Tete-a-Tete (9 page)

She had talked about her to Sartre, Beauvoir told Olga. “I've made plans for the new school year. We will go to Le Havre together. We'll go for long walks, and we will see each other very often.”

In October 1934, Olga took a room in Rouen and began her new life. Her parents had persuaded her to study medicine, and though she did not have the slightest interest in the subject, she was going to prepare for the entrance examinations. She was in many ways immature, but she had an unusual capacity for listening and understanding. With her came “a new perception of the world,” Beauvoir told Sartre, “a world rethought in an absolutely unexpected way by an original little consciousness.”
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After a year abroad—he called it his “Berlin holiday”—Sartre was back in Le Havre, considerably podgier. (“I was a real little Buddha.”
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) Beauvoir was happier than she had been for some time. Sartre was not.

Later, he would refer to this period of his life as “the gloomy years.”
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The excitement of Berlin was over, and he was back at his old school. (Raymond Aron had taken his place while Sartre was in Berlin.) Sartre was painfully conscious that time was marching on. In his arrogant youth he had written in his journal: “Whoever is not famous at twenty-eight must renounce glory forever.”
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Now he was twenty-nine, going on thirty, and no one had heard of him. Paul Nizan had published a second book,
Antoine Bloyé,
and it was receiving even higher praise than his first. Sartre had been writing diligently for years, and all he had to show for it was a novel that had done the rounds of publishers to no avail, and two drafts of a second novel that Beauvoir, Guille, and Madame Morel agreed was still not right.

Beauvoir thought it a good idea for Sartre to write a philosophical novel, but so far Sartre's writing was too symbolic, dry, and dull. Couldn't he convey his ideas by writing a story like the detective stories they so loved, which portrayed real life? Sartre finally understood what he was doing wrong. In his third draft, he would set the novel in Le Havre, and base the main character, Antoine Roquentin, on himself.

He tried to rekindle his affair with Marie Ville, who was back in Paris with her husband, but she was fed up with Sartre. She now felt he had made her life unnecessarily difficult in Berlin.
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Sartre felt frustrated about his writing and frustrated about his life, including his relationship with Beauvoir. He liked to tell himself she felt the same:

One afternoon in November 1934, they were sitting on the terrace of Les Mouettes, their favorite seafront café in Le Havre. The sea was dark green and choppy. Seagulls were circling and shrieking. Sartre started to complain about the monotony of his life. What had happened to the gay irresponsibility of his student days? Where had his dreams gone? This was not the great man's life he had anticipated. He still hadn't written anything good. What was he? A provincial schoolteacher! He liked teaching and was fond of his students, but he despised institutions, headmasters, senior masters, colleagues, and parents. Like it or not, he told Beauvoir, they were prisoners of the bourgeois world. They taught fourteen hours a week, took a trip abroad every summer, and their pensions were guaranteed by the state. They were almost thirty, and their paths were preordained. They might as well be married. What adventures could possibly lie ahead? Beauvoir was soon in floods of tears.
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Sartre had put his novel aside in order to finish a philosophical essay on “The Imagination,” commissioned by an academic publisher. The subject made Sartre wonder about the role of hallucination and dreams. He talked to Daniel Lagache, a friend from the Ecole Normale who had specialized in psychiatry. Lagache suggested Sartre take mescaline, a hallucinogenic drug, to see for himself what hallucination was like. It might conceivably be slightly unpleasant, Lagache warned, but the effect would wear off in a few hours.

In February 1935, Sartre went to Sainte-Anne's Hospital in Paris for a mescaline injection. For several hours he lay in a dimly lit room under observation. He did not hallucinate in the rose-tinted way he would have liked; instead, everyday objects took on grotesque shapes and forms for him. The clock became an owl, his umbrella turned into a vulture, and in the corner of his eye, crabs and polyps swarmed. Beauvoir waited for him in Madame Morel's apartment on the Boulevard Raspail. When Sartre turned up that afternoon, his friends were shocked to see that he was not at all his usual self. He spoke in a dull, flat voice and stared fixedly either at the telephone cord or at Beauvoir's crocodile-skin shoes.

For weeks, Sartre did not seem interested in anything. One weekend, Colette Audry accompanied Beauvoir to Le Havre. “We walked along the beach collecting starfish,” Beauvoir recalls. “Sartre looked as
though he had no idea what Colette and I—or indeed he himself—were doing there.”
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In Paris, they went to an exhibition of Fernando Gerassi's paintings, and the whole day Sartre sat slumped in a corner, his face blank. Finally, he admitted that he was fighting off serious depression. He still had freakish visions. Houses had leering faces. Lobsters trotted along behind him. Beauvoir, used to Sartre's insistence that the mind controlled the body, was impatient. “Your only madness is believing that you're mad,” she told him.
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A doctor advised Sartre to avoid being alone. He did seem far better in company. He knew Beauvoir too well to put himself out, but with their friends, particularly younger people, he made a real effort to be entertaining, and he temporarily forgot his neuroses.

In Le Havre, Sartre's friends were a handful of baccalaureate students. One of his favorites was Jacques-Laurent Bost, a charming young man who was the youngest of ten children from a well-known Protestant family. His father was the chaplain at their school. His elder brother Pierre, a novelist and playwright, worked as a reader for Gallimard. The handsome Jacques-Laurent, his mother's favorite, was known by all and sundry as “Little Bost.”

In Rouen, Sartre started to spend time with Olga Kosakiewicz. They enjoyed being together, and everyone benefited. Sartre felt reinvigorated in Olga's presence, Beauvoir was relieved to see Sartre more cheerful, and Olga liked to feel needed.

Before she even set eyes on Sartre, Olga had encountered the legend. Beauvoir had talked about him and the couple they formed. Sartre knew that. As he wrote later, his relationship with Beauvoir appeared “fascinating” and “crushingly powerful” to the people around them. “Nobody could love one of us without being gripped by a fierce jealousy—which would end by changing into an irresistible attraction—for the other one, even before meeting them, on the basis of mere accounts.”
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The man Olga encountered was at his seductive best. His lobsters gave him a poetic aura. Olga liked the idea of eccentric artists and bohemian madness. It went with the dark Russian soul she made so much of. Sartre was also hilariously funny. Sometimes they acted little scenes together: a lone Englishwoman meeting a famous adventurer in the middle of the desert, and so on. He would listen to
her for hours, encourage her, and offer to help her. “Sartre had something of a medieval knight about him,” Olga said later. “He was very romantic.”
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That summer, Sartre and Beauvoir went walking in the Tarn region, north of Montpellier. Lobsters followed Sartre along the mountain tracks. Worse, he discovered he was losing his hair. “When I noticed it—or rather when the Beaver noticed it with a shriek at the Trou des Bozouls—it was a symbolic disaster for me…. For ages I used to massage my head in front of mirrors: balding became the tangible sign for me of growing old.”
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Lobsters gave way to the Little Russian. For two years, from the spring of 1935 to the spring of 1937, Sartre was completely obsessed. As he put it, his “strange black mood…turned to madness.”
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Who was this young woman, Olga Kosakiewicz, who managed to fascinate first Beauvoir then Sartre? Her father was a Russian aristocrat, an officer of the Csar. Her mother, who was French, had gone to Kiev to be a governess in a family of aristocrats, and ended up marrying one of the sons. Olga was born in Kiev on November 6, 1915.
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Her sister, Wanda, was born in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. Soon after, the Kosakiewicz family joined the exodus of Russian nobles and dissidents to France.

Victor Kosakiewicz bought a sawmill in Laigle, Normandy. The business did not do well. The girls grew up hearing romantic stories about the magical country they would still be living in, were it not for the evil communists. They felt exotic in France, and superior.

Ever since September 1934, when Olga took a room in town, she and Beauvoir had been spending all their spare time together. In her memoirs, Beauvoir explains the intensity of their relationship by the provincial backdrop against which they were both floundering. “Her feelings toward me quickly reached a burning intensity,” she writes of Olga.
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The fact is, her own were also strong. “There are at the present time only two people in the world who count in my life,” she told Olga, “and you are one of them.”
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She took the girl to the theater and movies. They drank vast quantities of cherry brandy in each other's rooms. “One night we drank so
much of the stuff that Olga, after leaving me, rolled head over heels down the stairs and slept there at the bottom till one of the other tenants kicked her awake,” Beauvoir writes in her memoirs.
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They sometimes went to dance bars, and Olga, a superb dancer, tried to teach Beauvoir.

Beauvoir would describe those evenings in fictional form in her first published novel,
She Came to Stay.
Xavière, the exhibitionist young girl, loves nothing more than to dance. “She did not dislike having people take them for Lesbians when they entered a public place; it was the kind of shocking behavior that amused her,” Françoise, the Beauvoir character, muses. Xavière soon has them on the dance floor:

In July 1935, Olga failed her medical preliminaries, and her parents decided she would have to come home. It was then that Sartre made a suggestion to Beauvoir. Why didn't they take on Olga themselves? She was not interested in medicine, but it seemed she had talent for philosophy. With their two salaries, they could afford to support her. All they needed, since she was twenty and still a minor, was her parents' consent. Beauvoir, it seems, did not sense the danger ahead. “I would help you to work well,” she promised Olga. “What an interesting year you could have.”

Beauvoir went to Laigle to see Olga's parents. She told them that Olga was intelligent, and she thought she could help her. Olga did not value herself enough, Beauvoir said, and she lacked motivation.
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But if she did something she liked, she would surely do well.

Marthe and Victor Kosakiewicz were frank about their worries. They did not know what to do with Olga. She never did any work. Nothing interested her. When they tried to talk to her about her future, they met with complete indifference. Olga had spent the sum
mer daydreaming, they said. She would hum to herself, then get up and dance for a few minutes. She read a little, but only in brief bursts. She played tennis and went for long walks. At least—and they were grateful for this—her violent outbursts were less frequent than in the previous year. They thought perhaps Mademoiselle de Beauvoir was right: she was the only person who could give Olga a sense of purpose. If Beauvoir could afford to support Olga, they were deeply grateful. “I do not understand how, at twenty, she can accept the beautiful gift you want to give her,” Marthe Kosakiewicz wrote to Beauvoir. “I would have liked her to show more independence.”
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Beauvoir had moved to the Hôtel du Petit Mouton, a charming place with exposed wooden beams, leadglass windows, and rickety but cheerful furnishings. In October 1935, she rented a room there for Olga. She and Sartre bought Olga a shelf full of philosophy books. Together they drew up her schedule.

It was the beginning of the “trio.” Their relations were suddenly placed on an entirely different footing. Beauvoir had originally been Olga's teacher, then they had become friends, and around this time they became occasional lovers. Sartre had been courting Olga as well, and now he also became her teacher. Olga was financially dependent on them both. Her feelings toward them were a mixture of gratitude, reverence, defiance, and resentment. Authority figures always brought out the rebel in her.

At first, Beauvoir writes, the trio had a magical sheen to it: