Book Review: Portrait of the Artist as a Glamorous Existentialist
The Patagonian Hare by Claude Lanzmann
Yes, that's him in 1952, the handsome, blue-eyed 27-year-old Resistance veteran, winning an editorial spot on Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, then daringly phoning Simone de Beauvoir—17 years his senior—and telling her he'd like to take her to a movie. "Which one?" Beauvoir asks. "Oh, any one," the fledgling journalist replies. Before you can sayThe Second Sex, the first sex between them takes place at her place, and Lanzmann soon moves in, becoming Beauvoir's lover for seven years.
That's Lanzmann too on January 4, 1960, phoning Beauvoir and Sartre to inform them of Albert Camus's death in a car crash. Later, he's all ears, listening to Frantz Fanon go on about Sartre as a "living God." When the "Manifeste des 121" implores French soldiers not to serve in Algeria, Lanzmann signs it and lobbies others to do likewise. When Sartre and Beauvoir die, Lanzmann helps arrange both funerals.
Gaze over the last six decades of Parisian cultural bustle and he's always there. For years, Lanzmann wrote a serious column for Elle, the French women's magazine, and appeared as a presenter on Dim Dam Dom, a top French TV show. Since 1980, when he succeeded Sartre, he's remained chief editor of Les Temps Modernes. Most famously, over 11 years of full-time struggle, he produced his prize-winning nine-and-a-half-hour Shoah (1985), now judged the most powerful film ever made about the Holocaust..
After their affair began, Beauvoir wrote, "I had rediscovered my body. ... Thanks to him, a thousand things were restored to me: joys, astonishments, anxieties, laughter and the freshness of the world." Lanzmann's appeal comes through as well in a passage that captures the cultural stratosphere in which Beauvoir operated by the early 1950s: "I had lost the taste for ephemeral encounters. ... The evening that Sartre had dinner at Michelle's with Picasso and Chaplin, whom I had met in the States, I preferred to go with Lanzmann to see Limelight." Her young lover became one of Beauvoir's most devoted friends after their sexual relationship ended, joining with her in crusades against France's death penalty, holding her hand in the hospital days before she died in 1986. Beauvoir, in turn, proved an astute observer of Lanzmann, recognizing that his early Marxism paled before something deeper: "To define himself, he said first of all, I'm a Jew. ... It was the ruling force of his life. ... The names Marx, Freud and Einstein filled him with pride." She wrote that Lanzmann found it hard to control his anger against anti-Semites: "I want to kill, all the time," he told her.
That same mixture of self-knowledge, loyalty, braggadocio, and moral activism spills over in The Patagonian Hare. Lanzmann's ability to tell his tale with anecdotal richness full of ego, yet with a becoming modesty about the nexus between his memories and the facts—"I leave chronological fidelity to her," he remarks in regard to the diary-keeping Beauvoir—helps us understand better not just everyone's role in the Sartre-Beauvoir mise-en-scène, but the arc of Lanzmann's own life and achievements.
From the beginning, Lanzmann admits to a psychology haunted by death, torture, execution, and violence. He makes us see that if, as he writes, he loves life "all the more now that I am close to leaving it," it's because he's seen so much death..
