Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Beauvoir was apprehensive about returning to Paris. Sartre’s letters said ominously little about his feelings for Vanetti. Beauvoir, due to leave on May 10, begged him to “fix up a nice return” for her. She wanted to go away with him for two weeks—anywhere. “All I ask is to have you for a fortnight to myself.”17

  On Monday, April 28, she received an unusually loving letter. “My little sweet, dear heart,” Sartre wrote. “I just want you to know that I’m filled with joy at the thought of seeing you again.” He had booked her back into her pink room at the Louisiane, and would be waiting for her at the airport bus terminal. “We’ll get back together as though we’d parted the night before. I am so happy when I’m with you, my little one.”18

  “How happy I’ve been feeling since Monday,” Beauvoir wrote on Wednesday. “In ten days you’ll be there, I’ll touch you, I’ll speak to you—I’m in raptures. You see, more than the Liberation, more than my journey to New York, it’s you every time who are the most astonishing experience in my life, and the strongest and the deepest and the truest.”

  On Saturday, May 3, she went out for breakfast and returned to the Brevoort to find a cable waiting for her from Sartre. The situation with Vanetti was difficult, he said. Could Beauvoir postpone her return for a week?

  Beauvoir did not write back until Thursday, May 8, “I was really shattered when I found your cable.” She told Sartre she had suffered a “dreadful breakdown” and cried all day, “an anguish I just couldn’t manage to cast off.”

  I found the idea of returning earlier than you wanted so unbearable, that on Saturday it made me quite ill when I couldn’t exchange my seat. But on Monday I groveled to everybody so successfully that by Tuesday it had all been fixed. So I’ll be at the Gare des Invalides at about 10.30 on Sunday 18th…. Ireally do want to feel completely calm and free of problems in Paris, at least during the first days. I beg of you, my love, fix everything nicely so that we can be on our own for a long time, and nothing spoils the happiness of being back with you.

  She told Sartre she was going to Chicago for a few days. “The guy I liked there has been entreating me for two months to go back.” What she did not tell Sartre was that when she got Sartre’s cable, she was overcome with longing to be wrapped in loving arms. She first thought of Bernard Wolfe. She gathered all her courage and called him, hinting that they could perhaps take a brief trip away somewhere. He blustered excuses, clearly nervous that his wife would find out. When she put down the phone, she was damp with sweat.

  She had paced the room nervously, then picked up the phone again. “I can come and spend three or four days in Chicago this week,” she told Nelson Algren. “What do you think?”19 He sounded very happy. He would meet her at the airport, he said.

  She arrived in Chicago at mid-morning on May 10, and Algren was nowhere to be seen in the airport. She waited. Eventually it became clear that she was going to have to make another of those awful phone calls. She began to fumble in her handbag for her address book, thinking that it had been a dreadful mistake to come back to Chicago, when a tall figure appeared in front of her and said hello. Algren was mortified to find her there waiting for him. He had rung the airport, he said, and they told him there was no flight from New York for an hour. He had even turned up forty minutes early. He sat down beside her. As Beauvoir herself has pointed out, Anne Dubreuilh’s reunion with Lewis Brogan in The Mandarins is closely based on real life:

  I smiled at him. “We aren’t going to stay here all morning, are we?”

  “No,” he said. He thought for a moment. “Would you like to go to the zoo?”

  “To the zoo?”

  “It’s near here.”

  “And what will we do there?”

  “We’ll look at the animals and they’ll look at us.”

  “I didn’t come here to exhibit myself to your animals.” I got up. “Why don’t we go to some quiet place, where I can have some coffee and a sandwich, and we’ll look at each other?”

  He, too, got up. “That’s an idea!”

  Beauvoir desperately wished Algren would suggest going back to his house. He didn’t. In the taxi, he was silent. Beauvoir worried about spending four days with this stranger.

  “We should stop off at the hotel first and leave my suitcase there,” she said. On the phone from New York, not wishing to appear as if she were throwing herself at him, she had asked Algren to reserve a hotel room for her. Of course she hoped he would ignore the request.

  Algren gave her an embarrassed smile and said it was hard to find a room in Chicago. He took her to an ugly cafeteria. After that they went to a baseball game. Then they went to a bowling alley. The day wore on. In the late afternoon, tired, cold, and frustrated, Beauvoir insisted that Algren ring for a hotel room. He helped her check in to the Hotel Alexandria, on Rush Street, in North Chicago. Surely, she thought, he would find an excuse to go up to the room with her? (“I could have given him twenty.”) But he left her in the foyer. Beauvoir lay on the bed, listening for the sound of his steps in the corridor. They never came.

  They had dinner that evening in a little Polish restaurant, then went to a bar. Algren had just fronted up to the gaming table when a group of his down-and-out friends, men and women, turned up. They talked excitedly to Algren, and Beauvoir could not understand a word they said. She was on the point of abandoning all hope when later, in a cab on their way to yet another jazz bar, Algren pulled her toward him and kissed her.

  Anne Dubreuilh’s body feels as if it were rising from the dead. In the jazz bar, she sips her whiskey, unable to focus on the music, encumbered by a “brand-new body,” which is “too large, too burning.” At last she is under the Mexican blanket with Brogan:

  Suddenly, he was no longer either awkward or modest. His desire transformed me. I who for a long time had been without taste, without form, again possessed breasts, a belly, a sex, flesh; I was as nourishing as bread, as fragrant as earth. It was so miraculous that I didn’t think of measuring my time or my pleasure; I knew only that before we fell asleep I could hear the gentle chirpings of dawn.

  Beauvoir and Algren would always call May 10 their “anniversary.” The next day, Algren slipped a cheap Mexican ring on Beauvoir’s finger. She told him she would wear it till the day she died. He called her “Simone, honey.” She called him her “local youth.” Algren laughed and imitated her accent. “Local use.”

  Apart from the New Yorker article, Algren knew almost nothing about Beauvoir, Sartre, or that worldwide craze, existentialism. For Beauvoir, it was intensely refreshing to be with a man who desired her first and foremost as a woman. Anne Dubreuilh muses: “I, who always question myself suspiciously about the feelings I inspire in others, never wondered who it was Lewis loved in me. I was certain it was myself. He knew neither my country, my language, my friends, nor my worries, only my voice, my eyes, my skin.”

  Beauvoir had to return to New York, but she did not want to leave Algren, so he came, too. He had never flown before, and was afraid of heights, but once on the plane, he enjoyed himself. They spent passionate days and nights at the Brevoort. Beauvoir showed him her favorite New York haunts. It was fascinating for her to see the city through the eyes of a man from Chicago.

  “It’s funny that we get along so well,” Algren told her. “I’ve never been able to get along with anybody.”20 There were brief moments when he became sullen and morose, and Beauvoir would feel panic rising in her and wonder what she had done wrong. But she could see that his moodiness was defensive. She liked to think she was the only one who understood him.

  On the plane back to France, she opened Algren’s Chicago underworld novel, Never Come Morning, and read the loving inscription he had made to her. She leaned her forehead against the window, with the blue sea below her, and wept. “Crying was sweet because it was love,” she wrote to her “beloved local youth” from the pale blue airport lounge in Newfoundland. It felt like a dream, she said, but it was not a dream, so they would never have to wake up.
21

  Her return was painful. It was springtime, the sun was shining, and lilies of the valley and bunches of asparagus were being sold on the streets of Paris, but the cars were old, the window displays looked anemic, the Louisiane was dingy, and Sartre was cold.

  Vanetti was still in Paris, and appeared to have no intention of leaving. Sartre listened to Beauvoir’s stories about America, but he volunteered little information himself, and evaded her questions. It seemed that Vanetti was pressuring him to marry her, and he was not at all sure what he wanted. He was in love, but not prepared to give up his life for her, and Vanetti was not willing to accept anything less. “Poverty. Anxiety. No doubt about it: I was home,” Anne Dubreuilh thinks to herself in The Mandarins.

  After three days of weeping and heartache, Beauvoir decided she needed air—country air. She packed her bags again, including a pile of books and notebooks, and took a train to Saint-Lambert, a quiet village in the valley of Chevreuse, southwest of Paris. She installed herself in a blue-and-yellow inn, down the hill from the old stone church. In the nearby woods were the ruins of an ancient Benedictine convent, the Abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs. The playwright Jean Racine, an orphan, had received a fine education from those nuns, and wrote about his solitary walks through the forest there. The area breathed the spirit of religious retreat. In her Catholic youth, Beauvoir had gone into retreat every year—to pray, tell her beads, meditate, and write down the outpourings of her soul. Thirty years later, she knew what she needed to try to restore her serenity.

  For the two weeks he had promised Beauvoir, Sartre divided his time between Saint-Lambert and Paris. Whenever he was in the country, Vanetti would phone from Paris, weeping and making threats. After those two weeks, Sartre returned to Vanetti. Beauvoir remained in the village, on and off, for the next two months—with regular trips to Paris for Temps modernes meetings and to see friends.

  In the country, surrounded by birdsong, cows, and the scent of roses, she worked on America Day by Day. Bost and Olga spent time with her. (Olga was home from the sanatorium, feeling much better.) Sartre came once a week, and they walked through the forest, along the paths Racine had taken, and Beauvoir tried to understand what was going on in Sartre’s head.

  She cursed the “dreadful Atlantic Ocean” between her and the man she desired. “I cry because I do not cry in your arms,” she wrote to Algren. “This is not sensible at all, because if I were in your arms I should not cry.”22

  She admitted to Algren that she was doing a lot of weeping, but she rarely mentioned Sartre, and never mentioned Vanetti. There was a great deal that she did not tell Algren. When she talked about her life it was in the same whimsical, self-mocking tone that Algren himself used. One afternoon, friends came to visit her in the country, she told Algren in her idiosyncratic English, and there was a dramatic, beautiful storm:

  The storm had gone on my nerves, and I drank much…. When the other friends left I became a storm myself, and poor Sartre was very bored with me who spoke about life and death and everything in a rather mad way…. You see, it has never been very easy for me to live, though I am always very happy—maybe because I want so much to be happy. I like so much to live and I hate the idea of dying one day. And then I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, and to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish…. You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.23

  Her emotional storms were rather more protracted than she let on to Algren. That summer, there were moments when Beauvoir’s anxiety “bordered on mental aberration.” For the first time in her life, she took drugs to fight off depression. For some time Sartre had been taking Benzedrine, a stimulant that pilots took to keep awake when flying. He gave her some. The pills seemed to help her work, though she wondered if they were making her anxiety even worse.

  In July, Sartre finally saw Vanetti off on a boat from Le Havre. She warned him that either she would never come back or she would come back for good. For months, Sartre brooded. Beauvoir was reminded of the dark days when he had been followed by lobsters. “I wondered in terror if we had become strangers to one another.”24

  In September 1947, Beauvoir returned to Chicago for two weeks. Algren took her on a thorough guided tour of that city—including the country prison, the electric chair, a police lineup, and a psychiatric hospital—and she took notes for her book America Day by Day. She called Algren’s humble abode the “Wabansia goat nest.” There was no bathroom. They washed themselves at the kitchen sink. Algren showered twice a week at the local men’s boxing gym, and arranged for Beauvoir to take an occasional bath at a friend’s place.25

  He wanted her to stay in Chicago and marry him. She tried to explain that her life was Paris, that in Chicago she would be lost and uprooted, that she could never cope with what she saw as “the harsh loneliness of America.”26 Algren found this hard to accept. Beauvoir worried that if she could not give him her life she did not deserve his love.

  By the time Beauvoir was back in Paris, at the end of September, a new woman had appeared in Sartre’s life. As screenwriter of The Chips Are Down, Sartre had gone to the launch at the Cannes film festival. He was photographed reading on that fashionable promenade, La Croisette. One day, a feisty twenty-four-year-old American journalist had come up to him, explaining that part of her job was to assemble details for future obituaries. “Here’s an opportunity,” she told him with a grin. “You can influence what people say about you before you die!” Sartre gave her his phone number at the Rue Bonaparte.

  Beauvoir must have been extremely relieved. Sartre’s two-and-a-half-year obsession with Vanetti seemed finally to be over. He was no longer faithful to her. Beauvoir was once again Sartre’s loyal confidante—the one to whom he complained about the demands of his women.

  Journalist Sally Swing, who was currently based in Paris, found herself slotted into Sartre’s schedule on Wednesday evenings (till Thursday mornings) and from Saturday afternoon till Sunday afternoon. “He treated women like a chest of drawers,” Swing recalls. “You’re in the top drawer. She’s in the bottom drawer. I hated it. It made me mad.”

  But she was crazy about him, she says. When he imitated people, he had her rolling on the floor with laughter. He wanted to psychoanalyze her. (“No way!”) They played duets—he at the piano, she on the violin. (“Stop playing like a bloody German!” she said to him.) They acted out roles. She thought him “a wonderful lover.”27 (Decades later, Swing would read in Sartre’s published correspondence to Beauvoir that he found her too sexually demanding.) When they spent the night together, they slept at her apartment on the Rue Grenelle, never at his mother’s.

  Beauvoir dedicated America Day by Day to Ellen and Richard Wright, and handed it in to her publishers in January 1948. Then she plunged into her essay on women, which she now saw as a book. She was inspired to work even harder than usual because she and Algren planned to travel together for four months, from May to September. She wrote to him that since they both liked to do the planning, she had come up with a scheme: “We’ll cut the days in two parts, you’ll plan the nights (I heard you were not bad at it), and I’ll obey your plans in a very submissive way, and I’ll plan the days, and you’ll follow me the same way. What do you think of it?”28

  Sartre’s new play, Dirty Hands, opened on April 2 at the Théâtre Antoine. Sartre had insisted that Wanda play the lead female role, even though the director did not think she was capable. The weeks leading up to the play had been filled with anxiety. And then, to everyone’s surprise, Wanda had acted like a star. Tickets sold out, and critics proclaimed Dirty Hands one of the most important plays to have come out of France in a long time. For Wanda, it was a personal triumph. “That is good,” Beauvoir wrote Algren, “since the whole thing was done for her.”29

  While Sartre was writing the third volume of his trilo
gy and making notes for future books, he was heavily involved in politics. He had become one of the leaders of a new movement called the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR). The idea of the RDR was that Europeans must not allow themselves to be pawns in the cold war being waged between the two great enemy powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Europeans wanted peace, and they must make their voices heard.

  That summer, when the Soviet blockade of Berlin had the world poised yet again on the edge of war, the RDR gained considerable popular momentum. “We think that it is man who makes history,” Sartre said, “and that this war… is absurd and unjustifiable.”30

  Sartre and Beauvoir had been making elaborate plans. From May to September 1948, Vanetti was coming to stay with Sartre in Paris. (He had warned Sally Swing that he would not be able to see her then.) During this time, Beauvoir was going to travel with Algren—down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then to the Yucatán, Guatemala, and Mexico.

  And then, just a few days before the two women were due to swap continents once again, the plans went awry. Vanetti wrote to say that she had decided not to see Sartre under these conditions. Sartre, who saw this as a rejection, threw himself into the arms of his other American woman, Sally Swing. Beauvoir, faced with a new choice—being with Sartre instead of Algren—started to have doubts. Four months, after all, was a long time to be away from Sartre. After talking it over with him, she decided to cut her trip back by two months. She did not dare tell Algren. She would break the news to him later.

  There was another delicate subject she had to broach with Algren, one that made her shy. “I am just a little afraid you’ll laugh at me,” she told him. On her previous visit, they had made love without taking any precautions. She had told him not to worry. (“If I had caught a baby, I should have gone to some surgeon and it would have been quickly fixed up.”) But this time they were going to be traveling, and “it would be terrible if anything happened.”31 What did he think they should do? Did Americans have any sophisticated new method of contraception? She did not want to lessen his pleasure in any way. Algren wrote back and said he would use one of the traditional methods—withdrawal or condoms.