Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  Beauvoir, meanwhile, gave lectures in Tunis and Algiers. She couldn’t believe the ‘wild success’ of existentialism: in Algeria people came in droves. But she missed his letters, and when she got back to Paris, Bost was in Italy, Sorokine had left for America, Sartre was still in New York. Even so, people were starting to talk about Sartre and Vanetti. He was going around calling her the most wonderful woman: his biographer, Annie Cohen-Solal, wrote of this period that she didn’t know whether to think his behaviour ‘mad, perverse, cynical, opportunistic, cruel, sadistic, or simply clumsy’.43

  Despite the fact that none of Sartre’s books had been published in English, in New York Sartre had met with much-publicized fanfare. TIME magazine ran an article about ‘the literary lion’ of Paris who’d ‘bounced into Manhattan’. It described Being and Nothingness as the ‘Bible’ of existentialism, and Simone de Beauvoir as its ‘foremost disciple’.44

  If Beauvoir had known what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic, she might have felt justified in fearing the worst. The face Sartre showed Beauvoir described him as enjoying New York and an American love affair but also finding himself ‘scared’ by Vanetti’s love for him: he wrote as though he were keeping Vanetti’s passion at arm’s length.45 But in fact Vanetti was pursuing a divorce. Columbia University had offered Sartre a two-year post and he had asked Vanetti to marry him.46

  Sartre declined the post, and Vanetti’s divorce was taking time, so she and Sartre agreed that he would return to France. They would spend more time together later in the year. And after that, who knew?

  Back in Paris that February, Beauvoir started working on The Ethics of Ambiguity and published an article in Les Temps Modernes entitled ‘An Eye for an Eye’. By this point after the War the Holocaust’s horrors were no longer hidden, and ‘An Eye for an Eye’ is a subtle discussion of punishment and revenge, responsibility and forgiveness. She wrote that human beings are fundamentally ambiguous: both subject and object, both consciousness and matter. ‘Absolute evil’, she said, involves refusing to acknowledge that others are subjects, instead seeing them as objects that can be tortured and killed.47

  On 15 March Sartre left New York for Paris. When he got back his conversation was peppered with ‘Dolores-this’ and ‘Dolores-that’. Beauvoir found it hard to concentrate on her work; after a couple of hours she got a headache or felt distracted.48 In April 1946 she was upset: did Sartre have a harmony with Dolores that she would never have with him? She wanted to rid herself of the uncertainty that plagued her, and the question burst out of her before she could choose her moment: ‘Frankly, who means the most to you: Dolores or me?’ They were on their way to lunch with friends, there wasn’t much time. He replied that Dolores meant ‘an enormous amount’, but ‘I am with you’.49 She sat through the meal with her heart sinking. Was he with her out of faithfulness to the pact or because he wanted to be? After lunch Sartre explained: they had always taken actions to be more valuable than words, so why not do so now? He was with her.

  She thought she believed him. But in May of 1946 Beauvoir was still working on The Ethics of Ambiguity, and after the shock of seeing Sartre infatuated with Vanetti she struggled. She continued to read philosophy, studying the concept of mediation in Hegel. She knew that she worked too hard sometimes, writing that there were days when she felt like a fish washed up on the rocks ‘dying and drained’.50 But drained or not, she delivered: on 14 May she handed over four articles for Les Temps Modernes; the introduction to The Ethics of Ambiguity was published on 1 June.51

  The estrangement she felt from Sartre was made worse by the fact that they were now too famous to write in cafés. Sartre’s stepfather had died the previous year while he was in America, and his mother had asked him whether he would consider sharing an apartment with her. He said yes, and in May 1946 he moved into the fourth floor of 42, rue Bonaparte. It had windows looking over the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés; from his study he could see the terrace of Les Deux Magots and the intersection with the rue de Rennes.

  Sartre had re-entered his mother’s bourgeois world, fake Louis XVI furniture and all. But the apartment was comfortable, and for the first time ever he started to collect a library. Madame Mancy bought his clothes, and her maid, Eugénie, did Sartre’s laundry. Beauvoir and Madame Mancy had still not exactly warmed to each other: now Sartre’s mother was describing these new arrangements as ‘her third marriage’.52

  Soon after Sartre moved in they had word that Olga – who was due to perform in Sartre’s play, The Flies – was ill. She had tuberculosis in both lungs. She was 29. She went to a hospital in Clichy, the Beaujon, where she had the operation that saved her life. Bost had just published a book of his own but he had little time to enjoy it; he visited Olga daily and Beauvoir often accompanied him.

  Sartre’s situation changed in another way shortly after his return from America. He had a letter from a keen student from the École Normale. Jean Cau was 21 years old and wondered: would Sartre like a secretary? Initially Sartre laughed at the idea. But then he came round to it and employed him for three hours each morning. Cau worked for Sartre for eleven years, writing the letters Sartre didn’t want to and, eventually, managing Sartre’s finances – an unenviable task. Madame Mancy let him in at 10 a.m. each morning and he began opening Sartre’s mail. Sartre arrived at work around the same time – and then he worked ‘like a mule’. At 1 p.m. Sartre would leave for lunch with Beauvoir or another woman and Cau would leave for the day. At 4.30 p.m. Sartre returned to the apartment with Beauvoir, who would set up to work on a bridge table in Sartre’s study, and stay there until 8 p.m.

  In the period from 1946 to 1949 Sartre – now with his mother managing his household, and domestic and secretarial staff – produced forty published works in less than four years. And Beauvoir, of course, was his editorial advisor; they still consulted each other about all of their books in progress. Beauvoir’s labour was not exactly unpaid in these endeavours – she had her own income from her writing and editorial work, and her letters suggest that they related to Sartre’s income as joint income (although once they had it they often gave it away).53 But Beauvoir was supporting her family; she did not have the same means for private space and private staff.

  For many readers of Beauvoir’s autobiography, the Vanetti years have made it hard to resist wondering whether it would have been a relief for Beauvoir to end her ‘necessary’ relationship with Sartre. It was public knowledge that the pact had been made over fifteen years before. But it was not public knowledge that Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre was not conventional erotic love. When she wrote in Force of Circumstance that she ‘possessed an incommunicable knowledge of [her] bond with Sartre’ many simply assumed that this bond fitted the common narratives of women’s lives – namely, the pursuit of a central place in a man’s life, through licit marriage or illicit liaisons rather than an intense intellectual friendship.54

  Beauvoir had started to see Merleau-Ponty again from time to time; he was going to take over the day-to-day editing of Les Temps Modernes, a role nominally held by Sartre. She had lunch with him on 6 May and they discussed Sartre’s philosophy, which Merleau-Ponty thought failed to do justice to the intricacies of reality. This made her want to go back to writing her essay on ambiguity, Beauvoir wrote in her diary, but she felt too tired and didn’t know why.55

  In June of 1946 she published an early version of the ‘Introduction’ to The Ethics of Ambiguity in Labyrinthe. She criticized philosophers for fleeing reality in ‘rational metaphysics and consoling ethics’: ‘as long as there have been men who live, they have experienced the tragic ambiguity of their condition, and as long as there have been philosophers who think, most of them have tried to mask it’.56 What was needed was an ethics that looked the ambiguity of human life in the face instead of giving people alibis.

  By the end of the month she had finished The Ethics of Ambiguity and she was wondering what to write next. She sat with blank paper, looking vacantly at it. A
friend, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, saw her and said she looked ‘wild’; she explained that she wanted to write but didn’t know what to write. He told her to ‘write anything’. She had liked Michel Leiris’s book Manhood and was inspired to write about herself: an idea began to take shape in her mind. So she made some notes and then chewed them over with Sartre. Her question was: ‘What has it meant to me to be a woman?’

  In Beauvoir’s memoirs she described her conversation with Sartre as a revelation. At first, the account in Force of Circumstance says, she thought that being a woman hadn’t meant much at all; she didn’t feel inferior and she claimed that ‘no one had ever said to me: “You think that way because you’re a woman”; my femininity had never been irksome to me in any way’.57 Sartre suggested that perhaps she should think about it further: she wasn’t raised like a boy would have been. So she did look into the question, and it was then that she discovered just how much the world was a masculine world: her childhood was shaped by many myths, and those myths shaped boys and girls differently. So she put her autobiographical idea on a back burner and instead dived headlong into researching ‘the myths of femininity’, spending hours reading at the Bibliothèque Nationale. For this work she did not want to focus on her own experience of being a woman, but rather on the condition of ‘woman’. Although The Second Sex contains passages that closely resemble the experiences of Beauvoir and some of her circle, and although she had already voiced criticisms of philosophers’ pretensions to neutrality and universality in her diary in 1941, and her essays and novels throughout the 1940s, she had not fully come to see the extent to which the personal could become political. Philosophers wrote about ‘man’ and ‘the human condition’. But what about ‘woman’? Was there such a thing as ‘the feminine condition’?

  Some have taken this passage in Beauvoir’s memoirs to give too much credit to Sartre for his role in the genesis of The Second Sex. Margaret Simons has pointed out that the idea that Beauvoir had never reflected on being a woman is patently false – it contradicts several passages in her diaries, letters, life and fiction. Given Beauvoir’s deliberateness and her disposition to reflect, some have even argued that her telling of this story was purposefully false. After all, in her teenage years Beauvoir wanted to be one of the pioneers of philosophy so badly that she waged a campaign of silence against her parents; but she also acknowledged that fulfilling this desire meant estrangement from many of the roles traditionally reserved for women.58 The teenage Beauvoir turned to her teacher, Jeanne Mercier, when she struggled to understand how philosophical rationality could coexist with her passionate side; her mentor urged her to see emotions as an integral part of life. In July of 1927 Beauvoir wrote that she wanted to ‘remain a woman’, but to be ‘more masculine by her brain, more feminine by her sensibility’.59

  A little over a decade later, during the war, she was about to turn 32 when she wrote: ‘I feel myself to be a grown woman; I would like to know which one.’60 She had just written to Sartre about an aspect of herself that truly interested her: her ‘femininity’, ‘the manner in which I am and am not of my sex’. ‘This remains to be defined,’ she said, ‘as well as what I expect from my life, my thought, and how I situate myself in the world.’61

  But the notorious passage in Force of Circumstance doesn’t say that Sartre had the idea for the book; she said that her conversation with him was eye-opening. She had already read Leiris, made notes about the project, and then she discussed them with him as she worked on it.62 He was, once again, not the source of her thoughts but their incomparable friend – a conversational catalyst. The concept of the situation is what Beauvoir would later say made The Second Sex so original. She did not see femininity as an ‘essence’ or a ‘nature’ but rather as ‘a situation created by civilizations from certain physiological givens’.63

  In summer of 1946 Beauvoir and Sartre travelled to Switzerland and Italy together. In Geneva Beauvoir gave a talk to students and in Lausanne she gave a public lecture. From Geneva they travelled to Fribourg, Neuchâtel, Basel. Beauvoir was finishing up her third novel, All Men Are Mortal, and Sartre was writing more plays. After their time together Sartre went to spend time with Wanda, and Beauvoir went walking in the Dolomites – again finding the retreat from city life and company restful and restorative. They went to Rome together in October, passing their days peacefully in writing.64

  In December 1946 Beauvoir published All Men Are Mortal. It is very different from Beauvoir’s other novels, with a sweeping historical plot rather than one driven by passionate interiority. It is less well known, perhaps because it lacks any character that could be presumed to be Jean-Paul Sartre. Like The Blood of Others, its narrator – Count Fosca – is male and recounts his story over the space of a single night. But unlike Jean Blomart, Count Fosca is immortal. He was born mortal – in Italy in 1279 – and has witnessed nearly six centuries of now indefinite life. Fosca chose immortality because he believed that with it he could orchestrate lasting changes in history: he would eliminate famine and war by becoming a world dictator, directing everything so that there was peace and prosperity for all on earth.

  Fosca’s own story is woven through significant moments in Europe’s past: medieval Italy, sixteenth-century Germany (in the heat of disputes about Luther and the fallout of giving authority to individual conscience). Whether in the thirteenth century or the sixteenth, he finds war. He wants to reform society to help the poorest, but in each century he encounters resistance. After losing hope in Europe Fosca thinks perhaps the New World will not be tainted by the tradition-enforced savagery of the Old. But when he arrives there he discovers the destruction of the Incas and the exploitation of indigenous South Americans. He is told that ‘the black people of Africa’ and ‘the savages in America’ do not have souls, so their deaths and suffering should not stand between Europeans and their gold.65 Seeing the misery that was justified in the name of the Good led him to doubt the existence of goodness itself.66

  Fosca tells his history to an audience of one: Regina, a narcissistic twentieth-century woman who is enchanted by the idea that she can achieve immortality by being loved by an immortal man. She thinks being loved by Fosca will make her unique among women; when in fact his immortality reduces her to the place of one lover in a potentially limitless line. Mortal authenticity is found in neither Fosca nor Regina, but in another character, Armand, who is content with being committed to his own time. Beauvoir wanted All Men Are Mortal to express the morality of Phyrrus and Cinéas, but as an ‘imaginary experience’ rather than a lesson.67

  The novel’s immortal narrator and historical structure also expressed a theme that Beauvoir would go on to unpack in The Second Sex: ‘that men have always kept in their hands all concrete powers’.68 The women in All Men Are Mortal are, as Elizabeth Fallaize put it, ‘an almost exclusively depressing demonstration of the marginality to which history has largely confined women’.69 We see dependency, forced marriage, women left to die as expendable parts of society. But as history unfolds, in Fosca’s later lovers, in later centuries, we also see women who want to fund science and found universities. With each of them, Fosca asks the question: What does it mean to love?

  Beauvoir had been preoccupied with the problem of history since the early 1940s. After the end of the war, Beauvoir wondered where she should take her stand: with ‘the nihilism of the false prophets’ who declared that the third world war was already beginning, or with ‘the giddiness of the good-timers’? Against contemporary Communists (politically) and against Hegel (philosophically), Beauvoir could not speak of the future of ‘Humanity’ as unified and progressive.70 She had little optimism about history, and used Fosca’s story to express this: ‘Stupid wars, a chaotic economy, useless rebellions, futile massacres, populations unaccompanied by any improvement in the standard of living, everything in this period seemed to me confusion and marking time; I had chosen it for this very reason.’71

  The question this novel asks is not ‘what i
s to be done?’, but ‘can anything be done’?

  11

  American Dilemmas

  On 25 January 1947 Beauvoir boarded a flight to New York for what would be a momentous four months in America. She had always loved English and American novels; after her childhood encounters with Alcott and Eliot she loved Hemingway, Woolf and too many others to list. So she was over the moon when Philippe Soupault, a French journalist and surrealist poet who was teaching at Swarthmore College, arranged a lecture series for her in the United States. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was working for the French cultural embassy at the time, arranged to cover her expenses. Dolores Vanetti was going to Paris to be with Sartre while she was away.

  When she got off the plane the immigration official asked her what the purpose of her stay was. Her visa said lectures; he asked ‘On what?’ Philosophy, she said. At the airport she was met by a woman from the French Cultural Services, who took her for a lobster dinner en route to her midtown hotel. Once the official welcome was over, Beauvoir set off into Manhattan, taking in the sights as she strode through the streets. She’d imagined them many times, but seeing them was surreal: Broadway, Times Square, Wall Street, Lady Liberty. She felt so free here; no one looked at her.1

  She was amazed by New York: people dropped letters down chutes, bought things from machines, and spoke like characters in the movies she and Sartre so loved. Since the 1930s they had both developed a joint and dissonant affection for America and the USSR: they loved jazz, African-American spirituals, the blues, American movies, American novels. But they also thought that America sheltered the most hateful form of capitalist oppression and detested its exploitation of the poor – especially the segregation of blacks and whites. The USSR could not rival America’s artistic attractions, but in the 1930s they admired its social experiment.2