Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  Then she hopped on a plane to Chicago on 10 May, arriving mid-morning. Simone and Nelson would call this day their ‘anniversary’. The next day he put a cheap Mexican ring on Beauvoir’s finger; she said she would wear it all her life.

  Simone and Nelson had a week together before she boarded the plane for Paris on 17 May; she wrote him her first letter from a layover at Newfoundland. She had cried in the taxi on the way to the airport but the tears were sweet. ‘We shall never have to wake up, because it was not a dream; it is a wonderful true story which is only beginning.’31 Her first letter was addressed to her ‘precious, beloved Chicago man’.32 Before long he would be ‘her dearest American dilemma’.33

  She hoped Paris’s beauty would vanquish her sadness, and the day after she arrived she was happy to see it. But the day after that Paris was grey and dead – or maybe, she wrote to him, it was her heart that had died to it. Vanetti was still there. And Algren was not: she wrote to him entreating him to come, as soon as either of them got the money. She felt painfully at sea, with her body in Paris and her heart somewhere over the Atlantic.

  On 21 May Beauvoir left the capital for the country, taking books and notebooks with her, to Saint-Lambert, a village in the Chevreuse valley. A mile away there were some ruins of a monastery, Port-Royal des Champs, where the philosopher Pascal lived for a while and the poet Racine was a pupil. In Paris she had none of Algren and half of Sartre; she needed solitude to regain her serenity. But Sartre had promised her two weeks – he, after all, wanted to see her too – so he divided his time between Paris and Saint-Lambert. Vanetti resented Beauvoir’s presence, and after the two weeks Sartre went back to Vanetti in Paris. Beauvoir stayed on in the country. She made occasional visits to Paris for work for Les Temps Modernes or to see friends.

  Figure 9 Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren in Chicago, 1948.

  She was exhausted and probably depressed; she spent more time than usual sleeping. Sometimes she walked along the path to Port-Royal, which was decorated with a ‘very bad’ poem by Racine praising nature for its freedom, clarity and truth – and the ‘fecund solitude’ of this countryside. And she wrote to Algren, wearing his ring and using a red stylo he gave her. She didn’t usually wear rings, she told him, and her friends had noticed: ‘everybody in Paris was very amazed’.34

  In Saint-Lambert at the end of May she re-read what she had written at the end of 1946 about women – the early material for The Second Sex – and had one of those days when she didn’t understand why anybody bothered to write anything.35 One of those days turned into a few days, and by 6 June she decided that she couldn’t do ‘the book about women’ until she’d written about her travels. So she turned her mind to writing America Day by Day and slowly began to find her stride again.

  Beauvoir’s letters to Algren reveal much about her daily life: what she was writing, whom she saw at her publisher’s cocktail parties, etc. She wanted him to learn French and included paragraphs of prose for him to translate: they were the best bits, she told him, so he had an incentive to learn. Beauvoir told Algren about the way Myrdal’s American Dilemma and conversations with Richard Wright had inspired her book on women.36 This book, she told Algren, made her ‘begin again to think about the book I began about women’s situation. I should like to write a book as important as this big one about Negroes’.37 She wanted to do for women what Myrdal had done for African-Americans, showing the ways that racism and sexism were rooted in the contingencies of culture – that with women, too, people were hiding behind alibis.

  But her letters were rather quiet on the subject of Sartre, and even quieter on Vanetti. In July Vanetti left France by boat, from Le Havre. Once again Vanetti made an ultimatum: if Beauvoir came back a next time, it would be for good. Sartre felt torn, but Beauvoir was feeling divided, too; it had been two months since she got back to France and ever since she had had a lingering disquiet. By July Algren had written that when she came back to Chicago he wanted her to stay forever. So on 23 July she replied that she could not. She loved him but could not give her life to him. She didn’t want to lie to him, and her heart had been aching with the question: ‘Is it right to give something of oneself without being ready to give everything’?38 Whatever happens, she said, she knew she couldn’t give him everything, and although she felt torn and anxious about this she wanted it out in the open.

  He wrote back with a proposal of marriage. He had been planning to ask her in flesh and blood, but her letter made him resort to pen and ink.

  They wanted to be together but they both knew there was a problem: he didn’t want to leave Chicago; she didn’t want to leave Paris. He’d been married before and already felt as though she was more his wife than his ‘real’ wife of seven years had been. So they agreed on a less conventional approach as their next step: she would come to see him for a while and return to Paris. Then he would visit her in France.

  In August she travelled to Copenhagen and Sweden with Sartre. And on 6 September she boarded a plane to Chicago. Sartre encouraged her to go, even offering her the money for the trip.

  When she got there, Algren took her on a tour of the city:

  I wanted to show her that the USA was not a nation of prosperous bourgeois, all driving toward ownership of a home in the suburbs and membership in a country club. I wanted to show her the people who drove, just as relentlessly, toward the penitentiary and jail. I introduced her to stickup men, pimps, baggage thieves, whores and heroin addicts. Their drive was downward, always downward. I knew many such that year. I took her on a tour of the County Jail and showed her the electric chair.39

  Beauvoir took notes for her book; they sat in Chicago pizzerias and drank Chianti. When the visit came to a close they planned to see each other again in the spring of 1948, to travel for four months. But even so, after she left him she wrote to him in broken English that something ‘broke up in her heart’ when they said goodbye. He still wanted to marry her, but she told Algren that although she would give up much to be with him, she would not give up her work. ‘I could not live just for happiness and love, I could not give up writing and working in the only place where my writing and work may have a meaning.’40 Beauvoir’s philosophy assigned pride of place to the concept of the situation: she thought the cultural context of individual lives and individual works mattered – possibly so much that she couldn’t see that her insights were powerful enough to illuminate places other than France.

  When Beauvoir got back to Paris at the end of September 1947 Sartre had found a new fling; Vanetti’s grip on him was easing. The new interest was a 23-year-old American journalist called Sally Swing Shelley, who was in town to cover Princess Elizabeth’s visit. When that affair fizzled out Swing would reflect that he treated women like drawers in a dresser, opening whichever one he wanted to whenever he wanted to. But at the time she was crazy about him.41

  In November of 1947 Beauvoir published her second philosophical essay, The Ethics of Ambiguity, further developing her philosophy of freedom. In Pyrrhus and Cinéas she had written that everyone must decide which place they occupy in the world. In The Ethics of Ambiguity she returned to Sartre’s idea of invulnerable, autonomous freedom and the theme of her essay ‘An Eye for an Eye’. After the war she had learned about the atrocities of Buchenwald and Dachau; like so many in her generation she wondered how human beings were capable of such inhumanity. The Nazis, she said, systematically abjected the men they wanted to destroy so that their fellow men no longer saw them as human, as free, conscious subjects.42

  In Pyrrhus and Cinéas Beauvoir had written that every person needs the freedom of other people, and in a sense we always want it because it is only the freedom of others that prevents us from atrophying into thinking of ourselves as things, as objects.43 She argued that evil consists in denying freedom, whether one’s own or another’s. To fight evil, therefore, we have to recognize that affirming our own freedom entails responsibility to shape the present and future in such a way that we and others will
be free.

  This is not easy. It is much more comfortable to exist in a state of childlike dependence, taking our roles in the world to be foreordained. As children we don’t know who we will become – and, for a time, this is developmentally appropriate. Young worlds are furnished with regular and reassuring features that we hardly notice enough to question: girls wear dresses, bedtime’s at eight. But some adults relate to features of the world with the same passive acceptance: Jews wear stars, curfew’s at nine.

  Beauvoir thought that remaining childlike in this passive way is an act of bad faith. To become ethical we have to make what she called (like Sartre) an original choice. We have to choose what we want to be – not once and for all but over and over again, ‘moment by moment for an entire lifetime’.44 Again she criticized the concept of freedom put forward by Sartre in Being and Nothingness (although by now, under her influence, he was beginning to retreat from it). In Beauvoir’s view, no one can be free alone: ‘A man who seeks being far from other men, seeks it against them at the same time that he loses himself.’45 To Sartre’s slogan ‘man is what he makes of himself’, Beauvoir replied that we don’t make ourselves alone or from scratch. ‘We can only be who we are because of the others in our lives.’46

  The Ethics of Ambiguity was published in English in 1976, at a time when there was no translation of Pyrrhus and Cinéas and only a partial translation of The Second Sex. So it is important to pause briefly on the way this work developed Beauvoir’s earlier philosophy and laid foundations for what she would go on to do. She was still thinking about the idea of a ‘situation’, and how other people shape our lives. In The Ethics of Ambiguity she argued that in order to be free ethically you must use your freedom to embrace the ties that hold you to others. She calls this taking up the ‘appeal’ or ‘call’ of the other’s freedom. Every human being longs for her life to be seen truly, and to matter not just because it is a life, but because it is her life. We all want to be ‘justified’, to feel that our lives have meaning. But to listen to the call of freedom in ourselves without hearing the call of freedom for others is solipsism: a kind of spiritual death, a refusal that stultifies our own becoming. Only with others can we bring certain projects, values – and a changed world – into being.

  In Being and Nothingness Sartre included a footnote where he said that he would write an ethics of ‘deliverance and salvation’ as an antidote to its bleak and conflictual account of human existence. But although Sartre wrote notes for a book on ethics he never published it during his lifetime – and he was not a man who was reluctant to publish (the Economist once calculated his output at twenty published pages per day over his working life). Today, Beauvoir’s ethics are beginning to be recognized as ‘the fulfilment of Sartre’s unkept promise’.47 But in 1947, a book by Francis Jeanson appeared called Sartre and the Problem of Morality. One reviewer wrote that here ‘for the first time’ readers could see what an ethics of freedom could be for itself – ‘if one disregards the interesting Ethics of Ambiguity of S. de Beauvoir’.48 He gave no reason why it should be disregarded, so we are left wondering whether he had any.

  In any case, it is clear that by 1948 Beauvoir was being dismissed in philosophical reviews, on the one hand, and irritated by the popularizing demands of ‘incompetent’ ‘nonspecialists’ on the other – how could they expect her to explain existentialism in a sentence? At one and the same time she was excluded by the philosophical elite and being philosophically elitist. Beauvoir wanted to be an engaged writer, which is why she wrote fiction and magazine articles as well as philosophy. But no one could reasonably expect to understand Kant or Hegel after reading a single slogan; why did they think this would be possible with existentialism?49 In her view, understanding existentialism required understanding the long philosophical tradition on which it rested: at this stage, in her mind, existentialist philosophy was not something for everyone; existentialist literature, by contrast, could reveal to readers an existentialist perspective on the world and appeal to their freedoms by different means.

  In January 1948 Beauvoir submitted America Day by Day to the publisher, with a dedication to Ellen and Richard Wright. And then it was time to focus on her essay on women. She and Algren were planning to travel together from May to September, so she wanted to write as much as she could before the trip. While Beauvoir was away with Algren Sartre had planned for Vanetti to come and stay in Paris (he would have to stop seeing Sally Swing for a while; Dolores didn’t know).

  But Beauvoir started having doubts about being away for so long – not just because of Sartre, but because she was planning to release instalments of The Second Sex between May and July. She talked to Sartre and decided to cut the trip down to two months, but she didn’t have the heart to tell Algren by letter. Better to bring it up in person.

  Beauvoir travelled down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and then South from there to the Yucatan, Guatemala, Vera Cruz and Mexico City. She and Algren made their way down the Mississippi on a riverboat, drinking whiskey on the deck. She loved the colours and textures of the cloth in Guatemala, buying blankets, curtains and fabric to take back to her dressmaker.50 And she kept finding reasons not to tell Nelson that she was leaving early until one day, on the journey from Mexico City to Morelia, she clumsily made the announcement that she had to return on 14 July. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said. But the next day he didn’t want to explore Morelia with her. At Cholula, Puebla and Taxco, too, he was withdrawn. What was wrong, she asked? Mexico was getting on his nerves.

  Eventually he told her he didn’t feel the same as he had. They got back to New York and one night Beauvoir blurted out, ‘I can leave tomorrow.’ But he didn’t want her to leave, saying instead, ‘I’m ready to marry you this very moment.’51 It was an agonizing situation: neither of them felt ready for a transatlantic transplant and each of them regretted the other’s reluctance. When Beauvoir left for Paris on 14 July 1948 she thought she might never see Algren again.

  Back in Paris, she threw herself into work. She had not yet earned the means to have a private study of her own, so she often wrote at Les Deux Magots when she was not writing at Sartre’s. The extracts of work in progress from The Second Sex were getting interesting reactions – the first one was on ‘woman and myths’, and in it Beauvoir discussed the way women were presented in the works of some respected novelists such as Henri de Montherlant, Paul Claudel and André Breton. She wrote to Algren that the book needed another year of work before it would ‘be good’. But in the meantime, ‘to her delight’, she ‘had heard that the portion published in Les Temps Modernes, has enraged some men. It’s a chapter devoted to the stupid myths about women that men cherish and the ridiculous and kitschy poetry they produce from it. [These men] seem to have been affected at their most sensitive point’.52

  The two of them still had their own sensitive point to resolve; Algren still wanted more of her. She wrote to him in August explaining that she’d always said she couldn’t be his. She knew Sartre’s role in her life bothered Algren. ‘I told you already how I care for him,’ she wrote:

  but it was rather deep friendship than love; love was not very successful. Chiefly because he does not care much for sexual life. He is a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed. I soon felt it, though I had no experience; and little by little, it seemed useless, even indecent, to go on being lovers. We dropped it after about eight or ten years rather unsuccessful in this way.53

  Eventually Algren’s letters grew warmer. He sent parcels with books and whiskey (hidden in a bag of flour). He was coming to Paris for a visit in May.

  He read The Blood of Others and sent a long letter with a note from an American publisher who thought it wasn’t hopeful enough, that it was full of characters ‘who cannot be saved’. Beauvoir replied that the French papers also wanted existentialist novels to be ‘heroical and smiling’. But for herself, she wrote: ‘I like shadows in a book, as there is always a kind of dimness in life, but maybe I put in too much shadow?’
Algren didn’t comment on the quantity of shadows, but he did say that there was too much philosophy. Maybe he was right, she thought – but even so, she replied, ‘that is my genuine way of feeling; when anything happens to me I am always ratiocinating about it inside myself […] [F]eeling, events, and philosophy, it would be rather unnatural for me if I put it away’.54 She was deep in the process of writing the book on women so couldn’t think about writing another novel yet, but she knew already that she wanted to try.

  She was working hard – reading and writing eight hours by day, eating too little and drinking too much by night. She wrote to Nelson that maybe she did things ‘a little too crazily’, whether it was work, travel, or love: ‘But that is my way. I have [sic] rather not do things at all as doing them mildly.’55 She had a way of weaving memories into her letters to show the way past moments lived on in the present, and wrote to Nelson to describe her excitement and impatience about some new clothes she was having made from the Guatemalan fabric they bought together:

  I am having two beautiful things made with the Guatemala embroidered stuff: just the top of a dress, to wear with a black skirt. I stayed two whole hours standing up with five people around me to fix it nicely. I got mad, but I wanted it to be really pretty and I went to a good dressmaker. […] (Remember when you bargained so cleverly the blue thing in Quetzaltenango?)56

  In October of 1948 Beauvoir left hotel life behind her and moved into a small fifth-floor apartment on the rue de la Bûcherie. It was near the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, a fifteen-minute walk from Sartre’s. She decorated it with red curtains and bought white armchairs; Giacometti had given her some bronze lamps he designed. And from the rafters she hung colourful decorations from Mexico and Guatemala. Now she had somewhere of her own to work in the mornings, she could cook her own meals at home, and she had somewhere to welcome Algren. She wrote to him in December that she was reading the Kinsey report, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, and wished that an equivalent work existed for women.57