They met on 26 September 1938. Events were such that they stayed in Paris: by the 28th war looked inevitable but the Treaty of Munich on the 30th seemed to assure peace. For a month Beauvoir and Bost enjoyed normal life in Paris, seeing each other daily. But on 3 November Bost had to rejoin his station at Amiens. Military service lasted two years; for Bost, ten months later, it would be active duty.
Beauvoir’s concealed relationships with Bost, Olga and Bianca reveal not only her sexual dissatisfaction with Sartre but also a disturbing willingness to deceive others – in particular, other women. In the case of Bost, her relationship with him revealed her complicity in the life-long deception of a woman she called her friend. In a 1948 letter Beauvoir justified her behaviour by saying that Olga was ‘the kind of girl who asks too much from everybody, lying to everybody, so everybody had to lie to her’.60
Whatever Olga’s character, there is no doubt that Beauvoir’s behaviour was deceptive and – for many readers, on many grounds – deeply problematic. While Beauvoir was in love with Bost and deceiving Olga she also continued a relationship with Bianca Bienenfeld. During the summer of 1938 – while Beauvoir was in Morocco and Bost was in France – she told Bost in a letter that Bianca’s mother had read one of Simone’s more passionate letters to her daughter, which had led to drama – she still wasn’t sure how it was going to play out.61 Madame Bienenfeld accused Beauvoir of being ‘an old maid with unusual morals’.62 But that did not put an end to the women’s affair: in November 1938 Bianca told Simone she would never love anyone as much as she loved her.63 Bianca was 18 now, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, and they saw each other several times a week. But Beauvoir told her little about herself – and nothing at all about her relationship with Bost.64
That Christmas, Beauvoir introduced Bianca to Sartre. They went skiing in Mégève, and Bianca was staying nearby at Mont d’Arbois, so the three of them took to the slopes and talked philosophy. When they returned to Paris in January 1939 Sartre turned his attentions to Bianca. She found this flattering: many of her closest friends at the Sorbonne had been Sartre’s pupils, and between their esteem, Simone’s, and the recent reviews of The Wall that praised him as brilliant and innovative, she was starstruck.
Bianca wrote in her memoirs that, ‘Just as a waiter plays the role of a waiter, Sartre played to perfection the role of a man in love.’65 He was ugly, but his words were so beautiful they blinded her to her own repulsion. He asked her if she might be able to love him; Bienenfeld said that it was possible – but what about Beauvoir? She cared about her deeply and didn’t want to hurt her. Sartre replied that the Beaver wouldn’t mind. Sartre and Bienenfeld discussed consummating their relationship, and chose a day. It would be her first time with a man; she was full of anticipation. But as they walked to the Hôtel Mistral she shuddered inside: Sartre told her that housekeeping would be in for a surprise since he had slept with another virgin just the day before.
Sartre’s actions were deeply unsettling, too – and not only where Bianca was concerned. He began another trio of his own, courting Wanda and sleeping with Bianca, and Beauvoir began to find their relationships with Bianca troubling. She wrote to Bost that the threesome’s café conversations had become awkward, and that Bienenfeld did not know how to conduct herself with multiple lovers in the same place. ‘She does not realize that effusions of tenderness work with two but not with three; she took our hands, squeezed them, let them go, took them again, taking care to share herself equally.’66 Eventually Bianca told Beauvoir that she felt love for Sartre, but not passion; she wondered if Beauvoir could explain this to him?
Meanwhile, Bost had to perform the delicate balancing act of sharing himself between Olga and Beauvoir. Beauvoir’s letters are full of impatience to see him, to hold him again – when he was on leave it was agony not to meet him at the station and share his first moments in Paris. Consequently Bost did not always tell her his plans in full.
Beauvoir still enjoyed spending time with Olga, but she was increasingly uncomfortable about the place of the Kosakiewicz sisters in their lives. Her discomfort has often been interpreted as jealousy or resentment of their place in Sartre’s life – and she certainly was protective of her time with him – but she was also frustrated with Sartre for making matters so convoluted. He had begun to support Wanda financially, moving her to Paris and arranging for her to take painting lessons and share Hélène’s studio space. Wanda was suspicious of Beauvoir, and challenged Sartre directly on the nature of their relationship. They were just friends, Sartre said.
By May 1939 Beauvoir found the situation ‘grimy’. She was deceiving Olga. Wanda hated her. She wrote to Bost saying it was beginning to make her tremble with rage: it wasn’t entirely anyone’s fault, she thought, but it would have been easier if Sartre wasn’t lying to Wanda. And she didn’t like the feeling of being dissected by the consciousnesses of the two Kosakiewiczs. But even so, she said, it raised an interesting philosophical problem: is someone else’s experience as real as your own?67 She had been thinking about it for a long time, she wrote to him, because it was the subject of her novel. Every time she heard Olga speak about Bost it bothered her to think that in Olga’s consciousness of Bost he had no link to Beauvoir.
Bost’s reply rebuked her: he found it outrageous that she ‘protested against the judgements and conversations that may be made about you and Sartre, and also about me, Wanda, and [Olga]. I think you must strike them as shady and dubious to the highest degree, and that is just right because they are so deceived in all senses.’ He didn’t want to discuss the matter further by letter, but he warned her that if she was withering – which she was, often enough to have a reputation for it – he wasn’t backing down. She was lovely when he agreed with her, he wrote candidly, but this time he did not.68
Beauvoir didn’t want a fight: she wrote back that she thought his judgement was impartial and true, and he had been honest with her. But a week later he reprimanded her treatment of others again. This time the other in question was Bianca, whom she was still sleeping with despite the fact that Sartre’s waxing affections made hers wane. Beauvoir and Bianca had spent an afternoon together: a champagne lunch at La Coupole, coffee at the Flore, and then back to the Mistral to Simone’s room for privacy. Beauvoir wrote: ‘I think in the end that I’m not a homosexual since sensually I feel almost nothing, but it was charming and I love being in bed in the afternoon on a sunny day.’69
Bost jumped in the air when he read this sentence. He found the word ‘charming’ ‘appallingly obscene’. It made him feel strange, he said. Not because she spoke so lightly of Bianca or treated her as an object – which he noted – but that word, charming, drew a blush.70 He had been feeling sick with guilt about Olga, and in the same ‘charming’ letter Simone had confessed to feeling some remorse – though not regret. Olga was sincere with him, he said: but he was not sincere with her.
When Beauvoir read this, she felt numb for hours. She held herself together for a night out with Olga but when she got home she wept and wept. When she replied to Bost she told him his letter produced a ‘pathological’ anxiety, and she woke up to a morbid despair. She went to lunch with her mother, and again had to fight back welling tears.
So she decided to explain her side of the story to Bost in no uncertain terms: ‘I have only one sensual life, and that is with you.’ She didn’t want him to be an episode of her life: she wanted him to be in all of it. That was not the case for Bianca nor, sexually speaking, for Sartre. ‘With Sartre, too, I have physical relations,’ she explained, ‘but very little, and it mostly out of tenderness and – I’m not sure how to say this – I don’t feel that engaged because he is not that engaged in it himself.’71 By this point in their relationship she had explained this to Sartre several times. Now she was explaining it to Bost because she wanted him to know how seriously she took their relationship: he was the lover of her life.
Bost’s reply didn’t survive – but the relationship did.
&nb
sp; Over that summer Beauvoir went walking in Jura, visited Geneva, and covered vast distances on foot in Provence. In July the French government passed the ‘Code de la famille’, a piece of pro-natalist legislation that offered incentives to mothers who stayed home with their children and banned the sale of contraceptives. The Napoleonic Code, established in 1804, had given authority to men – as husbands and fathers – over women. This Civil Code was in effect until the 1960s, when Beauvoir would be one of the women who dismantled it.
In August, Bost had a long leave, so he, Beauvoir and Sartre met in Marseilles where they stayed in the villa of a friend at Juan-les-Pins, near Antibes. Bost thought war was inevitable now, but Sartre was one of the last people to think it was not.
Bost’s relationship with Olga was going well now; she had become more confident since, at Beauvoir’s suggestion, taking acting workshops with Charles Dullin, and she had also become more committed to Bost. Things were getting more serious, Bost wrote, so it would be terrible if she found out: would Beauvoir burn his letters to her? He was thinking of doing the same. (Neither of them did.) After Bost left Juan-les-Pins, Beauvoir was tearful once again: with war coming she might lose both Bost and Sartre. War or no war, she wasn’t at peace about Bianca and the Kosakiewicz sisters. Beauvoir found the end of the 1930s one of the lowest times of her life – war was coming, and her relationships with Sartre, Olga, Bianca and Bost left her feeling trapped.72
Figure 6 Beauvoir and Sartre at Juan-les-Pins, August 1939.
8
War Within, War Without
Bost was called to active service on 31 August 1939. On 1 September Germany invaded Poland. Paris was papered in posters mobilizing all fit men between the ages of 18 and 40, so Sartre went to the Mistral to pack. He wrote farewell letters to Bianca and Wanda but spent his final evening with Beauvoir: they had dinner and tried to sleep before the alarm went off at 3 a.m. She walked him to the Dôme for coffee before setting out for the Gare de l’Est. Sartre told Beauvoir he wouldn’t be in danger at Nancy. He was in the meteorological corps so it would be just like it was before Paris, they would write to each other – please could she send him books? They embraced and parted; his retreating figure was blurred by her tears.
On 2 September Beauvoir had a ‘breakdown’ – the first of several: fear of Bost dying was her constant companion. Jacques-Laurent Bost went into service with ideas typical of the interwar Left. The generation whose thought shaped his had fought in the trenches and advocated unconditional pacifism: Alain, Giono, Romain Rolland, Gide. He could have been fast-tracked into leadership but he wasn’t keen on this kind of entitled self-assertion; he felt it would compromise his commitments not to join the herd of cannon fodder. Beauvoir took to writing a diary again, partly to record reality and partly to escape it – ‘when one is writing, one doesn’t think’.1
On 3 September 1939 Britain and France declared war on Germany. In 1936 Beauvoir’s sister Hélène had met one of Sartre’s students from Le Havre, Lionel de Roulet. He had heard rumours about ‘the woman philosopher with the ferocious intellect’,2 but it was Hélène who captured his heart – by 1938 they were in love, the most constant of all the couples in ‘the family’, as Sartre and Beauvoir had started to call their circle. On the day war was declared, Simone offered Hélène the funds to travel to Portugal to be with Lionel; she gratefully accepted them and left.
The advent of war and so many significant departures severely disrupted Simone’s equilibrium; even before the war she had been suffering from confusion and depression, but now she sank further into both. By 4 September she detected a new diurnal rhythm: mornings were liveable, but evenings brought breakdowns. By the 5th she was having ‘wild panic attacks’. Her sleep was fragmented by air raid sirens; once, after being jolted awake by explosions and sirens she struggled to find her clothes in the dark before evacuating the building; when she went back to bed she decided it was easier just to sleep in them.3
Over the days that followed Paris was transformed: the men had been deployed and many civilians fled. Her students brought gas masks to their classrooms. But for the first eight months – the ‘Phony War’ – it was neither war nor peace. Day after day, Beauvoir’s diaries show desperation at the thought that Bost or Sartre might die. Each passing hour seemed to drain her of hope, and her reading material hardly helped – she wanted to understand what it meant to be at war, so she read Alain and Gide. She had to skip pages in Gide’s 1914 journals – reading scenes from the trenches was ‘needless torture’.4
Gradually, Beauvoir started to receive letters and to see new light in herself: on days when she had news from Bost or Sartre she could feel happiness, even joy. But then she felt guilty. (After all, Gide said, ‘when one is safe oneself and with all one’s family safe, it is a bit too easy to laugh and almost unseemly’.5) In retrospect, both Sartre and Beauvoir claimed that the war made them recognize the force of history; after the war, they said, their previous disinterest in politics – and their bystander mentalities – were no longer sustainable. But it did not, immediately, lead them to reform their personal lives. On 14 September Olga told Beauvoir that if Bost died it would be tragic, yes – but that ‘deep down’ it would not affect her. That, Beauvoir said, ‘confirmed my resolution never to give up Bost because of her’. Olga didn’t bother to arrange to have her mail forwarded when she moved, which meant going weeks without news from Bost – Beauvoir could not comprehend her indifference.6
Bianca, by contrast, wasn’t quite indifferent enough for Beauvoir’s liking. The Bienenfeld family had fled Paris, and on 16 September Beauvoir received a letter from Bianca reproaching her for not going to visit. Tension was emerging in their relationship: with Sartre gone Bianca wanted to occupy an even more central place in Beauvoir’s life, but Beauvoir found Bianca increasingly entitled and controlling. In Paris she was just beginning to rediscover the happiness of her own solitude, and it bothered her that Bianca didn’t respect her freedom.7
Even so, on 20 September she went to visit Bianca in Quimper. When Beauvoir arrived Bianca was waiting on the platform with tears in her eyes. They went for a coffee, and Bianca told Beauvoir that her mother was upset that Beauvoir had come – she had stolen one of Bianca’s letters and threatened to send it to the minister of education. (‘I didn’t believe any of it and didn’t get worked up about it,’ Beauvoir wrote in her diary.8) They went for a long walk together, that day and the next. And then they had ‘Embraces’. But Beauvoir didn’t enjoy them: she felt a kind of ‘blockage’.9
In addition to the dawning realization that they were part of history, absence made Sartre recognize just how much Beauvoir meant to him. He wrote that one thing would not change, no matter what. No matter what he became, he told Beauvoir, ‘I will become it with you.’ He thanked the war for showing him that they were one:
my love, you are not ‘one thing in my life’ – not even the most important – because my life no longer belongs to me, because I don’t even regret it, and because you are always me. You are so much more, it is you who permit me to foresee any future and realize any life at all. We cannot be any more at one than we are now.10
In hindsight, we know that Sartre could praise the unique irreplaceability of several women at once, which makes it hard to take his epistolary avowals very seriously. But even in his diaries Beauvoir took on a singular significance. In the days preceding 14 October, the ten-year anniversary of their ‘morganatic marriage’, Sartre reflected about how much he owed her: without her the world would be ‘a desert’. He hadn’t had letters from her for three days, and the lack of them made him realize the extent to which his courage to face this situation came ‘from the certitude of being understood, supported, and approved by the Beaver’. Without that, he said, ‘everything would fall apart’.11
They didn’t know when they would next see each other; he wasn’t even allowed to tell her where he was. As a lycée teacher he still drew his salary while in service so he had the means to keep Olga
and Wanda in Paris: they would not have to leave or get jobs. With the men away Beauvoir spent more time with ‘the Kosaks’ as Sartre called the sisters: they moved together into a new hotel, the Hotel du Danemark, on the rue Vavin. But Beauvoir struggled with resentment: she was working hard, earning her own way through life. The sisters, whom she and Sartre supported (Beauvoir paid for the artist studio that Hélène shared with Wanda), were making little progress in their so-called pursuits.
Olga and Wanda openly wrote to Bost and Sartre as their men; Beauvoir clandestinely wrote to both as hers. Once when she was with Olga she caught sight of the thickness of her latest letter from Bost: it was bigger than the ones she received, could its words be tenderer? Beauvoir was struck by jealousy and guilt with increasing frequency. One night she had a dream that Olga asked her to show her a letter she was writing to Bost: she woke up in a cold sweat.12 Two weeks later, Olga walked into her room just after Beauvoir had read a letter from Bost. Olga didn’t know what she was reading, but Beauvoir felt an ‘unpleasant feeling’ – she tried to ‘defend herself’ against it but she knew that Bost loved Olga; she was just making excuses. ‘It may be possible again for him to love her and for me to love him though I feel too depressed to make this effort.’ She felt deeply unhappy, and wished Sartre was there to put things in perspective.13 For weeks she had been descending into low moods and confusion: ‘War is again in me and around me, and an anguish that doesn’t know where to alight.’14
Becoming Beauvoir Page 16