Tete-a-Tete (35 page)

Beauvoir would knock on Sartre's door at eight in the morning, and they would dress and go down to the square to read the newspapers, French and Italian, over breakfast. Sartre would order as many
as three double espressos. At ten
A.M
. they'd return to their rooms to work until two. Lunch was a light meal, no alcohol. They liked to finish up with a gelato, then go for a walk. At five
P.M
. they were back at their desks for three or four more hours of work.

On October 24, 1956, they walked up to a press kiosk in the Piazza Colonna to buy their morning papers, and read that Soviet tanks had entered Budapest, killing hundreds of Hungarians and wounding thousands. For Sartre, the news was like a body blow. How could the USSR go against its promise of non-intervention? Why taint itself in the eyes of the world with this crime?

That evening they had dinner with communist friends on Via Veneto. A guitarist strummed old Roman songs. Sartre and his artist friend Renato Guttoso were almost weeping into their whiskeys as they went over and over the events, trying to understand what it all meant. Guttoso could not bear the thought of the lonely wilderness he would face if he left the party. And Sartre dreaded breaking the bond he had so carefully built up with the communists over the last few years. He had made so many enemies by standing up for communism, and now he risked losing his few allies. The group was briefly distracted when their actress friend Anna Magnani sat at their table and sang mournful songs, accompanied by the guitarist. Then she disappeared into the night, and they resumed their tortured discussions.

Sartre had a difficult decision to make. Since 1952 he had been the most famous fellow traveler in Europe. In
The Communists and Peace,
he had argued that Soviet foreign policy was defensive, whereas American foreign policy was entirely aggressive, and bent on destroying the Soviet Union. He was heavily invested in the Peace Movement, a worldwide organization whose headquarters were in Moscow. He believed in peace; he believed in socialism; he had wanted so much to believe in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he knew that if he condemned the USSR, the American propaganda services would have a field day.

He spoke out. “I condemn the Russian aggression completely and unreservedly,” he said in an interview in the conservative French magazine
L'Express.
He added that he was breaking “regretfully but completely” with those of his Soviet friends who had failed to denounce, or were
unable to denounce, the massacre in Hungary. As for the French Communist Party, who had tried to justify the Soviets' bloody coup, their excuses were “the outcome of thirty years of lying and ossification.”

He added that the United States was not innocent either. “America's responsibility in the present events is undeniable…. The Marshall Plan, to begin with. Its avowed aim was to prevent the construction of socialism in the ‘satellites.'”
¹³

Beauvoir joined Sartre in protesting the Soviet aggression. She was pleased that Sartre had taken a strong stand. No one knew better than she did what it cost him.

 

In the midst of these turbulent weeks, Evelyne Rey broke up with Sartre. They had been lovers for three years. She had found another man: a lawyer who was short, witty, and ugly, and who, all her friends agreed, could almost have been Sartre's brother. At least her affair with him was not clandestine. She was tired of remaining hidden in the background with Sartre. Beauvoir and Michelle Vian had a public role in Sartre's life. Why couldn't she?

Sartre told Evelyne he would never abandon her. He would continue to look after her financially. They would see each other three times a week, and he promised to write a play for her soon.

 

In the winter of 1956, Beauvoir began the project she had first thought of writing ten years earlier—her childhood memoirs. In 1946, Sartre had suggested that she first explore what it meant to be a woman, and that had led to
The Second Sex.
She had gone to the United States, met Algren, and written about her trip, then struggled for years with
The Mandarins.
She had gone to China and written about that. In those ten years, she had become the most famous woman writer in the world. Now she would write her memoirs from a very different vantage point. She would look back on her life as a dramatic success story. Above all, she was far more confident about her relationship with Sartre than she had been in 1946.

In 1946, Sartre's passion for Vanetti had Beauvoir worried that she was about to be replaced. Since then, she and Sartre had gone their
own ways more than ever, and yet they had survived. Indeed, they had invented their coupledom anew. She could look back at their life together with a gratifying sense of achievement.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
would take her eighteen months. Beauvoir had never enjoyed writing more. She discussed their childhood with her sister Poupette and mulled over memories with friends. She read through old diaries and went to the Bibliothèque Nationale to consult newspapers from the period. She reread the books that had influenced her as a young girl.

There were many discussions with Sartre. What did he think? Did she dare talk openly about her parents? The tensions in her family? Her father was dead, but her mother would be hurt. Could she write frankly about Zaza, her conflict with her mother, her romance with Merleau-Ponty, Zaza's death? They agreed that in some cases she should use pseudonyms. Merleau-Ponty became “Jean Pradelle.” René Maheu became “André Herbaud.” Even so, the men would recognize themselves instantly, of course. And so would everyone who knew them. The project was fraught with difficulties.

Beauvoir began the narrative with her birth in January 1908, and ended it in 1929, the year she met Sartre, the year Zaza died, the year that had changed her life.

 

Shortly before he left on his summer vacation in 1956, Sartre received a letter from a nineteen-year-old French Algerian girl. Arlette Elkaïm was a philosophy student who was hoping to get into the Ecole Normale Supérieure for women in Sèvres, near Versailles. She told Sartre she had read
Nausea
and
Being and Nothingness
and was interested in phenomenology. She was writing a dissertation on injustice. Could she possibly come and discuss it with him?

Sartre asked for a copy of her dissertation. After they corresponded for a few weeks, it became obvious to him that the girl was seeking help beyond her studies. They met in November, when Sartre was back from Rome.

Elkaïm was originally from Constantine, in Algeria. She had arrived in France in September 1954, two months before the Algerian War broke out. Her mother was an Arab: her father was a Sephardic Jew, a
French government functionary who identified with the French colonizers. Elkaïm felt both Algerian and French, she was not at all sure how she felt about the Algerian Arabs demanding their independence.

When Elkaïm was fourteen, her mother had committed suicide. Elkaïm partly blamed her father. He was authoritarian, she told Sartre, and tyrannical. Elkaïm really did not know what she was doing in France, except that she wanted to get away from her father and stepmother. She didn't have any friends, and didn't know what she wanted to do with her life.

Sartre slotted her into his schedule on Sundays, for two hours in the afternoon. “I had a lot of personal problems at the time, and if he hadn't been there, I don't know how things would have turned out,” Elkaïm recalls. “I lived off that meeting for the rest of the week.”
¹⁴

They sat opposite each other in Sartre's study—she in the leather armchair, he on his hard-backed upright (a Schweitzer family heir-loom)—and Sartre asked probing questions. He treated it like a psychoanalytical session, except that he played an active role himself, and made comments and observations. When she was silent, he waited. He let her cry when she needed to. At the end of the session he told her he cared a great deal about her, and they would continue their conversation the following week.

“He did it with gaiety and perseverance, sometimes with a bit of violence,” Elkaïm says. “He shook me up, tried to get me to look at the world, and even enjoy it. Today I realize I had a belated education from him—even if I had to struggle sometimes not to see the world with his eyes.”
¹⁵

They were briefly lovers, but Sartre ended that aspect of their relationship after two or three months. The soft-eyed Elkaïm made him think of a doe. She brought out fatherly feelings in him rather than anything else.

In July 1957, Elkaïm failed her exams, and decided not to sit them again. Sartre thought she might have some talent for journalism and sent her to see a friend of his at the
Nouvel Observateur.
Nothing came of it. “I was like a little mouse,” Elkaïm says. “I couldn't take myself seriously. I despised myself all the more because I had things to say, but couldn't say them.”
¹⁶
She became financially dependent on Sartre.

Looking back later, after she had become his legally adopted daughter, Elkaïm thought she had probably asked too much of Sartre in those early years. She was hopelessly passive, she said. Sartre was busy with his own work, and always in a hurry. He was fatherly and caring, but not quite fatherly enough to realize that she needed to move out from his orbit. She only ever saw him by himself. He never introduced her to the members of the family. She saw him at fixed times: there was no spontaneity in their meetings whatsoever. What did she expect from him? She really did not know.

 

It was impossible for Jean Cau, Sartre's secretary, not to be aware of the lies Sartre told his women. Sartre would phone two girlfriends in a row, telling the second a quite different story from the first. Cau recalls an occasion when Sartre put down the phone and sighed:

Cau was impressed by this notion of a temporary morality. It was like opening an umbrella in a storm, he thought to himself. The dilemma for the Sartrean subject, Cau mused, is that he is not alone in the world, and he does not create
the situation
(an important Sartrean concept) that is rotten. Of course he is
free
to confront it in this or that way, but the
Other
sticks to him and bogs him down. What do you do if you are Sartre and you find yourself persecuted by the Other? You resort to a temporary moral code! That way, you wriggle out of the situation, and the huge moral edifice you have constructed remains intact.
¹⁷

Cau and Sartre fell out in the summer of 1957, and they parted
ways. Cau, a “prolo-made-good,” who had always had a conservative edge to him, had become an outright political reactionary.

But as a secretary, Cau had made himself indispensable. These days the demands made on Sartre were overwhelming. Every day he received dozens of letters soliciting his help. Would he give money, write an article, be on a committee to help militants, political prisoners, or refugees? Would he write a preface for a friend's book, sign a manifesto, attend a meeting, speak at a reunion, read a manuscript?

Sartre replaced Cau with another young man: Claude Faux, a lawyer, who was close to the communists. In 1961, Faux would marry Gisèle Halimi, a radical lawyer, who was receiving death threats for her defense of FLN
(Front de Libération Nationale)
militants. She became Sartre's personal lawyer, fighting cases of copyright infringement and piracy for him. Sartre himself never cared about these things, Halimi writes in her memoirs. They infuriated
her,
but he saw them as trifles. All he wanted was time, time to get on with his work.
¹⁸

 

Looking back, Beauvoir called 1958 “that excruciating year.”
¹⁹
It was a crisis year, both for her and for Sartre.

In January, Beauvoir turned fifty, which she hated. She and Lanzmann went skiing for two weeks, but he was busy writing an article for
Les Temps modernes,
and rarely ventured out onto the slopes. She skied alone. Impatient with her lack of progress in the sport, she told herself it was her age.

The Algerian War had intensified. Paris, full of men swaggering around in French military uniforms, felt once again like an occupied city. It was impossible not to notice the police harassment of Arabs in the streets.
Les Temps modernes
published reports of barbaric torture perpetrated by the French military on Arab resistance fighters.

Sartre seemed almost crazed by his political rage. He was working with a kind of desperation, buoyed up by vast quantities of corydrane, scarcely bothering to reread what he had written, and never taking the time to cut or trim. By the end of the day he was so speedy that he was mixing up his words, and when he drank, the alcohol went
straight to his head. On those evenings when they were together in her apartment. Beauvoir tried in vain to restrain him: