Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Sartre was staying in a midtown hotel. At weekends the two either remained holed up in Vanetti’s uptown apartment out of sight of the doormen (“she calls me the prisoner,” Sartre told Beauvoir) or they went to Connecticut to stay with her friend Jacqueline Lamba, a talented painter, who had separated from André Breton and was now living with the American sculptor David Hare.

  I get up around 9 o’clock and never manage, despite all my efforts, to be ready before 11 (bath, shave, breakfast), I go to some appointment, and I lunch with Dolores or various people wanting to see me. After lunch I take a walk all alone till 6 o’clock around NY, which I know as well as Paris; I meet Dolores again here or there and we stay together at her place or in some quiet bar till 2 in the morning. I’m drinking heavily, but without any problems so far.

  His letters were full of mixed messages. “Dolores’s love for me scares me. In other respects she is absolutely charming and we never get mad at each other. But the future of the whole thing is very grim…. Au revoir, my dearest, my darling little Beaver, au revoir. I’m at my best with you and I love you very much. Au revoir, little one, I’ll be so happy to be with you again.”

  At the end of February, Sartre wrote that he was busy giving lectures and writing articles. He would tell her more when he got back:

  I’ll also tell you about Dolores, who is a poor and charming creature, really the best I know after you. At present we are involved in the agonies of departure, and I’m not having fun every day…. Her passion literally scares me, particularly since that’s not my strong suit, and she uses it solely to her disadvantage, but she can display the candor and innocence of a child when she is happy…. I yearn to go home, I’m half dead from passion and lecturing.

  Sartre postponed his return by two weeks—ostensibly to give lucrative lectures in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. He did not tell Beauvoir that Columbia University had offered him a job for two years, and that he had considered the proposition seriously. Nor did he tell her that he had asked Vanetti to marry him.

  Since Vanetti was not yet divorced, they agreed that Sartre would return to Paris and they would spend three or four months together later in the year. After that, they would see. On March 15, 1946, Sartre went home, this time by plane.

  “I seem to be working at half speed,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. “It’s so annoying to have obstacles in one’s head.”39 She had constant headaches and was plagued by bad dreams. Sartre’s conversation was full of Vanetti. Such was their harmony, he told Beauvoir, that when they walked around New York together they always wanted to stop and go on again at exactly the same moment. Beauvoir was frightened. At parties, with the slightest amount of alcohol, she would weep into her glass.

  One day—she and Sartre were about to go for lunch with friends—she blurted out, “Honestly, who means the most to you, Dolores or me?” Sartre told her: “Dolores means an enormous amount to me, but it’s you I’m with.” Beauvoir thought he meant that he was respecting their pact, and she should not ask more than that. She could barely pull herself together during lunch, and used the fish bones as her excuse for being unable to swallow. She saw Sartre watching her uneasily. That afternoon, when they were alone again, he told her he thought it was obvious that they were together; it did not need explaining.40

  So many aspects of their past seemed to Beauvoir to be unraveling. They were too famous to be able to work quietly in cafés. When Sartre got back from America, it was in the din and smoke of the Méphisto, a new jazz cellar on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, that he read the last chapters of her novel All Men Are Mortal. But this was about to change. Some months earlier, Sartre had agreed to share an apartment with his mother. Anne-Marie Mancy had found a fourth-floor apartment at 42 Rue de Bonaparte, on the corner of Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In May 1946, they moved in.

  After fifteen years of living in Spartan conditions in hotels, Sartre was suddenly living the bourgeois life. From his large study at the far end of the apartment, he looked across the cobblestone square to the old church, the terrace of the Deux Magots, and right up the Rue de Rennes. The living room was fitted out with his mother’s fake Louis XVI furnishings, which he hated. The large oak desk and black leather armchair in his study had belonged to his stepfather, whom he hated. But the apartment was very comfortable. He enjoyed having access to a piano again. For the first time in his life, he began to build up a library. Until then he had always given his books away.

  Anne-Marie Mancy was ecstatic. “This is my third marriage,” she told friends proudly.41 From now on, it was she who bought Sartre his ties and shirts. Her old Alsatian maid, Eugénie, who had a small bedroom at the other end of the apartment, took care of Sartre’s washing and ironing. His mother glowed with pleasure when Sartre occasionally had lunch or dinner with her. “She was completely devoted to her son,” Beauvoir writes, “just as she had been to her husband, and she liked to believe that she was necessary to him.”42 Beauvoir and Madame Mancy had never warmed to each other.

  Sartre had only just moved into his new abode when he heard devastating news. Olga was about to begin rehearsals for a new production of The Flies, but she had been feeling weak for some time. Now chest X rays showed tuberculosis. Both lungs were infected. Olga was just twenty-nine, and facing possible death.

  She was sent to the Beaujon hospital in Clichy, on the northern outskirts of Paris, and given a pneumothorax, an operation that involved cutting a hole through the chest wall and using a tube to collapse the affected lung by pumping air into the pleural cavity. Bost had no time to enjoy the success of his novel, Le Dernier des Métiers (The Last Profession), based largely on the letters he’d written to Beauvoir during the war. He went to visit Olga every day and Beauvoir often went with him. In those dark days, the two were a great comfort to each other.

  After Sartre got back from America, he received a letter from Jean Cau, a twenty-one-year-old student who was preparing for the competitive entry exam to the Ecole Normale. He wanted to know if Sartre could use a secretary. The two met. Sartre liked the eager young man with his ironic smile, sense of humor, peasant good sense, and working-class southern accent. He agreed to employ him for three hours each morning.

  “Sartre’s secretary! Never has a title been worn so comically. Never under the sun will such a ‘boss’ appear again.” After Sartre’s death, Jean Cau would paint an affectionate picture of his generous, trusting boss.43

  The arrangement was to last eleven years. Cau would turn up at 42 Rue Bonaparte at ten A.M. on the dot, climb the four flights of stairs, and ring the bell. Madame Mancy, “the very beautiful, tall, elegant, adorable ‘little mama,’ with her superb bearing, fine ankles, blue eyes, and her clear and musical voice,” would come to the door. On occasion, it was Eugénie who let him in, in which case Cau invariably found Sartre and his mother playing a duet—usually Schubert or Chopin—on the upright piano in the living room. Cau’s arrival would interrupt the idyllic scene. Sartre would lower the lid and cry, “To work!”

  More often Cau would go straight to the foldup bridge table in the drawing room, which was separated from Sartre’s study by an opaque glass door, and would already be going through the mail when Sartre emerged from his room, unshaven and in pajamas and a badly tied dressing gown. He’d been working, and now he was heading to the bathroom for his morning ablutions. His fast walk, head bent forward, always reminded Cau of a boxer: “He does not walk, he charges.”

  When Sartre had slept at home, Cau would open the study door and reel, slightly nauseated, from the stench of sleep and tobacco. If Sartre had slept at a girlfriend’s, he would turn up around the same time as Cau. On those mornings, Cau writes, Sartre was in such a huge hurry to get to work that he often went straight to his desk without even bothering to take off his jacket and tie.

  Cau was dumbfounded by Sartre’s capacity for work. He worked, Cau says, “like a mule.” All morning he would smoke like a train, either a pipe or cigarettes, and drink tea from a thermos on his desk.
He wrote by hand, rarely crossing things out. If he didn’t like what he was writing, he preferred to start again, on a fresh page. He disliked messy drafts.

  It was Jean Cau’s job to ward off the outside world. Sartre would tell him: “I simply don’t have time, Cau, to write that letter” or “to see that fool” or “to argue with that moron” or “to bore myself stupid with those jerks.” Cau had to convey the message more delicately.

  Cau’s other task was to manage Sartre’s finances. If Sartre was careful with his time, he was profligate with his money. Cau had never seen anything like it. “Generosity? I don’t know. Sartre didn’t give money. He strewed it.” Like all Sartre’s friends, Cau was astonished to see that Sartre went around with wads of banknotes in his pockets—as much as a couple of thousand dollars. Sartre never let others pay for meals, and he left huge tips for the waiters.

  Instead of an advance for each book, Gallimard gave Sartre a monthly allowance. At the beginning of the month, there was a flurry of check signing. Ever since she had stopped teaching, Beauvoir had been financially dependent on Sartre. Then there was Cau’s salary to pay, and a monthly allowance for Wanda. Bost and Olga sometimes asked for a “loan,” which they rarely paid back. Other friends were always asking for help with this and that—medical bills, travel, or some emergency. Sartre never hesitated. He signed a check or handed over the cash. By the end of the month, he regularly ran out of money. Cau recounts that Sartre would come barging out of his study:

  “Cau, I haven’t a dime. Is there any money around, by any chance?”

  “Zero.”

  “Shit! Are you sure? You’ve done the rounds?”

  “Yes. Nothing to be scraped from anywhere.”

  “Oh well, too bad. I’ll borrow from Eugénie.”

  And he plunged down the corridor that led to the other end of the little apartment in the Rue Bonaparte.

  At one P.M., Sartre would go off for lunch, either with Beauvoir or another woman friend, and Cau would leave for the day. Sartre would be back at four-thirty in the afternoon, when Beauvoir would turn up and work at the little bridge table, transported to Sartre’s study. Beauvoir started work immediately. Sartre sometimes sat at the piano for an hour and practiced a Bach prelude or a Beethoven sonata, then set to work. They worked till 8 P.M. Just across the square from the Flore and the Deux Magots, they recreated the café atmosphere at home.

  In the summer of 1946, Sartre and Beauvoir went to Switzerland and Italy. Beauvoir was finishing her historical novel, All Men Are Mortal. Sartre was writing two plays. The Victors—dedicated to Vanetti, with a leading role for Wanda—was about the courage of the resistants during the war and the torture many of them had endured. The Respectful Prostitute, inspired by the famous Scottsboro case in Alabama, in which nine black youths were falsely accused of raping two white prostitutes, portrayed racism in the American South. The title caused a scandal (the play was obliged to run under the title The Respectful P.), and the play itself aroused cries of “anti-Americanism.” Sartre was taken aback by the accusations. “I am not anti-American,” he said. “I don’t even know what the word means…. I have just devoted two whole issues of my review, Les Temps modernes, to the United States. The writer’s duty…is to denounce injustice everywhere, and all the more so when he loves the country which lets this injustice happen.”44

  In the evenings in Rome, Sartre and Beauvoir dined with Italian friends, including the writers Elio Vittorini, Carlo Levi, and Ignazio Silone. Marked by the bitter memory of Italian fascism during the war, Italian intellectuals were nearly all communist sympathizers. In France, the Communist Party, which was fiercely Stalinist, attacked independent left-wingers like Sartre. In Italy, the atmosphere was quite different. The Italian Communist Party, far more all-inclusive, regarded fellow travelers as friends. It made life much more pleasant for the intellectuals. Throughout their lives, Sartre and Beauvoir would always feel comfortable in Italy.

  Sartre spent three weeks with Wanda, and Beauvoir went hiking by herself in the Dolomites, staying in inns and mountain huts. Once more she experienced “the noise of pebbles rolling down the screes…the gasping effort of the long climb, the ecstasy of relief when the haversack slips from the shoulders…the early departures under the pale sky.”45 As usual, the long exhausting walks helped her to find an inner serenity. For her, it was a form of meditation.

  She and Sartre had arranged to meet in Paris on the morning of Sunday, August 24, and planned to spend the day together. Unfortunately, Wanda (worried about Olga, who was to have a second pneumothorax) understood things differently, Sartre explained to Beauvoir:

  Around 10 o’clock (perhaps just slightly later) I’ll be at the Deux Magots. I’ll stay with you till noon. The catastrophe is that W. doesn’t understand “till the 24th” as we do. To her it means “including the 24th.” Which means that, to end things on a good note, I think we’d better give her that much. We’ll gain her good mood for a time—because she is in a good mood these days (the play, a new hotel). I’ll meet you on the morning of the 25th and we’ll stay together till Monday evening without seeing a soul…. Don’t becross with me and don’t be upset that I gave in: she’d just heard about her sister’s pneumothorax, which came as a blow, we were on the verge of a frightful scene and I simply gave in.46

  In the autumn, Beauvoir accompanied Sartre back to Rome. “I had never seen Rome in the gentle October light,” she writes.47 They stayed at the old Minerva Hotel, in the center of town, and spent peaceful days writing.

  Les Temps modernes might have looked sober with its plain white cover and black-and-red print, but like its editor-in-chief, it was never stuffy. Sartre set out to break down the divide between so-called “serious literature” and journalism. Alongside articles on politics, literature, sociology, and psychoanalysis was a humorous column by Boris Vian, autobiographical pieces by people from all possible walks of life (a prostitute, a thief, and so on), and articles on the latest jazz, literature, and films from America. In no time, Les Temps modernes acquired a reputation throughout Europe for being fresh and stimulating.

  To Beauvoir, this collective editorial project was “the highest form of friendship.”48 It was a privileged way for her and Sartre to communicate with their contemporaries, to take part in current debates. “I would read an article that made me angry and say to myself immediately: ‘I must answer that!’” Beauvoir writes in her memoirs. “That’s how all the essays I wrote for Les Temps modernes came into being.”49

  Every two weeks, on Sunday afternoons at five-thirty, the editorial committee would crowd into Sartre’s study on the Rue Bonaparte. They argued heatedly, laughed, and drank a great deal. It seemed to the others that Sartre breathed ideas. Meetings would often last until one in the morning, when Sartre and Beauvoir would still be full of steam. The others were exhausted.

  Sartre had little interest in the practical management of the magazine. Maurice Merleau-Ponty took over the day-to-day direction.50 The other highly energetic member of the team was Simone de Beauvoir. She came up with ideas for articles, read through the pile of submissions, and wielded her editor’s pen with skill. It was a great deal of work in addition to her own writing, but she relished it.

  By the summer of 1946, Beauvoir was wondering what to write next. She wanted to write about herself, and Sartre encouraged her. Once again, he asked her: What did it mean to be a woman?

  She answered, a little impatiently, that for her it did not mean much. She led the same sort of life as her male friends, she was just as privileged, and she had never felt inferior because of her femininity. “All the same,” Sartre insisted, “you weren’t brought up in the same way as a boy would have been; you should look into it further.”

  Beauvoir was sure she could dispense with the question quickly. She went to the Bibliothèque Nationale and looked up everything she could find on the condition of women and the myths of femininity. She was there for weeks and was astonished by her findings. “It was a revelation
. This world was a masculine world, my childhood had been nourished by myths forged by men, and I hadn’t reacted to them in at all the same way I should have done if I had been a boy.”51

  Such was her interest in the subject that she put her memoir project to one side and embarked on what she thought would be a long essay. It was to become a thick book, a twentieth-century landmark called The Second Sex.

  Beauvoir had greatly envied Sartre and Bost when they flew off to the United States, and was thrilled when Philippe Soupault, a French surrealist writer and journalist who had lived in the United States during the war, managed to arrange a series of lectures for her at American universities. She was to leave in January 1947.

  She was also extremely nervous. Four months was a long time to be away. She felt as if she were leaving her life behind. It did not help that while she was away, Vanetti was coming to Paris to live with Sartre.

  She wondered, would she be able to immerse herself in American life as Sartre and Bost had done? Unlike Sartre, she had a good command of English, even if her accent was thick. But whereas Sartre had been looked after there—first by the Office of War Information, then by Vanetti—Beauvoir was on her own.

  The final weeks passed in a whirl. It was a tumultuous time. The cold war divided French intellectuals and split up friendships. There were endless discussions about Soviet communism versus American imperialism, the Soviet gulag versus the American atom bomb.

  Relations between Sartre and Camus were already strained because of politics. Then, in October 1946, Beauvoir writes: “a tumultuous newcomer burst into our group.”52 Arthur Koestler and his wife were visiting Paris for a few weeks. Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, a chilling look at Stalinist Russia, was a best seller in France. Koestler and Camus were close, and shared a virulent anticommunism. Sartre and Beauvoir often went out with them. Koestler and Camus would harangue Sartre about his sympathy with the Soviet Union, telling him he was an apologist for Stalinism. They drank vast quantities, and their arguments were fierce.