He embarked as a deckhand on one of the last commercial sailing ships, the four-masted U.S. schooner Rosamond, for a voyage to the southern ocean and Cape Town.

Chevalier wrote a vivid and nostalgic testimony of this end of the age of sail in his book The Last Voyage of the Schooner Rosamond.

He translated works by Salvador Dalí, André Malraux, Vladimir Pozner, Louis Aragon, Frantz Fanon and Victor Vasarely into English.

Together, Chevalier and Oppenheimer founded the Berkeley branch of a teachers' union, which provided benefits for leftist causes.

Chevalier returned to the United States briefly in July 1965, to attend his daughter's wedding in San Francisco.