy Week, New Orleans is a Catholic and pious city and, tonight, the place is closed. They simply take us to another bar in the French Quarter where there is excellent black jazz with saxophone and trumpet; the trumpet player is very young, he plays with all his youth, with such total self-giving that his entire life seems engaged in each note. It is here, in these modest clubs, among these unknown musicians, that jazz, more than at Carnegie Hall or even at the Savoy, achieves true dignity: neither entertainment, nor exhibition, nor commerce, it is for certain men a way of life and a reason for living: it has over art, poetry and printed music the pathetic privilege of an immediate and fleeting communication like the very moments whose substance it transfigures. If the lives of these men are often tormented, it is because instead of keeping death at a distance like other artists, they realize minute by minute the marriage of existence and death; it is against this background — against the background of death — that the inspired choruses of the young trumpeter rise; and one cannot hear it only with one’s ears and one’s brain: he offers an experience into which one must immerse oneself entirely. He offers it: in what a desert! The people who are here do not even have the respectful zeal of regular concertgoers; they enjoy jazz and despise it from the height of their dignity as white men well established in their money and their morality; it is with this arrogance that the great lords of the past amused themselves with buffoons and histrions. R. calls out to the trumpeter, they exchange a few words and the young black man lights up; While playing, he looks at us, he smiles at us: like those at Absinthe House, he feels the need to play for someone and it is a chance that is not often given to him.

The jazz stops. A beautiful young woman with black hair steps onto the small stage; she begins to dance, slowly shedding her clothes according to the classic burlesque rites; in a corner, a middle-aged woman watches her with a careless eye: she resembles her like a mother, and it is said that she is her mother. It is also said that the dancer is from an excellent family, that she has had a good education, that she is intelligent and cultured; but in New Orleans, Jon readily surrounds naked dancers with a legendary halo. What is certain is that this one is beautiful and attractive. The more she undresses, the more austere the faces become; they express a detached, polite, and almost bored curiosity; When she abandons her panties, keeping around her waist only a small sequined triangle held by a silk cord, the atmosphere is so charged with morality that one would think one was in the temple on a Sunday morning.

Our friends want to try to drive us to the Black neighborhood. A taxi takes us to the other end of town. We enter a small dance hall whose owner, who knows R., gives us a friendly welcomes; but there is no orchestra today, because of Holy Week, and the Blacks who are sitting in the bar look at us with hostile eyes; we will not impose our presence on them, we leave; as we go through the door, we hear them laughing behind us, without friendship. In the street, the taxis refuse to stop; some say “no” in an ironic voice; others apologize: we would be in trouble if we picked up white people. And it is true that in New York, Black drivers are only allowed to work for customers of color. So we cross on foot this enemy city, this city where, despite ourselves, we are enemies, precisely responsible for the color of our skin and for all that, despite ourselves, it implies. R. tells us that, despite the profound charm of New Orleans, he could not bear to live here, because of the odious racial discrimination, and that he will return to the North as soon as possible.

We walk for a long time. The pink of the azaleas shines dully through the pearl-colored fog; the sky diffuses a white light and the streets are bottomless; the humid air clings to the skin and the smell of dead leaves oppresses the earth. We stop in a small bar and while drinking whiskeys we talk until dawn. R. gets drunk on talking, he says that it is so rare in America to be able to talk. He accompanies us to the hotel. The lobby, so superb during the day, is now nothing more than a gloomy waiting room; a man washes the tiles which give off a smell of soap; it is dark; in an armchair, an old man sleeps, his mouth half-open. We say goodbye to the little Italian, whose fate we will probably never know, and he says to us approvingly: “It is rare to find something to talk to in this country.” We reply: “It is rare to find an American of your kind.” He smiled: “Oh! I know: I’m a ‘character’.” I’d like to meet him again in ten years.

April 1^st.

This morning I was driven by taxi, at random, far from the city center, and I walked for hours through quiet suburbs; over the palm trees, over the pink azaleas and the baskets of large red flowers, the wind blew, harsh as a vengeance, and from time to time the rain fell in short sobs. The old romantic houses seemed as fragile as the flowers: the water seeped into the verdigris wooden walls, and the rotting planks seemed ready to crumble like the trunks of trees eaten away by the weather in tropical forests. This afternoon, as Professor S. and his wife drove me around, the deluge broke loose. I had never seen rain fall. It was a revolt of the heavens, a deadly convulsion of the earth. The world was sobbing with desperate violence, sobbing until it died, knowing that one cannot die from it and that there will always be so many tears to shed. Stopped against the sidewalk, in front of an old house we wanted to visit, it was impossible for us to get out and cross the two meters that separated us from the threshold. It was also impossible to drive. In vain, the windshield wiper went wild: the windows streamed, the landscape cracked and trembled as on the screen in the second when the hero feels himself dying. We waited for the outbreak of a definitive night into which the world would have been engulfed. But night did not come. Abruptly, around 5 o’clock, the rain stopped; it was as if the very tears and the revolt had become useless: in the depths of the sky, a fixed yellow, the last hope was dead; the flowers, the trees, the houses were bathed in a great light of the end of the world. Later, the daily night fell.

I visited the interiors of some old houses, touched the green lace of the wrought iron. In the evening, after my lecture, Professor S. gathered some colleagues at his home. His fifteen-year-old daughter, who carefully cultivates a distant resemblance to Bette Davis, walked barefoot and in slacks in the living room: she dressed to go to the movies with her date: in her naively sophisticated freshness, in her lively and free grace, how different she was from the professors’ daughters back home! But even in this smiling home, among these formerly liberal intellectuals, the Red Terror has penetrated. “Just a few months ago,” say S. and his friends, “we thought that a democracy must respect all opinions. But we understand that it must repress those that are harmful to democracy itself.” The propaganda is well done. Four days ago, the leader of the FBI declared in his turn that the Reds should be assimilated to a fifth column; and the word “Red” is most elastic. Among workers as among the bourgeoisie, among intellectuals as among politicians, the sense of freedom is being lost day by day.

April 2.

Through its storms, its sun, its humid nights, through its pearly gray spring with the scent of autumn, New Orleans seemed to us worthy of its most fabulous legends. I know that it is also one of the most miserable cities in America, one of those where life is the harshest; already its stagnant luxury seemed ambiguous to us; we would like to penetrate deeper into its heart, we would like to live there in the truth of a daily life. As I leave, I think with resolution: I will return.

It’s a long journey we’re undertaking today. The bus leaves at 9:00 a.m. and will be in Jacksonville at 2:00 a.m. It’s a “fast” bus that only stops two or three times. They sell sandwiches and Coca-Cola; the seatbacks are movable, and at night everyone can turn on a small individual lamp, like on airplanes. And the steward rewards us with encouraging wishes; from time to time, he takes stock, announces the next stops, and explains the landscapes. We cross Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The arms of the Delta are as vast as lakes; they sparkle in the sun, and the Gulf of Mexico is as blue as a honeymoon dream. Palm trees, cacti, azaleas, flowering cities, tropical forests with heavy vegetation, romantic houses growing in the middle of quiet lawns and dilapidated cabins in the solitude of the woods, dazzling sea, languid lagoons, luxurious and sordid Spanish moss, it is the whole South with its pathetic contrasts that is offered throughout the day. And throughout the day the great tragedy of the South pursues us like an obsession. Even the traveler confined to a bus and in waiting rooms cannot escape it. Since we entered Texas, everywhere we go, there is a smell of hatred in the air: arrogant hatred of whites, silent hatred of blacks. At the stations, the decent and poorly dressed petty bourgeois women stare with envious anger at the pretty black girls in bright dresses and cheerful jewelry; and the men sense the nonchalant beauty of the young black men in light suits. American gentility no longer has a place here; In the queue at the bus doors, black people are jostled: “You’re not going to let that black woman get in front of you,” a woman says to a man, her voice trembling with fury.

The blacks humbly pile onto the back seat, trying to be forgotten. In the middle of the afternoon, in the heat and the jolting that are particularly harsh in the back, a pregnant woman faints; her abandoned head bangs against the window with each start; we hear the sneering and scandalized voice of a college girl shouting: “The black woman is crazy!” The driver stops the bus and goes to see what’s going on; it’s only a black woman who has fainted, and everyone sniggers: these women always have to cause trouble… We give the sick woman a little shake, wake her up, and the bus moves on; we don’t dare offer her our place at the front, the whole bus would oppose it and she would be the first victim of the indignation provoked. The bus continues to roll, the young woman to suffer and, when we stop in town, she has fainted again; people go to drink Coca-Cola without paying attention to her; there is only one old American woman who comes with N. and me to try to help her. She thanks us, but she seems worried and she leaves as quickly as possible without accepting that we help her further: she feels guilty in the eyes of the whites and she is afraid. It is only a small incident. But it helps me to understand why, when we pass through the suburbs where a black population is crowded, such fierce looks are directed at the placid Greyhound.

April 3.

Between Jacksonville and Savannah this morning, N. sat down for lack of another place next to a young black man; as soon as a seat was free on the white side, he pointed it out to her: “I suppose you’d prefer not to stay here,” he said curtly; those tonight are very rare. The games represent a social obligation that is complied with from time to time, but there is no conversation or entertainment there, and it is very rare for writers to meet there among themselves. In Paris, literary life sometimes ends up taking precedence over literature itself, which is not a good thing; but the absence of any literary life is an even more debilitating evil. We understand that Hollywood and all the mirages of ease dangerously tempt the gifted writer; we understand that those who create in difficulty become discouraged. It takes a great deal of asceticism and vigor to “hold on” for long. This explains a phenomenon that has long seemed disconcerting to me: that so many writers, after a very good or at least promising book, have gone silent for good. One can cite long lists of these only children. They are one of the most striking proofs of the possibilities found in this country among individuals taken one by one and of the way in which American civilization is killing them.

We listen to old jazz: Louis Armstrong from the heyday, tunes by Bessie Smith, the black singer who died in an automobile accident because she was refused admission to a white hospital; we also hear folk music older than jazz: the funeral songs sung in New Orleans; the work songs sung in the days of slavery by black plantation workers. Between songs, we discuss American literature. Many problems confront young novelists. The previous generation forged an excellent instrument and used it successfully; by substituting behaviorism for analysis, it did not impoverish psychology as is sometimes claimed; the inner life of a man is nothing other than his apprehension of the world; it is by turning toward the world and leaving the subjectivity of the hero in the shadows that one succeeds in expressing it with the greatest truth and depth. it is indicated in the hollow through the silences, in a much more learned way than by the chatter of the bad disciples of Proust; and this bias of objectivity allows to manifest the dramatic character of human existence. However, the richness of the implications is not the same in all the authors of this school; in the mediocre ones, the process becomes mechanical and nothing is more indicated than emptiness. In any case these techniques cannot, any more than any other, express everything. We understand that young people do not want to rewrite Hemingway, Dos Passos. They are searching. NG, who is an admirer and disciple of Farrel, has written a completely objective story; he does not understand that we reproach him for often being more documentary than novelistic; it also seems to us that the behavior of his characters is sometimes unjustified, that he authorizes himself from the chosen point of view to evade the problem of psychological motivations. He defends himself with fire and he defends the aesthetic to which he rallies. AE, on the contrary, feels the need for another form of art; he is one of those to whom a well-constructed, well-written novel no longer seems satisfactory; he considers it impossible to render the totality of a human being in his immanence and transcendence, in his surroundings and in his solitude, without inventing new processes. It is because they sense the shortcomings of the novel as created by their elders that many young people today choose poetry. And there are prose writers who seek to integrate poetry into their works; the influence of surrealism and the interior monologue in the manner of James Joyce is very significant. The debate continues until 2 a.m., and we continue it still while going down to our hotel, along Central Park, on a mild spring night.

April 11.

I show N. the Bowery, the Jewish quarter, Chinatown. We go to a cocktail party at our friend L.’s and, after dinner in a French restaurant, AE takes us to hear Sydney Bechet, the trumpeter, on 52nd Street. He is one of the last musicians who plays in the pure style of the Bowery. He was famous in America, he also played in France; in Paris, he killed another black musician during a brawl; he spent a year in prison during which his hair turned completely white; today he is an old man with a scraggly face. A pianist accompanies him. This is not enough of an attraction: the small nightclub is deserted. There are only three young people at a nearby table who are listening passionately: they are undoubtedly of the same species as the little Italian from New York; they listen as others pray. But Bechet could not dream of an audience more worthy of his genius than the woman with the black face and white apron who appears from time to time through a small door behind the platform. She is undoubtedly the cook; she is a strong woman of about forty with a tired face but inhabited by large, tireless eyes; her hands placed flat on her stomach, she is stretched towards the music with religious ardor; little by little her worn face is transfigured, her body indicates the rhythm of a dance, she dances, motionless, and peace and joy descend upon her; she has worries, she has had misfortunes, she forgets worries and misfortunes, she forgets her rags, her children, her illnesses; without a past, without a future, she is fulfilled: music justifies her throughout her difficult life, and the world is justified with her; she dances, motionless, with a smile in her eyes unknown to white faces where only the mouth grimaces gaiety; and by watching her we understand the greatness of jazz even better than by hearing Bechet himself.

That white Americans understand jazz less and less is obvious. They do not, as I believed, make it their daily fare. There is a formidable institution here called “Music by Musak” which plays music to anyone who orders it, at any time of day; they have several types of programs: for funeral homes, for engagements and weddings, for cocktail parties, for bars and restaurants; in the factories too, streams of music are spread throughout the workshops while the workers are working. And every public place has its jukebox. The American, when he eats, works, rests, at every moment of the day, and even in a taxi thanks to the radio, is immersed in music: there are some who go so far as to carry portable radios in their hands whose price is ridiculous. But what they serve them is never jazz: it’s Sinatra or Bing Crosby, those sugary melodies that are called sweet music and which are as sickly sweet as sweet potatoes. It is sweet music that is most often offered in the hit clubs, or even a sweet jazz that is a bastardization of jazz. The public likes big, spectacular orchestras where it is only possible to play written music. What is worse is that those who claim to love real jazz distort it; and since blacks only earn their living from white customers, they necessarily become accomplices in this perversion. When we compare Bechet, or the small orchestras of New Orleans, or the old records of Armstrong and Bessie Smith, with the jazz that is in vogue today, we realize that the Americans have gradually emptied this burning music of all its human and sensitive content. Mourning, work, sensuality, eroticism, joy, sadness, revolt, hope, black music always expressed something, and hot was the feverish and passionate form of this expression; the present was exalted in its concrete truth, that is to say, weighed down by the weight of a feeling, of a situation, linked to a past and a future. Americans turn away with contempt from the past (“What, you’re still interested in old Faulkner?” a publisher said to me with scandal) — the collective future is in the hands of a privileged class, the Pullman classto whom is reserved the joy of undertaking and creating on a large scale; the others do not know how to invent for themselves, in the world of steel of which they are the cogs, a singular future: they have neither project, nor passion, nor nostalgia, nor hope that engages them beyond the present; they know only the indefinite repetition of the cycle of the seasons and the hours. But cut off from the past and the future, the present no longer has any substance; it is nothing; it is a pure empty now. And because it is empty it can only assert itself by external means: it must be “exciting”. What Americans like about jazz is that Mabe Bonifestates the moment; but since for them the moment is abstract, it is also an abstract manifestation that they demand; they want noise, rhythms, nothing more; It may be that noises and rhythms are orchestrated with art, with science, in such a way that the present is indefinitely reborn from its death: but the meaning of old jazz is lost. AE tells me that the most recent form of jazz, be-bop, manifests this divergence even more clearly. Originally, it is a hot pushed to its most extreme point, it is an effort to express the quiver, the palpitation of life, in its most fragile and feverish aspects. But from this inner fever the whites have made, and the blacks after them, a completely external trepidation; they have kept only rhythms of a breathless precipitation but which no longer signify anything. Such a passage to abstraction is not limited to the domain of jazz. Going through the picture galleries again, reading certain works by young people, I was struck by the generality of the phenomenon. Cubism and surrealism have also been emptied of their content. Only the abstract schema remains. These forms, which in Europe were living languages, and which were destroyed by the very movement of their life, are found here intact but embalmed; they are produced and reproduced mechanically without realizing that they no longer say anything. In this country so ardently turned toward concrete civilizations, this word: abstraction, comes back to my lips every day. I will have to understand the reasons for this more precisely.

Text prepared by:

• Chase Echols
• Devin Falgout
• Neil Haas
• Bruce R. Magee

Source

de Beauvoir, Simone. L’Amérique au jour le jour. Trans. Google Translate and Bruce R. Magee. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997. Internet Archive, 6 July 2021, https:// archive.org/ details/ lamerique aujourl 0000beau/ Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.

L’Anthologie  Louisianaise