Tete-a-Tete (18 page)

 

Beauvoir had not seen Sartre for eleven months. One evening, at the end of March 1941, she returned to the Hôtel du Danemark and found a note in her mailbox in his handwriting. “I'm at the Café des Trois Mousquetaires.” Her heart stopped. She ran all the way to the café (“a reddish glow behind its thick blue curtains”) and almost fell through the door.
⁶⁸
Sartre was not there. A waiter handed her a note.
Sartre had waited two hours, then gone out. He would be back shortly.

There were civilians as well as military men in the Nazi prison camps, and the Nazis were releasing civilians if they proved themselves unfit for military action. Sartre and a priest friend of his had organized forged papers and passed themselves off as civilians. At the medical examination, Sartre made the most of his near-blind right eye, pulling at his eyelid, exposing the expanse of white, and complaining of dizzy spells. The doctor had signed his release papers.

Sartre had come back to Paris a changed man. It frightened Beauvoir. Never had the two of them seemed so far apart. He was impatient, intransigent, full of moral strictures. He was shocked that she had signed an affidavit declaring she was not a Jew, and disgusted to hear that she occasionally bought food on the black market. He had not come back to Paris to enjoy his freedom, he told her, but to
act.
He wanted to organize a resistance group. They had to expel the Germans from France. Beauvoir thought him deluded. Had he
still
no idea how powerless they were as individuals?

“That evening, and the next day, and for several days thereafter, Sartre completely baffled me,” she would write in her memoirs. “We both felt that the other one was speaking in a completely different language.”
⁶⁹

March 1941–September 1944

Sartre wasted no time in making contact with other intellectuals interested in forming a resistance group. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was back in Paris—freed from his prison camp when he contracted pneumonia—and he knew some young philosophers who had already formed a group called “Under the Boot.” Bost also had friends who were eager to take action against the Germans. In the end, a dozen or so people turned up to the first meeting in Beauvoir's room at the Hôtel Mistral, where she and Sartre were living again. Most of them, like Bost, were in their mid-twenties, ten years younger than Sartre and Beauvoir.

A couple of the members, including the hotheaded Corsican philosopher Jean-Toussaint Desanti, wanted to manufacture bombs and hurl grenades, but the group quickly decided that this was beyond their capacity. Their weapons would be words. They would collect information and distribute news bulletins, inciting Parisians to resist German power.

They called their group Socialism and Liberty. Sartre had been deeply marked by collective life in the prison camp, which he considered a kind of socialism, and for the first time he thought of himself as a socialist. He did not mind that some members of the group were Marxists. Their aim was not to form a political party, he pointed out, but to expel the Germans from France. Discussion at the weekly meetings was sometimes fierce, but Sartre never tried to impose his own views.

It was usually Dominique Desanti, Jean-Toussaint's wife, who typed the leaflets; Bost and his friend Jean Pouillon printed them on a duplicating machine, and members of the group distributed them across Paris, preferably at the doors of factories, at dawn. They soon had fifty members. For better secrecy, they modeled themselves on the communist network, splitting up into groups of five.

They made overtures to the communist resistance movement, but word came back that the communists did not trust Sartre, who by his own admission had sat around in his prison camp reading Heidegger (a Nazi supporter), and who probably bought his release by agreeing to spy on French resistants. Sartre was horrified by this rumor.

He arranged meetings with other resistance leaders, and Beauvoir sometimes went with him. “All these groups had two things in common,” she writes, “a very limited effective strength, and extraordinary lack of common caution. We held our meetings in hotel rooms or someone's study at the Ecole Normale, where walls might well have ears. Bost walked through the streets carrying a duplicating machine, and Pouillon went around with his briefcase stuffed full of pamphlets.”
¹

That summer, Sartre and Beauvoir crossed into the so-called Free Zone, run by the collaborationist government of Marshal Pétain. Sartre hoped to establish contact with some resistance members in the south, in order to make Socialism and Liberty part of a larger organization. The border was formally closed, but they sent ahead bicycles (illicitly supplied by Sorokine) and camping equipment (lent by Bost), and were led across the border at night by a guide to whom they paid a small fee. For the next few weeks they cycled long distances up hills and along bumpy roads, eating even less well than in Paris. Among the people on Sartre's list of contacts were the prominent left-wing writers André Gide and André Malraux. Neither showed much interest in Sartre's plans. Malraux (who was not yet a member of the Resistance) told Sartre that Russian tanks and American planes were needed to combat Hitler, not well-meaning groups of intellectuals.

Resistance was dangerous work, and it became clear that the risks they were taking were far greater than any influence they might have. “We had the feeling we were shouting in the desert,” Dominique
Desanti recalls.
²
As a group, they felt isolated. In May 1942, nineteen-year-old Yvonne Picard, a former student of Beauvoir's, resigned from the group to join the much larger and more effective communist resistance. One week later, she was arrested by the Germans. Her friends never saw her again.

Soon after that, reluctantly, the group decided to disband.
³
The Marxist members, including the Desantis and their friend François Cuzin, went to work for the communist Resistance. Cuzin, a brilliant young philosopher, joined a major resistance group in the south. In July 1944, the Germans laid an ambush. Cuzin and his comrades were first tortured, then executed.

 

Although Sartre would not sign the declaration that he was neither a Jew nor a Freemason, he did not lose his job, and was sent back to the Lycée Pasteur. It turned out that the inspector general of education was a resistant. In October he transferred Sartre to the more prestigious Lycée Condorcet, where Sartre prepared students for the Ecole Normale.

After a morning's teaching, Sartre and Beauvoir installed themselves in a café to write. Their favorite was the Flore, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, with its red chairs and mirrors. The café was not well known in those days, and German soldiers almost never set foot in it. But the best thing was its warmth. The four winters of the Occupation would prove unusually severe, with snow and ice on the streets of Paris. Coal was rationed, and power cuts were common. In the middle of the Flore sat a large potbellied stove, which the owner kept well stoked with his supply of black-market coal.

Sartre and Beauvoir worked mostly upstairs, on the second floor, where it was quieter. They sat at opposite ends of the room so they would not be tempted to talk, and—in the fug of tobacco fumes, amid the jangle of coffee cups, the hubbub of conversation, and the distraction of people making their way to the toilet or phone—they wrote. Both used fountain pens. Sartre's handwriting was small, neat, and professional. Beauvoir's jagged calligraphy was almost impossible to decipher. Even Sartre complained about it.

On the table beside their sheaf of papers were a small porcelain
teapot, a cup and saucer, and an ashtray. Like everyone else, they smoked. Tobacco was scarce during the war, and Sartre would scour the café floor for cigarette butts to stuff in his pipe. Beauvoir liked the feel of a cigarette in her hand, but she did not inhale, and did not mind if she had to go without cigarettes altogether.

Dominique Desanti, a former member of Socialism and Liberty, was thoroughly inspired by Sartre and Beauvoir. One day she plucked up the courage to ask Sartre if he would read the first fifty pages of a novel she was writing. Sartre took her manuscript, and made an appointment to meet with her the following week:

Sartre said encouraging things, then asked Desanti if she planned to make writing her vocation. Yes? In that case, he would make some more substantial criticisms. He was gentle and encouraging, she recalls, and he soon had her laughing at some of the weak passages in her writing. His criticism was kind, and utterly to the point. He tapped his pipe on the table, filled it (his nails were filthy, she noticed), and made several attempts at lighting it. “Writing is an occupation without respite,” he told her as he handed the manuscript back. “I like to teach. But at some level I am always thinking about what I am writing…. At every moment you must be ready to dive back into it. Look at the Beaver.”
⁴

It was an affectionate joke in their circle, writes Desanti, that the Beaver was always beavering away. It was clear that Sartre admired her for it.

 

“My relationship with Wanda is perfect,” Sartre declared. Although he and Beauvoir had moved back to the Mistral, he spent most nights in Wanda's room at the Hôtel Chaplain. “She is absolutely charming with me, in a proprietary way; I feel like a beloved cat or Pekinese,” he told Beauvoir. “I've decided to have her give up painting, which she hates, and have her do theater work.”
⁵
Sartre's collection of short stories,
The Wall
(1939), had been dedicated to Olga; the trilogy he was writing,
Roads to Freedom,
was dedicated to Wanda.

Beauvoir would maintain a lifetime of silence about Wanda. Her memoirs scarcely mention the young woman who played such a major role in Sartre's wartime life. But she vented her spleen in the novel she was writing. The title itself,
L'Invitée
(published in English as
She Came to Stay
, but whose literal translation is “the woman guest”), hints that this particular “guest” overstayed her welcome. When Beauvoir first began her novel, in 1938, Xavière was modeled entirely on Olga. Over time, Xavière had acquired some of Wanda's traits. Later in life, Beauvoir would tell her biographer, Deirdre Bair, “Too many people…entirely overlooked the fact that the most unpleasant aspects of Xavière came from my prickly relationship with Wanda.”
⁶

Sartre and Beauvoir's own sexual relationship was over. Beauvoir tried to rationalize: “It is pretty much accepted that in men habit kills desire.”
⁷
Her father had turned away from her mother in the same way. She remembered her young mother glowing with happiness—a happiness five-year-old Simone vaguely associated with the bedroom from which her mother had just emerged. By the time Beauvoir was an adolescent, the idyll was over. Georges de Beauvoir had lost interest in his wife and started to frequent prostitutes. “Her senses had grown demanding,” Beauvoir would write sympathetically of her mother. “At thirty-five, in the prime of her life, she was no longer allowed to satisfy them.”
⁸

When Sartre came back from the war, Simone de Beauvoir was thirty-three, and had to accept, once and for all, that the man she most loved no longer desired her.
⁹
For years, their sex life, such as it was, had limped along without sparkle. Neither of them had any doubt that this was because of Sartre, not Beauvoir. They discussed what they called his “sexual indifference” or “sexual coldness,” and attributed it to Sartre's complete inability to lose his self-consciousness about his
body. He was incapable of “letting go.” On vacation, he would never relax on the grass or the sand, and he almost never sat in an armchair to read. For him, he admitted, sex involved “a slight touch of sadism,” since his partner yielded her body to him, and he never yielded his.
¹⁰

“It was rather deep friendship than love,” Beauvoir would explain to Nelson Algren, a more passionate lover, a few years later. “Love was not very successful. Chiefly because [Sartre] does not care much for sexual life. He is a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed. I soon felt it, though I had no experience; and little by little, it seemed useless, and even indecent, to go on being lovers.”
¹¹

At the age of sixty-nine, in a taped conversation with Beauvoir intended for publication, Sartre was quite candid about his lack of priapic drive:

Certainly, Beauvoir's life could not have been more different from her mother's. She was no dependent wife, languishing at home. If Sartre had his twenty-four-year-old Wanda, Beauvoir had her twenty-five-year old Bost. Nevertheless, try as she might to make it so, their situation was not parallel. Sartre spent almost every night with Wanda; Beauvoir spent only one night a week with Bost. Sartre's relationship with Wanda was public: Beauvoir's relationship with Bost was clandestine. Even her relationship with Sartre was largely hidden. Sartre did not want Wanda to know the extent of their intimacy.

These days, Sartre's woman was Wanda. Bost's woman had always been Olga. Beauvoir was behind the scenes, undeclared. Almost like a mistress. But paradoxically it was Olga and Wanda who were the kept women. Not only was Beauvoir financially independent, but she was also constantly shelling out money in their direction.

 

With their pooled civil servant salaries, Beauvoir and Sartre were completely supporting Olga and Wanda, and helping Bost and Nathalie Sorokine as well. In July 1941, Beauvoir's father died, leaving no money. Françoise de Beauvoir, at the age of fifty-four, became entirely dependent on her eldest daughter.

Beauvoir decided that she and Sartre could not afford to keep eating out. To make ends meet, she moved, in the Mistral, to a room with a small kitchen. She borrowed saucepans, crockery, and utensils from Poupette's studio (Poupette was still in Portugal), and for the first and only time in her life took it upon herself to shop and cook. She enjoyed the challenge of foraging for food, shopping with ration cards, and making edible meals out of their meager provisions. “What a windfall it was if I stumbled on a beet or a cabbage!” she writes.
¹³
Bost and Sorokine often helped.

Beauvoir writes that she constantly felt hungry during the war. Sartre seemed better able to go without food. Madame Morel regularly sent food parcels from La Pouèze. Sometimes the package, held up in the mail, would arrive stinking, with a putrefying rabbit or purplish sausages inside. Too hungry to be proud, Bost and Beauvoir, would wash the meat with vinegar and try to disguise the taste in a spicy stew. Sartre once walked in and caught sight of this operation. “It's a rotting carcass!” he exclaimed, and insisted that they fling it out.