Beauvoir thought that society had spiritual pretensions about sex, and liked that Vadim tried to ‘bring eroticism down to earth’. But he overshot: he dehumanized it.6 He reduced bodies to objects for visual consumption. In real life people are defined by more than their sexuality; our bodies have histories and our erotic lives unfold in situations – situations that include our emotions and our thoughts. But, for some reason, Beauvoir wrote, ‘the male feels uncomfortable if, instead of a doll of flesh and blood, he holds in his arms a conscious being who is sizing him up’.7
Beauvoir’s Lolita Syndrome was critical of the ways that women’s sexual autonomy was denied – and of the ways that men still pursued ‘lordship and mastery’ over women instead of reciprocity. Despite these criticisms, however, this work has been cited in places as prestigious as The New York Times, as recently as 2013, to claim that Beauvoir offered ‘an evangelical defence of the sexual emancipation of the young’, that she herself was an apologist for the pursuit of ‘Lolitas’ to be discussed in the same breath as Jimmy Savile and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. It is surprising that anyone who had read the book in full could come to this conclusion. It is also rather ironic. After all, her point was that men do not like it when women size them up and find them wanting – and so choose younger women, in their dreams and on their screens, to avoid confronting the gaze of a freedom who was confident enough in herself to be ‘the eye that looks’ and speak her mind. The fact that Beauvoir has been misconstrued in this way raises the question: whose interests does it serve to cast her as a sexual libertine who had neither reservations nor regret about the consumption of ‘Lolitas’?
Being sized up by a conscious being can be uncomfortable even when you’re doing it to yourself – and Beauvoir was still hesitating about how to handle the second volume of her autobiography. In January of 1959 she told Nelson that she didn’t feel like writing ‘in this kind of France’.8 During the height of her turmoil about Algeria in 1958 Beauvoir had started keeping journals again – something she hadn’t done since 1946.9
In her private diaries in May 1959 Beauvoir wrote that as a 20-, 30-, and even 50-year-old woman she had ‘never stopped saying thank you to, and asking forgiveness from’ the 5-year-old girl she once was. Her life, she thought, had a certain ‘admirable harmony’. She was doing another of her ‘appraisals’, and under the heading ‘Essential’ she asked the question that had concerned her for decades: what does it mean to love? It perplexed her that at times she had preferred Sartre, ‘his happiness, his work before mine’:
Is there something in me that makes this way the easiest? Is it for me, and for those who love, easiest to love? […] This is the true key, the only, the only problem and crucial point in my life. And precisely because I have never been questioned or questioned myself about it. If anyone was interested in me, whom I would nickname divine: that’s the question, the only one.10
Even pioneers have to walk a long way down some paths before discovering they’re dead ends. In her letters to lovers, Beauvoir used the same effusive language that some Christian mystics used to describe their union with God – ‘union totale’ (with Lanzmann), ‘my absolute’ (with Sartre). But no man could fill the place emptied by God: it was a tall order to expect someone to see her completely – from birth until death, or first sight until final breath – with a gaze of pure love. Even so, by the age of 51 she had made and remade the choice of her 21-year-old self many times, and she decided once more: ‘Sartre is for me the incomparable, the unique one.’11
Again they spent a month together in Rome; Sartre was better now, finishing the play that had nearly killed him the year before. One evening he gave Beauvoir the last act to read. Neither of them minced their words with each other’s work. But this she really didn’t like. Whenever she was disappointed by one of his works she tried first to convince herself that she was wrong not to like it. This made her angry, and led to her becoming even more firmly convinced that she was right. That evening in the Piazza Sant’ Eustacchio she was in a bad mood when he came to join her: she felt let down. He changed it, making the final scene a dialogue between father and son – and she ended up thinking it was the best scene in the play.12 (Once staged, the reaction to the play was much more positive than Sartre expected; after the reviews came in he wrote to Beauvoir ‘Many thanks, my sweet, thanks very much.’13)
Now that Michelle Vian was out of the picture Sartre had reallocated Michelle’s time to another young woman, Arlette Elkaïm. Instead of two hours on a Sunday Arlette had been promoted to two evenings per week. They had had a brief sexual relationship but on the whole his feelings were more paternal than passionate. Before long she became his contingent holiday companion. In September 1959 he left Beauvoir in Milan and travelled with her, but he kept in touch with Beauvoir by letter, reassuring her that he wasn’t drinking too much.14
Lanzmann was coming to meet Beauvoir a week later, on friendly terms. They spent ten days at Menton, where he read her work too and made comments. When she first met him, she reflected, she wasn’t yet ‘ripe for old age’ and felt she could hide from it in his presence. But like it or not, she was becoming older – so she reluctantly came to terms with it. ‘I still had the strength to hate it, but no longer to despair.’15
After Beauvoir delivered the second volume of her memoirs to the publisher, at first untitled, she went back to the Bibliothèque Nationale to start work on the next part. She had already written about much of it in The Mandarins, but she felt that novels didn’t show the contingency of life in the way that autobiographical writing did. Novels are crafted into an artistic whole; life is full of unpredictable and gratuitous events that are not held together by any overarching unity.16
In autumn of 1959 Beauvoir continued working on her own books and spent hours working on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason.17 She wrote prefaces to books on family planning and birth control – she was starting to become a pre-eminent voice on these issues. One preface – to a book entitled The Great Fear of Loving – opens with the question, ‘How do other women do it?’ The ‘it’ in question is not getting pregnant. And Beauvoir’s preface challenges the optimistic claim that women’s rights and possibilities were equal to men’s. They could still not legally and safely control their fertility. So how, Beauvoir asked, ‘in the current economic circumstances, can you succeed in a career, build a happy home, joyfully raise children, be of service to society and achieve self-realization, if at any moment the crushing burdens of a new pregnancy can come upon you?’18
Over the winter she rediscovered music: when she’d had enough of words for the day she spent evenings on her divan with a glass of Scotch and a symphony. She and Sartre often went walking together on Sunday, and lamented the diminishing effects of age on their curiosity. They now had invitations to travel all over the world. Sartre recoiled at the idea of being resigned to anything, so to reassure himself he accepted an invitation to Cuba. They left in the middle of February of 1960; Batista had been ousted scarcely a year earlier and relations between Cuba and the United States were strained. Sartre and Beauvoir wanted to see what the revolution had done for Cuban people. They spent three days with Fidel Castro and watched Sartre’s play, The Respectful Prostitute, at the National Theatre in Havana.19 He took them to see happy crowds, sugar cane, palm fronds, Havana. The atmosphere was hopeful, even joyful. Sartre called it the ‘honeymoon of the revolution’.20
When Beauvoir got back from Cuba on the 20 February Nelson Algren was staying in her apartment.
She was nervous about seeing him; The Mandarins had been published in America in May of 1956, at the same time as his last novel, and the press had hounded him. He said some blunt things, in public, in Time magazine: he was angry, and said that a good novelist ‘should have enough to write about without digging up her own private garden. For me, it was just a routine relationship, and she’s blown it up’.21 In private, however, he apologized for saying these things – he wanted to come to Paris to see
her again.22 He was low: he had remarried his ex-wife but the marriage was foundering for a second time. He told Beauvoir that the best days of his life were days spent with her; but he still didn’t want to compromise his terms and neither did she. He felt like he had lost whatever it was that gave him the ability to write.
For a long time the US government had refused to give Algren a passport because he had previously sympathized with communists, so he could not travel to Paris. But Beauvoir encouraged him not to give up on that or writing: he was too hard on himself, she said: ‘the little light inside you could not die; it never will’.23 For a few years afterwards their communication followed the holiday conventions of America and France: Christmas cards from him, New Year’s greetings from her.
But in July 1959 he was finally given a passport. He wrote more, sent her packets of books and made plans to visit – to stay for six months. So when she got back from Cuba in March 1960 and rang her doorbell he answered it. When her eyes lit on his face she didn’t see the effects of time: all she saw was Algren. Age didn’t stop them feeling ‘as close as during the best days of 1949’.24
He had just come from Dublin and told her about his travels in Irish mists was well as his disillusionment with American politics. His last visit had fallen during the publication furore of The Second Sex. Her life was quieter now, so they spent time together in the rue Victor Schoelcher and with ‘the family’: Olga and Bost, Sartre and Michelle (who were on again) and Lanzmann.
In Paris they worked together in the mornings in her flat; then she went to Sartre’s in the afternoon as usual. They walked to the rue de la Bûcherie to revisit the past, and spent evenings at the Crazy Horse and other strip joints, where Algren was confused by the presence of strippers of both sexes. They travelled together, to Marseille, Seville, Istanbul, Greece, Crete.
In the spring of 1960 Beauvoir received a letter from a baccalaureate student in Rennes. Her name was Sylvie Le Bon. Born in 1941 in Rennes, Sylvie enjoyed philosophy and admired Beauvoir’s books enough to write expressing her appreciation. Beauvoir replied and when Le Bon visited Paris a few months later Beauvoir took her out for dinner. Sylvie wanted to study at the École Normale, and went on to do very well there, becoming an agregée in philosophy. In time, she would also come to occupy a central place in Beauvoir’s life.
In August Beauvoir flew to Brazil with Sartre, leaving Algren in her apartment. He stayed until September. She wrote to him from Rio, and regularly for the rest of the year. Her epithets were back to the endearing heights of their earlier relationship: he was the ‘subversive beast’ of her heart. Beauvoir and Sartre were celebrated with honours and invited to give several talks and interviews: on 25 August she gave a talk at the national faculty of philosophy, ‘Simone de Beauvoir speaks of the condition of women’. In early September she gave two interviews that were published in O Estado de Sao Paulo, and in October Beauvoir and Sartre took some time for private travel. She became ill in Manaus, a town on the Amazon River, and ended up in a hospital for a week in Recife with suspected typhoid fever.
Even when they weren’t in France, their actions caused a stir. In August and September of 1960 Beauvoir and Sartre both put their names to the ‘Manifesto of the 121’, demanding Algeria’s independence – and they published it in Les Temps Modernes.25 Before they left Brazil Lanzmann phoned to tell them that it wasn’t safe for Sartre to fly into Paris. In addition to signing the Manifesto, Sartre had supplied a letter for the defence of Francis Jeanson, who was under trial for his support of the Algerian National Liberation Front.26 He was being accused of treason, and 5,000 veterans had marched down the Champs Elysées yelling ‘Shoot Sartre!’ Thirty of the manifesto’s signatories had been charged with treason and many had lost their jobs. There were threats of prison.
Figure 10 At a book signing in Sao Paolo, Brazil, 6 September 1960.
They changed their flights and were met in Barcelona by Bost. They drove to Paris and Lanzmann joined them outside the city, so they could make a quiet entrance by back roads.27 When Beauvoir got back to Paris in November there were no letters from Algren.
Sartre was getting death threats, and friends worried that both he and Beauvoir were in danger if they stayed in their homes. So for the next few weeks they lived together in separate rooms in a large, elegant flat that was lent to them by a sympathizer, a M. Boutilier.28 It was one of the only times they lived like this, and in a letter to Algren dated 16 November Beauvoir wrote teasingly of the strangeness of it: ‘I cook for him.’ There wasn’t much to work with: ham, sausages, things that could be kept in tins. Sometimes Bost came with fresh things and made meals.29
Beauvoir hadn’t testified in Jeanson’s trial but her support was soon courted for another: the trial of Djamila Boupacha, an Algerian Muslim member of the Liberation Front who was cruelly – including sexually – tortured by French soldiers. Many Algerian women had been raped and tortured before her. But Boupacha was willing to testify, and she had the support of a Tunisian-born lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, who had been involved in the trials of many Liberation Front fighters. Halimi asked to meet Beauvoir and told her Boupacha’s story. Like many of her compatriots, Boupacha joined the independence and helped underground networks by exploiting French assumptions about the ‘traditional’ and ‘passive’ roles played by North African women. Algerian women were considered to be apolitical by default. But in November 1956 and January 1957, Boupacha planted bombs in Algiers. She was discovered, arrested, tortured and tried – but she contested the legitimacy of the court.
Halimi convinced Boupacha to sue the French authorities on account of the torture she underwent. Would Beauvoir publicly support her cause? The consequences could be serious: Boupacha could be given the death penalty. Beauvoir agreed to support it in one of the most powerful ways she could: by pen. She wrote a defence of Djamila Boupacha, which was published in June in Le Monde, and helped set up a committee for her defence. Their aim was to publicize the case and, with it, reveal the shameful behaviour of the French during the war. In Le Monde Beauvoir wrote that the most scandalous thing about this scandal was that people had become so used to it. How could they not be appalled by their own indifference to others’ suffering?
In 1946 Beauvoir had written about the trial of Robert Brasillach; then the French demanded justice for this collaborator who had betrayed the values of France. In 1960, she described the actions of the same nation: ‘men, women, old people, children, have been gunned down during raids, burnt down in their villages, shot down, their throats cut, disembowelled, martyrized to death; in internment camps entire tribes have been left to suffer from hunger, the cold, beatings, epidemics’. Every French person was complicit in this torture, she said: did it reflect their values? The collective action of those who said it did not carried Beauvoir into the future with more hope. It also renewed the strength of a long friendship: Bianca Lamblin (formerly Bienenfeld) campaigned alongside her.30
On 25 October 1960 the second volume of Beauvoir’s memoirs was published – The Prime of Life. It was a huge success: many critics thought that the subject of her own life brought out Beauvoir’s best writing. Carlo Levi described it as ‘the great love story of the century’. In it, commentators celebrated the fact that Beauvoir had made Sartre appear as a human being: ‘You revealed a Sartre who had not been rightly understood, a man very different from the legendary Sartre.’ Beauvoir replied that that was exactly her intention. At first, he didn’t want her to write about him. But ‘when he saw that I spoke about him the way I did, he gave me a free hand’.31
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see many reasons why she ‘simplified’ the ‘legend of the couple’, Sartre and Beauvoir.32 Olga, it seems, still didn’t know about her nine-year-long affair with Bost – but whether she kept it secret out of a desire to protect Olga, Bost or herself is unclear. And as for her relationships with women, in addition to reasons of Beauvoir’s own privacy and the privacy of the women she slept with, the reception of
The Second Sex gives some insight into why she might have considered it wise not to be forthright. There were also reasons of law to consider – although the 1970 French law on private life (la loi sur la vie privée) was still a few years away, article 12 of the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights still held: ‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks on his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.’ Olga, Nathalie and Bianca were all living their own lives: they were still Beauvoir’s friends and, in Bianca’s case at least, we know that Beauvoir promised never to reveal her identity.
Given the frequency with which Beauvoir has been accused of prudishness or deception, it is important to bear in mind that she never promised her readers that all would be revealed. Her exclusions may have been motivated by modesty, privacy or fear – or simply to abide by the law. But it is also possible that she told her story the way she did because of the message she wanted to convey to her readers, and a desire not to muddy that message with the full truth about the messenger.
Reviewers praised Beauvoir’s autobiography as her best writing, but for feminists this has raised several suspicions: Was it because she was writing something more conventionally feminine? Because it gave readers unprecedented access to a hidden side of Jean-Paul Sartre? There is something to this suspicion – after all, The Mandarins was her most successful novel, and it was also considered to be her most autobiographical. But whether or not Beauvoir was praised for writing ‘more feminine’ works, it is highly unlikely – given the audacious risks Beauvoir had already taken – that she chose to write in this form because it was more proper for a woman to write about her life with ‘a great man’ than to express her ideas about politics and philosophy. After all, that conclusion flies in the face of both her politics and her philosophy.
Becoming Beauvoir Page 31