Alice Kaplan - Dreaming in French: the Paris years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis

The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis

ALICE KAPLAN is the author of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, The Interpreter, and French Lessons: A Memoir, all available from the University of Chicago Press. She holds the John M. Musser chair in French literature at Yale. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut, and in Paris.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2012 by Alice Kaplan

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42438-5 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-42438-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42440-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kaplan, Alice Yaeger.

Dreaming in French : the Paris years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis/Alice Kaplan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42438-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-42438-3 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 19291994Homes and hauntsFranceParis. 2. Sontag, Susan, 19332004Homes and hauntsFranceParis. 3. Davis, Angela Y. (Angela Yvonne), 1944Homes and hauntsFranceParis. 4. WomenUnited StatesBiography. 5. Students, ForeignFranceParisBiography. 6. WomenUnited StatesIntellectual life. 7. United StatesCivilizationFrench influences. I. Title.

HQ1412.K37 2012

944.361083609252dc23

[B]

2011026598

Illustrations on title page: (left) Jacqueline Bouviers student ID photograph (1949), courtesy Claude du Granrut; (center) a detail from a photograph of Susan Sontag in Sevilla (1958), courtesy Harriet Sohmers Zwerling; (right) a detail from a photograph of Angela Davis following her acquittal (1972), Michelle Vignes, courtesy Standford University Libraries.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Florence, Sylvie, and Franois
And for Lquipe

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction

On August 23, 1949, the De Grasse set sail from New York Harbor. Regular ocean crossings for civilians had just resumed the previous year on liberty ships refurbished for tourists, and the departure of a group of young women from Smith Collegethe third set of juniors bound for Paris since the end of the warmade the news. They were feted by the French consul in New York, with a luncheon and photo shoot with society columnist Hedda Hopper. On board ship they got special attention. The last night of the voyage, the captain asked them to sing Edith Piaf s La vie en rose, the hit song they all knew by heart, whose simple words lulled them with dreams of a happiness that was unattainable in any other language. One of the girls in their group was asked to sing a verse of her own. Perhaps it was because her name was French, or because she looked glamorous. Though she was from Vassar, not Smith, she had been accepted into Smith Colleges rigorous Junior Year in Paris. The other students knew about her triumphant Newport dbut and about the New York gossip columnist who had named her Queen Deb of the Year, but where they were going, it didnt matter.

1. Jacqueline Bouvier and fellow Smith juniors on board SS De Grasse (1949). Left to right: Elizabeth Curtis, Mary Snyder, Jacqueline Bouvier, Mary Ann Freedman, and Hester Williams. Photograph Bettmann/CORBIS.

...

Jacqueline Bouviers 1949 trip to Paris was a flagship voyage, the harbinger of a golden age of study-abroad that began in the aftermath of the Second World War and continued for three decades, sending thousands of American students into French homes and French universities. She was the first of three exemplary women whose lives were transformed by a year in France, and who, in turn, transformed the United States. What Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis owed to their time abroad and how their American fame reverberated back to France are the questions at the heart of this book, a triptych of three young womens cultural, academic, and social lives in Paris, and a study of influence in several directions. They differ from the best-known expatriates of the last centuryDjuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Bakerbecause they lived in France as students, their careers uncharted. They each crossed the threshold of the Sorbonne between 1945 and 1964, during the period the French call the countrys thirty glorious years, les trente glorieuses. Glorious for some, violent and reactionary for others, this long quest for modernization and affluence stretched from the postwar recovery in 1945 to 1975.

Two of them were French majors in college, and the third had imbued herself with French literary and cinematic culture on her own terms. Each woman had a unique beauty and a perception of the world that was unmistakably hers, and each made Paris her own.

Jacqueline Bouvier went abroad on the Smith College Junior Year in Paris in 194950, became First Lady of the United States, and later, a successful book editor. Susan Sontag went to Paris by way of Oxford, on a fellowship from the American Association of University Women in 195758. She was a prolific essayist and novelist, a controversial New York intellectual who spent her summers in Paris. Angela Davis arrived in Paris for the Hamilton College Junior Year in France in 196364. A philosopher and an activist, she survived imprisonment and a murder trial, and became a university professor with an endowed chair. If you reduce them to identity labels, they are the soul of diversity: a Catholic debutante, a Jewish intellectual, an African American revolutionary, from the East Coast, the West Coast, and the South. They have often been reduced to their images: a sheath dress and a double strand of pearls, a mane of black hair with a white streak, an afro and a raised fist. They have been part of the national conversation, the subject of fascination, the object of wildly divergent interpretations.

The France where each of them lived as a temporary resident with a carte de sjour changed from 1949, when Jacqueline Bouvier arrived, to 1964, when Angela Davis left. Jacqueline Bouviers France was drained by the German occupation and scarred by the camps. It was a damaged place, rebuilding its economy with American funds from the Marshall Plan. While Susan Sontag was in Paris in 195758, France shattered over the question of Algerian independence, the Fourth Republic crumbled, and Charles de Gaulle returned to power. Angela Davis, in 1963, lived in the aftermath of the loss of Algeria. The France she knew was a Gaullist France, a France without empire where the dark monuments of Jacqueline Bouviers and Susan Sontags Paris began to be scraped clean.

All three women dreamed about France long before they ever crossed the ocean. Paris, and the French language, existed in their imaginations, even in their parents imaginations, so that they went abroad accompanied by the ghosts of ancestors and the echoes of public conversations. Jacqueline Bouvier arrived with her upper-class connections; Susan Sontag, the self-invented European, with her opinions; Angela Davis, with her sense of justice and her fearlessness. They were in their twenties, reaching that existential threshold where you start to see what you can do with what youve been given. France was the place where they could become themselves, or protect themselves from what they didnt want to become, as products of their families, their societies.