Tete-a-Tete (33 page)

Evelyne was a tall woman, like Sartre's mother. Sartre admitted to Beauvoir that this made him self-conscious in public. “I thought other people looked upon me as a figure of fun, being the lover of such a tall girl…. But sensually I liked it very much.”
⁶⁴

Evelyne was aware that she was not the only woman in Sartre's life, but he assured her that he was no longer sleeping with any of them. He insisted, nevertheless, that Michelle Vian must not hear of their affair. She was very jealous, he said, and he did not want to hurt her.

Evelyne would have liked to proclaim to the world Sartre's love for her. It was hurtful that she could not go out with him publicly, travel on vacation with him, or talk about their affair except to close friends. Over time, she would come to resent this.

For her part, Michelle had no idea about Evelyne. To be sure, Sartre was intensely preoccupied with his work, but he still made love to her, and his letters were as passionate as ever. “I kiss you everywhere,” he wrote to Michelle. “I adore you, my sweetheart, I miss you.”
⁶⁵

Thirty years later, a Sartre scholar interviewed Michelle Vian at length. When he unwittingly mentioned Sartre's affair with Evelyne, presuming she knew about it, Michelle could not believe her ears.
⁶⁶

 

Evelyne—along with Wanda and Michelle—became another of Sartre's “mistresses.” He kept her handsomely. When they first met, Evelyne was living in a hotel in Montmartre. Sartre installed her in a two-bedroom apartment at 26 Rue Jacob, five minutes from where he lived with his mother, on the Rue Bonaparte.

Jacques Lanzmann, who was broke after his travels in South America, moved in with his sister. “I have always lived above my means,” he writes in his memoirs. “Luckily, Sartre was there to mop up Evelyne's financial messes. And luckily, Evelyne was there to mop up mine.”
⁶⁷
Evelyne and Claude both handed Jacques money, indirectly from Sartre and Beauvoir. Sometimes the gift was more direct.
When Jacques's girlfriend went to Switzerland for an abortion, it was Sartre who paid.

Jacques Lanzmann was writing a book about his experiences in South America. Beauvoir recognized that he had considerable talent, and helped in every way she could. She handed him money regularly, and published an extract from his book in
Les Temps modernes.
When he finished the book, it was she who edited the manuscript, with her usual care and skill.
Le Rat d'Amérique,
published in 1955, was nominated for the Prix Goncourt.

Meanwhile, Sartre had written a fourth play for Wanda:
Kean,
adapted from a melodrama by Alexandre Dumas. It was a resounding success.
⁶⁸
Sartre promised Evelyne he would write a play for
her,
too.

 

Beauvoir was seriously worried about Sartre. He had been working far too hard all year and was suffering from high blood pressure. His doctor prescribed a long rest in the country, but Sartre ignored him and went on working at his usual frenetic pace. He took no exercise. He occasionally went on diets. (“Most of my life I've tried to lose weight so as to give the impression of a thin little man instead of a fat little man,” he said. “Besides, fatness was something I thought of as surrender and contingency.”
⁶⁹
) But Sartre enjoyed eating. His favorite food was the rich Alsatian cuisine his mother had cooked in his childhood—cabbage, pork, and all kinds of sausages filled with fat. He hated vegetables and fruit. He loved cakes, chocolate, and sugar-drenched desserts. And he never touched lobsters, oysters, or any kind of shellfish.

The worst was the corydrane. He had started crunching as many as twenty tablets a day. Beauvoir and Lanzmann kept telling him, “You're mad. You're killing yourself.” Sartre would say he did not care; he wanted to switch on the sun in his head.
⁷⁰

At the end of May 1954, he left for three weeks in the USSR. It was his first trip there; he'd been invited by the Soviet Writers Union. Before he left, he stayed up for several nights, writing a preface to a book of Cartier-Bresson's photographs of China. On the way, he stopped in Berlin to participate in a Peace Movement meeting. He wrote his speech on the plane.

In the USSR he gave talks, attended meetings, met official groups, and spoke on the radio. He was whirled around on sightseeing tours across the country. There were endless official receptions and banquets, with a staggeringly heavy consumption of vodka. Always the little tough guy, Sartre was determined to keep up with his large Slavic hosts. At the end of yet another meal in which he had already drunk too much, the writer Simonov presented him with a drinking horn full of wine. “Empty or full, you shall take it with you,” he challenged Sartre.

 

“No letter from you,” Beauvoir wrote to Sartre at the beginning of June. The French newspapers sported photos of him in Red Square and on the banks of the Moskowa. Beauvoir had been reading books about the USSR, but she would have preferred a letter. (“L's waiting avidly for one, because of the stamp—I promised to make him a present of it.”) Evelyne, who had been in the hospital, had received Sartre's flowers but was “suffering acutely from the lack of letters,” and Beauvoir had done her best to console her. She had also given Wanda her money and made arrangements for Michelle to get hers. “I had your mother on the phone this morning…she seemed in good form. Your whole little world is doing fine in fact…. I kiss you with all my soul, my dear, sweet little beloved.”
⁷¹

 

After a short visit to London, Beauvoir and Lanzmann returned to the Rue de la Bûcherie to find an urgent note from Bost under their door: “Come and see me at once.” They rushed downstairs, to Bost and Olga's apartment. Sartre's secretary, Jean Cau, had phoned Bost to say that Sartre was in a hospital in Moscow, with high blood pressure. Beauvoir panicked. The whole group went to see Jean Cau, who assured them that it was nothing serious. But Beauvoir remained uneasy. They decided to go to the Soviet embassy and ask the cultural attaché to phone Moscow.

At the embassy, they were told they could phone the USSR themselves. All they had to do was to pick up the receiver and ask for Moscow. Beauvoir writes:

Sartre spent ten days in the hospital in all, and returned to Paris exhausted. For months afterward he was depressed, with no energy, and close to a nervous breakdown.

Years later, he would claim that he was too sick to think clearly when he insisted in an article in
Libération
that there was complete freedom of expression in the USSR. The statement was so palpably false that even Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet writer who had been responsible for Sartre's invitation to Moscow, rebuked him for his rosy reporting.

In
The Mandarins,
Anne Dubreuilh, musing about her husband, the Sartre-like Robert Dubreuilh, finds herself thinking the unthinkable:

In 1975, Sartre would admit that he had lied after his first visit to the USSR:

Until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Sartre never criticized the USSR in public statements.

 

Sartre went to Rome, with Michelle, to convalesce. He slept a great deal. To Beauvoir he wrote that he did not seem capable of rubbing two ideas together. At the end of August, when they made a trip to Germany and Austria, Beauvoir was shocked by his apathy:

In Rome, Sartre had started work on an autobiography, the book that would become
Words.
If he felt the urge to look back on his childhood, it was to explore what he now saw as his “neurosis.” Applying the method he called “existential psychoanalysis” to himself, he showed that he had used his freedom to rebel against his family, who had wanted to confine him in a cotton-wool world of bourgeois illusions. As Sartre saw it, he had rejected religion, but his roots “sucked up its juices,” and what he did was to replace one form of blindness with another.

He replaced religion with literature. For almost fifty years, his reality had been words. He had been convinced that writing would bring him salvation and glory. Well, he had changed. In
Words
he described himself as a man who was “waking up, cured of a long, bittersweet madness, who cannot get away from it, who cannot recall his old ways without laughing and who no longer has any idea what to do with his life.”

There is no doubt that Sartre's corydrane habit was covering up a chronic depression. It was something no love affair could shake off. Beauvoir was one of the few to understand just how vulnerable he was behind his public façade. Sartre was forever questioning himself and his motives: he was worried about his place in posterity and anguished about the inefficacy of his actions.

With the help of immense doses of corydrane, Sartre managed for the most part to maintain his delusions of grandeur. Throughout the fifties and sixties, he set out, time and again, to write
everything
about a subject. In his book on Genet—and later, Flaubert—he professed to be able to grasp a person in his or her
totality.
For Sartre it was all or nothing. If his writing could not change the world, then it was not worthwhile.

In reality, he had not been cured of his bittersweet madness, and he knew it. Ironically, he was taking unusual pains with
The Words.
The narrative in which Sartre expressed his profound disillusion with literature was to be his most beautifully crafted work. It was the book that would win him the Nobel Prize.

 

Beauvoir had completely rewritten
The Mandarins.
Never had she worked so hard on a book. She had begun it in 1949, and finished the first draft in 1951. After four years of writing and rewriting, the typed manuscript was huge: twelve hundred pages. Beauvoir was exhausted when she handed it in, in May 1954.

For weeks before its publication, in October 1954, Beauvoir was nervous. She had written about Sartre, Camus, and Koestler with the thinnest of fictional disguises. She had portrayed well-known political feuds. Anne Dubreuilh's affair with the Chicago writer Lewis Brogan was closely based on her affair with Nelson Algren, and Beauvoir had dedicated the book to him. She had never revealed more about her own life, her lost illusions, her vulnerabilities. What were readers going to make of it? She was sure the communists and anticommunists would hate it with equal ferocity.

To her astonishment, the reviews were mostly very positive. The original print run of eleven thousand proved far too small. Forty
thousand copies were sold in the first month. Beauvoir learned that the book was a serious contender for France's most respected fiction award, the Prix Goncourt.

Two days before the jury's announcement, a group of journalists positioned themselves in a café on the corner of Beauvoir's street. On Sunday, December 5, she and Lanzmann eluded the whole bunch of them by slipping out a back door and taking a taxi to a friend's apartment. The following morning they listened nervously to the radio. The news came through at midday. Beauvoir was the winner.

She did not go to the Goncourt lunch and thank the judges. Nor did she go to the Gallimard cocktail party and allow the press to take photos. Instead, she and Lanzmann quietly made their way to Michelle Vian's for a celebration lunch with Sartre, Olga, and Bost. Sartre ceremoniously presented her with a book on the Goncourt brothers, the two literary men who had founded the prize in 1903.

Beauvoir posed for a couple of press photos only. She was photographed with her mother, inside Françoise de Beauvoir's apartment, and on the landing outside. It made Beauvoir happy that her mother could for once be proud of her, without reserve. Beauvoir agreed to one interview only, in the communist newspaper
Humanité Dimanche.
She wanted to make the point that the book was not intended to be anticommunist.

Beauvoir was already internationally famous. On both sides of the Atlantic she was well known as the companion of the infamous Jean-Paul Sartre.
The Second Sex
had been published in the United States a couple of years earlier, to great acclaim and none of the sour chauvinism that had greeted the book in France. But now Beauvoir had shown the world that she was not merely a brilliant polemicist. She was also a first-class fiction writer.