Portrait of the Artist as a Glamorous Existentialist
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Dashing, cerebral, seductive, morally committed—a Bernard-Henri Lévy decades before BHL—Claude Lanzmann seems to turn up in nearly every snapshot of French cultural and political life since the 1950s.
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.
Media controversies still swirl about Lanzmann. In 2006, the legendary dragueur threatened to sue Hazel Rowley over Tête-a-Tête, her biography of Sartre and Beauvoir. (Among Rowley’s shockers: She cited three sources who claimed Lanzmann’s original overture to Beauvoir resulted from a bet with Jean Cau, Sartre’s secretary, that one of them could seduce her.) In February, security personnel at Ben-Gurion Airport detained Lanzmann, now 86, for allegedly hitting on one of their attractive colleagues, a charge he denied in a letter to Ha’aretz.
Who can blame the French for making Le Lièvre de Patagonie, his 2009 memoir, an instant best seller? The back-cover blurbs glow—Lévy deems it a “masterpiece,” Shimon Peres finds it “magnificent.” Who can doubt that crowds will turn out this month during Lanzmann’s U.S. tour (it includes stops at Columbia and Harvard) for his memoir’s just-published English translation, The Patagonian Hare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)?