by Hazel Rowley
For money, Bost was churning out love stories under a pseudonym. Work on his war novel was advancing slowly. He looked forward to showing Beauvoir what he had written.
Wanda’s affair with Camus did not last long. (Camus fell in love with the beautiful twenty-one-year-old Spanish-French actress Maria Casarès, whom he brought to the next fiesta.) Nevertheless, Sartre was hurt. It was a turning point in his relationship with Wanda. “She made the break inevitable by becoming Camus’s mistress,” Sartre said later, adding that he had also grown tired of her “pathological rages.” He knew that he sometimes provoked this behavior. Still, he found it tedious.52
Sartre and Wanda soon went their separate ways, but Sartre would support Wanda for the rest of her life, spend time alone with her twice a week, and take her on vacation for two or three weeks every year. All in all, he would write six plays for her, giving her the only roles she would ever have. In 1965, he would buy her an apartment.
Wanda had plenty of other lovers, but she never ceased to be jealous of Sartre’s other women. The one she hated most, with a passion, was Simone de Beauvoir.
Food, coal, and gas had become even more scarce. Restaurants and cafés were obliged to close three days a week because of electricity shortages. The Allied air forces were pounding French factories, industrial targets, ports, and railway stations—anything useful to the Germans. The Nazi flag was still flying over the Senate. The Germans had not yet withdrawn. But liberation was in the air. The Anglo-Americans were advancing on Paris.
On the evening of Friday, August 25, 1944, Sartre, as a member of the resistant writers’ group, the National Theater Committee, was at the Comédie Française. He and others had put up a barricade to protect the theater from German sabotage. Bost and the women—Olga, Wanda, Beauvoir, and Sorokine—were in the room Bost shared with Olga at the Hôtel Chaplain. Bost had rigged up a kind of stove. For fuel, they used old newspapers. It was a challenge to cook on the contraption. Dinner consisted of potatoes. While they were eating, the radio announced that General de Gaulle had arrived in Paris that afternoon and had given a speech at the town hall.
The group heard cheers and shouts in the street, and went down. A throng of people had gathered at the Vavin intersection, in front of the Dôme. Church bells pealed. Some people lit a bonfire in the middle of the street and danced around it, singing and laughing. Then a voice called out, “Tanks coming!” The fire was stamped out, and people ran for safety. The lights in neighboring houses were turned off. Armored cars filled with SS men clattered past. There was sniper fire. Red Cross ambulances whizzed by with wounded people.
The next day, the French tricolor flew from the summit of the Eiffel Tower. De Gaulle marched down the Champs-Elysées accompanied by French and American troops. Sartre watched from the balcony of the Hôtel du Louvre. Beauvoir went with Olga to the Arc de Triomphe, where, arm in arm, they joined the cheering crowd. Shots rang out. Beauvoir and Olga ran. People crumpled onto the street. Sartre and his colleagues retreated inside the building and lay flat on their bellies.
These were euphoric yet frightening days. Before the Germans withdrew, there was violent fighting in the streets. Sartre and Beauvoir took notes and combined their impressions for a series of articles they wrote for Combat, under Sartre’s byline.53 On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, an old man who could not run fast enough was shot down by German soldiers. Meanwhile, the French were taking revenge on those deemed to be collaborators. At the bottom of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, a middle-aged woman whose hair had been shaved off was shaking her head from side to side saying, “No, no, no!” Sartre was disgusted by this “medieval sadism.” Did people think this was patriotism, these low acts of vengeance towards women who had supposedly slept with a German?
Paris was liberated, but the war continued. In September, the Allied air forces obliterated large sections of Le Havre, killing thousands. The Germans fired the world’s first long-range ballistic missiles on London. It was “a ravaged world,” Beauvoir writes.54 “No blade of grass in any meadow, however I looked at it, would ever again be what it had been.”55
SEVEN
FAME
November 1944–January 1947
“Go and see Camus. He wants to send you to America for Combat!” Hardly able to contain his excitement, Bost was calling down from his first floor room to Sartre, who had just walked into the courtyard of the Hotel Chaplain.1 The United States State Department was going to pay for eight French Resistance journalists to spend two months in the United States to report on the American war effort. “Shit! I’ll run over there!” Sartre said. Beauvoir had never seen him so elated.
Sartre had been fantasizing about America since his boyhood. Back then, his voracious reading of adventure stories made him realize that if he was to be a bona fide hero, he needed to go to that continent. “In Paris you don’t often see a Redskin leap out with feathers on his head and a bow in his hand,” he told Beauvoir in his old age. “So I began to dream that I would go to America, where I’d fight with roughnecks and come out of it safely, having knocked around a fair number of them. I often dreamed of that.”2
As young writers, he and Beauvoir had been hugely influenced by American literature—particularly Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. Their reading left them fascinated by the country itself. “America…was the future on the march,” Beauvoir writes. “It was abundance, and infinite horizons; it was a crazy magic lantern of legendary images.”3 America was jazz, the blues, skyscrapers, movies, and magical names like Memphis, New Orleans, and Chicago. They could not wait to go there.
The military DC-8 landed at La Guardia Airport in the late evening of Saturday, January 13, 1945. It was Sartre’s first flight. The trip had taken two days and involved three stops. The plane was nonpressurized, and the air pockets had been alarming.
The eight French journalists—six men and two women—stumbled off the plane, tired, shabby, and disheveled. Their hosts from the Office of War Information (OWI) whisked them in limousines through the neon shimmer. Sartre, nose pressed to the window, was astonished to see barber shops open at that hour. “You could have your hair cut or washed or you could be shaved at eleven o’clock at night,” he told Beauvoir.4 They alighted at the Plaza Hotel, on Fifth Avenue, opposite Central Park. Bellhops ushered them through the revolving door. In the foyer, milling about, were women in low-cut evening dresses and men in dinner jackets. The ragged Europeans had entered another universe.
The following day, after a luxurious American breakfast, Sartre ventured out with a couple of his colleagues. It was Sunday, freezing cold, and there were few people about. “I was looking for New York,” he wrote, “and I could not find it.” The long straight streets all looked the same. “New York is for farsighted people,” Sartre decided, “people who can focus to infinity.”5 The snow under their feet was a dirty gray color. Litter blew about in the wind.
On Monday their American hosts wasted no time in marching the shabby-looking French group down Fifth Avenue to do some shopping. Sartre had arrived in a wretched sheepskin jacket. From now on, he got around New York in a smart pinstriped suit.
The French were only now realizing the full extent of the austerity they were suffering back home. “With large glasses of whisky, they seemed intent on blotting out four years of privations,” Henriette Nizan recalled. “For them, America was like a country fair. Night clubs, pretty girls.”6 Henriette had fled to the United States with the Nizans’ two children in 1940, after Paul Nizan was killed. She saw a lot of the visiting French journalists, who had accompanied Sartre, and was soon having an affair with one of them.
Sartre was representing the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, as well as the left-wing Combat. He felt a little nervous among these trained journalists. He was grateful to the Americans for funding his trip, but determined that this should not get in the way of his objectivity. And he was scared of naïve generalizations. “How can one talk about 135 million Americans? You need to have spent te
n years here and we’re here for six weeks.”7 All in all, he would write thirty-two articles while he was in the United States.8
At first he stuck to simple observations about the country. Cigarettes were rationed, and petrol was apparently in short supply, he reported, but there was plenty of food. Fruit and vegetables were abundant, and New Yorkers ate vast quantities of meat. The streetlights were dazzling. The buildings were overheated. At night, he boiled under his thin blankets. Didn’t the Americans know about eiderdowns and fresh air?
Sartre knew the best way of getting to know America. But he did not speak English. How could he possibly get himself an American girlfriend? He and his colleagues had been in New York only a few days when they were invited to the OWI offices for a radio interview, in French. A vivacious young woman, Dolores Vanetti, welcomed them to the French broadcasting section. She was tiny, even shorter than Sartre, with a golden-brown complexion and a radiant smile. The eight French journalists filed into the recording studio, she recalls, and at the end of the line was a little man, by far the smallest of the bunch. “At some point he knocked against something and dropped his pipe, then he picked it up and that’s when we started talking. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but whatever it was, once it was said he asked me whether we could see each other again.”9
Sartre had landed on his feet. Vanetti had been brought up in France and had worked before the war as an actress in a theater in Montparnasse. Sartre thought of her as a “mulatto.” Her parents were Italian and Ethiopian, though Vanetti had learned, in race-conscious America, to keep quiet about the Ethiopian part. She was married to a wealthy American doctor, Edward Ehrenreich, but her marriage was floundering. She had spent the war years in New York, and had lots of friends among the French expatriate community, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and his wife, Jacqueline Lamba. Breton had published some of Vanetti’s poems in his surrealist magazine VVV. They liked to explore Manhattan’s antique shops together.
Sartre set out to charm her. “He was in a state of constant effervescence,” Vanetti told Sartre’s biographer, Annie Cohen-Solal, years later. “He kept telling all sorts of stories to amuse you and draw you into his life. He was always looking for the things that could please you, going out of his way for you, and always giving his very most.”10
After a week in New York, the French journalists were taken on a six-week trip across the country in a chartered military plane. They traveled north and south, east and west; gazing at bridges and dams; inspecting army training camps, armament factories and infantry schools; attending concerts, university debates, a meeting of Midwestern farmers, and numerous cocktail parties. A highlight for them was visiting film studios in Hollywood; another was a hair-raising descent into the Grand Canyon in a little plane in stormy weather, with the pilot asking the passengers: “Are we touching on the left? Are we touching on the right?”11 They were even invited for an evening at the White House with President Roosevelt. “What strikes one first of all is the deeply human charm of this long face, at once hard and delicate, the eyes shining with intelligence,” Sartre wrote. “He loves France: in his youth he biked all over its roads.”12 Less than a month later, Roosevelt would be dead.
Sartre was astonished by the immensity of the country, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the social conformity, and the level of discrimination against blacks. “In this land of freedom and equality there live thirteen million untouchables,” he wrote. “They wait on your table, they polish your shoes, they operate your elevator, they carry your suitcases into your compartment, but they have nothing to do with you, nor you with them.”13
In early March, when the other journalists left for home, Sartre returned to New York to see Vanetti. He was in love, and with her as his guide, he soon fell in love with New York as well. Vanetti acted as his interpreter, helped him read the newspapers, and took him to her favorite haunts. They drank vodka at the Russian Tea Room, listened to jazz at Jimmy Ryan’s and Nick’s Bar while sipping scotch, watched people jitterbugging in Times Square, and visited Harlem. Sartre would always say: “Dolores gave me America.”14
The war was still raging, and mail, sent by boat across the Atlantic, was extremely slow. Beauvoir hardly heard from Sartre while he was away. To find out what he was doing, she read the reports he wired in to Combat and Le Figaro. She also heard bits of news from Camus, with whom Sartre had brief conversations when he filed his stories over the phone.
At the end of February, Beauvoir went to Portugal for five weeks. Her sister, Poupette, had married her boyfriend, Lionel de Roulet. Roulet was working at the French Institute in Lisbon and had invited Beauvoir to give some lectures there. She wrote several articles on Spain and Portugal, which appeared in Combat.
The sisters had not seen each other for almost five years. Poupette was shocked by Simone’s threadbare clothing and wooden clogs, and took her shopping for new clothes. Portugal was wealthy compared with France, with an abundance of food, leather, silks, and other quality goods. “Never in my life had I surrendered to such a debauch,” Beauvoir would write in her memoirs. “My lecture tour was very well paid, and in one afternoon I assembled a complete wardrobe.”15 She returned to Paris with shawls and knitted sweaters for her women friends, and shirts for the men. It was the beginning of April, and to Beauvoir’s dismay, Sartre was still not home.
Sartre wrote to say he was staying on for two more months, till the end of May. Bost was away, freezing at the front with the American military, covering the war for Combat. Beauvoir sought consolation in the arms of Michel Vitold, a Russian-born actor the same age as Bost, who was playing the part of Garcin in No Exit. Vitold, too, had love problems. They put their bicycles on the train and cycled around the Auvergne region. Among other things, they talked about the play Beauvoir had written, Useless Mouths.16 Vitold was going to direct it later that year.
That spring, René Maheu returned to Paris. He had spent most of the war years in Morocco, teaching philosophy at a high school in Fez. He had fallen in love with one of his students, and though he had no intention of divorcing his wife, the girl was about to join him in Paris.17 Maheu and Beauvoir were delighted to see each other again. They roamed in the woods outside Paris, and for the first time, they went to bed together. A few months later, when her novel The Blood of Others was published, Beauvoir would inscribe Maheu’s copy: “To my very dear Lama, in memory of spring 1945, very confidentially, S de Beauvoir.”18
On May 7, Germany capitulated. Bost was in Dachau a few hours after the Americans, and sent back horrified reports for Combat. None of their deported friends was among the emaciated survivors transported from the camps to the Paris reception center at the Hôtel Lutétia. “I was ashamed to be alive,” writes Beauvoir, and “just as frightened of death as before.”19
She had begun a third novel, All Men Are Mortal, about a man who drinks the elixir of immortality. At first he is elated and then, unable to die, he feels more and more disconnected from everyone around him. He no longer shares their hopes and illusions, and finds himself envying real men, whose lives have the weight of mortality hanging over them. As a philosopher, Beauvoir knew that death gave life meaning. She needed to convince herself of this at an emotional level.
At the end of May 1945, Sartre returned to Paris brimming with stories about America, and with a second suitcase stuffed full of food and clothes, including a tailor-made suit for Beauvoir. He had heard from his mother while he was abroad, but only now did she tell him that his stepfather, Joseph Mancy, had died in mid-January, shortly after Sartre left. Anne-Marie knew what the trip to America meant to her son, and had not wanted him to feel obliged to come home early. He was moved by her thoughtfulness.
Sartre hated turning forty, that June. He resigned from his teaching job, determined to earn his living by writing from then on. But he was in the doldrums. His affair with Vanetti had collapsed because of Beauvoir. Vanetti had said she could not accept another
woman in Sartre’s life. Before they parted, she had asked him not to write to her.
Years later, Vanetti observed that Sartre returned to France in a “troubled, unsettled, undecided” state, and that all three of them—she, Sartre, and Beauvoir—were “all of these and much worse.”20 As if Beauvoir’s position were not already insecure enough, Bost went to New York in June, sent by Combat, and had a brief fling with Vanetti himself. He started to tell Beauvoir that he, too, had fallen a bit in love with her, then realized his mistake. Beauvoir looked devastated.21
In July, Sartre cracked, and wrote to Vanetti. She replied with a loving letter. In early August, the Americans dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered. The war was over at last, and to Beauvoir, the world had never felt more terrifying.
“The war really divided my life in two,” Sartre said in his old age. “It started when I was thirty-four-years old and ended when I was forty, and that really was the transition from youth to maturity.”22 Before the war, Sartre was unknown. After the war, he was famous. It happened almost overnight. “We were astonished by the furore we caused,” Beauvoir writes. “My own baggage weighed very little, but Sartre was now hurled brutally into the arena of celebrity, and my name was associated with his.”23
Their names were everywhere. Existentialism had become a buzzword. Sartre’s play No Exit had been the talk of the theater season. In September and October 1945, Beauvoir’s novel The Blood of Others, and the first two novels of Sartre’s trilogy, The Age of Reason and The Reprieve, all appeared at the same time in the bookstore windows. At the end of October, Beauvoir’s play Useless Mouths opened at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, with Olga in the lead female role.24 And the news kiosks sported a new journal, Les Temps modernes (named after the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times), with Jean-Paul Sartre as editor-in-chief, and Simone de Beauvoir among the names on the editorial committee.25 Sartre had always maintained that everything, however banal, shed light on society. The aim of the journal was to comment and take a position on “modern times.”