During the 1970s, Beauvoir increasingly used her voice to amplify the voices of others. In the introduction to a special issue of Les Temps Modernes entitled ‘Women Insist’, she wrote that the struggle against sexism, ‘attacks within each of us what is most intimate to us and what seems most sure. It questions our very desires, the very forms of our pleasure’.48 Feminists made people uncomfortable; but if their words were in fact powerless they would not be subject to ridicule, treated like shrews, and gaslit. In this piece she acknowledged that in the past she had ‘more or less played the role of the token woman’, believing that the best way to overcome the barriers to her sex was to ignore them. But younger feminists helped her see that this stance made her complicit in perpetuating inequality, so now she was calling it – and herself – out.
Beauvoir’s acknowledgement of her own complicity was admirable: she had become a woman who could see the failings of her former self. But could she see all of them? When she wrote that the struggle against sexism ‘attacks within each of us what is most intimate to us and what seems most sure’, what were the constraints and desires that held her back from telling the full story about her love of philosophy and her loves other than Sartre? Was she motivated by self-preservation, concern for others in ‘the family’, or delusion? Or was she motivated, as she herself put it in All Said and Done, by giving her life an ‘artistic necessity’ that would infuse it with the potential to liberate her readers, to show them new possibilities like Louisa May Alcott’s Jo and George Eliot’s Maggie had done for her?49 (She had said that that’s what she was doing in the middle of the 1960s in an interview for The Paris Review. Saying it again in All Said and Done might imply that she meant it.)
Given Sartre’s deserved reputation as a womanizing man – and the ongoing lies he told his contingent women – it is a little surprising to find him telling their story in ways that emphasized Beauvoir’s intellectual centrality to his life first and foremost. But when Sartre gave interviews in the 1970s, that is exactly what he did. He wrote that ‘You have her version in her memoirs,’ but that ‘For me, I think our relationship developed intellectually at first.’50 To this, his interviewer John Gerassi – the son of Beauvoir’s friend Stépha – asked outright, ‘were you not in love with each other?’
Sartre’s reply was that they loved each other, but not in the way that love is commonly understood:
we fell in love with each other’s intuition, imagination, creativity, perceptions, and eventually for a while bodies as well, but just like one cannot dominate a mind (except through terror, of course), one cannot dominate taste, dreams, hopes, etcetera. Some things Castor was better at, some I was. Do you know that I would never allow any writing of mine to be published, or even made public to anyone, until Castor approved?’51
Sartre had always been conscious of posterity, and determined to defeat mortality by having a long afterlife as a great writer. In June 1975, to mark the occasion of Sartre’s 70th birthday, Le Nouvel Observateur commissioned an interview. Among other things, his interviewer, Michel Contat, asked him about all of his women. Sartre admitted that there were several. But he said that ‘in a sense’, Simone de Beauvoir was the only one. He mentioned two others by name – Michelle and Arlette. But Beauvoir, he said, had played a role that no one else could:
J.-P. S. I have been able to formulate ideas to Simone de Beauvoir before they were really concrete […]. I have presented all of my ideas to her when they were in the process of being formed.
M.C. Because she is at the same level as you, philosophically?
J.-.P. S. Not only that, but also because she was the only one at my knowledge of myself, of what I wanted to do. For this reason she was the perfect person to talk to, the kind one rarely has. It is my unique good fortune…
M.C. Still, you have had to defend yourself against Simone de Beauvoir’s criticisms, haven’t you?
J.-P. S. Oh, often! In fact we have even insulted one another. […] But I knew that she would be the one who was right, in the end. That’s not to say that I accepted all her criticisms, but I did accept most of them.
M. C. Are you just as hard on her as she is on you?
J.-P. S. Absolutely. As hard as possible. There is no point in not criticizing very severely when you have the good fortune to love the person you are criticizing.52
The same year Beauvoir decided to interview Sartre herself for Les Temps Modernes (although they didn’t call it an interview when they published it, they called it an ‘interrogation’). She got straight to the point: ‘Sartre, I want to ask you about the question of women.’ Why is it, she asked, that he claimed to be on the side of the oppressed, speaking out for them when they were ‘workers, blacks, Jews – but not women? How do you explain this?’
His childhood, probably, he said.
‘But you became an adult!’ She pushed him, asking whether it might not be possible that many men have a blind spot where women are concerned (like she herself had, for a long time). Couldn’t their blindness to women’s suffering be like the blindness of the ancient Athenians, who talked about ideals like justice and democracy while the slaves worked their land and cooked their dinners? Wasn’t it possible that his indifference would look as shocking to later generations as the apathy of the Athenians?53
Beauvoir continued to engage with feminist writers and campaigns, taking part in many interviews herself. In 1976, as she looked back on her life in conversation with Alice Schwarzer, she commented that she had escaped women’s ‘slave labour’ because she was neither a mother nor a housewife. But for over two decades she had been receiving letters from women all over the world, telling her about their struggles, which made her realize that the other side of silence was even worse than she thought. Many women who wrote to her were between 35 and 45 and married. They married young, for love, and were happy to do so at the time, but later in life they found themselves facing dead ends: their children no longer needed them and they had no professional training, no projects of their own to pursue.
In 1976 Beauvoir thought marriage and motherhood were still – too often – traps. If a woman wanted to have children, she said, she should seriously consider the conditions in which she would raise them, since it was she who would be expected to give up her work, to stay home when the children were ill. And it was she who would be blamed if they did not succeed.54 The problem wasn’t with house and care work in themselves, Beauvoir said, because no work is degrading in itself; but that everybody – not just women – should be doing the work needed to maintain life because that way they would still have enough time to do things that were life-giving. She called herself an ‘activist for voluntary motherhood’.55
The same year, across the Atlantic, Adrienne Rich published Of Woman Born, a book that began with Beauvoir’s discussion of motherhood in The Second Sex to develop an account of maternal power. In March 1976 an International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women was held in Brussels with a letter by Beauvoir as part of its proceedings – she found it laughable that the event opened just after the ‘Year of the Woman’ – another thing ‘organized by male society for the mystification of women’.56
In March 1977 Sartre was experiencing pain in his leg; the doctors warned him that if he didn’t stop smoking they may have to amputate his toes – or more. Two days later he gave his Boyards and his lighters to Sylvie Le Bon. But alcohol was harder to give up, and he began to play deceitful games with the women in his life in order to have it. He told Beauvoir that he would have only a glass of whiskey each night. But he had Michelle smuggle bottles in, hiding them behind books in his bookshelf. The Beaver didn’t have to know everything, he said.
One day Beauvoir caught him hungover, and she was furious. When she discovered that he was still drinking whiskey by the half-bottle at Michelle’s, she was irate. She phoned Michelle and fired her from his Saturday nights.57 Arlette was pleased about this: she had always been jealous of Sartre’s other women. But over time, Arlette Elkaïm Sartre
had overcome her dislike of Pierre Victor, who was, like her, North African and Jewish. By 1978 they had begun to learn Hebrew together, since Victor had developed an interest in Jewish theology and messianism. In February of 1978 Beauvoir was worried that they were taking advantage of his weakness, co-opting his reputation for their own political ends: Sartre, Victor and Elkaïm were going to Jerusalem. Sartre was taken to the plane in a wheelchair and he stayed in a luxury hotel; he returned in one piece. But when they got back Victor tried to publish a piece on the peace movement in Israel in Le Nouvel Observateur with Sartre’s name as a co-author. Beauvoir had a telephone call from Bost, who was working on the paper at the time, telling her the piece was bad and Sartre should withdraw it. Beauvoir read it and agreed, and persuaded Sartre not to publish it.
Beauvoir was clearly one of Sartre’s carers by this point. But there were several people who wanted to be his intellectual custodian, and conflicting accounts about what he himself wanted. Sartre never told Victor why the piece didn’t run. But at an editorial meeting for Les Temps Modernes (which Victor attended in Sartre’s place) Beauvoir mentioned it, assuming that he knew. He was irate, stomping out of the meeting and calling his colleagues ‘putrefied corpses’.58 He no longer attended the meetings of Les Temps Modernes and now referred with disdain to the members of the old guard as ‘the Sartreans’. Arlette took Victor’s side.
Meanwhile, Sartre gave more interviews in which he said that he never let anyone but Simone de Beauvoir read his manuscripts before publication, claiming even in July 1978 that her role in his life was ‘essential and unique’.59 According to Sylvie Le Bon, the last five years of Sartre’s life were particularly hard on Beauvoir. She had to watch his blindness develop, and found it harder to be stoical for him than for herself. She drank and took Valium, but that didn’t stop her from regularly breaking down in tears. She took solace in other friendships when she could. Claude Lanzmann lived in rue Boulard, five minutes away, and when he was in Paris they saw each other twice a week. But he was directing Shoah – a film that Beauvoir had lent him the money to kickstart – and was often away travelling.
In 1978, a film adaptation of The Woman Destroyed was made and reviewed in Le Monde, which again declared Beauvoir’s work outdated, and her feminism inferior: ‘Today, the argument and the tone of the book seem especially to have archaeological value. They make it possible to measure the accelerated evolution of a feminism for which this type of problem is more a question of Elle or Marie-Claire than, for example, of ‘Women on the move’ [Femmes en mouvement].’60
By the late 1970s, Beauvoir was exhausted by Sartre’s decline and no longer inclined to write lengthy new material, but in 1979 she published When Things of the Spirit Come First (the novel she’d written during the 1930s, which Gallimard and Grasset had rejected). It contains a fictional couple based on Zaza and Merleau-Ponty, Anne and Pascal, written before Beauvoir discovered the truth about Merleau-Ponty’s courtship. Anne’s mother persecutes her daughter, criticizing her ideas, her book-reading, and her friendship with the Simone character ‘as though they were so many sins’.61 The book’s execution is not as accomplished as Beauvoir’s later works, but it reveals that Beauvoir’s preoccupations in the 1930s included questions of love and self-sacrifice, happiness and what it means to become a woman. It also shows that she was not afraid, even then, to pepper her prose with philosophy: her characters discuss Duns Scotus, Bergson, Leibniz and Hobbes, alongside Racine, Baudelaire, Claudel and Péguy.
That autumn she participated in a film about her work by Josée Dayan and Malka Ribowska: it was called ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ and the opening credits called it ‘a documentary on our only woman philosopher’.62 In interviews about the film she was asked why she agreed to make it, given that she had already spoken about herself so much in her life-writing. She answered that she wanted to ‘rectify’ certain things, to tell the truth, to give ‘a more just image of herself’.63
In 1979 she also became Publication Director for Questions feministes, a feminist magazine whose relaunch she would oversee in the early 1980s, and won the Austrian Prize for European Literature. Le Figaro announced this honour under the headline: ‘A perfect bourgeoise: Simone de Beauvoir’, explaining that ‘Simone de Beauvoir, the first woman to receive the Austrian Prize for European Literature, owes everything to a man.’64 It is little wonder that, when asked why she continued her feminist advocacy, she said it was because even in 1980, women were ‘given the illusion that a woman can achieve anything today, and that it is her fault if she does not’.65
The following March Beauvoir heard that Le Nouvel Observateur was going to publish interviews between Sartre and Pierre Victor, over three Sunday issues. Sartre hadn’t published anything in a long time (by Sartre’s standards, at any rate); it would draw a lot of attention. She had asked to see what they were working on several times over recent years, but nothing prepared her for what it was: Sartre and Elkaïm had both evaded her questions. When Sartre let her see the extracts they’d selected for publication she was horrified.
Pierre Victor was going to use his real name – Benny Lévy – in print. (He had not had the legal right to be in France until Sartre took up his cause and got him leave to remain.) The tone was dismissive of much of what Sartre had stood for, rejecting the meaning of literature and political engagement that he’d dedicated his life to. In the last interview, Lévy even got Sartre – who had been a lifelong friend of secular Jews – to claim that the only ‘real’ Jews were religious ones. Sartre had even conceded ground to messianism. Beauvoir begged Sartre not to publish it, but he refused to be dissuaded. Was her incomparable friend losing his capacity for thought?
She was deeply upset – tearful and anxious. Lanzmann and Bost both rang the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur to try to stop the publication. But the editor, Jean Daniel, received a call from Sartre himself saying that he wanted the interview published: if the Nouvel Observateur wouldn’t have it, another paper would. The interviews appeared on 10, 17 and 24 March 1980.
Between the second and the third Sundays, on Wednesday 19 March, the atmosphere between them was still tense when Beauvoir arrived for her turn on the rota, staying over at Sartre’s apartment. When she entered his room to wake him the next morning at 9.00 a.m. he was sitting in his bed, panting for breath. He had been there for hours, unable to speak or call for help. She went to call the doctor but there was no dial tone: the secretary had not paid the phone bill.
So she ran downstairs to the concierge’s phone: the doctor came quickly and called for an ambulance. Beauvoir watched anxiously as they administered an emergency treatment, and then took him to the Broussais hospital. She went back up to the apartment and got dressed, and then went to lunch with Jean Pouillon as she had planned. She asked if he would go with her to the hospital; she didn’t want to go alone. At first it looked hopeful. They made another rota of readers and visitors to keep Sartre company; for a few weeks Beauvoir regularly attended her afternoon slot. On Sunday, 13 April, Sartre held her wrist and told her he loved her very much. On 15 April, he went into a coma. Beauvoir spent the day next to him, listening to him breathe, and then went back to her flat and started drinking. At 9.00 p.m. the phone rang. It was Arlette Elkaïm – it was over.
16
The Dying of the Light
Beauvoir went back to the hospital with Sylvie Le Bon. She called Bost and Lanzmann, Jean Pouillon and André Gorz, who came to the hospital immediately. The hospital staff said they could stay with the body until 5 a.m., then it would be moved.
How could they call him ‘it’?
Elkaïm went home, while the old ‘family’ drank and reminisced until the early hours of the morning. Journalists were already circling the area but Bost and Lanzmann told them to beat it. Then Beauvoir wanted to be alone with him. After the others left she crawled up on Sartre’s bed. She was about to get under his sheet when the nurse stopped her – his bedsores were gangrenous. So she climbed up on top of the sh
eet, lay down beside him, and fell asleep.
At 5.00 a.m. they came for the body. She went to Lanzmann’s to sleep, and stayed there on Wednesday. She couldn’t bear the phone in her apartment, let alone the stake-out of journalists, so after Lanzmann’s she went to Sylvie Le Bon’s. Hélène came to be with her from Alsace and she was flooded with cards, letters, telegrams. Lanzmann, Bost and Sylvie took care of the funeral arrangements: it would be Saturday, 19 April.
When the day came Beauvoir got into the hearse with Sylvie, Hélène and Arlette. Behind them followed tens of thousands of people, paying their respects to Sartre. But Beauvoir could see nothing. No quantity of Valium and whiskey could restrain her tears, but she took both anyway. When they arrived at Montparnasse Cemetery she asked for a chair. Later that week The Times of London would report that ‘Mme de Beauvoir’ ‘was on the verge of collapse and supported by two friends’ when she stood before the coffin.1 There were swarms of people around her, but her mind was blank. She didn’t remember what happened after that: she went to Lanzmann’s and then they had dinner in a private room, but she drank too much and she had to be helped down the stairs. Sylvie tried to stop her drinking, but now she would not be stopped.2
After that she stayed at Sylvie’s. The following Wednesday the cremation took place at Père Lachaise, but Beauvoir was too tired to go. When Sylvie and Lanzmann returned they found her on the floor, delirious. She had pneumonia.
Becoming Beauvoir Page 37