Jean-Paul
Sartre preferred the company of women. As one would expect of the great
advocate of transparency, he discussed his reasons frankly. “First of all,
there is the physical element. There are of course ugly women, but I prefer
those who are pretty,” he explained in an interview for the documentary “Sartre
by Himself.” “Then, there is the fact that they’re oppressed, so they seldom
bore you with shop talk. . . . I enjoy being with a woman because I’m bored out
of my mind when I have to converse in the realm of ideas.” “Sartre by Himself”
was filmed in 1972, when Sartre was sixty-six; his interviewers were loyal
associates from the journal he founded after the war, Les Temps Modernes. None of them encouraged him to expand on the topic, since Simone
de Beauvoir was present, and everyone in the room understood that the legend of
their relationship was in her keeping. But everyone in the room also knew that
Sartre liked the company of women because he devoted much of his time to the
business of seducing them.
The nature of Sartre and
Beauvoir’s partnership was never a secret to their friends, and it was not a
secret to the public, either, after they were abruptly launched into celebrity,
in 1945. They were famous as a couple with independent lives, who met in cafés,
where they wrote their books and saw their friends at separate tables, and were
free to enjoy other relationships, but who maintained a kind of soul marriage.
Their liaison was part of the mystique of existentialism, and it was
extensively documented and coolly defended in Beauvoir’s four volumes of
memoirs, all of them extremely popular in France: “Memoirs of a Dutiful
Daughter” (1958), “The Prime of Life” (1960), “Force of Circumstance” (1963),
and “All Said and Done” (1972). Beauvoir and Sartre had no interest in
varnishing the facts out of respect for bourgeois notions of decency.
Disrespect for bourgeois notions of decency was precisely the point.
Sartre
and Beauvoir had met in Paris in 1929, when he was twenty-four, she was
twenty-one, and both were studying for the agrégation, the competitive examination for a career in the French school
system. Beauvoir was a handsome and stylish woman, and she had a boyfriend,
René Maheu. (It was Maheu who gave her her permanent nickname, le Castor—the Beaver.) But she fell in love with Sartre, once she got over
the physical impression he made. Sartre was about five feet tall, and he had
lost almost all the sight in his right eye when he was three; he dressed in
oversized clothes, with no sense of fashion; his skin and teeth suggested an
indifference to hygiene. He had the kind of aggressive male ugliness that can
be charismatic, and he wisely refrained from disguising it. He simply ignored
his body. He was also smart, generous, agreeable, ambitious, ardent, and very
funny. He liked to drink and talk all night, and so did she.
Sartre
had been engaged, though the engagement was broken off after he failed his
first attempt at the agrégation; but
he and Beauvoir decided that their love did not require marriage for its
consummation. “The comradeship that welded our lives together made a
superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves,”
Beauvoir explained in “The Prime of Life”:
One single aim fired us,
the urge to embrace all experience, and to bear witness concerning it. At times
this meant that we had to follow diverse paths—though without concealing even
the least of our discoveries from one another. When we were together we bent
our wills so firmly to the requirements of this common task that even at the
moment of parting we still thought as one. That which bound us freed us; and in
this freedom we found ourselves bound as closely as possible.
Sartre
proposed a “pact”: they could have affairs, but they were required to tell each
other everything. As he put it to Beauvoir: “What we have is an essentiallove; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” Beauvoir’s whole life to that point had been
an effort to escape from the culture of her family. Her mother had been
educated in a convent; her father was a conservative Paris lawyer of diminished
means who, though he was proud of his daughter’s mind, discouraged her interest
in philosophy, and would probably have discouraged her pursuit of any career if
he had been able to provide her with a dowry. So she was excited by the affront
to conventional standards of domesticity that Sartre’s arrangement posed. She
also had a high opinion of Sartre’s brilliance as a philosopher. An argument
based on terms like “essence” and “contingency” worked as well on her as a
diamond ring. She saw (before he did, but in some ways she was cannier than he
was) that the pact bound to her for life a man whom she knew would never be
faithful. It closed the normal exit.
ADVERTISEMENT
As
matters worked out, the pact meant that Beauvoir not only discussed with Sartre
his interest in other women; she often formed intimate friendships with the
women herself. At first, she was distressed to discover that she sometimes felt
jealous. Sartre advised her that jealousy, like all passions, is an enemy of
freedom: it controls you, and you should be controlling it. Sartre soon stopped
sleeping with her, and she had her own serious affairs, notably with Nelson
Algren, a transatlantic relationship that lasted from 1947 to 1951, and Claude
Lanzmann, with whom she lived from 1952 to 1959; she wrote openly about her
relations with both men in “Force of Circumstance.” But she remained committed
to Sartre and to the pact; and the relationship, with its carrousel of changing
partners and café tables, lasted fifty-one years.
Beauvoir never pretended
that her memoirs told the whole story. “There are many things which I firmly
intend to leave in obscurity,” she warned in “The Prime of Life.” Though she
strategically employed pseudonyms in the memoirs, enough was revealed, and
enough suggested in her romans à clef “She Came to Stay” (1943) and “The
Mandarins” (1954), to satisfy most curiosities. Sartre died, after a prolonged
debilitation, in 1980. A year later, in a book called “Adieux: A Farewell to
Sartre,” Beauvoir published a series of “conversations” with Sartre that she
had conducted in 1974, in which she guided him through philosophically tinged
musings on his affairs. Even for existentialists, it was painful reading:
DE
BEAUVOIR: Were you ever
attracted by an ugly woman?
SARTRE: Truly and wholly ugly, no, never.
DE
BEAUVOIR: It could even be said
that all the women you were fond of were either distinctly pretty or at least
very attractive and full of charm.
SARTRE: Yes, in our relations I liked a woman to be pretty because it
was a way of developing my sensibility. These were irrational values—beauty,
charm, and so on. Or rational, if you like, since you can provide an
interpretation, a rational explanation. But when you love a person’s charm you
love something that is irrational, even though ideas and concepts do explain
charm at a more intense degree.
DE BEAUVOIR :
Were there not women you found attractive for reasons other than strictly
feminine qualities—strength of character, something intellectual and mental,
rather than something wholly to do with charm and femininity? There are two I’m
thinking about.
And so on. It was hard
to say whether the conversation was more humiliating for her or for him, with
his boorishness so plainly on display. Still, it was possible to stick to the
no-fault view: these were consenting adults. Their erotic lives were no one’s
concern but their own.
That view soon lost
tenability. Three years after Sartre’s death, Beauvoir published a collection
of his letters to her, in which he described in detail his activities in bed,
but she edited them to conceal identities. She died in 1986; in 1990, her
executrix, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, published Beauvoir’s “Letters to Sartre.”
These were unedited—“Is it not, by now, preferable to tell all in order to tell
the truth?” Le Bon de Beauvoir wrote in the preface—and they shocked many
people. The revelation was not the promiscuity; it was the hypocrisy. In
interviews, Beauvoir had flatly denied having had sexual relations with women;
in the letters, she regularly described, for Sartre, her nights in bed with
women. The most appalling discovery, for many readers, was what “telling each
other everything” really meant. The correspondence was filled with catty and
disparaging remarks about the people Beauvoir and Sartre were either sleeping
with or trying to sleep with, even though, when they were with those people,
they radiated interest and affection. Sartre, in particular, was always
speaking to women of his love and devotion, his inability to live without
them—every banality of popular romance. Words constituted his principal means
of seduction: his physical approaches were on the order of groping in
restaurants and grabbing kisses in taxis. With the publication of “Letters to
Sartre,” it was clear that, privately, he and Beauvoir held most of the people
in their lives in varying degrees of contempt. They enjoyed, especially,
recounting to each other the lies they were telling.
Some
of those whose names appeared in “Letters to Sartre” were alive in 1990, and
the book opened mouths that, for various reasons, had remained shut while
Sartre and Beauvoir were alive. The chatter has not stopped, which means that
Hazel Rowley’s new book, “Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre”
(HarperCollins; $26.95), is basically an update on a breaking story. Sartre and
Beauvoir were prolific letter writers, and most of their correspondence remains
under the control of their estates. Le Bon de Beauvoir allowed Rowley to see
many of the unpublished letters in her possession; one of Sartre’s longtime
mistresses, Michelle Vian, let her leaf through her collection. But Sartre’s
executrix, Arlette Elkaïm, did not respond to inquiries. Rowley interviewed
Lanzmann, but he did not show her his letters from Beauvoir. She read the
letters Sartre wrote to his Russian lover Lena Zonina between 1962 and 1967,
though Elkaïm will not permit them to be published. Rowley is able to tell a
fuller version of a story that has been written many times, but it is probably
still some distance short of complete. (She also includes in the book—it sounds
like a Woody Allen joke—a photograph of Beauvoir in the nude.) It seems fair to
say that, in a manner consistent with an open-minded lack of prudery, Rowley is
horrified by the behavior she describes. Readers looking for a friendlier spin
can consult the pages on Sartre’s love life in Bernard-Henri Lévy’s gigantic
“Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century” (2000), but even Lévy, a
delightfully unabashed heroworshipper and special pleader par excellence, is reduced to complaining that what’s really disgusting is
everyone’s obsession with the subject. That may be true, but it is not much of
an argument.
Sartre
and Beauvoir liked to refer to their entourage as “the Family,” and the
recurring feature of their affairs is a kind of play incest. Their customary
method was to adopt a very young woman as a protégée—to take her to movies and
cafés, travel with her, help her with her education and career, support her
financially. (Sartre wrote most of his plays in part to give women he was
sleeping with something to do: they could be actresses.) For Sartre and
Beauvoir, the feeling that they were, in effect, sleeping with their own
children must, as with most taboos, have juiced up the erotic fun.
In 1933, when she was
teaching in Rouen, Beauvoir had a seventeen-year-old student named Olga Kosakiewicz,
a daughter of a Russian émigré who had been dispossessed by the Revolution.
Olga was attractive, dreamy, unhappy; Beauvoir struck up a friendship, and they
began to see each other outside of school. In the summer of 1935, Beauvoir
proposed that Olga should put herself under the protection of her and Sartre,
who would pay her way and be responsible for her education, and a few months
later Olga moved into a room in the Hôtel du Petit Mouton, where Beauvoir was
living, and they began an affair. Sartre became infatuated with Olga and spent
two years attempting to seduce her. He failed, but in 1937 he met her sister,
Wanda, also beautiful, and even more at sea, and he managed, after two more
years, to sleep with her. The day of his triumph, he left her lying in bed,
“all pure and tragic, declaring herself tired and having hated me for a good
forty-five minutes,” in order to rush out to a café and write Beauvoir with the
news. (“She Came to Stay” is an account of the Sartre-Beauvoir-Olga affair
that, from all the evidence, is only lightly fictionalized—except that at the
end of the novel the Beauvoir character murders the Olga character. Beauvoir
dedicated the book to Olga.)
Bianca Bienenfeld was
the daughter of Jewish refugees from Poland. She became Beauvoir’s student in
1938, when she was sixteen. The two went on a hiking trip at the end of the
school year and began an affair. Beauvoir introduced Bianca to Sartre, and he
began wooing her. “I was very attracted by his charm, spirit, kindness, and
intelligence,” Bienenfeld wrote in her memoir, “A Disgraceful Affair,” which
was published in France in 1993. (The French title, “Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille
Dérangée,” is a takeoff on the title of the first volume of Beauvoir’s memoirs,
“Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangée.”) “Just as a waiter plays the role of a
waiter,” she wrote, “Sartre played to perfection the role of a man in love.”
(This, too, is an allusion with a sting: it refers to a famous passage in
Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” which he began working on around the time he
was courting Bienenfeld, about the bad faith of the waiter, who lets himself be
defined by the role society has given him.) Sartre eventually persuaded
Bienenfeld, who had never slept with a man, to accompany him to a hotel, where,
he suavely confided to her, he had taken another girl’s virginity the day
before. The first encounter was unpleasant: Sartre had a mildly sadistic
attitude toward sex. He took enormous satisfaction in the conquest but little
pleasure in the sex (and so he usually terminated the physical part of his
affairs coldly and quickly). Still, he and Bianca became lovers, and Sartre and
Beauvoir kept up the pretense that they were both in love with her until they
had had enough, and then, prompted by Beauvoir, Sartre wrote a letter
announcing the end of the affair.
Three months later, the
Germans arrived in Paris. Bienenfeld barely escaped capture during the
Occupation; her grandfather and an aunt died in the camps. She says that Sartre
and Beauvoir never inquired about her or tried to find her during the war. She
reunited with Beauvoir in 1945, and saw her once a month until Beauvoir’s
death. She had no idea that Beauvoir had connived with Sartre to drop her, or
that both of them regarded her as a shallow nuisance, until she read about
herself in “Letters to Sartre.” “Their perversity was carefully concealed
beneath Sartre’s meek and mild exterior and the Beaver’s serious and austere
appearance,” she wrote in “A Disgraceful Affair.” “In fact, they were acting
out a commonplace version of ‘Dangerous Liaisons.’ ”
Nathalie
Sorokine, another student of Beauvoir’s, was also the child of Russian émigrés.
She and Beauvoir became sexually involved while Beauvoir was still having her
affair with Bienenfeld. (“I’ve a very keen taste for her body,” Beauvoir wrote
to Sartre.) Sorokine, too, slept with Sartre and, with Beauvoir’s
encouragement, with another lover of Beauvoir’s, Jacques-Laurent Bost. (This is
where you start to need a scorecard: Bost was Olga Kosakiewicz’s boyfriend when
Beauvoir seduced him; he later married Olga, but continued, in secret, his
affair with Beauvoir, who remained Olga’s intimate friend.)
The
ideal form for a Sartre and Beauvoir ménage was
the triangle. If they couldn’t fashion one, they contrived a simulation: when
Sartre couldn’t get Olga to sleep with him, he seduced her sister. Later on,
their affairs followed a copycat pattern. In 1945, Sartre went, alone, to the
United States, where he met and began an affair with Dolores Vanetti, a
Frenchwoman who had moved to the United States during the war and was married
to an American doctor. Sartre proposed marriage (a detail he neglected to share
with Beauvoir), and, since Vanetti was emphatically not interested in à-troisarrangements, Beauvoir felt threatened. In 1947, Beauvoir went,
alone, to the United States, where she met and began an affair with Nelson
Algren. (She never told Algren about Sartre’s affair with Vanetti; he learned
about it by reading “Force of Circumstance.”) In 1952, when she was forty-four,
Beauvoir began her affair with Lanzmann, who was twenty-seven. In 1953, Sartre
began an affair with Lanzmann’s sister, Evelyne. She was twenty-three.
Biographers have trouble
getting the complete story because there is contentiousness between the
estates, and this, too, is a consequence of the pact. Sartre met Arlette Elkaïm
in 1956. She was a French Algerian, nineteen years old, who had fled to Paris
after her mother committed suicide. Sartre took her in, and they had a brief
affair. In 1965, he adopted her as his daughter. Since Beauvoir had no legal
relationship to Sartre, and since Sartre did not make a will, Elkaïm was his
sole heir. Beauvoir, though, was not far behind. In 1960, she met Sylvie Le
Bon, a seventeen-year-old student. Rowley suspects that they were lovers,
though she reports that Le Bon “talks about this subject . . . with vagueness
and ambiguity.” (Le Bon says that the relationship was “carnal but not sexual,”
which sounds a little Clintonesque.) After Sartre died, Beauvoir adopted Le
Bon, who now controls access to Beauvoir’s writings, as Elkaïm controls access
to Sartre’s.
What
makes the Existentialist Family different from other twentieth-century
counter-domesticities—Bloomsbury, for example, which had its own
quasi-incestuous, partner-swapping patterns of intimacy—is the asymmetry of
most of the pairings. Sartre’s novels and plays earned him a great deal of
money after the war, but he spent virtually none of it on himself (a lifelong
habit). In 1946, at the peak of his celebrity as the philosopher of freedom and
authenticity, he moved in with his mother. He used most of his income to
support friends and current and former mistresses. He described the women he
was attracted to as “drowning women,” women whose lives were damaged or
insecure—which, of course, was why they offered the devotion he demanded. They
were all a little desperate, and Sartre was the leading intellectual in a
culture that treats its intellectuals like pop stars. He set his women up in
apartments within ten minutes of his own and, every week, made what he called
his “medical rounds.” Each woman had specified hours allotted to spend with
him. The women almost never saw each other; in many cases, they never knew
about each other. But they all knew about Beauvoir, and Beauvoir was Sartre’s
standing excuse: the Beaver wouldn’t like it; he had to spend more time with
the Beaver.
And the Beaver is the
great mystery at the center of the whole system. What explains her? One theory
is plainly wrong. That is the theory that her relationship with Sartre was a
post-patriarchal partnership of equals, combining genuine mutuality with
genuine autonomy, and rejecting the superstitious equation of sexual fidelity
with commitment—in less pretentious terms, an open marriage. But it is clear
now that Sartre and Beauvoir did not simply have a long-term relationship
supplemented by independent affairs with other people. The affairs with other
people formed the very basis of their relationship. The swapping and the
sharing and the mimicking, the memoir- and novel-writing, right down to the
interviews and the published letters and the duelling estates, was the stuff
and substance of their “marriage.” This was how they slept with each other
after they stopped sleeping with each other. The third parties were, in effect,
prostheses, marital aids, and, when they discovered how they were being used,
they reacted, like Bianca Bienenfeld, with the fury of the betrayed. Algren
never forgave Beauvoir for concealing Sartre’s affair with Vanetti from him:
when her books appeared in English translation, he reviewed them, and they are
reviews from hell.
Two
theories are left. One, a respectable but minority view among Beauvoir
scholars, is that she was the engineer of the whole pact. It was Beauvoir who
rejected marriage, not Sartre, who felt lucky to have her on any terms; and it
was Beauvoir who was the dominant partner intellectually, not, as she always
publicly insisted, the other way around. The view has some evidentiary support.
Beauvoir was far more passionate sexually and complex emotionally than Sartre,
and she was also, arguably, the stronger, if less creative, mind. Deirdre Bair,
in her 1990 biography of Beauvoir, reported that the jury for the agrégation, in 1929, debated whether to award first place in the competition
to Sartre or Beauvoir. They gave it to Sartre—he was, after all, a man, and it
was his second try—but they agreed that Beauvoir was the real philosopher. She
was the youngest agrégée in French history.
A close comparison of their books by no means supports the notion that her
thought was parasitic on his. But the theory that Beauvoir tolerated the system
because it was the system she created founders on “The Second Sex.”
Beauvoir wrote her great book in two years, a fast pace for her.
She started it while Sartre was deeply involved with Vanetti, and it was
published in 1949. The edge on its analysis still gleams. (The English
translation, made in 1952, is badly misleading, as a number of scholars,
notably Margaret Simons and Toril Moi, have pointed out—an abridgment filled
with mistakes that distort and sometimes invert Beauvoir’s meaning. According
to Moi, proposals to produce a new translation have been ignored by Beauvoir’s
American and French publishers.) The book’s final chapter, “The Independent
Woman,” arguing that only economic self-sufficiency can release women from
subordination, was one of the inspirational texts for the women’s movement of
the nineteen-sixties and seventies. But you can no longer read it without
thinking of Olga and Wanda, Arlette and Michelle—the women Sartre supported,
who never had independent careers, and who knew that they were allowed access
to Sartre only as long as they were “pretty” and never bored him by talking “in
the realm of ideas.” A little intellectual
pretension, the flattering kind shown by a young admirer, was titillating, of
course. It was necessary to get the attention of the great man, who was not
disappointed, because he was not surprised, by its limitations. “If a woman has
false ideas,” Beauvoir writes in “The Second Sex,”
if she is not very
intelligent, clear-sighted, or courageous, a man does not hold her responsible:
she is the victim, he thinks—and often with reason—of her situation. He dreams
of what she might have been, of what she perhaps will be: she can be credited
with any possibilities, because she is nothing
in particular. This vacancy is what makes the lover weary of her quickly; but
it is the source of the mystery, the charm, that seduces him and makes him
inclined to feel an easy affection in the first place.
There is no more
remorseless dissection of the situation of the successful man’s mistress than
“The Independent Woman,” and, since Beauvoir always wrote out of her own
experience, it is possible to imagine that chapter as a coded letter to Sartre,
the evisceration that she could never deliver to his face.
If
“The Second Sex” can’t be squared with the life, we are reduced to the final,
depressing theory that the pact was just the traditional sexist arrangement—in
which the man sleeps around and the woman nobly “accepts” the situation—on
philosophical stilts. Sartre was the classic womanizer, and Beauvoir was the
classic enabler. In the beginning, the bisexuality was her way of showing the
proper spirit. “I’ve a very keen taste for her body”: who is speaking that
sentence? The woman who wants it to be heard, or the man who wants to hear it?
Later on, she had other men, but finding a man willing to enter a sexual
intimacy without strings is not the most difficult thing in the world. (Algren
turned out not to be one.) Beauvoir was formidable, but she was not made of
ice. Though her affairs, for the most part, were love affairs, it is plain from
almost every page she wrote that she would have given them all up if she could
have had Sartre for herself alone. ♦
(via WWW.NewYorker.com )
To "speak" a language is to use it, but to "speak" cinematographic language is to a certain extent to invent it. This invention, as something viable, something effectively and vitally mechanically fixed, because ineffectual if tampered with, a liability bound to backfire and injure its user. It seems the art critic is the only species of humans aware of most of this, printing reviews that seemingly go unread, spouting monologues to closed ears in awe of diluted tales in which are not privy to the originals. It has be theorized that sequels endanger originals but it is only in modern film, where the sequels are forfeited their origin in place of blood, gore and predictable outrage and disaster, that originals are truly endangered of poor rewrites. It is not the filmmaker who must remain true to a promising tale but the audience must become more keen to demand that that very tale is given wholly, not just breadcrumbs swept to the floor.
