by Hazel Rowley
Beauvoir gave in to Koestler’s aggressive seduction ploys and spent a night with him. She would write about the episode, with a thin fictional disguise, in The Mandarins. In the novel, Anne Dubreuilh is about to leave for America, and feels nervous, insecure, and lonely. Her one-night stand with the condescending and sadistic “Scriassine” is a vivid evocation of alienated sex.53
One night, at a party, Camus picked a fight with Merleau-Ponty, accusing him of justifying the Moscow show trials. Sartre stood up for Merleau-Ponty. Camus left in a rage, slamming the door behind him. Sartre and Bost ran after him, but Camus refused to come back. It was their first major falling out, and would not be the last.
Before she left for America, Beauvoir went to say good-bye to Olga, who was undergoing “heliotherapy”—exposure to fresh air and sunshine—in the Leysin sanatorium high up in the Swiss alps. Her bed had been wheeled out onto the balcony, where she spent hours each day breathing in the icy air. A few months earlier, she and Bost had married.54 It was a romantic gesture in the face of possible death, and a practical one as well. For Bost, it was easier to visit Olga in conservative Swiss sanatoria if they were married.
After twenty-four hours in that sinister white building filled with death and despair, Beauvoir felt crushed. She was relieved to take the train back to Paris.
It was a severe winter. Violent storms obliged some flights to turn around halfway across the Atlantic. On the evening of January 24, 1947, Beauvoir and Sartre went out to the airport at Orly. She was tense. Sartre kissed her and left. Then came the announcement that due to bad weather the flight would be postponed until the following evening. Beauvoir returned to Paris and spent the evening with Sartre and Bost, feeling as if she were floating between two worlds.
Twenty-four hours later, she was finally sitting in a forty-seat cargo plane. She opened her notebook. “Something is about to happen,” she wrote. “You can count the minutes in your life when something happens.”55
The flight was long and tiring, with stops in the Azores and Newfoundland. Beauvoir was apprehensive, and takeoffs and landings were an ordeal. Her ears hurt, and her temples throbbed. She wrote to Sartre from the airport at Newfoundland. “Do you remember that hall where I’m writing to you, with its pale blue walls?…I find your tracks everywhere and that’s another way of feeling how tightly joined we are…. I really feel I shan’t be separated from you for an instant—nothing can separate us.”56
On the descent into New York, Beauvoir felt frightened and queasy. The plane pitched. Peering out of the little round window, she could make out houses and streets. She told herself she would soon be walking down those streets. The woman next to her murmured that the engine was making an odd noise. The plane turned, leaning on one wing. Beauvoir thought: “I don’t want to die. Not now. I don’t want the lights to go out.” Then she felt the thud of the wheels touching the runway.
EIGHT
WABANSIA AVENUE, JAZZ, AND THE GOLDEN ZAZOU
January 1947–Summer 1950
A woman from the French Cultural Services met Beauvoir at the airport, and the two of them had a lobster dinner, then Beauvoir deposited her suitcase in her midtown hotel room, and plunged alone into the Manhattan night. She walked down Broadway to Times Square. The streets were full of people. But she felt like a phantom. Nothing seemed quite real, and she was invisible in this crowd. On her previous travels—in Rome, Madrid, even in Francophone Africa—she still thought of Paris as the heart of the universe. No longer. This was another world.
Over the next few days, everything astonished her: the silence of the traffic (“no horns”), the uniformed doormen who stood at the entrance to apartment buildings as if they were palaces, the elevator employees (“it’s difficult to receive clandestine visits”), the women’s very high heels (“I’m ashamed of my Swiss shoes with the crepe soles I was so proud of”), the friendliness of total strangers, the speed of restaurant service (“You can eat anything, anywhere, very quickly—I like that”). She tried to pierce the façade of this strange culture, while mocking her little ruses. “I don’t like the taste of whiskey; I only like these glass sticks you stir it with. Yet until three o’clock in the morning, I drink scotch docilely because scotch is one of the keys to America. I want to break through the glass wall.”1
She knew the best key: an American lover. Sartre had found himself one with enviable ease. Why did it seem to her so difficult?
If I want to decode New York, I must meet New Yorkers. There are names in my address book but no faces to match. I’ll have to talk on the telephone, in English, to people whom I don’t know and who don’t know me. Going down into the hotel lobby, I’m more intimidated than if I were going to take an oral exam.2
As she roamed Manhattan and Brooklyn by herself, she took pleasure in seeing the things Sartre had seen. “It’s you I meet everywhere about New York,” she told him, “and it’s you again whom I love when loving the skyscrapers.”3
Vanetti was about to fly off to join Sartre in Paris, and Beauvoir was determined to meet her. Vanetti reluctantly agreed to come to the Sherry-Netherland, on Fifth Avenue, where the two women talked until three in the morning. They were nervous, and drank one whiskey after another. “I like her a lot,” Beauvoir told Sartre, “and was very happy because I understood your feelings—I could appreciate them, and honored you for having them.” A day or two later, she was invited to a cocktail party in Vanetti’s home. “I was very moved to be entering that apartment where you’d lived for so long…. Dolores was as cute as a little Annamite idol and really charming to me—I’d like to know what she was actually thinking.” Vanetti was certainly kind. She even arranged for Beauvoir to write some articles for American newspapers, for supplementary income.
The last time they met, Vanetti was surrounded by suitcases, about to leave for the airport, and dreading the long flight ahead. “I really do find her extremely pleasant and likeable,” Beauvoir wrote. “Just a bit too much of a ‘little dame,’ as Bost puts it, for my own taste. But if you’re male, and what’s more driven by an imperialistic passion of generosity, you couldn’t find anyone more appropriate.”4
Beauvoir particularly liked Richard Wright, the black American writer, and his wife, Ellen. Their apartment on Charles Street, in Greenwich Village, became her home away from home. Julia, their five-year-old daughter, was “a real little marvel.” (“Even I who don’t like children am friends with her.”)5 The Wrights introduced Beauvoir to their circle of friends—left-wing intellectuals, nearly all Jewish, and all vehemently anticommunist—and Beauvoir found herself invited to their apartments. To her surprise, she saw that all these people had a typewriter, a record player, and a good collection of jazz.
She was immediately drawn to Bernard Wolfe’s haunted face and generous spirit. Wolfe had been Trotsky’s secretary down in Mexico, and had co-written a book on black hip culture, Really the Blues, with his friend Mezz Mezzrow, a white jazz clarinetist brought up in Chicago’s black culture.6 Beauvoir asked Wolfe where she could hear good jazz, and he took her to a Louis Armstrong concert at Carnegie Hall. This was a rare occurrence, and tickets were hard to come by. Beauvoir was touched by what she saw as yet another example of staggering American kindness to strangers.
Her visit was featured in The New Yorker. Intimidated by the thought of meeting “Sartre’s female intellectual counterpart,” her interviewer admitted thinking he was “set for a grim half-hour.” “Well, surprise! Mlle de B. is the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw; also eager, gentle, modest, and as pleased as a Midwesterner with the two weeks she spent in New York.”7
In mid-February, Beauvoir left New York on a lecture tour. “My heart is as torn as if I were leaving someone special,” she wrote. “I didn’t think I could love another city as much as Paris.”8
She was in Chicago for thirty-six hours. It was the end of February, so the streets were covered in snow and the wind cut like a razor. She did not feel like seeing the city by herself. Friends in New Yo
rk had given her the address of a writer, Nelson Algren. Algren was thirty-eight, a year younger than Beauvoir. She had been warned that he was a moody, difficult fellow.
Beauvoir plucked up her courage and dialed. A man answered. She blustered into the phone with her thick French accent. The man hung up. She dialed again and spoke louder. “Wrong number,” he said. After three tries, she was crimson with embarrassment, and asked the hotel operator to help. “There’s a party here that would like to speak to you,” the operator told Algren. He was used to misplaced calls in thick accents from Polish immigrants who had never used a phone before, and was busy cooking something on his stove. This time, he listened more carefully to what he later described as that “hoarse screech.”9 To Beauvoir’s relief, he sounded more friendly.
That evening in the hotel bar, she saw a tall blond man with wire-frame glasses and a leather waistcoat come through the door and look her up and down with surprise. Beauvoir told him she was tired of luxury hotels and elegant restaurants. Would he show her the real Chicago?
Algren took her to Chicago’s Bowery—to a strip club, a Negro bar, and a “gangster tavern,” where music blared out from the jukebox and a variety of tramps, crooks, drug addicts, and whores propped themselves up at the counter. He felt at home in places like this, Algren said. These people were his friends.
Between his mumbling Midwestern drawl and her strong French accent, they had trouble understanding each other. At first she plied him with questions, and he answered laconically. But by the end of the evening, he was telling her about his life. He was born in Detroit, he said, and brought up in a poor immigrant district on the South Side of Chicago. His mother was Jewish and his father Swedish, but he did not feel either. During the Depression, after graduating in journalism from the University of Illinois, he had traveled in the South, hopping freight trains, and had served a four-month term in a Texas prison for stealing a typewriter. Back in Chicago, he was involved in a communist writers’ group. It was the best time of his life. During the war, he had served in the army in France. He did not speak French, but he liked the French. On his way to and from Europe, he had stopped in New York. Otherwise, he had scarcely left Chicago.
They arranged to see each other the following afternoon. Beauvoir had to attend lunch with people from the Alliance Française. As soon as she could, she asked the French consul to drop her off at Algren’s. The consul drove her to the Polish district, past warehouses, vacant lots, and rows of squalid wooden houses with scruffy backyards. At 1523 West Wabansia Avenue she stepped out into the snow, waved good-bye to the consul, and knocked on the door. The place was a hovel.
A fire was crackling in the black potbellied stove in the kitchen. The linoleum floor was covered with newspapers. “I was trying to clean up a bit,” Algren said. He ushered her into the other room. There was a bright yellow chair, books, papers, a typewriter, a record player. On the bed was a colorful Mexican blanket. Beauvoir wished they could get under it and spend the afternoon there.
Instead, Algren showed her his neighborhood. She slipped on a patch of ice, and he took her arm. When their ears felt as if they would fall off with the cold, they went inside a bar and warmed up with stiff drinks. Beauvoir had not been able to get out of a dinner appointment with the French consul, and she resented it. Algren saw her to a taxi, and kissed her good-bye. He wanted her to come back in a few weeks. “If you do not I will come to Paris one day after you.”10
The following morning, Beauvoir was on the train crossing the country to Los Angeles, remembering Algren’s boyish smile. Before leaving the hotel, she had not seen the parcel Algren had left for her at the front desk. She had told him she was scared of seeing him again: wouldn’t the parting be too painful? The parcel contained inscribed copies of his books, along with a tender note, which he was to forward to Los Angeles. He hoped very much to see her again, he said, even if the parting were painful.
After two days and nights on the train, Beauvoir arrived in Los Angeles at eight in the morning. Nathalie Sorokine, who was pregnant when Beauvoir saw her off from Paris two years earlier, was now living with her husband, Ivan Moffat, in Westwood, Los Angeles. She was at the station (“her hair and face magnificent, but more enormous than ever”) and drove Beauvoir to their apartment, where Moffat was waiting with breakfast on the table. Their little girl was being looked after by a nanny.
Moffat, who was proving to be a successful screenwriter, had liked Beauvoir’s novel All Men Are Mortal, and proposed to his producer friend George Stevens that they make a film of it together. (In the next few years, the two men would produce such classics as A Place in the Sun, East of Eden, and Giant.) There was talk of Claude Rains and Greta Garbo in the lead roles. “It would mean at least $30,000 for me,” Beauvoir told Sartre. “Doesn’t that make your head spin? We’d live for a whole year in America, you and I.”11
A few days later, Moffat lent the women his big red Packard, and they set off. With Beauvoir navigating, they drove to San Francisco, then to Lone Pine, on the edge of the Nevada desert, where one afternoon, Moffat and George Stevens loomed up in Stevens’s big car, a little later than the appointed meeting time, having stopped for several whiskeys on the way. They were wearing cowboy hats, red-and-black-checked shirts, and neckerchiefs. Beauvoir would write about that wondrous desert meeting in America Day by Day.
They went back to Los Angeles for a time, and then Moffat drove the women across a deserted Los Angeles bathed in the early light of dawn, and dropped them at the Greyhound bus station. Beauvoir and Sorokine set off on a three-week tour: a bus to Santa Fe, Houston, Natchez, and New Orleans; a plane to Florida, then a bus up to New York, with Beauvoir giving lectures along the way. The two women got on surprisingly well.
After she left Los Angeles, Beauvoir wrote and told Moffat how close she had felt to him, and how sad she felt to leave him. “While you were here I consciously became fonder and fonder of you and attracted by you,” he replied. He wished they could have spent “a whole night in each other’s embrace.”12
Ivan Moffat, ten years younger than Beauvoir, could not help but respond to “the ardor and the vitality of her face, and those marvelous blue eyes and lovely smile and laughter.”13
Her lecturing schedule was strenuous, but Beauvoir, untiring, was grateful for the opportunity to talk to American intellectuals. The Daily Princetonian reported:
The elegant and attractive Simone de Beauvoir, the female ambassador for Existentialism in the United States, made the conquest of Princeton’s linguists yesterday afternoon, while bombarding them in fast French about the responsibility of the writer. “In France today,” Mme de Beauvoir told her audience, “it is no longer permissible for the writer to stand apart and isolate himself in his ivory tower.”14
Beauvoir pointed out that after the war, French tribunals had shown no mercy to French intellectuals who had collaborated, whereas other kinds of collaborators—war profiteers, for example—were treated comparatively leniently. In France, they had understood that an intellectual has a serious responsibility. As existentialists, she and Sartre believed that writers must be “committed.” Words were actions. Writers had to take sides.
While Beauvoir was traveling around, imparting her message to university audiences across the country, she was meeting many people and asking many questions. Over cocktail parties and dinners, she chatted with faculty members and graduate students. Whenever she found herself alone, she sat in restaurants and bars or lay on her bed in hotel rooms, reading American literature and making notes. The book she would write about her trip, America Day by Day, gives a vivid sense of the kinds of conversations she was having, as well as her private reflections. When it was translated into English in 1953, most American critics (including the Francophile Mary McCarthy) resented what they saw as Beauvoir’s facile generalizations and her sense of French superiority. In recent years, several American critics have hailed the book as “a forgotten gem.”15
Beauvoir was also making notes f
or the essay she was writing on women. The experience of a different culture was proving invaluable. She was observing things with fresh, foreign eyes, and seeing the relationship between the sexes from an entirely new perspective. To her astonishment, she had come to the conclusion that women were less free in the United States:
I’d imagined that women here would surprise me with their independence. “American woman,” “free woman”—the words seemed synonymous. At first,…their dress astonished me with its flagrantly feminine, almost sexual character. In the women’s magazines here, more than in the French variety, I’ve read long articles on the art of husband hunting and catching a man. I’ve seen that college girls have little concern for anything but men and that the unmarried woman is much less respected here than in Europe…. Relations between the sexes are a struggle. One thing that was immediately obvious to me when I came to America is that men and women don’t like each other…. This is partly because American men tend to be laconic, and in spite of everything, a minimum of conversation is necessary for friendship. But it’s also because there is a mutual distrust, a lack of generosity, and a rancor that’s often sexual in origin.16
In mid-April, Beauvoir was back in New York, staying at the Brevoort, an old hotel near Washington Square. She rarely spent an evening by herself. As well as the Wrights, she was seeing a lot of Bernard Wolfe and enjoying nights of jazz and ardent discussion. Wolfe took her to a marijuana party. She smoked several cigarettes, inhaled conscientiously, and felt nothing at all. Nevertheless, at four in the morning, she found herself passionately kissing Wolfe in front of her hotel.