Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

When she tried to distract herself from this void with relationships she just seemed to fall further into it. Another former student – Nathalie Sorokine – wanted a sexual relationship with her but she wasn’t sure that was a good idea: ‘I don’t know what to do and it makes me feel really ill at ease.’15 Things with Bianca, too, were taking a turn for the worse: she was sending letters telling Beauvoir to ‘send all these people packing’, which Beauvoir found stiflingly possessive and annoyingly self-important.16 Her relationships with Sartre, Bost and Olga stretched back for years: she wasn’t just going to walk away from them. The only thing that seemed to be going well was her novel – she had to fight to protect her writing time, but it was really starting to take shape.

  At the end of October Sartre sent a letter to Beauvoir with details of his whereabouts, in code.17 Beauvoir went to extraordinary lengths to see him, feigning illness to get a medical certificate so she could procure travelling papers. On 31 October she arrived late at night; the next morning she went to the tavern where he had breakfast so he’d know she’d arrived. They couldn’t be seen out together since he was in uniform, so she took him to her hotel room. Her permit only lasted 24 hours – would she be allowed to extend it?

  In the end she stayed until 5 November. They talked about philosophy, the complicated mess of their love lives, and their novels. She read his work in progress on The Age of Freedom and he read her work in progress on She Came to Stay. She told him that he needed to redo his book’s female character, Marcelle. She had almost forgotten how good it felt ‘to talk to someone, to find my intellectual life again’.18 She had been teaching and reading, of course, but reading – even Husserl, Heidegger, Gide, Pearl S. Buck, Shakespeare, Gogol, Somerset Maugham, Jack London, Defoe, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dostoevsky – did not make up for deep conversation.

  Beauvoir was beginning to be upset about sharing Sartre’s and Bost’s military leaves: she did not want Kosakiewicz leftovers, and now Bianca, too, wanted to take her share of Sartre’s time. Sartre reassured her: Yes, he felt tenderly towards Wanda, but she was 22, childish and fickle; he really didn’t expect the relationship to outlast the war. And yes, he was still writing to Bianca – often copying passages from his letters to Wanda verbatim – but he was losing enthusiasm. Of the four nights she was there they spent two – unusually passionate – together. The sexual relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir, despite this brief reignition during their separation in 1939, had now gone utterly flat.19

  Beauvoir told Sartre that she was still upset that Bost loved Olga and now especially she didn’t want to share Bost’s leaves with her. Sartre reminded her that she had chosen to love a man who loved Olga, and that in fact without Olga the relationship would be unstable. It was hardly fair to expect exclusivity from Bost when she had no intention of observing it herself.

  Slowly, she was beginning to realize that she hadn’t become the woman she wanted to be. ‘In the past,’ she wrote, ‘I tried to believe I was what I wanted to be.’ That year, however – because of Bost, she said – she realized that ‘the presence of the contingent, the passionate’. It was interesting, she wrote in her diary, to find this out about herself: ‘It’s a step toward knowing myself, which is beginning to interest me. I think that I’m becoming something well defined. […] I feel I’m a mature woman, though I would like to know what kind.’20 She had become a successful teacher – that October she received a commendation from her school, and many students sent her cards or took her for coffees to express their thanks.21 But was that enough?

  A few days after Beauvoir returned from visiting Sartre, Bianca arrived in Paris to see her. Beauvoir wasn’t thrilled – she had found Bianca’s recent letters ‘frenzied’, which was worrying given the way her own feelings had cooled. She ‘felt the lie’ of Sartre’s relationship with Bianca and ‘cringed at the thought’ of intimacy with her, but she went to bed with her anyway. Afterwards Beauvoir wrote in her diary that her physical pleasure with Bianca was ‘perverse’: she knew that she ‘took advantage’ of Bianca’s body and that her own sensuality was ‘deprived of any tenderness’. It was ‘boorish’, and she had never felt that way before. It was ‘sickening’, she wrote – ‘like foie gras and not of the best quality’.22

  When Beauvoir’s letters and war diaries were published in French after her death, it was passages like this that led the Parisian press to call her ‘machiste et mesquine’ – macho and petty.23 It wasn’t the first time Simone de Beauvoir was accused of acting or thinking ‘like a man’. But it was shocking to the French press to hear her speak like such a carelessly unfeeling macho one. And it was disturbing to see that even after feeling ‘boorish’ and ‘sickened’ by her own behaviour, she didn’t stop.

  The next day, Bianca reproached Beauvoir for sending her sister Hélène financial support – Bianca’s reasoning was that if she stopped doing that then she could pay for Bianca to come to Paris more often. And if Beauvoir stopped teaching she would have more time to see her, too. This was more than annoying; she told Bianca that she felt smothered. Then Bianca told Beauvoir that she had been fantasizing about offering herself to some friends who were about to leave for the war, so they wouldn’t leave as virgins.24

  By the visit’s third day Bianca’s presence had become a heavy burden: quite apart from her fantasies, it was increasingly clear to Beauvoir that Bianca did not see love in the same way that she did. Bianca viewed love as ‘symbiosis’; she did not understand that people could actually find genuine pleasure in being alone or wanting to work. At one point, Bianca broke down crying, upset because Beauvoir loved Sartre more than her. Beauvoir was aghast: ‘I never told her the contrary. I hate how easily she creates illusions for herself.’25

  She tried to encourage Bianca to ‘imagine herself in the center of her own life’, instead of placing Beauvoir and Sartre there. ‘She must become a person who is in touch with her own self,’ Beauvoir wrote in her diary – but she could plainly see that Bianca found this difficult. As soon as Bianca left Beauvoir felt ‘ill at ease’ because of her own ‘remorse and affection’. Beauvoir judged her own behaviour ‘disgraceful’.26

  As November unfolded she was still struggling with the dishonesty in her relationship with Olga. But then Olga told Beauvoir that she had stopped writing to Bost and feared she couldn’t make herself start again. ‘I’m not thinking all the time about Bost,’ Olga said. Besides, how meaningful could a relationship be when you only saw each other for a few days every few months? Just a few months into the war, Olga was saying outright that it would be better to break things off. Beauvoir tried to defend Bost’s interests – he didn’t want his relationship with Olga to end, he just wanted her to write.

  Beauvoir found Olga utterly unintelligible. If she loved Bost, why didn’t she want to share her life with him? How could she see the effort it took to write a letter as a cost, not a benefit, when Bost was at war and a few warm words could bring him so much happiness? For Beauvoir, letters were a lifeline. She wanted to share in Bost’s life, and Sartre’s – though in the latter case she realized that ‘the very fact of an intellectual life essential for both of us makes things so much easier’.27

  In the final months of 1939 Beauvoir discovered that she could have an intellectual life in Paris even when Sartre wasn’t there. Her friend Collette Audry invited her to dinner with the philosopher Jean Wahl, and at first she wasn’t sure whether to go – alterations to her weekly timetable tended to provoke angry reactions from Olga et al. But she decided to do it; she needed ‘to see people and have some serious conversation’. On the day of the dinner she had a premonition that her novel (She Came to Stay) would definitely be printed – ‘I had the impression of being taken seriously.’ And at the dinner itself she was amazed by her own ability to hold conversation. It was just like it had been at the Sorbonne twelve years ago, she wrote in her diary. Why, she wondered, did she always think that other people were more ‘serious’ than she was?28

  More and
more, she felt like she needed to study herself. A friend, Marie Ville, told her that Sartre oppressed her. (‘Hardly amusing,’ she said.) But it was true that she was starting to find things to disagree with in his philosophy – she agreed with his ideas about the will. ‘But I don’t know how he is going to give a content to his ethics.’29

  Stépha, too, had been asking probing questions – after Bianca’s visit to Paris in November she asked: was Simone a lesbian? Beauvoir never expressed any doubts about whether she was heterosexual, but she frequently attracted women – especially young women from her school – and the truth, she wrote to Sartre, was that she had ‘developed a certain taste for such relations’.30 She enjoyed sex with women but she seems to imply that, for her, it was second order. Her physical relationship with Bianca was still going on at Christmas 1939 – Bianca moved back to Paris in the middle of December – but now there was another young woman who was demanding her attention. Nathalie Sorokine was in her baccalaureate class; she had become infatuated with Beauvoir.

  Nathalie Sorokine’s parents were Russian by birth; they had left during the upheavals of the revolution and were now stateless. Nathalie was tall, tempestuous and bright, and she had done well in philosophy in her baccalaureate – Beauvoir enjoyed talking to her about Kant and Descartes. Nathalie wanted to study more philosophy but her mother was divorced and didn’t have the means to pay for tuition at the Sorbonne. When she encouraged Nathalie to get a job rather than continue with her education Beauvoir offered to help pay her fees, so in 1939 Sorokine enrolled.

  Sorokine – who was born in 1921, the same year as Bianca – had been pushing for a sexual relationship with Beauvoir since October. She was jealous of the presence of Sartre, Bost, Olga and Bianca in Beauvoir’s life: she felt like she was in ‘5th place’. She was a troubled young woman, who stole bicycles and shoplifted pen sets from department stores. She resold the pens at the lycée to raise money for what she needed; she told Beauvoir that her parents called her a ‘parasite’ and had no qualms about taking money from her when they found it. In December Beauvoir told Nathalie that it wouldn’t work for them to have a physical relationship. But then, on 14 December 1939, Sorokine tried to caress the clothed Beauvoir instead of working on Kant. That night she wrote to Sartre, ‘There is nothing to be done, she wants to sleep with me.’31 She didn’t want to, she wrote in her diary, ‘but that’s what she really wanted – and the situation is disgusting and impossible’.32

  A week later she wrote to Sartre that Sorokine had told her she loved her and tried to kiss her as if it was a legal romance. ‘If I were free,’ Beauvoir wrote, she would throw herself into this story with momentum. But as it stood it made her feel strange to be passionately loved in this ‘feminine and organic manner’ by two women: Bianca and Sorokine.33 It is unclear why she suddenly took herself to be ‘unfree’: she clearly didn’t believe in monogamy with men, so why would she hold herself to a different standard with women? It is unlikely that she felt ‘unfree’ in a political sense:

  In 1942 the age of consent for homosexual relationships would be increased to 21 (while the age of consent for heterosexual relationships remained fixed at 13). But in 1939 Beauvoir’s relationships were both consensual and legal.

  Could her discomfort have arisen because that month Sartre had written to her to say he planned to end things with Bianca? Beauvoir didn’t think ending things would be as easy as he thought: she could no longer avoid the recognition of (in her words) ‘how used’ Bianca was.34

  Alone in Mégève that Christmas Beauvoir worked on her writing and amazed herself at how much she accomplished. She felt inspired and focused – and she was starting to feel sufficiently close to the end of her novel to imagine future projects. She wanted to write ‘a novel about an entire life’.35 She read and commented on Sartre’s works, alongside her own. He had been working on the concept of freedom and sent Beauvoir some of his work in progress. She sent him a letter praising it, comparing it to the philosophies of Bergson and Kant – but, she told him, she couldn’t really criticize it without the rest of the argument. If she had to raise an objection now, she wrote, her question would be: Once one recognizes one’s freedom, what is one supposed to do?36

  Beauvoir had been interested in philosophies of freedom since she read Bergson, Fouillée, Lagneau and others as a teenager. Since it was a central topic on their agrégation exam she and Sartre had spent a lot of time discussing it. It was all well and good to think about freedom as an abstract concept, and to claim, as Sartre did, that all freedoms are equal. But Beauvoir wanted a philosophy that could be lived. And when she looked at the lives people lived, she came to the conclusion that their freedoms were not equal, because (as she later put it) ‘situations are different, and therefore so are freedoms’.37

  On 12 January 1940 Beauvoir wrote to Sartre that she’d written the first 160 pages of her novel, She Came to Stay – she was looking forward to showing it to him when he came to visit. And she told him that she and Bienenfeld had had ‘Embraces’: ‘If I’m to tell you everything, in addition to the usual rufous odour of her body she had a pungent fecal odour which made things pretty unpleasant. So far as friendship with her goes, no problem – but our physical relations couldn’t be more distasteful to me.’38

  Such a dramatic expression of disgust is startling and unsettling given that Beauvoir clearly did enjoy other lesbian relationships and that Bianca would remain her friend for life (on both women’s accounts). Was Beauvoir really so disgusted by another woman’s body? Could this be a psychosomatic expression of disgust with her own behaviour? When Beauvoir eventually broke up with Bianca she said that she preferred sex with men.39 But despite her disgust and growing unease about their relationship – even an ‘icy chill’ when she first saw Bianca that January – she still agreed to see her two nights a week.40

  At the same time Sartre wrote to Beauvoir that apart from her he didn’t ‘mean anything to the rest of the world (aside from my mother)’. He would ‘slough off his old skin’ at the end of the war, because ‘not one of those good ladies will have acquired the rights of fidelity’.41 But in a letter dated two days later Beauvoir describes being in bed with Nathalie Sorokine. As she described the event to Sartre, they were naked, thinking about reading some passages on the philosophy of the will together: ‘The embraces started up again, this time with reciprocity. It’s certainly not what it was with Kos. But I’ve a keen taste for her body.’42

  Sartre’s reply from 16 January reads: ‘I’ve half forgotten what it’s like to have anyone at my side at all, let alone you, who’s interested in what I think and feel and who can understand it.’43 The day after he exclaimed: ‘What’s going on? Such a lot of affairs and loves you’re enjoying, little one!’44

  Sartre was working away on the philosophy that would eventually be published as Being and Nothingness; when he told Beauvoir about it she replied: ‘How seductive it sounds, that theory of Nothingness which solves every problem!’45 The next month Sartre wrote to Beauvoir excitedly because he thought that at last he had found ‘an intellectual niche’ for himself. ‘I’m beginning to see glimmers of a theory of time. This evening I began to write it. It’s thanks to you, do you realize that? Thanks to Françoise’s obsession: that when Pierre is in Xavière’s room, there’s an object living all by itself without a consciousness to see it.’46 (Françoise, Pierre, and Xavière are characters in She Came to Stay.)

  He didn’t receive a letter the next day, so he wrote to her again. He was still working on his theory of time but he felt empty … why didn’t she write? ‘I wish you were here; then, everything would be fine.’47

  The very day that Sartre was writing to thank her for inspiring his theory of time, Beauvoir received an unexpected note in her classroom. After six months of not seeing Bost at all, he was there. She trembled as she ran to meet him and they spent the day talking feverishly. They had three days and three nights together, after which he was going to see Olga. The previous year she
had told Bost that she loved him ‘with all her soul’.48 Now she wrote to Sartre that she and Bost would ‘never get to the end of what we have to say to one another’; that looking forward, ‘Bost forms part of my future in an absolutely certain – even essential – way.’49

  Perhaps it was because of this letter, perhaps it was because of Wanda’s discovery of one of Sartre’s jilted lovers from the previous year, or perhaps it was because he hadn’t had another letter from Beauvoir for days: whatever the reason, Sartre began to be fearful:

  I’m in an odd state, I’ve never been this uneasy with myself since I went crazy. […] My sweet, how I need you […]. I love you. I’m afraid I must seem slightly underhanded to you with all of the lies I’m entangled in. […] I’m afraid you might suddenly ask yourself […] isn’t he perhaps lying to me, isn’t he perhaps telling me half-truths? My little one, my darling Beaver, I swear to you that with you I’m totally pure.50

  The next day he wrote again, declaring that he no longer wanted to play the game of seduction. Intent on simplifying matters, he wrote a letter to Bianca to break up. Beauvoir saw her soon after: Bianca was hurt, angry and suspicious. It was a complete about-face on Sartre’s part – his letters only a few weeks before had been talking about the future ‘the three of them’ would have after the war. She was right to be indignant, Beauvoir said to Sartre: the way they had treated people was ‘unacceptable’.51

  At last she was admitting her wrongdoing – and confronting Sartre’s. But there was nothing they could do to undo it. In 1940 Bianca Bienenfeld had a breakdown; she felt ‘crushed by abandonment and heartbreak’.52

  What we know for certain is that Sartre broke up with Bianca by letter in February of 1940.53 He wrote to Beauvoir to tell her about how harshly Bienenfeld had rebuked him; on 27 February Beauvoir briefly expressed sympathy for Sartre before adding her voice to the chorus of reproach: he ‘really did go too far’ with her – ‘honestly, I don’t know what got into your head’. Bienenfeld had come to see Beauvoir, showing her Sartre’s letter. The letter’s contents haven’t survived – so it’s unclear whether Beauvoir’s reaction was hypocritical, given what we know about her own behaviour – but Beauvoir described Bianca as humiliated and disgusted: ‘I found her estimable in her attitude that evening, and scathing, and right. […] your letter was indefensible.’54