by Hazel Rowley
But Beauvoir wanted him to be “as free as free can be,” and made other plans. On her way to Chicago she flew to New York, where Stépha Gerassi had made an appointment with a gynecologist, and Beauvoir had herself fitted with a diaphragm.
The voyage down the Mississippi was blissful. Lulled by the watery landscape, she and Algren made love often, and drank whiskey on deck. Algren took photographs with his new camera (none of which turned out), and Beauvoir translated one of his short stories for Les Temps modernes.
In Mexico City, Beauvoir was relieved to get a cheerful letter from Sartre. He did not seem to be pining for Vanetti. He was indignant about events in Palestine (the Arab armies appeared to be winning the war in the Middle East, and Sartre feared the Jews’ dream of a homeland might yet be crushed) and indignant that the French newspapers seemed far more interested in Princess Elizabeth’s sojourn in Paris. Sally Swing was part of the fleet of journalists covering the British royal visit. He was seeing a lot of her—he called her “the little one”—but her sexual demands were killing him, he told Beauvoir. He punctiliously did as he was told, but it was boring.
Here’s my schedule: She lands at my place (Rue B.) around 5 in the evening, exhausted by her life as a journalist, her clothes in tatters, her calves scratched, her feet all blistered, her face spattered; she covered eight kilometers through the brambles of the Trianon to surprise Elizabeth at lunch, and she reached it dog tired, to find 50 journalists who had come in by the front door; or else she battled it out with the police…. She collapses on my bed and drops off with the sleep of Sorokine, by which I mean that I come and go, cough, light my pipe over and over, and she only wakes up at eight o’clock when I shake her. Sometimes, at 7.30, she draws grating notes out of a violin while I play the piano…. Then she takes a bath…. At 8.30, departure, search for taxi, dinner…. She adores eating. Then, at almost eleven, another taxi, where she loses some trinket (day before yesterday her bag with 30,000 francs, yesterday her hat). Then we search and take action, and we find or do not find the object (the hat found; the bag not). Then invariably, whether I go back to my mother’s or sleep at the little one’s place, I mount and submit. The mornings are pleasant: sun, the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, the greenery, the rooftops, her balcony, and then an American orange juice, American coffee, and departure: I get a taxi, go back to my mother’s, drink some of Dolores’s American coffee and work.32
Time was passing, and Beauvoir had still not said anything to Algren about her return date. Finally, on a long, dusty bus journey between Mexico City and Morelia, she clumsily announced that she had to leave him two months earlier than planned. Algren made some flippant comment, and Beauvoir did not at first realize how betrayed he felt. When she found herself exploring Morelia’s old streets and squares without him, she still did not understand what was happening.
By the time she did, it was too late. For the rest of the trip she saw plenty of the famous Algren sullenness. He told her he could not love her on her terms, and she kept weeping. She wanted to talk things over openly and honestly; he had no patience with her obsession with talk. Near the end of the trip, during a particularly disagreeable Sunday lunch at the Tavern on the Green in New York, she told him she would leave the next day if he wanted her to. He burst out that she had not understood anything. “I’m ready to marry you this very moment.”33
The return flight was nightmarish. Beauvoir stuffed herself with sleeping pills and still did not sleep. She was not sure she would see Algren again. Had she, in her foolishness, destroyed the greatest passion she had ever had?
On July 19, from her “toothpaste pink” room at the Louisiane, Beauvoir wrote to Algren that she and Sartre were leaving in a week (on July 23) for a two-month working trip in North Africa. She hoped he would write to her. Once again, she tried to explain to Algren why she could not give him her whole life:
I could not love you, want you, and miss you more than I do. Maybe you know that. But what you have to know too, though it may seem conceited to say it, is in which way Sartre needs me. In fact, he is very lonely, very tormented inside himself, very restless, and I am his only true friend, the only one who really understands him, helps him, works with him, gives him some peace and poise. For nearly twenty years he did everything for me; he helped me to live, to find myself, he sacrificed lots of things for my sake…. I could not desert him. I could leave him for more or less important periods, but not pledge my whole life to anyone else. I hate to speak about it again. I know that I am in danger losing you; I know what losing you would mean for me.
The next day, July 20, Beauvoir sent Algren a wire. Plans had changed. Would it be possible for her to come back to Chicago for a month?
His wire had the effect of a bombshell: “No, too much work.”34
Why had Beauvoir changed her plans yet again? On July 20, Vanetti had phoned Sartre from New York. She was sobbing into the phone. She could not bear to be away from him any longer, she said. Would he agree to spend a month with her in the south of France? Sartre said yes.35
Beauvoir had cut back her trip with Algren to be with Sartre, and now Sartre was leaving her high and dry. Sartre felt bad about it and offered to pay her fare back to Chicago. But whereas Dolores won this round with Sartre, Beauvoir lost with Algren.
On Friday the twenty-third, the day she and Sartre had originally planned to fly to Algiers, Beauvoir wrote to Algren with an invented story:
I hope you were not angry at my wire, honey, I’ll tell you what happened. If I had to come back to Paris in the middle of July, it was because Sartre needed me for working at a movie script from his last play. I told you I always wanted to help him when he asked, and then that is one of the ways of earning my life; my books would not be enough for me to live on…. But then suddenly, Tuesday, the producers changed their mind; there were arguments and quarrels, and the script is not to be done just now. Sartre has to stay here and discuss business before beginning the job, if he ever begins it, so he was terribly remorseful of having asked to me to come back…and he proposed to me to fly back to Chicago if I wanted, helping me with the money of the trip.
She did not mention Vanetti. In letters to Algren, she never mentioned her. What is surprising is that fifteen years later, in Force of Circumstance, she told the truth. When Algren, along with all her other readers, read about the woman Beauvoir called “M,” and learned the extent to which Beauvoir had lied to him, he would never speak to her again.
After Sartre spent a month with Vanetti in the south of France, he and Beauvoir went to Algeria for six weeks. Bost joined them for a time. They swam in the ocean, toured the country, and worked, in front of a fan or in the shade of the trees.
Back in Paris, Beauvoir wrote most mornings at the Deux Magots, then had lunch and a break, and at four P.M. she went to work at Sartre’s. At eight P.M., she emerged for an evening’s sociability. “What is really fine in Paris is this evening life, in the cafés,” she told Algren. “When you have worked all day long, you just go on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and without any appointment, you are sure to meet some friends with whom you can spend some time before sleeping.”36
Beauvoir had Paris’s café life; Algren had lonely Chicago. Beauvoir had Sartre; Algren had no one. He wrote that he felt the need to have a woman of his own. He did not think he would ever love another woman as much as he loved Simone, but “no arms are warm when they’re on the other side of the ocean.”37 He hoped he would remarry one day.
His letter did not make her happy, Beauvoir wrote back, but she understood, and everything he said was fair. “You will be a nice fate for any woman, and I should have chosen that fate for myself heartily if other things had not made it impossible for me.”38
Algren’s letters grew warmer again. He sent loving parcels to Beauvoir (and even to her mother), with tobacco, books, chocolate, and fine whisky concealed in a bag of flour. They agreed he would come to Paris the following May.
Beauvoir had lived in hotels for eightee
n years, and she decided she’d had enough. The places were badly heated. The Louisiane was damp and musty, and her pink room needed a good coat of paint. In October 1948, she moved into a small fifth-floor apartment on Rue de la Bûcherie, one of the ancient, narrow streets near the Seine, in the Latin Quarter. It was a poor Arab district in those days. As dusk fell, Beauvoir would hear the strains of Arab music coming from the second-floor café across the street, the Café des Amis. There were frequent street fights. Her building was shabby, and her ceiling leaked when it rained. But she loved having her own place. From one of her windows she looked across to the Seine, the quays, and the turrets of Notre-Dame.
She put red curtains up at the windows and bought two white armchairs. The room looked cozy with the green-bronze lamps designed by Giacometti, the cubist watercolor Fernand Léger had given her, some colorful Van Gogh and Picasso prints, and her books. From the ceiling beams she hung the colorful objects she had brought back from her travels in Mexico and Guatemala. From now on, she worked at home in the mornings. In the evenings, she sometimes ate at home. “I cook nice meals: chiefly, already cooked vegetables and cold ham,” she told Algren. “But I don’t know very well how to manage the can-opener, I broke already two of them.”39
When the studio below became vacant, the Bosts moved in. The three often had dinner together in the café in the cobbled square, which looked out across the trees to Notre-Dame. Things seemed perfect until Olga had another X ray and discovered she still had a hole in her lung. Half crazed with fear and frustration, she went back to Laigle to convalesce in the country air.
Soon after Algren came into her life, Beauvoir stopped sleeping with Bost. At first Bost (who never had any shortage of girlfriends) was hurt—jealous, even. He had never seen Beauvoir so much in love. But their own relationship had been more tender than passionate for some time now. They would always remain the closest of friends.
Beauvoir would dedicate The Second Sex to Bost. She told him he was the least macho of all the men she knew.40
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” It was to be the most famous sentence in The Second Sex. As an existentialist, Beauvoir did not believe in “human nature.” Her argument was that “femininity” is a social construct. Biology had no answer for the question: Why is woman the Other?
Her central thesis was that in all cultures, even those said to be matriarchal, man is regarded as the Subject, and woman as the Other.41 She explored the data of physiology, psychoanalysis, history, and Marxist theory and found no satisfactory reason for this. Her conclusion was that otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. No group can set itself up as the One, without setting up another group as the Other.
She was working long hours on this book, determined to finish it before Algren’s visit to Paris, in May 1949. Her research was vast, and yet she wrote The Second Sex in just two years. For her, this book was far easier to write than a novel. Fiction involved careful point-of-view writing and considerable emotional energy. The Second Sex required research, a lucid mind, and organizational powers. For that, she was well trained.
Since her framework was existentialist, her yardstick was freedom. Her premise was that the ultimate goal of any responsible human subject should be “sovereignty.” But this was complicated. If a woman was not free, it could be for two reasons. Her lack of freedom could be inflicted, in which case it constituted oppression. Or it could be chosen, in which case it represented a moral fault. In both cases, it was an absolute evil.
Like Sartre, she argued that freedom requires moral courage. It is easier to forgo one’s liberty and become a thing. As Beauvoir made clear, for women there were advantages to be gained from playing up to men, living through men, being kept by men. “It is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence.”
Several chapters in The Second Sex (“The Narcissist,” “The Woman in Love,” “The Mystic”) demonstrate the various ways women choose to avoid their freedom. But if The Second Sex is shot through with ambivalence, it is because Beauvoir shows that freedom itself is full of insurmountable obstacles for women. Society was not yet ready for the free woman.
One of the best chapters in the book, surely, is “The Independent Woman,” in which Beauvoir talks covertly about herself. She sums up the central problem thus:
The advantage man enjoys…is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter to his destiny as a male…. His social and spiritual successes endow him with a virile prestige. He is not divided. Whereas it is required of women that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject.
In other words, whether she is a sovereign subject or an unfree object, woman cannot win. As Beauvoir portrays her, the independent woman suffers from an inferiority complex when it comes to “femininity.” She can see that her intelligence and independence intimidate men. She knows that if she conducts her sex life too freely, she will be seen, humiliatingly, as “easy.” And she is only too aware of the double standard in society when it comes to aging.
Beauvoir knew plenty of women who lived through men, who foisted the burden of their existence onto a man. She herself knew the temptation. She also knew the price of independence. Indeed, as The Second Sex shows poignantly, the independent woman was doomed to feel divided.
Sartre had always thought of Michelle Vian as the wife of their friend Boris. The Vians made a beautiful, bohemian, hip young couple. But by the beginning of 1949, there were rumors that the marriage was crumbling.
In May, the Vians threw one of their famous parties. Sartre watched as Michelle danced the swing and the jitterbug in a little red dress and the very high heels she always wore. She was petite, with shapely legs, blue eyes, a warm smile, and long blond hair. Later that evening, Sartre said to her: “You’re always in motion. Stop dancing a moment, and come and talk to me.” Michelle smiled and sat on the edge of the sofa, beside him. She wore theatrical makeup, like an actress. “But I’m boring,” she said. “I have nothing to say.”
Behind her extroverted façade, Michelle was painfully insecure. Her voice was sweet and clear, but she rarely spoke unless spoken to. Since the war, Boris Vian had become famous as a novelist and jazz trumpeter. He was also known for his humorous column in Les Temps modernes. By contrast, Michelle felt stupid. She was not a writer. She did not even have her baccalaureate.
She and Boris were twenty when they met at Capbreton in the summer of 1940, the summer when Paris fell to the Germans and Michelle’s ten-year-old brother drowned in the currents. Her mother blamed Michelle, who was supposed to have been watching him. It was a trauma Michelle would never get over.
When America joined the war, and jazz was outlawed in occupied France, Boris and Michelle became part of the “Zazou” movement—young people whose resistance to the Germans took the form of dressing provocatively, listening clandestinely to American jazz, and dancing the swing at underground parties. Michelle loved English and everything to do with the Anglo-Saxon world—British detective novels, American films, American jazz. She helped Boris translate his favorite jazz songs. As Zazous, Boris wore high collars and tiny English-knotted ties and Michelle bleached her hair peroxide-blond and took to wearing the highest heels she could find.
They married in July 1941. Both were virgins. Boris wore a condom, but it burst, and Michelle became pregnant that very night. Boris was not ready to become a father. By the time their son, Patrick, arrived, in April 1942, Boris was making his mark as a jazz trumpeter. After the Liberation, when the new basement dance cellars sprang up in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he and Juliette Greco became the stars at the famous club, the Tabou. A bevy of pretty girls hung around the stage door, and threw themselves at Boris Vian.
When Michelle complained about Boris’s affairs, he snapped that she should take a lover herself, and learn something about sex. She said she had no interest in sleeping around;
she loved him. At one of their parties, he pushed her toward a sixteen-year-old jazz clarinetist, André Reweliotty. During the summer of 1946, Boris was writing his second novel, and was busy. He invited Reweliotty on vacation with him and Michelle. Reweliotty and Michelle made love in the sand dunes.42
In April 1948, a second child, Carole, arrived.43 The marriage deteriorated further. Michelle turned more and more to Reweliotty. He was too young to give her the validation she needed, but he was a loving man, and he was faithful.
Then, in May 1949, after the party where they had talked on the sofa, Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous intellectual in France, phoned Michelle and asked her out. On their first evening together, they talked for three hours in the bar of the Pont-Royal. For a whole month, until Sartre left on a trip with Vanetti, he and Michelle Vian saw each other almost every day. Sartre did not touch her. They talked. Michelle was deeply moved. Sartre seemed so gentle, so sensitive to her feelings.
In May 1949, Algren came to Paris. The family had never seen Beauvoir look so soft and happy. “She was always asking Algren: ‘Are you alright? What would you like?’” Michelle Vian recalls. “They gazed into each other’s eyes and held each other’s hands like young lovers.”