Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  Research by Ingrid Galster has shown that the content of Beauvoir’s broadcasts was not collaborationist. But even so Beauvoir’s critics have charged that she was apolitical or, worse, that she actively participated in creating radio that encouraged listeners’ evasion of their moral responsibilities to resist the Nazis. Beauvoir’s defenders, by contrast, noted that in the episodes she worked on there was a certain spirit of refusal – she chose people and texts from French culture that defied the reigning values of their day. It was difficult, in Occupied Paris, to draw clean lines between resistance and collaboration.84

  The existentialists would become famous for the slogan ‘man is the sum of his actions’. And although Beauvoir was soon to become a woman whose actions inspired many, she was not proud of all of them. Beauvoir clearly resisted the values of Pétain’s government in her classrooms and in her personal life. But she also failed to practise the ethics she would later preach: her relationships with women during this period were far from reciprocal. In the ‘grimy’ period between 1939 and 1942 she hit several low points before reaching the conclusion that she needed to think harder about the woman she’d become. And along the way she had written not one but two of the novels that would bring her fame and form her persona – She Came to Stay and The Blood of Others – although the second one would not be published until after the end of wartime censorship.85

  9

  Forgotten Philosophy

  The year that Beauvoir lost her post in the French education system both she and Sartre published works that would secure their places in French intellectual life for good. Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay was published in August, and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – dedicated to the Beaver – was published in June. Sartre was also beginning to produce plays to public acclaim, resurrecting innocent-looking plots from ancient Greek drama to convey messages of freedom and resistance.

  The early 1940s mark a significant shift in Beauvoir’s thought. Before the war she had been, by her own admission, solipsistic. As early as 1941 she realized that she had moved on from the ‘philosophical attitude’ of She Came to Say,1 and her plays and novels from 1943–46 show a moral and political engagement that many people do not credit to her until the publication of The Second Sex. Already in 1943 she was asking: who is useful or useless to society? Who has the power to decide?

  In July 1943 Beauvoir and Sartre moved to L’hôtel La Louisiane, 60 rue de Seine, where they lived (in separate rooms) until the end of 1946. They had left Montparnasse for Saint-Germain-des-Prés. And in the same month Beauvoir started an essay discussing Sartre’s view of freedom and contrasting it with her own, putting to paper the objections that she had ‘upheld against him in various conversations’.2 From this point onwards we have more than ‘constant conversation’, diaries and letters to inform our picture of their intellectual exchange, because Beauvoir’s voice became a public voice, available in print. And it was not just used to advertise Sartre’s ideas, but to criticize them.

  Well before the war Beauvoir and Sartre had discussed the ethics of their relationships with Olga and Wanda. Was it immoral to lie to someone whose happiness was false? Should she feel remorse for what she wasn’t telling Olga? Or for what Olga wasn’t telling Bost? In She Came to Stay, Beauvoir explored the philosophical problem that had preoccupied her since the 1920s: ‘the opposition of self and other’. Ostensibly it was a book about the ‘trio’, in which a couple, Pierre and Françoise, invite a younger ‘guest’ into their relationship: Xavière. She provokes jealousy in Françoise, who becomes so frustrated that the only escape she can imagine is to murder her rival. Dedicated ‘To Olga Kosakiewicz’, the book’s epigraph from Hegel reads: ‘Each consciousness seeks the death of the other’.

  But there is a fourth character: a tall, green-eyed man with dark hair – Xavière’s boyfriend, Gerbert. ‘I’m always fond of what belongs to me,’ Xavière tells Françoise: ‘It’s restful to have someone entirely to yourself.’3 But in the novel Xavière does not have Gerbert to herself; he is also sleeping with Françoise. It’s hard to imagine that Olga wouldn’t have had suspicions when she read the book: in She Came to Stay Françoise and Gerbert go on a hiking trip together, and end up becoming lovers one night in a barn. When they return to Paris he tells Françoise he has never loved another woman like he loves her. And the reason for Xavière’s murder is not the jealousy and frustration provoked by the trio with Pierre – but rather because Xavière discovers Gerbert’s letters to Françoise. Françoise, like the man who killed his cab driver because he was too embarrassed not to have the fare, would rather kill Xavière than face her accusing gaze.

  But Bost and Beauvoir insisted that this part of the novel – unlike the vivid conversations that echoed the real-life voices of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Olga – was fiction. In The Prime of Life Beauvoir felt no need to hide that she wrote the ending as catharsis: she thought that by killing Olga on paper she would purge herself of unwanted emotion and cleanse their friendship of its murkier memories.4 For a long time this explanation would lead readers to assume that jealousy was the demon she wanted to exorcize. But in light of the publication of her correspondence with Bost in 2004, there is a new possibility: guilt. For the duration of Olga’s life, she never knew that Beauvoir and Bost were having an affair.

  Just as Simone had recoiled from her reflection in the Kosakiewicz sisters’ eyes, Françoise struggles with the question of the relationship between herself and others:

  ‘It’s almost impossible to believe that other people are conscious beings, aware of their own inward feelings, as we ourselves are aware of our own,’ said Françoise. ‘To me, it’s terrifying when we grasp that. We get the impression of no longer being anything but a figment of someone else’s mind.’5

  The novel brought mixed responses: some thought it was scandalous; others read it as a courageous rejection of the Vichy dogma of ‘work, family, country’. But philosophically Beauvoir’s novel presents two possible modes of relating to other people: the first involves acknowledging that others, like oneself, are conscious beings with rich and vulnerable inner lives. The second way refuses to see this, and refuses the possibility of reciprocity, taking it for granted that others just are either things for my use or obstacles in my way.

  This is important because this second approach closely resembles something Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness, and the next period in Beauvoir’s life has long been reported as one of postwar fame, jazz and partying rather than intense philosophical productivity borne, in part, out of disagreement with Sartre. To understand why she has been so misunderstood, why she was later frustrated to be reduced to ‘Notre Dame de Sartre’, and why she had to walk a tightrope attempting to avoid (as best she could) ad feminam dismissals of her feminist work, we have to look more closely at precisely what it was about Sartre’s philosophy that Beauvoir thought was wrong.

  The British writer Angela Carter once wrote that ‘every thinking woman in the Western World’ must have asked herself, at one time or another: ‘why is a nice girl like Simone wasting her time sucking up to a boring old fart like J-P?’ Only love, Carter continued, ‘could make you proud to be an also-ran’.6 But in 1943 Sartre was worse than a boring old fart: he was an extremely pessimistic philosopher, with very low expectations of humanity even by the standards of extremely pessimistic philosophers. He thought that all human beings want to dominate each other, and that all relationships are conflictual – so conflictual that love is impossible (or, in his own words, an ‘unrealisable ideal’). And Beauvoir was not an ‘also-ran’. She was a philosopher who disagreed with him. She was also, as it happens, a woman whose own life would be wielded as a weapon against her – but that hadn’t started yet.

  In Being and Nothingness Sartre wrote that in all interpersonal relationships, one person plays the dominator and the other person plays the dominated. One person is a ‘subject’, seeing the world from his own point of view, and the other is the ‘object’, who internalizes the view
of the person who has ‘mastered’ them. Sometimes we like to rule others, Sartre thought, and sometimes we like to be ruled by them. But we never engage with them on level ground.

  Sartre wasn’t the only Western philosopher to think these kinds of thoughts; Hegel wrote a famous passage on the ‘master/slave dialectic’ that said something similar, and long before him Saint Augustine thought all human beings had a libido dominandi – a drive to dominate – and that this was the source of much human suffering. Because Beauvoir clearly studied Hegel during the war (taking solace in solitude and thinking) and made Hegelian themes central to her novel She Came to Stay, some scholars have gone so far as to claim that Sartre stole many of the central ideas of Being and Nothingness from her, and that if this was a story about two male philosophers, instead of a man and a woman, Beauvoir’s ideas would have received the recognition Sartre’s gained.7 For although Being and Nothingness was published in June and She Came to Stay was published in August; Sartre had read She Came to Stay while he was on military leave – so he encountered her ideas in fictional form before writing his in philosophy. And one of the philosophical distinctions Sartre introduces in Being and Nothingness is a divide between ‘being-for-itself’ and ‘being-for-others’, which (once you get beneath the jargon) looks strikingly like the distinction Beauvoir made in her student diaries in 1927 between the view from within and the view from without, the ‘for myself’ and ‘for others’.

  But claiming that Sartre ‘stole’ Beauvoir’s ideas is problematic, both historically and philosophically. Historically, it is problematic because their relationship was one of ‘constant conversation’ and mutual (if not exactly reciprocal) intellectual encouragement. And philosophically, it is problematic because both Beauvoir and Sartre were steeped in French philosophical sources that neither of them bothered to cite in their works, let alone claimed to own. An additional difficulty arises because initially Beauvoir was the kind of philosopher who thought that what mattered about a philosophy was not who had the idea; what mattered was whether it was true or not. In the 1940s, she would be very critical of the concept of ‘possession’.

  But she was also very critical of Sartre. Later in life she would realize that the idea of possession plays an important role in the perpetuation of power, and who is remembered by posterity. Being and Nothingness contained a concept that Beauvoir and Sartre had discussed together throughout the 1930s. It was present in When Things of the Spirit Come First and went on to inform Beauvoir’s later work in powerful ways. But it was Sartre who would become famous for it: bad faith.

  In her memoirs Beauvoir said that ‘we’ discussed bad faith when describing the emergence of this concept in their thinking in the 1930s. As Sartre described it in Being and Nothingness, bad faith was a way of fleeing from freedom, which consists in over-identifying with either ‘facticity’ or ‘transcendence’. Facticity stands for all of the contingent and unchosen things about you such as the time or place in which you were born, the colour of your skin, your sex, your family, your education, your body. And ‘transcendence’ refers to the freedom to go beyond these features to values: this concerns what you choose to make of the facts, how you shape yourself through your actions.

  For Sartre, bad faith arises when facticity and transcendence are out of joint in a way that makes an individual think they are determined to be a certain way. He gave the famous example of a waiter: he is in bad faith if he thinks his facticity – i.e., the fact that he is a waiter – determines who he is. The waiter is always free to choose another path in life; to deny this is to deny his transcendence. On the other hand, if the waiter thinks it doesn’t matter that he is a waiter when he applies to be a CEO, then he is in bad faith for the opposite reason: he has failed to recognize the limits of his facticity.

  This might sound trivial – but what if you replace the word ‘waiter’ with the word ‘Jew’ or ‘woman’ or ‘black’? Human history is full of examples of people reducing other people to a single dimension of their facticity and, in doing so, failing to recognize their full humanity. In 1943, it was crystal clear that that habit did not only belong to humanity’s past. But Sartre didn’t make this ethical move in Being and Nothingness. Nor did he give a satisfactory answer to the ethical problem of objectifying others there. Rather, he said that we must not take ourselves to be determined by our facticity – because whatever the conditions of our existence, we are free to make the most of them.

  Already in the 1930s Beauvoir was convinced that this was wrong. Sartre thought human beings were free because whatever their situation they were free to ‘transcend’ facticity by choosing between different ways of responding to it. Her challenge was this: ‘What sort of transcendence could a woman shut up in a harem achieve?’8 There is a difference between having freedom (in the sense of being theoretically able to make a choice) and having the power to choose in the actual situation where your choice has to be made. She would go on to articulate her philosophical criticisms in two philosophical essays in the 1940s, Pyrrhus and Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, but in the meantime she had to deal with the fallout from She Came to Stay in her personal life.

  Before the publication of Beauvoir’s first novel her mother knew little enough about her daughter’s life to think her ‘a good girl’. But, although after the publication of She Came to Stay ‘public rumour destroyed her illusions’, it also made her daughter a well-known writer, so Françoise was simultaneously shocked by Beauvoir’s books and flattered by their success. And since Simone was the family’s breadwinner, her success also brought some benefits to everyone.9

  She Came to Stay has been read in three ways since its publication: before Sartre and Beauvoir became famous in 1945 it was read as a study of bohemian Parisian life; later, it was taken to be a roman à clef of their ‘trio’ relationship; and more recently it has been read by feminists as a portrait of three non-traditional women in an tyrannical traditional world. It is easy to find passages in the book where its protagonist, Françoise, seems to speak for Simone: Françoise does not like to waste ‘precious working hours’ on feeling upset about Pierre’s other women.10 She paints herself as ‘the faithful sort’,11 who is uninterested in romantic affairs that have ‘no continuity’.12 Françoise ‘loathed the thought’ of being ‘a woman who takes’;13 she wants her seduction of Gerbert to be reciprocal because of ‘a deep-seated philosophical commitment to her own freedom’.14 But – where Pierre is concerned – she also asks herself whether she is in bad faith. The novel is punctuated by passages in which Françoise reflects on her relationship with Pierre – passages which have led to speculation about Beauvoir’s feelings about the Olga chapter of the Sartre–Beauvoir pact:

  She had loved him too blindly, and for too long, for what she received from him; but she had promised herself to love him for himself, and even in that condition of freedom of which he was now availing himself to escape from her, she would not stumble over the first obstacle.15

  Her readers wondered: was this Beauvoir’s voice speaking through Françoise’s? Or the pure fruit of her imagination? In the novel, Françoise declares to Xavière: ‘You think that you’re something ready-made once and for all, but I don’t think so. I think you make yourself what you are of your own free will.’16 In making her fiction resemble the facts of her life – closely enough to provoke curiosity, at any rate – Beauvoir left herself open to being ‘made’ into many things by her readers.

  Beauvoir herself encouraged the readings of some passages in this novel as autobiographical. Beauvoir’s seduction of Bost, she told Francis and Gontier ‘happened exactly as I tell it in L’invitée [She Came to Stay]’ (although she didn’t give his name, of course).17 Beauvoir recounted her seduction of Bost in her letters to Sartre, so after his death (and Olga’s) and the letters’ publication it was possible to compare Beauvoir’s letters with the novel’s scenes. The letters to Sartre breezily present an unexpected sexual encounter: ‘I slept with Little Bost three days ago. It was I
who suggested it, of course. […] Both of us had been wanting it.’18 In the novel, by contrast, Françoise describes ‘a vague yearning’ that accumulated over days until it became ‘choking desire’; because Gerbert felt ‘beyond reach’, she was held back from taking any initiative.19

  Before publication the novel’s working title was Légitime défense – self-defence.20 Looking back on it from a distance, Beauvoir thought that she had adopted a position of resolute blindness to others in the 1930s, that ‘protected by the gaze of Sartre, she wanted to forget that there were other eyes that saw her’. When she was forced to admit this, it was intensely uncomfortable – and it was this feeling of discomfort that she ‘pushed to paroxysm’ in She Came to Stay.21 She was no longer willing to be wilfully blind; as a philosophy to live by, this was a dead end.

  After the successes of 1943, Beauvoir and Sartre’s social scene began to expand rapidly. They were friendly with Albert Camus, and through him with other writers in the resistance including Raymond Queneau and Michel Leiris. Monsieur and Madame Leiris lived in an apartment on the Quai des Grands-Augustins; Beauvoir met Picasso there. La Louisiane was a much better hotel than any of their previous homes, so she began to invite people for hospitality at hers, too. She had parties with Leiris and Queneau, Camus, Sorokine and her boyfriend, Bourla, as well as Bost, Olga and Wanda. In the spring of 1944 they launched a series of all-night parties they called ‘fiestas’. The writer Georges Bataille hosted the first of these; they all saved coupons so they could amass enough food for a wartime feast, with dancing, singing and drinking. Bost hosted one at his mother’s house at Taverny; Simone Jollivet and Dullin hosted another in their apartment in Paris.