Tete-a-Tete (40 page)

For a couple of years now, Sartre's account at Gallimard had been in the red. He had started books and not finished them, and had written numerous political articles that brought no income. Now he needed to publish a book fast. In the spring of 1963, he took his autobiographical narrative,
Words,
out of a drawer. He had written most of it in 1954.

When he looked at what he had written, he thought it quite good. He decided that it did not matter if he had gone no further than the age of ten. As an exploration of why he had embraced the myth of the sanctity of literature, the narrative could stand as it was. For several months he reworked sentences that were already the most polished he had ever written. “I wanted to be literary in order to show the error of being literary,” he told Beauvoir.
²⁰
He dedicated the book “To Madame Z.” To Lena Zonina he wrote: “It's for you, my wife, Madame Z(artre).”

The critics would hail
Words
as Sartre's return to literature. Everyone agreed that it was his most moving and beautifully written book. Sartre was amused by the irony, but pleased—not least, he told Zonina, because this made it the best present he could give her.

 

In the summer of 1963, Sartre and Beauvoir spent six weeks in the Soviet Union, traveling with Zonina through the Crimea, Georgia,
and Armenia. The countryside was magnificent, but food shortages were worse and shopping queues longer than ever. The cultural thaw had proved a savage disappointment. The government had tentatively opened the doors of the Soviet house to Western influences, the Russian people had embraced those influences too eagerly, and the doors had been hastily slammed shut again. Khrushchev's position among the Stalinist jostlers for power was precarious, and he was now defending Stalin and attacking abstract art, jazz, and anything else that came from the West. He no longer tolerated criticism of the postrevolutionary era. And in a long speech he made that spring, he singled out Ilya Ehrenburg for particular criticism.
²¹

It was on this trip that Sartre suggested marriage to Zonina. He had discussed the idea with Beauvoir. With Soviet freedom fast evaporating, there was a danger that he and Zonina would no longer be able to see each other. She would have far better medical care in France. They both knew that if Sartre asked for permission for Zonina and her daughter to leave, the Soviet government would almost certainly feel obliged to consent.

Zonina asked for time to think about it. As she pointed out to Sartre, it was a wrenching decision for her to make. If she left the Soviet Union, she would never be allowed to go back. She loved French culture, but was intensely wary of the West, and she despised the ruthlessness of capitalism. She would never be allowed to bring her mother with her, and how could she leave her behind? She would not easily find work in France, and she would never agree to be one more of Sartre's dependent women. She did not think she could do it.

 

After their long sojourn in the Soviet Union, Sartre and Beauvoir went, as usual, to Rome. They stayed in their favorite lodgings, the Minerva, a rundown hotel located in an ancient palace right in the center of the city.

Sartre was writing an essay on the problems of revolution in the third world. Beauvoir, having handed in
Force of Circumstance,
was mostly reading that summer. Sometimes they took the car and went away for a few days—to Sienna, Venice, or Florence.

As soon as they returned to Rome after a short absence, they would hurry over to the Poste Restante. Sartre was hoping for a letter from Zonina. For weeks there had been silence. He worried that she might be ill, or that she did not love him anymore. At night he tormented himself. If he had to choose between the two explanations, which would he choose?

In early October, a letter finally arrived from Moscow. Sartre read it in the Piazza della Minerva, in front of their hotel. “Your hands are trembling,” Beauvoir said to him. It was true. His legs were trembling, too.

“It does not just depend on us,” Zonina wrote to Sartre. “The more I read the Beaver's memoirs, the more I understand that I could never decide to change things. And this kills something in me. You know that I feel friendship for the Beaver. I respect her, I admire the relationship you have…. But you and the Beaver together have created a remarkable and dazzling thing which is so dangerous for those people who get close to you.”
²²

He was thinking about their siestas on the Black Sea, Sartre wrote back. Their lovemaking. Did Zonina realize that he and Beauvoir never spent an evening alone together without talking about her?

 

At the end of October, the day before Sartre and Beauvoir were due to return to Paris, Bost phoned to say that Beauvoir's mother had fallen and broken her femur bone.

November 1963 was a long, sad month. Simone and Poupette took turns beside their mother's bed. Françoise de Beauvoir was seventy-seven and had been fragile and in pain with arthritis for some years. Now her surgeon discovered a massive cancerous tumor. The night after the operation, Poupette stayed at the hospital and Simone went home to spend the evening with Sartre at the Rue Schoelcher:

In those few weeks, Beauvoir felt closer to her mother than at any time since her childhood. Françoise was gentle and thoughtful; she even apologized to the nurses for taking up their time. At times, on her dying mother's face, Beauvoir saw the smile of the young woman in love she had seen when she was five. Françoise treasured every last drop of life. At the end, when she slept nearly all the time, Françoise mourned: “But these are days that I lose.”
²⁴

It was Sartre who suggested that Beauvoir write about the tragic adventure she and Poupette were undergoing with their mother. Beauvoir was scandalized, but tempted.

When her mother died in early December, Beauvoir could think of little else. She found that writing about it helped her deal with her grief.
A Very Easy Death
was the most tender book she would ever write. She dedicated it to her sister, Poupette.

 

Words
was published in January 1964, and Sartre, once again, had money in his bank account. He was fifty-nine. One day, in the bar of the Pont-Royal, Robert Gallimard, his publisher, asked him about his plans for his literary estate. Sartre had never thought about it:

It made no sense for Sartre to appoint Beauvoir as his literary heir and executrix: they were almost the same age. Sartre thought of Arlette Elkaïm. She was the youngest member of the family. He had always liked the fact that she seemed less interested in money than his other women. If anything, Elkaïm was too thrifty; she protested when he spent money on her. These days he saw her as a daughter. She was as jealous as the other women about Zonina's forthcoming visit to Paris, but she was the only one who aroused Sartre's sympathy. “She's really the daughter whose father is re-marrying,” he told Zonina. He decided to adopt her legally.

Beauvoir had no great liking for Elkaïm, who had always been envious of her. And she was privately contemptuous of Elkaïm's financial dependence on Sartre. (“Would you have agreed to be supported yourself, when you were twenty?” Beauvoir once asked Sartre. “No one has ever blamed Van Gogh for having been more or less supported by his brother. Because he painted, because he really had reasons for accepting…. But the people who settle down in that kind of life…. Don't you find that it warps your relations with those people? Giving them money, for life, without any reciprocity?”
²⁶
)

Beauvoir always tried to see things from Sartre's point of view, and she accepted his decision. She could see that he was determined. But she worried about the other women. They would never be able to accept this, she told Sartre. She hoped it would not destroy them.

 

In mid-October 1964, the
Figaro Littéraire
reported that the Swedish Academy favored Jean-Paul Sartre for that year's Nobel Prize in Literature. The journalist observed wryly that Sartre's “controversial political past would not be held too much against him.”

Sartre and Beauvoir talked it over. The risk was clear. If Sartre accepted, he would be seen as capitulating to the bourgeoisie, the bad boy who had finally fallen into line. The money was a small fortune. There was a lot Sartre could do with 250,000 Swedish kroner, both for good causes (he thought of the antiapartheid committee in London) and for his dependents. (He wanted to buy Wanda an apartment, for example.) They decided to ask some younger people what they thought.

The
Temps modernes
committee was elated by the news. They were unanimous: Sartre should accept. Beauvoir was not at all convinced. She asked a twenty-three-year-old female friend who was an active member of the Socialist Party, and the verdict was quite different. The young woman wrote an impassioned letter to Sartre, telling him that she and her militant friends agreed: Sartre would not be Sartre if he took the prize. She reminded him that the Nobel had been awarded to Boris Pasternak in order to embarrass the USSR.

Sartre and Beauvoir were strongly affected by this reaction. It was true that in 1958, Pasternak had been awarded the prize for
Doctor Zhivago,
a novel that was too critical of postrevolutionary Russia to find a publisher in the USSR, but had been published in the West to great acclaim. Communists the world over had been disgusted by what they saw as the perversity of the Nobel jury's decision.

Sartre fired off a letter to the Swedish Academy. He apologized for being so presumptuous as to write to them before the vote was taken, and assured the Academy of his profound respect, but he wanted to ask the members, for reasons that were personal as well as objective, not to include him among the possible prize recipients. He was hereby informing them that if he were awarded the prize, he would not accept it.

The news came over the wire services on Monday, October 19, around midday: Sartre had been named for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In Paris, the journalists set off like a pack of hounds. One of them finally ran Sartre down at the Oriental, a hotel at Denfert-Rochereau, where he was having lunch with Beauvoir. The young man burst in and announced: “You've won the Nobel Prize!”

Sartre put down his knife and fork. He would await confirmation, he said, but if the prize were offered to him, he would turn it down. Why? “I have nothing to say. I reserve my explanations for the Swedish press.” Sartre returned to his lentils and lamb. The evening headlines read: “Sartre refuses.”
²⁷

For days, the literary world was abuzz. Would the Swedish Academy nevertheless award Sartre the prize? Why was he refusing it? Was this yet another instance of what Sartre liked to call his “aesthetic of opposition”? Was he sulking because Camus had been
awarded the prize five years earlier? Was he afraid Simone de Beauvoir would be envious if he accepted? More serious journalists pointed out that Sartre had always hated elitism, and that none of his books showed this more clearly than
Words.
The last sentence reiterated his desire to be “a whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.”

The Swedish committee held to its decision. Sartre was formally announced as the winner on October 24, 1964. The evening before, Sartre went to Beauvoir's apartment to hide from the press. His mother, whose hotel was a little farther up the Boulevard Raspail from Sartre's apartment, rang to say there was a crowd of reporters in front of his building. A small group of journalists doggedly rang Beauvoir's doorbell. At two in the morning, Sartre finally went out and made a brief statement.

“The writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution,” he declared in an explanation published in
Le Monde.
He would have been glad to accept the prize during the Algerian War, after he had signed the “Manifesto of the 121,” he said, because it would have honored the freedom they were fighting for. But nobody had offered it to him then. He feared that his acceptance would be taken in right-wing circles as a sign that he had been forgiven for the sins of his controversial political past.

He went on to say that though this was perhaps not at all the intention of the Swedish Academy, the Nobel Prize
looked
as if it were a distinction reserved for writers of the West or rebels from the East. He added: “It is regrettable that the prize was given to Pasternak before being given to Sholokhov, and that the only Soviet work to be crowned so far is one that is not published—in fact, it's forbidden—in its own country.”

In November, Sartre wrote to Zonina. He had not heard from her. He did not even know what she thought about his decision. Until now he had taken for granted that she would understand him and agree with him. But now he was hesitating. How
had
she reacted?