Tete-a-Tete (24 page)

It was Jean Cau's job to ward off the outside world. Sartre would tell him: “I simply don't have time, Cau, to write that letter” or “to see that fool” or “to argue with that moron” or “to bore myself stupid with those jerks.” Cau had to convey the message more delicately.

Cau's other task was to manage Sartre's finances. If Sartre was careful with his time, he was profligate with his money. Cau had never seen anything like it. “Generosity? I don't know. Sartre didn't
give
money. He strewed it.” Like all Sartre's friends, Cau was astonished to see that Sartre went around with wads of banknotes in his pockets—as much as a couple of thousand dollars. Sartre never let others pay for meals, and he left huge tips for the waiters.

Instead of an advance for each book, Gallimard gave Sartre a monthly allowance. At the beginning of the month, there was a flurry of check signing. Ever since she had stopped teaching, Beauvoir had been financially dependent on Sartre. Then there was Cau's salary to pay, and a monthly allowance for Wanda. Bost and Olga sometimes asked for a “loan,” which they rarely paid back. Other friends were always asking for help with this and that—medical bills, travel, or
some emergency. Sartre never hesitated. He signed a check or handed over the cash. By the end of the month, he regularly ran out of money. Cau recounts that Sartre would come barging out of his study:

At one
P.M.
, Sartre would go off for lunch, either with Beauvoir or another woman friend, and Cau would leave for the day. Sartre would be back at four-thirty in the afternoon, when Beauvoir would turn up and work at the little bridge table, transported to Sartre's study. Beauvoir started work immediately. Sartre sometimes sat at the piano for an hour and practiced a Bach prelude or a Beethoven sonata, then set to work. They worked till 8
P.M.
Just across the square from the Flore and the Deux Magots, they recreated the café atmosphere at home.

 

In the summer of 1946, Sartre and Beauvoir went to Switzerland and Italy. Beauvoir was finishing her historical novel,
All Men Are Mortal.
Sartre was writing two plays.
The Victors
—dedicated to Vanetti, with a leading role for Wanda—was about the courage of the resistants during the war and the torture many of them had endured.
The Respectful Prostitute,
inspired by the famous Scottsboro case in Alabama, in which nine black youths were falsely accused of raping two white prostitutes, portrayed racism in the American South. The title caused a scandal (the play was obliged to run under the title
The Respectful P.
), and the play itself aroused cries of “anti-Americanism.” Sartre was taken aback by the accusations. “I am not anti-American,” he said. “I don't even know what the word means…. I have just devoted two whole issues of my review,
Les Temps modernes,
to the United States. The
writer's duty…is to denounce injustice everywhere, and all the more so when he loves the country which lets this injustice happen.”
⁴⁴

In the evenings in Rome, Sartre and Beauvoir dined with Italian friends, including the writers Elio Vittorini, Carlo Levi, and Ignazio Silone. Marked by the bitter memory of Italian fascism during the war, Italian intellectuals were nearly all communist sympathizers. In France, the Communist Party, which was fiercely Stalinist, attacked independent left-wingers like Sartre. In Italy, the atmosphere was quite different. The Italian Communist Party, far more all-inclusive, regarded fellow travelers as friends. It made life much more pleasant for the intellectuals. Throughout their lives, Sartre and Beauvoir would always feel comfortable in Italy.

Sartre spent three weeks with Wanda, and Beauvoir went hiking by herself in the Dolomites, staying in inns and mountain huts. Once more she experienced “the noise of pebbles rolling down the screes…the gasping effort of the long climb, the ecstasy of relief when the haversack slips from the shoulders…the early departures under the pale sky.”
⁴⁵
As usual, the long exhausting walks helped her to find an inner serenity. For her, it was a form of meditation.

She and Sartre had arranged to meet in Paris on the morning of Sunday, August 24, and planned to spend the day together. Unfortunately, Wanda (worried about Olga, who was to have a second pneumothorax) understood things differently, Sartre explained to Beauvoir:

In the autumn, Beauvoir accompanied Sartre back to Rome. “I had never seen Rome in the gentle October light,” she writes.
⁴⁷
They stayed at the old Minerva Hotel, in the center of town, and spent peaceful days writing.

 

Les Temps modernes
might have looked sober with its plain white cover and black-and-red print, but like its editor-in-chief, it was never stuffy. Sartre set out to break down the divide between so-called “serious literature” and journalism. Alongside articles on politics, literature, sociology, and psychoanalysis was a humorous column by Boris Vian, autobiographical pieces by people from all possible walks of life (a prostitute, a thief, and so on), and articles on the latest jazz, literature, and films from America. In no time,
Les Temps modernes
acquired a reputation throughout Europe for being fresh and stimulating.

To Beauvoir, this collective editorial project was “the highest form of friendship.”
⁴⁸
It was a privileged way for her and Sartre to communicate with their contemporaries, to take part in current debates. “I would read an article that made me angry and say to myself immediately: ‘I must answer that!'” Beauvoir writes in her memoirs. “That's how all the essays I wrote for
Les Temps modernes
came into being.”
⁴⁹

Every two weeks, on Sunday afternoons at five-thirty, the editorial committee would crowd into Sartre's study on the Rue Bonaparte. They argued heatedly, laughed, and drank a great deal. It seemed to the others that Sartre breathed ideas. Meetings would often last until one in the morning, when Sartre and Beauvoir would still be full of steam. The others were exhausted.

Sartre had little interest in the practical management of the magazine. Maurice Merleau-Ponty took over the day-to-day direction.
⁵⁰
The other highly energetic member of the team was Simone de Beauvoir. She came up with ideas for articles, read through the pile of submissions, and wielded her editor's pen with skill. It was a great deal of work in addition to her own writing, but she relished it.

 

By the summer of 1946, Beauvoir was wondering what to write next. She wanted to write about herself, and Sartre encouraged her. Once again, he asked her: What did it mean to be a woman?

She answered, a little impatiently, that for her it did not mean much. She led the same sort of life as her male friends, she was just as privileged, and she had never felt inferior because of her femininity. “All the same,” Sartre insisted, “you weren't brought up in the same way as a boy would have been; you should look into it further.”

Beauvoir was sure she could dispense with the question quickly. She went to the Bibliothèque Nationale and looked up everything she could find on the condition of women and the myths of femininity. She was there for weeks and was astonished by her findings. “It was a revelation. This world was a masculine world, my childhood had been nourished by myths forged by men, and I hadn't reacted to them in at all the same way I should have done if I had been a boy.”
⁵¹

Such was her interest in the subject that she put her memoir project to one side and embarked on what she thought would be a long essay. It was to become a thick book, a twentieth-century landmark called
The Second Sex.

 

Beauvoir had greatly envied Sartre and Bost when they flew off to the United States, and was thrilled when Philippe Soupault, a French surrealist writer and journalist who had lived in the United States during the war, managed to arrange a series of lectures for her at American universities. She was to leave in January 1947.

She was also extremely nervous. Four months was a long time to be away. She felt as if she were leaving her life behind. It did not help that while she was away, Vanetti was coming to Paris to live with Sartre.

She wondered, would she be able to immerse herself in American life as Sartre and Bost had done? Unlike Sartre, she had a good command of English, even if her accent was thick. But whereas Sartre had been looked after there—first by the Office of War Information, then by Vanetti—Beauvoir was on her own.

The final weeks passed in a whirl. It was a tumultuous time. The cold war divided French intellectuals and split up friendships. There
were endless discussions about Soviet communism versus American imperialism, the Soviet gulag versus the American atom bomb.

Relations between Sartre and Camus were already strained because of politics. Then, in October 1946, Beauvoir writes: “a tumultuous newcomer burst into our group.”
⁵²
Arthur Koestler and his wife were visiting Paris for a few weeks. Koestler's novel
Darkness at Noon,
a chilling look at Stalinist Russia, was a best seller in France. Koestler and Camus were close, and shared a virulent anticommunism. Sartre and Beauvoir often went out with them. Koestler and Camus would harangue Sartre about his sympathy with the Soviet Union, telling him he was an apologist for Stalinism. They drank vast quantities, and their arguments were fierce.

Beauvoir gave in to Koestler's aggressive seduction ploys and spent a night with him. She would write about the episode, with a thin fictional disguise, in
The Mandarins.
In the novel, Anne Dubreuilh is about to leave for America, and feels nervous, insecure, and lonely. Her one-night stand with the condescending and sadistic “Scriassine” is a vivid evocation of alienated sex.
⁵³

One night, at a party, Camus picked a fight with Merleau-Ponty, accusing him of justifying the Moscow show trials. Sartre stood up for Merleau-Ponty. Camus left in a rage, slamming the door behind him. Sartre and Bost ran after him, but Camus refused to come back. It was their first major falling out, and would not be the last.

Before she left for America, Beauvoir went to say good-bye to Olga, who was undergoing “heliotherapy”—exposure to fresh air and sunshine—in the Leysin sanatorium high up in the Swiss alps. Her bed had been wheeled out onto the balcony, where she spent hours each day breathing in the icy air. A few months earlier, she and Bost had married.
⁵⁴
It was a romantic gesture in the face of possible death, and a practical one as well. For Bost, it was easier to visit Olga in conservative Swiss sanatoria if they were married.

After twenty-four hours in that sinister white building filled with death and despair, Beauvoir felt crushed. She was relieved to take the train back to Paris.

 

It was a severe winter. Violent storms obliged some flights to turn around halfway across the Atlantic. On the evening of January 24, 1947, Beauvoir and Sartre went out to the airport at Orly. She was tense. Sartre kissed her and left. Then came the announcement that due to bad weather the flight would be postponed until the following evening. Beauvoir returned to Paris and spent the evening with Sartre and Bost, feeling as if she were floating between two worlds.

Twenty-four hours later, she was finally sitting in a forty-seat cargo plane. She opened her notebook. “Something is about to happen,” she wrote. “You can count the minutes in your life when something happens.”
⁵⁵

The flight was long and tiring, with stops in the Azores and Newfoundland. Beauvoir was apprehensive, and takeoffs and landings were an ordeal. Her ears hurt, and her temples throbbed. She wrote to Sartre from the airport at Newfoundland. “Do you remember that hall where I'm writing to you, with its pale blue walls?…I find your tracks everywhere and that's another way of feeling how tightly joined we are…. I really feel I shan't be separated from you for an instant—nothing can separate us.”
⁵⁶

On the descent into New York, Beauvoir felt frightened and queasy. The plane pitched. Peering out of the little round window, she could make out houses and streets. She told herself she would soon be walking down those streets. The woman next to her murmured that the engine was making an odd noise. The plane turned, leaning on one wing. Beauvoir thought: “I don't want to die. Not now. I don't want the lights to go out.” Then she felt the thud of the wheels touching the runway.

January 1947–Summer 1950

A woman from the French Cultural Services met Beauvoir at the airport, and the two of them had a lobster dinner, then Beauvoir deposited her suitcase in her midtown hotel room, and plunged alone into the Manhattan night. She walked down Broadway to Times Square. The streets were full of people. But she felt like a phantom. Nothing seemed quite real, and she was invisible in this crowd. On her previous travels—in Rome, Madrid, even in Francophone Africa—she still thought of Paris as the heart of the universe. No longer. This was another world.

Over the next few days, everything astonished her: the silence of the traffic (“no horns”), the uniformed doormen who stood at the entrance to apartment buildings as if they were palaces, the elevator employees (“it's difficult to receive clandestine visits”), the women's very high heels (“I'm ashamed of my Swiss shoes with the crepe soles I was so proud of”), the friendliness of total strangers, the speed of restaurant service (“You can eat anything, anywhere, very quickly—I like that”). She tried to pierce the façade of this strange culture, while mocking her little ruses. “I don't like the taste of whiskey; I only like these glass sticks you stir it with. Yet until three o'clock in the morn
ing, I drink scotch docilely because scotch is one of the keys to America. I want to break through the glass wall.”
¹

She knew the best key: an American lover. Sartre had found himself one with enviable ease. Why did it seem to her so difficult?

As she roamed Manhattan and Brooklyn by herself, she took pleasure in seeing the things Sartre had seen. “It's you I meet everywhere about New York,” she told him, “and it's you again whom I love when loving the skyscrapers.”
³

Vanetti was about to fly off to join Sartre in Paris, and Beauvoir was determined to meet her. Vanetti reluctantly agreed to come to the Sherry-Netherland, on Fifth Avenue, where the two women talked until three in the morning. They were nervous, and drank one whiskey after another. “I like her a lot,” Beauvoir told Sartre, “and was very happy because I understood your feelings—I could appreciate them, and honored you for having them.” A day or two later, she was invited to a cocktail party in Vanetti's home. “I was very moved to be entering that apartment where you'd lived for so long…. Dolores was as cute as a little Annamite idol and really charming to me—I'd like to know what she was actually thinking.” Vanetti was certainly kind. She even arranged for Beauvoir to write some articles for American newspapers, for supplementary income.

The last time they met, Vanetti was surrounded by suitcases, about to leave for the airport, and dreading the long flight ahead. “I really do find her extremely pleasant and likeable,” Beauvoir wrote. “Just a bit too much of a ‘little dame,' as Bost puts it, for my own taste. But if you're male, and what's more driven by an imperialistic passion of generosity, you couldn't find anyone more appropriate.”
⁴

Beauvoir particularly liked Richard Wright, the black American writer, and his wife, Ellen. Their apartment on Charles Street, in
Greenwich Village, became her home away from home. Julia, their five-year-old daughter, was “a real little marvel.” (“Even I who don't like children am friends with her.”)
⁵
The Wrights introduced Beauvoir to their circle of friends—left-wing intellectuals, nearly all Jewish, and all vehemently anticommunist—and Beauvoir found herself invited to their apartments. To her surprise, she saw that all these people had a typewriter, a record player, and a good collection of jazz.

She was immediately drawn to Bernard Wolfe's haunted face and generous spirit. Wolfe had been Trotsky's secretary down in Mexico, and had co-written a book on black hip culture,
Really the Blues,
with his friend Mezz Mezzrow, a white jazz clarinetist brought up in Chicago's black culture.
⁶
Beauvoir asked Wolfe where she could hear good jazz, and he took her to a Louis Armstrong concert at Carnegie Hall. This was a rare occurrence, and tickets were hard to come by. Beauvoir was touched by what she saw as yet another example of staggering American kindness to strangers.

Her visit was featured in
The New Yorker.
Intimidated by the thought of meeting “Sartre's female intellectual counterpart,” her interviewer admitted thinking he was “set for a grim half-hour.” “Well, surprise! Mlle de B. is the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw; also eager, gentle, modest, and as pleased as a Midwesterner with the two weeks she spent in New York.”
⁷

In mid-February, Beauvoir left New York on a lecture tour. “My heart is as torn as if I were leaving someone special,” she wrote. “I didn't think I could love another city as much as Paris.”
⁸

 

She was in Chicago for thirty-six hours. It was the end of February, so the streets were covered in snow and the wind cut like a razor. She did not feel like seeing the city by herself. Friends in New York had given her the address of a writer, Nelson Algren. Algren was thirty-eight, a year younger than Beauvoir. She had been warned that he was a moody, difficult fellow.

Beauvoir plucked up her courage and dialed. A man answered. She blustered into the phone with her thick French accent. The man hung up. She dialed again and spoke louder. “Wrong number,” he said. After three tries, she was crimson with embarrassment, and
asked the hotel operator to help. “There's a party here that would like to speak to you,” the operator told Algren. He was used to misplaced calls in thick accents from Polish immigrants who had never used a phone before, and was busy cooking something on his stove. This time, he listened more carefully to what he later described as that “hoarse screech.”
⁹
To Beauvoir's relief, he sounded more friendly.

That evening in the hotel bar, she saw a tall blond man with wire-frame glasses and a leather waistcoat come through the door and look her up and down with surprise. Beauvoir told him she was tired of luxury hotels and elegant restaurants. Would he show her the real Chicago?

Algren took her to Chicago's Bowery—to a strip club, a Negro bar, and a “gangster tavern,” where music blared out from the jukebox and a variety of tramps, crooks, drug addicts, and whores propped themselves up at the counter. He felt at home in places like this, Algren said. These people were his friends.

Between his mumbling Midwestern drawl and her strong French accent, they had trouble understanding each other. At first she plied him with questions, and he answered laconically. But by the end of the evening, he was telling her about his life. He was born in Detroit, he said, and brought up in a poor immigrant district on the South Side of Chicago. His mother was Jewish and his father Swedish, but he did not feel either. During the Depression, after graduating in journalism from the University of Illinois, he had traveled in the South, hopping freight trains, and had served a four-month term in a Texas prison for stealing a typewriter. Back in Chicago, he was involved in a communist writers' group. It was the best time of his life. During the war, he had served in the army in France. He did not speak French, but he liked the French. On his way to and from Europe, he had stopped in New York. Otherwise, he had scarcely left Chicago.

They arranged to see each other the following afternoon. Beauvoir had to attend lunch with people from the Alliance Française. As soon as she could, she asked the French consul to drop her off at Algren's. The consul drove her to the Polish district, past warehouses, vacant lots, and rows of squalid wooden houses with scruffy backyards. At 1523 West Wabansia Avenue she stepped out into the snow, waved
good-bye to the consul, and knocked on the door. The place was a hovel.

A fire was crackling in the black potbellied stove in the kitchen. The linoleum floor was covered with newspapers. “I was trying to clean up a bit,” Algren said. He ushered her into the other room. There was a bright yellow chair, books, papers, a typewriter, a record player. On the bed was a colorful Mexican blanket. Beauvoir wished they could get under it and spend the afternoon there.

Instead, Algren showed her his neighborhood. She slipped on a patch of ice, and he took her arm. When their ears felt as if they would fall off with the cold, they went inside a bar and warmed up with stiff drinks. Beauvoir had not been able to get out of a dinner appointment with the French consul, and she resented it. Algren saw her to a taxi, and kissed her good-bye. He wanted her to come back in a few weeks. “If you do not I will come to Paris one day after you.”
¹⁰

The following morning, Beauvoir was on the train crossing the country to Los Angeles, remembering Algren's boyish smile. Before leaving the hotel, she had not seen the parcel Algren had left for her at the front desk. She had told him she was scared of seeing him again: wouldn't the parting be too painful? The parcel contained inscribed copies of his books, along with a tender note, which he was to forward to Los Angeles. He hoped very much to see her again, he said, even if the parting were painful.

 

After two days and nights on the train, Beauvoir arrived in Los Angeles at eight in the morning. Nathalie Sorokine, who was pregnant when Beauvoir saw her off from Paris two years earlier, was now living with her husband, Ivan Moffat, in Westwood, Los Angeles. She was at the station (“her hair and face magnificent, but more enormous than ever”) and drove Beauvoir to their apartment, where Moffat was waiting with breakfast on the table. Their little girl was being looked after by a nanny.

Moffat, who was proving to be a successful screenwriter, had liked Beauvoir's novel
All Men Are Mortal,
and proposed to his producer friend George Stevens that they make a film of it together. (In the next few years, the two men would produce such classics as
A Place in
the Sun, East of Eden,
and
Giant.
) There was talk of Claude Rains and Greta Garbo in the lead roles. “It would mean at least $30,000 for me,” Beauvoir told Sartre. “Doesn't that make your head spin? We'd live for a whole year in America, you and I.”
¹¹

A few days later, Moffat lent the women his big red Packard, and they set off. With Beauvoir navigating, they drove to San Francisco, then to Lone Pine, on the edge of the Nevada desert, where one afternoon, Moffat and George Stevens loomed up in Stevens's big car, a little later than the appointed meeting time, having stopped for several whiskeys on the way. They were wearing cowboy hats, red-and-black-checked shirts, and neckerchiefs. Beauvoir would write about that wondrous desert meeting in
America Day by Day.

They went back to Los Angeles for a time, and then Moffat drove the women across a deserted Los Angeles bathed in the early light of dawn, and dropped them at the Greyhound bus station. Beauvoir and Sorokine set off on a three-week tour: a bus to Santa Fe, Houston, Natchez, and New Orleans; a plane to Florida, then a bus up to New York, with Beauvoir giving lectures along the way. The two women got on surprisingly well.

After she left Los Angeles, Beauvoir wrote and told Moffat how close she had felt to him, and how sad she felt to leave him. “While you were here I consciously became fonder and fonder of you and attracted by you,” he replied. He wished they could have spent “a whole night in each other's embrace.”
¹²

Ivan Moffat, ten years younger than Beauvoir, could not help but respond to “the ardor and the vitality of her face, and those marvelous blue eyes and lovely smile and laughter.”
¹³

 

Her lecturing schedule was strenuous, but Beauvoir, untiring, was grateful for the opportunity to talk to American intellectuals. The
Daily Princetonian
reported:

Beauvoir pointed out that after the war, French tribunals had shown no mercy to French intellectuals who had collaborated, whereas other kinds of collaborators—war profiteers, for example—were treated comparatively leniently. In France, they had understood that an intellectual has a serious responsibility. As existentialists, she and Sartre believed that writers must be “committed.” Words were actions. Writers had to take sides.

While Beauvoir was traveling around, imparting her message to university audiences across the country, she was meeting many people and asking many questions. Over cocktail parties and dinners, she chatted with faculty members and graduate students. Whenever she found herself alone, she sat in restaurants and bars or lay on her bed in hotel rooms, reading American literature and making notes. The book she would write about her trip,
America Day by Day,
gives a vivid sense of the kinds of conversations she was having, as well as her private reflections. When it was translated into English in 1953, most American critics (including the Francophile Mary McCarthy) resented what they saw as Beauvoir's facile generalizations and her sense of French superiority. In recent years, several American critics have hailed the book as “a forgotten gem.”
¹⁵

Beauvoir was also making notes for the essay she was writing on women. The experience of a different culture was proving invaluable. She was observing things with fresh, foreign eyes, and seeing the relationship between the sexes from an entirely new perspective. To her astonishment, she had come to the conclusion that women were less free in the United States: