Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Sartre had enjoyed writing and producing a play when he was in his prison camp. The French prisoners understood and appreciated his covert resistance message. Now he was keen to get a similar message past the German censors and onto the Paris stage. He wanted the French people to throw off their paralyzing guilt. They should stop seeing themselves through the eyes of the occupiers and realize that they were free to shake off their shackles.

  In the spring of 1942, Olga Kosakiewicz played a small role in a play directed by the talented young director Jean-Louis Barrault. He was encouraging, and one day she asked him how she might go about obtaining more significant roles. “The best way,” Barrault said, “would be to get someone to write a play for you.” When Olga told this to Sartre, he immediately said: “Why not me?” He and Olga no longer spent time together alone, but she was part of the family, and he liked the idea of giving her a lucky break.

  Sartre knew the German censors would never allow a play about the Occupation, so he decided to convey his message through Greek mythology. He would write about Orestes’s return from exile to his native Argos, a plague-ridden city ruled by the tyrannical Aegisthus and his consort, Clytemnestra. Orestes, in dialogue with Jupiter, comes to realize that the gods are not just. Throwing off the gods and assuming his freedom, he slays Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, his own mother. His act of violence frees the citizens of Argos and releases them from their plague.

  Barrault agreed to direct The Flies but said he did not think the twenty-seven-year-old Olga up to the part of Orestes’s sister, Electra. It was a demanding role, and Barrault worked with professional actors only. Sartre stood firm: Olga came with the play.

  Rehearsals began. Barrault kept losing his temper with Olga. Behind Sartre’s back, he muttered comments about Sartre promoting his mistress. Barrault was soon putting his energy into a production that was a far safer bet with the Vichy government, The Satin Slipper, an epic drama by the reactionary Catholic playwright Paul Claudel.

  Finally Sartre decided to end their contract. “All this is my fault,” he wrote Barrault. “I do not generally like to talk about my private life and my silence reinforced this misunderstanding. I want to tell you…that Olga has never been and will never be my mistress; it’s her talent alone that I wanted to serve.”28

  Charles Dullin agreed to take the play on. He himself played Jupiter. Dullin worked patiently with Olga, and she threw herself into the part. Nonetheless, Dullin’s temper was famous, and occasionally he erupted. Olga would burst into tears and threaten to give up. Their outbursts, writes Beauvoir, were “halfway between a family quarrel and a lovers’ tiff.”29 The other students in the Atelier would look on jealously, hoping Olga would prove inadequate to the task.

  Dullin was taking a big risk. Sartre was an unknown author, and Olga an unknown actress. The production was costly (involving a large crowd of extras), and the play was decidedly controversial. The opening night was June 3, 1943, at the Théâtre de la Cité. (The Vichy administrators had insisted that this theater change its name from the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, after the Jewish actress.) “How tense I was when the curtain went up!” Beauvoir recalls. Olga, under the stage name of Olga Dominique, performed beautifully. It was a triumphant beginning to her career.

  To the audience that night, a fresh breeze seemed to be blowing across the stage. “It was impossible to mistake the play’s implications,” writes Beauvoir. “The word Liberty, dropped from Orestes’ mouth, burst on us like a bomb.”30

  Dominique Desanti agrees. “Yes, Sartre had to make compromises because of the German censors. But what could he do? Some writers chose to maintain silence throughout the Occupation, in order not to compromise at all. That was a noble stance. But we young people were so excited that Sartre was speaking out. And to us, his message was clear.”31

  If Beauvoir did not care all that much about losing her teaching job in the summer of 1943 it was because she and Sartre had entered a far more exciting sphere than the world of classrooms, blackboards, and chalk. In June, a couple of weeks after The Flies opened at the Théâtre de la Cité, Sartre’s weighty philosophical tome Being and Nothingness was published, dedicated to “The Beaver.”

  The book would not make a real impact until after the war, but some readers already recognized that it represented a landmark. Sartre had applied philosophy to everyday life, taking examples from the world around him. His portrait of a waiter in a café would become famous. Slightly affected, bearing his tray aloft, bending forward with eager solicitude to take a new order: was he free? Was he merely acting a role?

  In August 1943, She Came to Stay appeared in the bookshop windows. After thirteen years of writing and rewriting, with dozens of drafts relegated to the back of her shelves, Beauvoir was a published author at last. For a brief time, she admits, she melted eagerly into her public image:

  One literary columnist, discussing new books from Gallimard, referred to me as “the firm’s new woman novelist.” The words tinkled gaily around in my head. How I would have envied this serious-faced young woman, now embarking on her literary career, if she had possessed any name other than my own—but she was me!32

  She Came to Stay seeded the Sartre-Beauvoir legend. There were not many reviews—the censored wartime press did not exactly embrace this decadent novel—but the word flew around that it was a roman à clef, drawn from Beauvoir’s open relationship with Sartre and the trio they had once formed with Olga Kosakiewicz, to whom the book was dedicated, the same woman, people said, who was acting the part of Electra in Sartre’s play The Flies, at the Théâtre de la Cité. Rumor had it that Sartre, whose play hinted at a frisson of incest between Electra and her brother, Orestes, was now sleeping with Olga’s younger sister, Wanda. The people in the Flore “looked somewhat askance at me,” Beauvoir writes.33

  There were polarized reactions to the novel. Some thought it immoral and exhibitionist; others thought it a courageous act of resistance to the Vichy ideology of “work, family, country.” One thing was certain: Beauvoir, with her very first novel, had surrendered the last shreds of bourgeois respectability.

  The book caused a frenzy of gossip. “It’s Sartre portrayed in his entirety,” the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss told a friend, “and he comes over as a vile bastard.”34 Raymond Queneau noted in his journal: “Extraordinary veracity of the description, total lack of imagination. Even when S de B attributes a different childhood to one of her characters, it belongs to someone else—for example, the childhood of Gerbert (J-L Bost) is Mouloudji’s.”35 As a portrait of an iconoclastic group of people, the novel was thought by Michel Leiris to be the French equivalent of The Sun Also Rises. But he observed that it lacked clarity on a central question: “Pierre and Françoise have been together for ten years. Are they people who still have a sexual relationship, or who don’t anymore?…Without this basic information, it is difficult to understand how the equilibrium of the trio works.”36

  Françoise de Beauvoir had already had to face the ignominy of having her daughter expelled from the teaching profession. Now she had to endure another round of comments from family and friends. “Until She Came to Stay came out she knew almost nothing at all about my life,” Simone de Beauvoir writes. “She tried to persuade herself that at least as far as morals were concerned I was ‘a good girl.’ Public rumor destroyed her illusions.”37

  Beauvoir heard that She Came to Stay was a serious contender for the Prix Goncourt. This was the Vichy period. Jewish writers could not be published; their names could not even be mentioned in any piece of writing published under the Vichy regime. Although Beauvoir was disgusted by this, she writes, “If I had been awarded the Prix Goncourt that year I should have accepted it with wholehearted jubilation.”38

  In the autumn of 1943, Sartre briefly put aside his trilogy and, in two weeks flat, wrote No Exit, a dazzling one-act play. An instant success, it would become a French classic, repeatedly revived on Paris stages.39

  The three characters—one man and
two women—are in Hell. They arrive one after another to find themselves locked in a room furnished with ugly antiques. At first they are relieved. They expected torture instruments and burning coals. Then they understand. There are no mirrors, no books, no toothbrushes, no distractions. All they have—for the rest of yawning eternity—is one another.

  Garcin is a coward who desperately wants to be seen as a hero. Estelle is a narcissist who lives for the desire of men. Inès, a lesbian, likes to see others suffer. She is the first to understand their plight. “Each of us is a hangman for the two others,” she says. Near the end of the play, Garcin utters the famous Sartrean quip: “Hell is other people.”

  Sartre wrote the role of Estelle for Wanda to play. For a year now, she had been going along to Dullin’s classes at the Atelier and acting in minor roles. She did not show her sister’s talent, but Sartre thought it only a matter of time. He wanted to give her a start.

  A young actress friend, Olga Barbezat, played Inès. Sartre asked Albert Camus to play Garcin and to direct the play. The first rehearsals took place in December 1943, in Wanda’s room at the Hôtel Chaplain.

  “One would hardly dare to invent two figures in a drama of such contrasting physical appearance as Sartre and Camus,” Arthur Koestler writes. “Sartre looked like a malevolent goblin or gargoyle, Camus like a young Apollo.”40

  Camus had walked up and introduced himself to Sartre at the dress rehearsal of The Flies. He was thirty and recently arrived from Algeria. His latest novel, The Outsider, was causing a splash. Sartre had written an appreciative review of it. Camus had also played a courageous role in the Resistance, editing the underground newspaper Combat.

  Sartre liked Camus immediately. So did everyone in the Sartre clan. Camus was a warm and passionate Mediterranean man. His roots were Spanish, French, and Algerian, and his accent sounded southern French. He was sensitive, funny, tragic, and full of stories, which he told in spicy language. His charm was extraordinary. “You’d be at a party, and you’d look around,” his publisher, Robert Gallimard, recalls, “and suddenly you’d see that nearly all the women in the room were clustered around Camus.”41

  Wanda had not heard of Camus before they started rehearsing. Over Christmas, she read The Outsider and thought it marvelous. She was fascinated by Camus—his exotic North African origins, his lifelong struggle with tuberculosis, the vulnerability beneath his swaggering surface.

  Camus had no idea that Wanda and Sartre were lovers. One evening at the Flore, he confided to Sartre that he was captivated by Wanda’s “Russian soul.” He even used the word genius to describe her.42

  Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s social horizons began to open up. Through Camus, Sartre joined the writers’ resistance group, the CNE—the National Committee of Writers. He became friendly with the former surrealist writers Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau, who were five or six years older than he was.

  Sartre and Beauvoir were invited to dinners at Michel and Zette Leiris’s apartment, on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, overlooking the Seine. Leiris introduced them to Picasso, whose studio was just around the corner. On several occasions they had lunch with Picasso and his mistress, Dora Marr, in a Catalan restaurant up the street. “Picasso always welcomed us with sparkling vivacity,” writes Beauvoir, “but though his conversation was gay and brilliant, one didn’t exactly talk with him. It was more a case of his holding forth solo.”43

  For the first time in her life, Beauvoir entertained in her own home. She and the “kids” had moved to a much nicer hotel, La Louisiane, on the Rue de Seine, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Several of the Flore regulars lived there, including Mouloudji and his new girlfriend. Beauvoir had a large corner room on the third floor, with a kitchen and a view of rooftops. The day she moved in, Sartre spilled a bottle of ink and the manager had the carpet removed, leaving bare parquet flooring. Beauvoir did not mind. “None of my previous retreats had come so close to being the apartment of my dreams,” she writes, “and I felt like staying there for the rest of my life.”44

  The room contained a divan, bookshelves, and a massive table, covered with books and papers, with Beauvoir’s bicycle propped against it. One evening, Beauvoir cleared the table, took her bike down to Sorokine’s room, and had their new friends around for a meal. Leiris and Queneau came with their wives; Albert Camus was there, and so were Sorokine and Bourla, Bost, Olga, and Wanda. Bost stood in front of a huge bowl of beans, dishing out with a ladle. Camus burst out laughing. “It’s like the army barracks,” he said.45

  That spring, they had a series of orgiastic all-night parties, which they called “fiestas.” Everyone saved up his or her coupons, so they could amass what seemed like prodigious quantities of food and drink. The surrealist writer Georges Bataille hosted the first party. Olga, Wanda, and Camus were the dazzling dancers in the group. Sartre sang lewd songs and danced a parody of the tango; Dora Marr mimed a bullfighting act; Queneau and Georges Bataille fought a duel with bottles. Leiris was so drunk he fell down the stairs. Once midnight struck, the revelers were imprisoned until dawn by the curfew. In the early hours of the morning, some of the company crept upstairs to sleep.

  Two weeks after Bataille’s party, Bost’s mother lent them the family house at Taverny. “For a septuagenarian and clergyman’s widow she was remarkably broadminded,” Beauvoir writes. “She locked up her antique furniture and precious knick-knacks, put away some chessmen that normally stood on a table, and went off somewhere else for the night.”46 In June, Simone Jollivet and Charles Dullin threw a party in their grand apartment. Jollivet, who was already showing signs of the alcoholism that would destroy her, was drunk before the guests arrived.

  At the first fiesta, Camus disappeared upstairs with Wanda. At the second, just before dawn, Olga went looking for Bost and found him on a sofa in a dark corner feeling up a young Algerian actress. Olga started to shout and scream, Mouloudji recalls, and people came hurrying out of the bedrooms, rubbing their eyes with sleep and wonder.47

  “What a carry-on. The little Sartre group is in an uproar,” Raymond Queneau reported in his journal the next day. “Bost has broken up with Olga K. etc. Discussions. Tragic atmosphere at the Flore this evening.”48

  At the fiestas, the revelers tried hard to forget that in those sinister curfew hours, Paris belonged to the men in gray. As Sartre pointed out in “Paris Under the Occupation,” the Gestapo carried out their raids with almost unfailing politeness:

  Towards midnight one heard the sound in the street of late passers-by hurrying to get home before the curfew, and then there was silence. And we knew that the only footsteps clacking past outside were their steps. It is difficult to convey the impression that this deserted town could give, this no man’s land plastered against our windows and which they alone inhabited. The houses were never exactly a protection. The Gestapo often performed their arrests between midnight and five in the morning. It felt at each moment as if the door could open, letting in a cold blast, a bit of night, and three affable Germans with revolvers. Even when we did not talk about them, even when we did not think about them, their presence was among us.

  In February 1944, the rehearsals for No Exit came to a standstill. Olga Barbezat, the actress who was to play Inès, went to a party one evening at the home of a fellow actor. She did not know that he was active in the Resistance until the Gestapo swept in and arrested everyone present. Their host was never seen again. Olga Barbezat was taken to Fresnes, the prison just outside Paris that was known for torturing and executing members of the Resistance. She was there for three months before being released. Out of solidarity, Camus refused to continue with the play. Sartre handed it over to professionals at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier.

  One hideous night at the end of March, Bourla was arrested. He had gone to see his father in the fashionable Paris district of Neuilly, and because of the curfew, he stayed over. Just before dawn, the Germans came crashing through the door. Bourla, his father, and his sister were arrested and taken t
o Drancy, the internment camp on the northern outskirts of Paris where, just ten days earlier, Bourla’s poet friend Max Jacob had died of pneumonia.

  Beauvoir and Sartre were at La Pouèze spending Easter with Madame Morel when they heard about Bourla’s arrest. Beauvoir writes of her “agony and despair.” Sartre tried to persuade her that, fundamentally, death at nineteen was no more absurd than death at eighty. Beauvoir was not convinced. She tortured herself with questions about Bourla and his fate. “Why had he stayed with his father on that night of all nights? Why had his father been convinced he ran no danger? Why had we believed him?”49

  Sartre and Beauvoir were in La Pouèze. On the nights of April 20 and 21, the northern districts of Paris were bombed by the allies. The noise was deafening, Bost wrote to Beauvoir. He was terrified. He could imagine nothing worse than being buried under a pile of rubble. The Kosakiewicz sisters were implacable. Bost admired them. He’d seen Nathalie Sorokine at the Flore, looking haggard. Someone had told her that Bourla had been transferred from Drancy to the prison at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. She was hoping against hope that it was true. (In fact the Bourlas had already been transported to Auschwitz.)50

  Olga was still giving Bost a hard time about the Algerian actress, he wrote. It was tiring. As for Wanda, there had almost been a scandal that morning at the Hôtel Chaplain:

  Tell Sartre that this morning Camus was in bed with Wanda, who was saying to him in her half-sleep, “We sleep like two little angels,” when they were woken by a battering on her door and the voice of the manager saying: “Monsieur Sartre, I’ve been calling you for an hour! Monsieur Sartre, you’re wanted on the phone!” It seems that Camus leapt out of bed and took at least an hour to recover.51