Tete-a-Tete (56 page)

16
.
Sartre passed in a script that was almost eight hundred pages long. When Huston cut it, Sartre decided it had been mutilated, and withdrew his name altogether from the film.

17
.
This was Barbara Aptekman.

18
.
André Puig would become Sartre's new secretary in 1963, an arrangement that lasted until Sartre's death, in 1980. Puig collaborated on
Les Temps modernes.
Sartre would write a long preface to Puig's novel
L'Inachevé
(Gallimard, 1970), which Puig dedicated to Arlette Elkaïm.

19
.
ASAD,
p. 287.

20
.
Adieux,
p. 214.

21
.
Ehrenburg's memoirs, which had been appearing in serial form in
Novy Mir,
talked about the “conspiracy of silence” in the 1930s. This was too uncomfortable for Khrushchev. If intellectuals such as Ehrenburg admitted that they had known about Stalin's abuses, Khrushchev, who had been close to Stalin, could hardly claim he did not.

22
.
Undated letter, courtesy Masha Zonina, quoted by Gonzague de Saint-Bris and Vladimir Fedorovski in
Les Egéries russes
(Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1994), p. 282.

23
.
S de B,
A Very Easy Death,
p. 31.

24
.
Ibid., p. 83.

25
.
Michel-Antoine Burnier,
L'Adieu à Sartre.

26
.
Adieux,
pp. 344–45.

27
.
Unpublished report by Curtis Cate, quoted by Thomas Molnar in
Yale Literary Magazine
150, no. 1 (1981).

28
.
My interview with Masha Zonina, Paris, March 25, 2004. Masha telephoned Irina Kreindlina, Zonina's closest friend, in Moscow to check this with her.

29
.
Gerassi interview with Sartre, October 27, 1972.

30
.
Words,
p. 14.

31
.
Michelle deplored the fact that Sartre had given Arlette his name. Michelle Vian felt it would have been more appropriate for
her.
My interview with Michelle Vian, October 13, 2003.

32
.
Siegel,
In the Shadow of Sartre,
pp. 66–67.

33
.
S to A. I. Mikoyan, August 17, 1965. The letter is printed in Ewa Bérard-Zarzycka's article “Sartre et Beauvoir en U.R.S.S.,”
Commentaire
(Spring 1991).

34
.
Zonina report, July 1–August 5, 1965, in “Sartre et Beauvoir en U.R.S.S.”

35
.
Pierre Macabru, “Reggiani fascine et irrite,”
Candide,
September 20–26, 1965.

36
.
ASAD,
p. 321.

37
.
S de B,
ASAD,
p. 320. According to her friend Lucia Cathala, Lena did have difficulties, and soon resigned from the Writers Union. My interview with Lucia Cathala, Paris, July 24, 2002.

38
.
S to Zonina, June 1966.

39
.
“Malentendu à Moscou,”
Roman 20–50, Revue d'étude du roman du XX siècle
13 (juin 1992).

40
.
Tomiko Asabuki, a married woman, does not mention this in her book
Sartre et Beauvoir au Japon en 1966
(Paris: L'Asiathèque, 1996). It is, however, a known fact in Sartre circles, and confirmed by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.

41
.
Sartre conversation with Beauvoir, summer 1974, in
Adieux,
p. 303.

CHAPTER TWELVE
:
TRAGIC ENDINGS
,
NEW BEGINNINGS

1
.
Le Nouvel Observateur,
November 23, 1966.

2
.
Sartre tells this to Lena in a letter written three months later.

3
.
My interview with Claude Lanzmann, July 20, 2002.

4
.
S tells this to Lena Zonina, August 25, 1965.

5
.
This was Claude Loursais.

6
.
John Gerassi interview with Simone de Beauvoir, January 30, 1973.

7
.
Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir,
pp. 462–63.

8
.
Jacques Lanzmann,
Le Voleur de hasards,
p. 49. Jacques Lanzmann is unable to explain exactly what he means by this, though he talks about “a certain intellectual perversion.” He admits that in the final analysis, Evelyne chose her life herself (My interview with Jacques Lanzmann, Paris, April 22, 2004).

9
.
Rezvani,
Le Testament amoureux.

10
.
For example, Judith Magre, Claude Lanzmann's actress wife, hated the portrait of Lanzmann. She thought Beauvoir made him sound like her porter, her case-carrier—young, insignificant, and merely useful to her. Magre had a major row with Beauvoir about it (My interview with Judith Magre, May 7, 2004).

11
.
When Wanda died in 1989, Le Bon went around to Wanda's apartment with Bost, at the time of the official police inspection. While Bost talked to the police, diverting them, Le Bon found the bundles of letters from Sartre, and took them. Today they are in Le Bon's possession.

12
.
My interview with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Paris, June 10, 2004.

13
.
H. E. F. Donohue,
Conversations with Nelson Algren,
p. 269.

14
.
Ramparts
4, no. 6 (October 1965).

15
.
Nelson Algren, “The Question of Simone de Beauvoir,”
Harper's,
May 1965.

16
.
Zeitgeist
1, no. 4 (Summer 1966).

17
.
W. J. Weatherby, “The Life and Hard Times of Nelson Algren,”
Sunday Times,
London, May 17, 1981.

18
.
Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir,
pp. 502–503.

19
.
Gerassi interview with Claude Lanzmann, June 5, 1973.

20
.
Elkaïm had an affair with their guide, Ely Ben-Gal. Sartre encouraged her. He encouraged everyone in his entourage to have affairs. For him, it was part of living to the fullest.

21
.
ASAD,
p. 404 ff. Beauvoir explains her point of view in detail in these pages.

22
.
There was also another cause of tension between them. Shortly before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, Lanzmann had asked Sartre and Beauvoir to sign a petition stating that it was misguided to associate Israel with aggression and imperialism and Palestine with peace and socialism. They signed. As a result, some Arab countries banned Sartre's and Beauvoir's books. Frantz Fanon's widow was so furious with Sartre that she refused to include his preface to
The Wretched of the Earth
in all future editions of the book. Sartre was dismayed that his position of neutrality had been undermined, and held it against Lanzmann for pressing him to sign a petition in the street, without giving him time to think about it.

23
.
Adieux,
p. 276. (Trans. modified.)

24
.
Cau,
Croquis de mémoire,
pp. 282–83, my trans.

25
.
Arlette Elkaïm helped edit the collection of documents and evidence for publication in
Tribunal Russell: Le Jugement de Stockholm
(Paris: Gallimard, 1967).

26
.
ASAD,
pp. 63–64.

27
.
Halimi,
Milk for the Orange Tree,
p. 315.

28
.
S de B interview with Alice Schwarzer, 1972, in Alice Schwarzer,
After the Second Sex.

29
.
My interview with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Paris, April 12, 2004.

30
.
My interview with Michel Contat, Paris, July 4, 2002.

31
.
My interview with J.-B. Pontalis, Paris, January 14, 2004.

32
.
S de B interview with Alice Schwarzer (1982),
After the Second Sex,
p. 110.

33
.
Sartre had bought apartments for Wanda and Arlette. Michelle had bought hers with money from Boris Vian's literary estate.

34
.
My interview with Michelle Vian, Apt, July 11–12, 2002.

35
.
John Gerassi interview with Wanda Kosakiewicz, March 23, 1973.

36
.
My interview with Michelle Vian, July 11 and 12, 2002.

37
.
“Entretien avec Claude Lanzmann.”

38
.
Other signatories were Colette Audry, Michel Leiris, and Daniel Guérin.

39
.
Sartre, “Les Bastilles de Raymond Aron,”
Nouvel Observateur,
June 19–25, 1968.

40
.
S to Zonina, undated letter [late 1968].

41
.
J.-B. Pontalis and Bernard Pingaud resigned in 1969 after Sartre insisted on publishing a transcript of a dialogue between a psychoanalyst and his patient that, in Sartre's view, showed psychoanalysis as a therapy based not on reciprocity but on violence. Sartre had a major influence on the “antipsychiatry” movement, associated with R. D. Laing and David Cooper.

42
.
Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy.”

43
.
Adieux,
p. 280.

44
.
Ibid., p. 285.

45
.
My interview with Michelle Vian, October 13, 2003.

46
.
Gerassi interview with Arlette Elkaïm Sartre, March 5, 1973.

47
.
Claudine Monteil,
Simone de Beauvoir: Le Mouvement des femmes, mémoires d'une jeune fille rebelle
(Quebec: Alain Stanké, 1995).

48
.
Sylvie Le Bon says she is one hundred percent sure that Beauvoir never had an abortion.

49
.
Wanda did not sign. Nor did Sylvie Le Bon. Her job was secure, Le Bon says, but she had students and parents to face, and Beauvoir did not want her to sign.

50
.
There were too many obstacles, Le Bon says, and the affair did not last long. For almost twenty years, she and Bost were simply friends. After Beauvoir's death, in their mutual grief, they turned to each other again. Olga had died by then. Le Bon inherited Beauvoir's apartment on the Rue Schoelcher, and in the last years of his life, she let Bost live there. Le Bon kept her apartment on the Avenue du Maine.

51
.
My interview with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Paris, June 10, 2004.

52
.
Ibid., April 12, 2004.

53
.
Nelson Algren review in the
Los Angeles Times,
June 25, 1972.

54
.
John Weightman, “Battle of the Century—Sartre vs. Flaubert,”
New York Review of Books,
April 6, 1972.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
:
THE FAREWELL CEREMONY

1
.
PL,
p. 75.

2
.
Toril Moi gives an insightful analysis of Beauvoir's anguish and displacement strategies in chapter eight (“The Scandal of Loneliness and Separation: The Writing of Depression”) of her book,
Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman.

3
.
Adieux,
p. 20.

4
.
Michel Contat, “Sartre by Himself: An Account, an Explanation, a Defense,”
Sartre Alive
(Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 353.

5
.
Gilles Lapouge,
Quinzaine Littéraire,
November 16–30, 1976.

6
.
The first issue of the new newspaper called
Libération
was in May 1973, by which
time Sartre's health had already declined. He resigned as editor in chief in May 1974.

7
.
S de B to Sylvie Le Bon, undated letter from USSR, 1967, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir archives.