Tete-a-Tete (28 page)

One evening in late December, in a taxi coming home after a nightclub, Sartre kissed her. By now, Michelle was well and truly in love. Shortly afterward, Sartre took her home to his place. It was the afternoon. His mother was away. They made love.

Sartre left the next day to spend New Year's Eve at La Pouèze. Bost and Beauvoir were working across the table from each other, translating Algren's novel
Never Come Morning.
Madame Morel, who was famous for her hospitality, was happy to let them work all day long. Sartre was absorbed in an essay he was writing about Jean Genet, a man he saw as an existential hero, since from his unfavorable beginnings (illegitimacy, public assistance, delinquency, prison, ped
erasty), Genet had, by choosing to write, made something positive out of what others had made of him. It was a Sartrean obsession: the idea of self-invention in the face of humiliation and stigmatization.

Sartre was writing frequent letters to Michelle, his “little charm.” He could not stop thinking about that marvelous afternoon—her dress, her hair and mouth, her mysterious smile. He wanted to make her happy. He wanted her never to feel alone. It was new for him, he said, this need he felt for someone else. It was physical, as if he had contracted an illness. He missed her, in his body.
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By February, Michelle realized she was pregnant. With Sartre, as with Boris, she became pregnant the very first time she slept with him. Sartre could not believe it at first. He had practiced his usual method of contraception, coitus interruptus, and thought it foolproof. “Of course, it wasn't safe at all,” says Michelle Vian. “Sartre would withdraw, and ten minutes later, he would make love again. We didn't know it back then, but it takes only a drop of semen…. You can see what the sexual act represented for me. Danger.”
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Sartre asked whether she wanted to keep the baby. Michelle knew he disliked children. She had seen her marriage destroyed by her pregnancies. And she already had two children. It was enough, she told Sartre. That meant an abortion. Sartre said he would ask Beauvoir for addresses. Michelle was shocked. “Don't tell the Beaver,” she said. “Not yet.” Michelle said she would ask her medical-student brother for help.

Sartre was about to go away again. He and Beauvoir were leaving in early March to spend two months in sub-Saharan Africa. Michelle begged him to postpone his departure a few days. Couldn't he stay until after the abortion? She was frightened, she said. But Sartre was firm. He could not let Beauvoir down. He had disappointed her the previous summer. (He did not go into details.) “I can't do it to her.”

“I was angry,” says Michelle Vian. Sartre left, and her brother performed the abortion. Michelle became infected and was feverish for days. From Algeria, Sartre sent orchids. From the depths of black Africa, he wrote tender letters. “I didn't reply,” says Michelle. “Maybe
once or twice, no more. I have photos of me at that time, looking incredibly sad. It was the end of the fantasy.”

Not long before, she had broken off her affair with André Reweliotty, explaining that she was in love with Sartre. Reweliotty had been very upset. Now Michelle went back to him. She did not tell him she was sleeping with Sartre. And she did not tell Sartre she was sleeping with Reweliotty. “It was a total secret,” she says. “I had a double life. Two different worlds.”
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It was Beauvoir who wanted to see the Sahara, and it was she who had rushed around and made the bookings. She and Sartre spent four days crossing the desert in a truck, leaving each morning at around five, just as a bright red sun was rising in the mountains. In Tamanrasset, one moonlit night, they were taken to see the Touareg chief in his tent in the desert. The Touareg men were tall and proud faced, with only their dark eyes visible above their indigo veils. In Gao, Mali, Sartre came down with high fever. While he was in bed for two days, scarcely conscious, Beauvoir worked. They took a plane to Bobo-Dioulasso. A violent midday storm soaked their beds and brought out the cockroaches. That evening Beauvoir and Sartre were dropping with fatigue when they returned to their room. “Sartre barely closed his eyes all night,” Beauvoir writes. “His bed was still wet, the jazz across the road deafened him, and above all he was frightened of the cockroaches that were trotting about on the ceiling. He spent the night reading.”
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They no sooner arrived in a place than they dived into the local Poste Restante. Sartre was tormented because Michelle was not writing. Beauvoir was tormented by the silence from Algren. “Surely…your witty prose is lost in some place of the Sahara,” she wrote to him, “or maybe some Negros enjoy laughing at it while eating each other.”
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In early May, Sartre flew back to Paris from Casablanca. Beauvoir made a sentimental journey to Fez, where she and Algren had been so happy together. “If I had got letters, it could have been a sweet pilgrimage,” she wrote to him afterward. “The way it was, it just broke my heart. I walked in all the little streets we liked so much, where we
were happy together, and I wanted you so much that I enjoyed nothing and just felt like crying to death.”
⁵⁴

In Paris, to her relief, there were two thick letters from Algren.

 

Vanetti's divorce had come through (Sartre had paid for it) and she was living in Cannes, on the Côte d'Azur, wanting Sartre to marry her. But Sartre was in love with Michelle. To Beauvoir, he complained that Vanetti was too demanding, always wanting more from him—more money, more time. But he felt guilty toward her, and agreed to spend a few weeks with her in June and July. Michelle was upset. “I thought you broke with her last year!”

“You have to do these things gradually,” Sartre said.
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Sartre broke up with Vanetti during the summer of 1950. Beauvoir was away, but Bost was on hand to witness it. There were no dramatic scenes, he reported to Beauvoir, and it seemed to him that Sartre was almost a bit disappointed by that. Vanetti had wept once, on Bost's shoulder. She seemed surprised that Sartre no longer loved her, but she did not express bitterness. She kept saying that Sartre had changed. He had become even more fanatical about his work. Nothing else seemed to interest him anymore.

Bost had a contract to write a guide book,
Spain Day by Day,
in the same series as Beauvoir's book on America.
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He needed a car, and Vanetti had a car, and she felt in need of a companionable vacation. The two were going to spend two months traveling around Spain together. Bost hoped she would not bash his ears about Sartre. “I kiss you tenderly,” he signed off to Beauvoir. “My best regards to Tough Algren!”
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Across the world, Beauvoir was having a terrible time. Back in January, she had made a bad mistake. She had written to Algren with a request. She was scared of his answer, she told him, which would make her either very happy or very sad. She had reminded him that
when they were in Tunisia he had said that she must come back to Wabansia Avenue, but not too soon. She had a favor to ask him:

Algren had agreed, which made Beauvoir very happy. But over the next few months, Algren's letters were less frequent. Just before she was due to leave, the Korean War broke out. The whole world seemed yet again headed for war. She thought of canceling her trip. Sartre persuaded her to go.

She arrived in Chicago, and Algren was strangely distant. He made love to her, but without tenderness. On the second night, Beauvoir asked what the matter was. No, it was not that he loved anyone else, he said, but something was dead. He was tired of her turning up only to leave again. He had waited for her with indifference, and he did not feel much when he saw her again. His ex-wife wanted him back, and though he was weary of women, he was thinking they might marry again.

On the third night, they tried to make love, and Algren could not. Beauvoir panicked. “It was so pitiful that it horrified me,” she wrote to Sartre. “I brooded over my horror for a good part of the night, then as soon as Algren woke up tried to talk to him; but he hates explanations—he just runs away.”
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They did not try again.

The heat in Wabansia Avenue was stifling, and Algren's morose presence was suffocating. Beauvoir fled the house, but the streets of Chicago were so hot she thought she would melt into the tar. The newspapers were full of virulent anticommunist rhetoric. When Beauvoir went to a hairdresser in the neighborhood, the girl who washed her hair said accusingly, “Why are you all communists in France?”
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At the beginning of August she and Algren moved to Miller, on Lake Michigan, where Algren had rented a cottage. They slept in separate rooms. Beauvoir struggled with despair. What was she doing there? Would she ever again experience passion? She took corydrane, an amphetamine mixed with aspirin, in order to be able to work on her new novel, the one that would eventually be called
The Mandarins.
A few months before, when she had been in Paris longing for Algren's body, he (the author of
Never Come Morning
) had asked her what the title was. “Never Come Woman,” she had quipped.

The summer passed. They swam in the lake. One afternoon Beauvoir nearly drowned. This dramatic incident briefly revived their old passion. In the evenings, they walked along the beach and wondered whether the world was about to end in nuclear war. Beauvoir tried to calm herself by thinking of Sartre. “The novelty and romance and happiness of my life are with you, my little companion of 20 years,” she wrote to him. As for Vanetti and her “avarice,” she was glad that Sartre had for once managed to be firm.

She was counting the hours until her return. “You'll see what a beautiful life we'll have from now on, as soon as we're back together,” she told Sartre. As she was writing her letter, the moon was veiled by an orange dawn. She felt sure they were about to begin a happy old age.

January 1951–December 1954

Sartre had changed, it was true. He had always worked hard, but now, with the help of corydrane, he had turned himself into a work machine. Gone were the evenings he and Beauvoir had once enjoyed at the cinema; gone were their strolls together through Paris. He did not have time.

Corydrane, a stimulant or “upper,” was fairly widely used in the 1950s. But whereas journalists would take a tablet or a half-tablet to get them going, Sartre took four. Most people took them with water; Sartre crunched them. They tasted bad, very bitter, and whether or not it was masochism, Sartre liked to give himself a hard time. On top of the corydrane, he smoked two packets of unfiltered Boyards a day and consumed vast quantities of coffee and tea. In the evening, he drank half a bottle of whiskey, then took four or five sleeping pills to knock himself out.

Increasingly, he felt that writing was a futile, self-indulgent pursuit in a world where children were starving and injustice was everywhere. He no longer read the novels Beauvoir enjoyed; he did not care anymore about fine sentences. He was convinced that politics mattered; literature did not.

He took corydrane to stave off his anxiety about the utter irrelevance of what he was doing. Under the influence of the drug, instead of writhing in anguish, he wrote at white heat. For hours at a stretch
he produced page after page, hardly able to keep up with his pen, borne away by a feeling of his own power.

He had temporarily put aside a huge philosophical tome he called
Ethics.
His essay on Genet, begun as a preface, had grown into a thick book, something between philosophy and literature, a monumental portrait that would leave readers admiring and uncomfortable. (“Who can swallow such a thing?” Cocteau would ask in his journal, noting Sartre's “will to be the center of attention in literature, and render everything else insipid.”
¹
) He had begun a book on Italy, a country he loved with a passion. His intention, as usual, was to talk about “everything” (history, politics, social problems, the church, art, architecture, and tourism), and was enjoying writing it, but guilt got the better of him. Politics was calling; the project struck him as an indulgence and was permanently shelved. His writing on his favorite cities—Venice, Capri, Rome, and Naples—published posthumously, shows Sartre at his most sensuous and poetic. He spent pages describing the plashing sound gondolas make.
²

At the beginning of 1951, he put several projects aside to write a play. His secretary, Jean Cau, observed that Sartre did not seem to enjoy writing plays nearly as much as other things, and that each time he embarked on one, it caused a major trauma in the Sartrean entourage. So why did he do it? He had initially written a part for Olga; these days it was for Wanda. “Others offered jewellery; he offered plays,” writes Cau.
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Wanda loved the stage, and showed genuine talent. She was currently involved with a young man, but for Sartre she remained part of the family, part of the brood of women, including his mother, who needed his support and protection. He saw her regularly. When he went away, he wrote her affectionate, humorous letters. Financially, she was entirely dependent on him.

The writing of
The Devil and the Good Lord
proved a nightmare. Sartre worked obsessively, but did not meet the deadline and kept adding scenes. Rehearsals began, and Sartre had still not finished it. Simone Berriau, the director of the Théâtre Antoine, was furious with him. She wanted cuts, not additions. Sartre refused to oblige. The tears, screams, and anger were reported in the press. When the curtain rose the first night, June 7, 1951, the play, which had finally been reduced
to four hours, was already the talk of the Paris theater season. Wanda, under her stage name, Marie Olivier, played alongside Pierre Brasseur and Maria Casarès, two of the best known actors in France. All three were praised. The play was a triumph.

The family had to be tactful about toasting Wanda's success. Olga, who was generally considered a far better actress than her younger sister, had suffered a major humiliation. After her tuberculosis, she had been impatient to resume her career and had taken on small roles with success. But she also wanted to be in the new production of
The Flies.
She had been the original Electra, and she did not want to see anyone else in the part Sartre had written for her. Her doctor firmly advised against her taking on such a demanding role too soon. Olga insisted. Shortly before the opening night, it was reported in the press that the director, Raymond Hermantier, did not think Olga was up to it, but that Sartre had ordered him to keep her.

In fact, Olga had not regained her powers. Her old fire was not there. Her breath let her down, and her voice was still not strong. The critics flayed her. Olga was devastated. To the chagrin of the family, she vowed never to step onto a stage again. She would keep to her word, and for the rest of her life she felt like a failure.

 

Boris Vian was going around telling people that Sartre had stolen his wife. Boris now wanted a divorce. Michelle was terrified. She did not want to be caught up in a scandal. And if she were declared an adulteress, Boris might gain custody of their children.

When she and Sartre went out together, Michelle disguised herself with sunglasses and hats. When they traveled, they were obliged to take separate rooms. “It was like a detective novel,” Michelle Vian recalls. “A messy, sordid business.”
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In Capri, she was alarmed when a press photographer sprang in front of them and started clicking his camera. In Rome, a private detective came up to them: “We are looking for Monsieur Sartre, who is accompanied by Madame Vian.” It took Sartre a considerable wad of notes to pay him off.

Sartre told Michelle not to worry; he would look after her and the children. “It feels sensuous to give you money,” he said.
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He hired a top lawyer to represent her. The cat-and-mouse games continued
until the divorce came through, in September 1952, with Boris declared the guilty party.

 

Beauvoir felt bleak. Sartre had never seemed farther away from her. He was reading enormously, mostly about Marxism, pushing his thinking to the limits, as he liked to do. He called it “breaking the bones in my head.”
⁶
With great enthusiasm, he would tell her to read this or that book, but Beauvoir already had more than enough to read, and she was not particularly interested in politics. She had no illusions that she could change the world that way.

She was having immense difficulties with
The Mandarins.
Sartre had pointed out the weaknesses in the first draft, and she was not at all sure she could remedy them. At times it seemed so difficult to pull the threads together that she wondered whether she should give up and start something else. Sartre's dismissive attitude toward fiction did not help.

In September 1951, she flew back to Chicago. She and Algren had decided to see each other on a different basis. They spent a peaceful month at the cottage on Lake Michigan. When they said good-bye, Beauvoir said how good it was that they had managed to retain their friendship. “It's not friendship,” Algren retorted, “I could never give you less than love.”
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Beauvoir sobbed all the way to New York, where she wrote to him from her hotel: “I feel utterly in your hands, absolutely defenseless, and for once I shall beg: keep me in your heart or chase me away, but don't let me cling to love to find out suddenly it is there no more.”
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Algren wrote an angry letter back, telling her it was over.

Beauvoir had made quite a bit of money from
The Second Sex,
and had treated herself to a record player, a huge apparatus that Boris Vian helped her choose. She and Sartre spent one or two evenings a week at the Rue de la Bûcherie listening to jazz and contemporary classical music—Schönberg, Webern, and Bartók. (The records were 78s in those days, and lasted only five minutes.) In November, Beauvoir bought a car. “A woman cannot live without some passion,” she wrote to Algren. “As love is forbidden, I decided to give my dirty heart to something not so piggish as a man: and I gave to myself a nice beautiful black car.”
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