Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  During the summer of 1931 Beauvoir crossed the French border for the first time in her life. She was 23 years old and had always wanted to travel; Zaza used to come back from Italy overflowing with mesmerizing descriptions of different people, different places. Beauvoir and Sartre were planning to visit Brittany that summer when Fernando Gerassi (Stépha’s husband) invited them to Madrid. Sartre still had a little money left over from a legacy he’d inherited from his grandmother; he paid their fares and turned his final francs into pesetas. They visited Figueres on their first evening, and kept finding themselves repeating ‘We’re in Spain!’ They travelled from there to Barcelona and Madrid, Segovia, Ávila, Toledo and Pamplona. At the end of September, they parted ways for Le Havre and Marseilles.

  When Beauvoir later reflected on her arrival in Marseilles it stood out as a ‘completely new turn’ in her career’.59 She arrived alone, with nothing she couldn’t carry on her own back, knowing no one at all. The previous year had left her feeling as though she didn’t know herself all that well, and her time in Marseille provided her with the space and time to resurrect parts of herself that had atrophied. She found the people provincial and uninteresting. But she had always loved to be outdoors; Sartre did not. So on her days off work she left early in the morning to walk – she started off with walks of five or six hours a day and gradually worked her way up, covering vast distances in an old dress and espadrilles. She hitchhiked despite friends’ and colleagues’ concern: it was dangerous for a woman to walk alone, and she had some narrow escapes. But she enjoyed the solitude of walking and thought this pastime saved her from boredom, depression and regret. She became compulsive about finishing the routes she planned – sometimes to endangering extremes.

  Her new teaching post had eased some family relations: Françoise even persuaded Georges to take a week’s holiday in Marseille. Françoise had begun to be impressed by Simone: she saw her as a professional woman with a good income. But she was disappointed that Sartre still figured in Simone’s life: spinsterhood would have been preferable to his incomprehensible presence. Beauvoir was relieved when her parents returned to Paris: she wanted to get back to walking.60 Hélène also came to visit twice – the sisters had never been separated for so long before that year, and they missed each other. Simone took Hélène walking with her, but one day Hélène became feverish. Simone was so determined not to be derailed from her plans that she left her shivering sister in a hospice to wait for a bus while she continued on her way. This would not be the only time in her life that her resolution to stick to a plan seemed to overtake her compassion.

  At work she did not shy away from teaching what she thought, and she scandalized her pupils and their parents with her teachings on labour, capital and justice.61 Her mind had grown liberal in many respects, but sexually she still sided with convention: she was scandalized when another teacher made sexual advances because the person wooing her was a Madame Tourmelin.62

  Marseille offered fewer human distractions than Paris so on her teaching days Simone began to write again. She did not publish anything from this period but every plot she penned returned to the same thing: ‘the mirage of the Other’ and the relationship between honesty, freedom and love. She did not want ‘this peculiar fascination to be confounded with a mere commonplace love affair’, so she made her protagonists both women to save their relationship from sexual undertones.63

  She visited Paris when she could: if her visit was brief she only saw Sartre and her sister – but if she stayed longer she enjoyed seeing other friends.64 When she and Sartre were apart they wrote letters, and when they were together she read Sartre’s work in progress and he read hers. He was writing a dissertation on contingency.

  By June of 1932 Simone had heard that the following year’s teaching post was in Rouen: only an hour from Le Havre, and an hour and a half from Paris. In The Prime of Life Beauvoir described herself emerging from this year triumphant: she had felt lonely living at such a distance from the significant others in her life but she now knew that she could rely on herself. In the 1980s she told Bair that her time in Marseille was ‘the unhappiest year of my life’: she loved Sartre and wanted to be with him, and couldn’t tell whether to attribute her heartsickness to missing him or regret.65

  That summer brought more travels – southern Spain, the Balearics, Spanish Morocco. When Beauvoir moved to Rouen at the beginning of the school year she took a room in the Hôtel La Rochefoucauld, near the train station. She found the trains’ whistling reassuring: escape was within easy reach. She made a new friend in Rouen – Collette Audry. Nizan knew Audry from communist circles, and she was a colleague of Simone’s at the lycée. Simone introduced herself, and at first Collette found her brusque and bourgeois.66 Audry was a committed Trotskyite, and Beauvoir thought she was intimidating: she was well dressed, self-assured and always talking politics. Before long they were lunching regularly at the Brasserie Paul.

  Audry admired Beauvoir’s determination and enjoyed her laughter. She saw Simone’s affections as ferocious. Beauvoir’s forthrightness could be crushing when she wanted it to be; her reputation for not suffering fools stayed with her throughout her life. When Sartre came to visit Rouen they went out as a trio. Beauvoir had explained the nature of her relationship with Sartre to Audry, saying that it was based on truth rather than passion. Audry described the intense and ebullient conversations they had as a new kind of relationship, the likes of which she had never seen: ‘I can’t describe what it was like to be present when those two were together. It was so intense that sometimes it made others who saw it sad not to have it.’67

  Rouen made the continuation of their pact much easier: Beauvoir and Sartre now spent their time between Rouen, Le Havre and Paris, where they took an increasing interest in theatre. Simone Jollivet’s lover was a theatre director, Charles Dullin, and they took a keen interest in learning his art. Whatever the city, they populated their conversation with people. In the 1930s they developed the idea of bad faith (mauvaise foi): a concept of dishonesty that they thought did greater justice to human experience than Freud’s concept of the unconscious.68

  In The Prime of Life Beauvoir credits this concept to herself and Sartre. Beauvoir starts by saying that Sartre ‘worked out the notion of dishonesty (bad faith)’. But she continues using we. ‘We’ set out to expose bad faith. There was a particular teacher, a colleague of Beauvoir’s, whose behaviour led Beauvoir to a moment of clarity – ‘I’ve got it,’ Beauvoir told Sartre,

  ‘Ginette Lumière is unreal, a sort of mirage’. Thenceforth we applied this term to anyone who feigned convictions or feelings that they did not in fact possess: we had discovered, under another name, the idea of ‘playing a part’.69

  The concept of bad faith would become one of the most famous in twentieth-century philosophy. The idea of ‘playing a part’ was famously illustrated by Sartre’s ‘waiter’ in Being and Nothingness. So why does Beauvoir say that we discovered it? In the 1930s it is very difficult to determine the extent to which Beauvoir and Sartre were indebted to each other with any certainty. As Hélène’s husband, Lionel Roulet, described it, their relationship then was one of ‘constant talking’: ‘through their constant talking, the way they shared everything, they reflected each other so closely that one just could not separate them’.70

  At this stage Beauvoir and Sartre became increasingly aware of politics, although the more mature Beauvoir would look back on herself and Sartre as ‘spiritually proud’ and ‘politically blind’.71 Through Audry and others their paths crossed with Troskyites and Communists – but they did not see the proletarian struggle as their struggle.72 Their struggles were philosophical. They discussed problem of how to understand their rational and physical selves: they wanted to understand freedom, and Sartre saw the body – its physical appetites and habits – as posing a threat to it. Although in 1929 Beauvoir did not challenge Sartre’s intolerance of passion and emotion, in the early 1930s she began to object to his position. He still t
hought his body was a bundle of muscles, detached from his emotions; it was weakness to succumb to tears or to be seasick. But Beauvoir disagreed: she thought eyes and stomachs were subject to their own laws.73

  They wrote and researched, reading voluminously. One evening, near the turn of 1932–33, Sartre and beauvoir were sitting with Raymond Aron at the Bec de Gaz, on the boulevard du Montparnasse. Aron had been spending a year in Berlin, at the French Institute. He was studying the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, whose work – and the philosophical method for which he is famous, phenomenology – was still relatively unknown in France. As Beauvoir tells the story in The Prime of Life, Aron pointed to his cocktail glass and told Sartre they could make philosophy of it. Sartre went pale with excitement when he heard this. It was precisely what he wanted to do: to return philosophy to the everyday, and root it in descriptions of experience.

  Sartre and Beauvoir would both employ phenomenological methods, although each with their own twists. In its founder Husserl’s hands, phenomenology describes the ‘things themselves’ – phenomena – by trying to pare back the distractions, habits and presuppositions of everyday life and received opinion. It is a philosophy that recognizes that there is a distance between things as they appear to us and things as they are (or as we think they should be). For Sartre, this was a revelation. But the phenomenological method was not entirely new to Beauvoir: when she was at the Sorbonne she studied with Jean Baruzi, who had encountered phenomenology and whose work paid attention to the lived experience of Christian mystics. And Bergson’s ‘concrete metaphysics’, too, used a similar approach.74 We have already seen that before Beauvoir met Sartre she was thrilled when she read Bergson’s praise of the novelist who could untangle the web of the conventional self; she wanted her work to express ‘palpable reality’.75 But neither Bergson nor Baruzi was as fashionable in 1930s Paris as Husserl. At the height of Bergson’s fame people would crowd around the doors and windows of his lecture rooms, craning to hear what he said. But so many of them were women that men began to suspect that what Bergson was doing was not, in fact, philosophy. As one 1914 review put it: ‘Bergson was nearly suffocated by scent when women attended his lectures; but had Bergson really been a philosopher, no woman would have listened to him.’76

  In April of 1933 Beauvoir and Sartre spent their Easter vacation in London: they were amused by the English conventions they saw – bowler hats and umbrellas, Hyde Park speakers, taxis, teashops and peculiar fashions. Their differences frequently asserted themselves with greater force when they were travelling – perhaps because they did not have the separate living quarters and lives they had when at home – and in London this was as true as ever. Beauvoir, more fluent in English literature and culture, wanted to trace the steps of Shakespeare and Dickens, visit Kew Gardens and Hampton Court. Sartre wanted to linger in lower-class streets, guessing at the thoughts of their inhabitants.

  In letters to Beauvoir Sartre sometimes wrote lovingly that they were ‘but one’. But in London their twoness kept reasserting itself: in Oxford Sartre liked the city’s streets and parks but he did not appreciate the ‘snobbishness of the English undergraduate’ and refused to go into the colleges. Beauvoir chided him for his churlishness, and went into the colleges by herself. In London, too, their wishes diverged: how could he not want to go to the British Museum?77

  Beauvoir continued to find much to admire in Sartre’s thoughts; but she did not like all of them. They were sitting in Euston Station when he explained how London fitted into his overall outline of understanding the world. Beauvoir was irritated by his habit of generalizing, and thought his hypothesis was spurious. This was old terrain – they had argued it before – but Beauvoir insisted once again that words could not do justice to reality, and that reality should be faced, warts and all: with all its ambiguity and uncertainty.

  Sartre replied that observing and reacting to the world wasn’t good enough: that they should try to pin it down in words. Beauvoir thought this was nonsense: London couldn’t be understood after a twelve-day visit. He wanted to write their experiences instead of living them, which grated against her own prime allegiance: ‘to life, to the here-and-now reality’.78

  In January 1933 they saw Hitler become Chancellor; by 2 May the German Embassy in Paris was flying a swastika. In here-and-now reality, Beauvoir (and Sartre) watched as Jewish scholars went into voluntary exile and books were burned in Berlin. In her autobiographies Beauvoir would claim that she and Sartre had not yet been converted to political engagement, that their only concern during this period was ‘themselves, their relation, their lives, and their books to come’. They had ‘little interest in public and political events’, instead preferring to retreat into their imaginations (‘to keep the world at arm’s length’, she said).79 ‘At every level,’ Beauvoir wrote in The Prime of Life, ‘we failed to face the weight of reality, priding ourselves on what we called our “radical freedom”.’80

  But she was not totally withdrawn from the world: that August Beauvoir was passionately interested in a story that was everywhere in Paris, about the crime and trial of a young working-class woman called Violette Nozière. Nozière had killed her father, after he raped her – although the press rarely put it that way, prompting many women to wonder: why did they call it ‘incest’? The debate her trial provoked was so intense that it was compared to the Dreyfus affair.81

  In Rouen Beauvoir continued to work on her philosophical and literary projects; she began a new novel in 1933 and had private German lessons two or three times per week with a refugee she met through Colette Audry.82 She modelled her novel on Stendahl, and wanted to tell a story that paralleled her own, showing the stagnation of bourgeois society and the need for individual revolt. Although she was not one of its protagonists, Zaza was written into this story under the name Anne: a paragon of piety and loyalty. It was not the last time Beauvoir would re-write Zaza’s life; she was just beginning to discover the cathartic and clarifying effects of writing literature. But she thought the characters in her first novel lacked depth, that they were not true enough to life, so she gave up on it not long after. But she returned to the same themes – and, indeed, characters – in subsequent work.

  Although they didn’t have much money during this period, Beauvoir and Sartre continued to travel whenever they could: in 1934 they visited Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Alsace, Corsica. They went to Hanover to see Leibniz’s house.83 That year Beauvoir did not try to write anything, making a conscious decision to focus on reading and learning instead. She studied the French Revolution and read Husserl in German.84 Sartre was working hard on a philosophical treatise on Husserl (The Transcendence of the Ego) and still editing the manuscript on contingency but without much success.

  During Sartre’s year in Berlin, Beauvoir took two weeks off to visit him. Sartre had met a ‘contingent’ woman there whose company he enjoyed a great deal: Marie Girard.85 Beauvoir met and liked her; in her memoirs she wrote that although this was the first time that Sartre had taken a serious interest in another woman, she was as comfortable with their arrangement in fact as she was in principle (although she was capable of jealousy and did not underrate it).86 She continued to feel secure in Sartre’s estimation; they were discovering Faulkner and Kafka together, exploring the question of how to write life well. At this stage they both thought that salvation could be achieved through art.87 Sartre’s biographer, by contrast, calls this the ‘first crisis’ in their relationship.88

  Personally, Beauvoir felt that her most serious problem was still the one she wrote about in her student diaries: how much of herself to keep and how much to give away. She still didn’t know how to reconcile ‘her longing for independence’ with the feelings that drove her ‘so impetuously towards another person’.89 She made controversial claims in her classes – for example, that ‘women were not exclusively intended for bringing children into the world’90 – and lent her students books their parents found objectionable. Some parents raised formal co
mplaints, accusing her of attacking the sanctity of the family; fortunately the schools inspector took her side.

  During this period, while Beauvoir and Sartre were both unknown teachers, Sartre underwent a period of depression. He was disappointed and bored, and later called this time of his life ‘the gloomy years’.91 Sartre felt like a failure: he had not expected to end up a provincial schoolteacher, finding life so monotonous and his genius so unacknowledged. Comparison didn’t help much, either. Paul Nizan had already published two books: Aden, Arabie in 1931 and Antoine Bloyé in 1933. The first was well received and the second, even more so. Even Maheu – who had failed the agrégation – was well on his way to a reputable career (he would go on to be Director-General of UNESCO). But Sartre had published nothing; he wasn’t famous and was starting to get worried that, ‘Whoever is not famous at twenty-eight must renounce glory forever.’92 He knew it was absurd to think this, but he felt no less agonized by his lack of achievement.

  One day in November they were sitting in a seaside café in Le Havre; both of them felt listless, worried that life had sedimented into relentless repetition and that nothing new would ever happen to them. Beauvoir was so upset that evening there were floods of tears and her ‘old hankering’ for the Absolute – that is, God – made a new appearance.93 In these moods she felt like human endeavours were vain and reproached Sartre for making an idol out of ‘life’. The next day she was still upset by her revelation and got into an argument with him: Sartre thought there was no truth to be found in wine and tears, and explained her mood by the depressing effects of alcohol rather than metaphysics. She thought that alcohol lifted a veil, revealing the ugly face of truth.