Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Algren was nervous about meeting Sartre, but when the Little Man put his arm on Algren’s back and guided him jovially into their first bar, Algren immediately felt at ease. He was especially fond of Olga and Michelle, who liked to speak English with him. Olga listened to his stories wide eyed. Michelle conscientiously acted as his interpreter in the group. Algren called her “the Golden Zazou.”

  The first volume of The Second Sex came out in June 1949. Beauvoir’s scandalous reputation was sealed. Even the title of the book shocked people. By talking frankly about the female body and female sexuality, Beauvoir had broken major taboos. She was considered even more outrageous than her cross-dressing female writer predecessors George Sand and Colette.

  Beauvoir was roundly attacked. “Unsatisfied, frigid, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, a hundred times aborted, I was everything,” she writes, “even an unmarried mother.” She received hundreds of letters. People told her that her problem was that she did not believe in God. Some offered to cure her frigidity. Others offered, in the coarsest possible terms, to assuage her labial appetites. The Vatican blacklisted the book. The conservative Catholic writer François Mauriac told a member of the Temps modernes editorial board, “Your employer’s vagina has no secrets from me.”44 Even Camus thought the book preposterous. (“Camus…a Mediterranean man, cultivating Spanish pride…accused me of making the French male look ridiculous.”45) The fact that Beauvoir had discussed abortion was particularly shocking. Since she and Sartre had both written about abortion in their fiction, people had already come to the office of Les Temps modernes asking for addresses. The secretary had put up a sign: WE DO IT ON THE PREMISES, OURSELVES.

  Algren arrived at the height of it all. Beauvoir and Sartre had almost stopped going into cafés; people pestered them. But with Algren there, Beauvoir went out a great deal. When the two of them went into a public place, people would point to her and snicker. She was glad Algren could not understand what they were saying, and relieved when they left on a two-month trip to Italy, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. On their return from North Africa, they stayed a few days with Bost and Olga, in their cottage at Cabris, in the hills of Provence. Bost and Olga were amused by Algren’s wild stories, most of which demonstrated his heroism. Bost called him “Tough Algren.”

  In mid-September, Beauvoir accompanied Algren to Orly Airport, feeling as if her heart would burst. Algren told her: “I’ve never been so happy; I’ve never loved so much.”46 During a stopover on his way home, he heard that his novel The Man with the Golden Arm had won the National Book Award.

  While Beauvoir was with Algren, Sartre was traveling for three months in Central America with Vanetti. Before he left, he told Michelle Vian: “I’m going to put some order in my life.”47 When he came back, in October, he started to court Michelle seriously.

  “I did not speak. I had no confidence. I was silent, always smiling, lost,” Michelle Vian recalls. “Sartre taught me to speak. He told me my ideas were good. It was his view that people must think, and talk. I found him very exciting. I didn’t care about handsome. I liked his lips. They were the same type as Brigitte Bardot’s. The upper lip the same size as the lower lip. Like his mother’s…. When I saw him coming, my heart began to beat. I’d think to myself, here’s joy, here’s fun.”48

  One evening in late December, in a taxi coming home after a nightclub, Sartre kissed her. By now, Michelle was well and truly in love. Shortly afterward, Sartre took her home to his place. It was the afternoon. His mother was away. They made love.

  Sartre left the next day to spend New Year’s Eve at La Pouèze. Bost and Beauvoir were working across the table from each other, translating Algren’s novel Never Come Morning. Madame Morel, who was famous for her hospitality, was happy to let them work all day long. Sartre was absorbed in an essay he was writing about Jean Genet, a man he saw as an existential hero, since from his unfavorable beginnings (illegitimacy, public assistance, delinquency, prison, pederasty), Genet had, by choosing to write, made something positive out of what others had made of him. It was a Sartrean obsession: the idea of self-invention in the face of humiliation and stigmatization.

  Sartre was writing frequent letters to Michelle, his “little charm.” He could not stop thinking about that marvelous afternoon—her dress, her hair and mouth, her mysterious smile. He wanted to make her happy. He wanted her never to feel alone. It was new for him, he said, this need he felt for someone else. It was physical, as if he had contracted an illness. He missed her, in his body.49

  By February, Michelle realized she was pregnant. With Sartre, as with Boris, she became pregnant the very first time she slept with him. Sartre could not believe it at first. He had practiced his usual method of contraception, coitus interruptus, and thought it foolproof. “Of course, it wasn’t safe at all,” says Michelle Vian. “Sartre would withdraw, and ten minutes later, he would make love again. We didn’t know it back then, but it takes only a drop of semen…. You can see what the sexual act represented for me. Danger.”50

  Sartre asked whether she wanted to keep the baby. Michelle knew he disliked children. She had seen her marriage destroyed by her pregnancies. And she already had two children. It was enough, she told Sartre. That meant an abortion. Sartre said he would ask Beauvoir for addresses. Michelle was shocked. “Don’t tell the Beaver,” she said. “Not yet.” Michelle said she would ask her medical-student brother for help.

  Sartre was about to go away again. He and Beauvoir were leaving in early March to spend two months in sub-Saharan Africa. Michelle begged him to postpone his departure a few days. Couldn’t he stay until after the abortion? She was frightened, she said. But Sartre was firm. He could not let Beauvoir down. He had disappointed her the previous summer. (He did not go into details.) “I can’t do it to her.”

  “I was angry,” says Michelle Vian. Sartre left, and her brother performed the abortion. Michelle became infected and was feverish for days. From Algeria, Sartre sent orchids. From the depths of black Africa, he wrote tender letters. “I didn’t reply,” says Michelle. “Maybe once or twice, no more. I have photos of me at that time, looking incredibly sad. It was the end of the fantasy.”

  Not long before, she had broken off her affair with André Reweliotty, explaining that she was in love with Sartre. Reweliotty had been very upset. Now Michelle went back to him. She did not tell him she was sleeping with Sartre. And she did not tell Sartre she was sleeping with Reweliotty. “It was a total secret,” she says. “I had a double life. Two different worlds.”51

  It was Beauvoir who wanted to see the Sahara, and it was she who had rushed around and made the bookings. She and Sartre spent four days crossing the desert in a truck, leaving each morning at around five, just as a bright red sun was rising in the mountains. In Tamanrasset, one moonlit night, they were taken to see the Touareg chief in his tent in the desert. The Touareg men were tall and proud faced, with only their dark eyes visible above their indigo veils. In Gao, Mali, Sartre came down with high fever. While he was in bed for two days, scarcely conscious, Beauvoir worked. They took a plane to Bobo-Dioulasso. A violent midday storm soaked their beds and brought out the cockroaches. That evening Beauvoir and Sartre were dropping with fatigue when they returned to their room. “Sartre barely closed his eyes all night,” Beauvoir writes. “His bed was still wet, the jazz across the road deafened him, and above all he was frightened of the cockroaches that were trotting about on the ceiling. He spent the night reading.”52

  They no sooner arrived in a place than they dived into the local Poste Restante. Sartre was tormented because Michelle was not writing. Beauvoir was tormented by the silence from Algren. “Surely…your witty prose is lost in some place of the Sahara,” she wrote to him, “or maybe some Negros enjoy laughing at it while eating each other.”53

  In early May, Sartre flew back to Paris from Casablanca. Beauvoir made a sentimental journey to Fez, where she and Algren had been so happy together. “If I had got letters, it could have been a sweet pilgrimag
e,” she wrote to him afterward. “The way it was, it just broke my heart. I walked in all the little streets we liked so much, where we were happy together, and I wanted you so much that I enjoyed nothing and just felt like crying to death.”54

  In Paris, to her relief, there were two thick letters from Algren.

  Vanetti’s divorce had come through (Sartre had paid for it) and she was living in Cannes, on the Côte d’Azur, wanting Sartre to marry her. But Sartre was in love with Michelle. To Beauvoir, he complained that Vanetti was too demanding, always wanting more from him—more money, more time. But he felt guilty toward her, and agreed to spend a few weeks with her in June and July. Michelle was upset. “I thought you broke with her last year!”

  “You have to do these things gradually,” Sartre said.55

  Sartre broke up with Vanetti during the summer of 1950. Beauvoir was away, but Bost was on hand to witness it. There were no dramatic scenes, he reported to Beauvoir, and it seemed to him that Sartre was almost a bit disappointed by that. Vanetti had wept once, on Bost’s shoulder. She seemed surprised that Sartre no longer loved her, but she did not express bitterness. She kept saying that Sartre had changed. He had become even more fanatical about his work. Nothing else seemed to interest him anymore.

  Bost had a contract to write a guide book, Spain Day by Day, in the same series as Beauvoir’s book on America.56 He needed a car, and Vanetti had a car, and she felt in need of a companionable vacation. The two were going to spend two months traveling around Spain together. Bost hoped she would not bash his ears about Sartre. “I kiss you tenderly,” he signed off to Beauvoir. “My best regards to Tough Algren!”57

  Across the world, Beauvoir was having a terrible time. Back in January, she had made a bad mistake. She had written to Algren with a request. She was scared of his answer, she told him, which would make her either very happy or very sad. She had reminded him that when they were in Tunisia he had said that she must come back to Wabansia Avenue, but not too soon. She had a favor to ask him:

  I have to ask you to let me come as soon as June. It is not whim, you know. Sure, I am impatient of melting in your arms again—I long for you—but if I wished to come soon just from my longing, I should not demand, I should just suggest. I don’t like to be demanding, and you know I try not to be much, honey. Now I demand. The point is Sartre has to go away this summer for three months, no later than June, and he asks me, very demandingly, to go away when he does—not to wait until he is back…. And sure he has no right at all to ask anything from you, but you see how it is for me: since I decided not to break, even for love sake, the long friendship I have with him (and which he needs very much, as you could feel), it would be stupid and unkind not to act in a real friendly way…. Trust me, Nelson. If I say it is important for him, so it comes to be for me.

  Algren had agreed, which made Beauvoir very happy. But over the next few months, Algren’s letters were less frequent. Just before she was due to leave, the Korean War broke out. The whole world seemed yet again headed for war. She thought of canceling her trip. Sartre persuaded her to go.

  She arrived in Chicago, and Algren was strangely distant. He made love to her, but without tenderness. On the second night, Beauvoir asked what the matter was. No, it was not that he loved anyone else, he said, but something was dead. He was tired of her turning up only to leave again. He had waited for her with indifference, and he did not feel much when he saw her again. His ex-wife wanted him back, and though he was weary of women, he was thinking they might marry again.

  On the third night, they tried to make love, and Algren could not. Beauvoir panicked. “It was so pitiful that it horrified me,” she wrote to Sartre. “I brooded over my horror for a good part of the night, then as soon as Algren woke up tried to talk to him; but he hates explanations—he just runs away.”58 They did not try again.

  The heat in Wabansia Avenue was stifling, and Algren’s morose presence was suffocating. Beauvoir fled the house, but the streets of Chicago were so hot she thought she would melt into the tar. The newspapers were full of virulent anticommunist rhetoric. When Beauvoir went to a hairdresser in the neighborhood, the girl who washed her hair said accusingly, “Why are you all communists in France?”59

  At the beginning of August she and Algren moved to Miller, on Lake Michigan, where Algren had rented a cottage. They slept in separate rooms. Beauvoir struggled with despair. What was she doing there? Would she ever again experience passion? She took corydrane, an amphetamine mixed with aspirin, in order to be able to work on her new novel, the one that would eventually be called The Mandarins. A few months before, when she had been in Paris longing for Algren’s body, he (the author of Never Come Morning) had asked her what the title was. “Never Come Woman,” she had quipped.

  The summer passed. They swam in the lake. One afternoon Beauvoir nearly drowned. This dramatic incident briefly revived their old passion. In the evenings, they walked along the beach and wondered whether the world was about to end in nuclear war. Beauvoir tried to calm herself by thinking of Sartre. “The novelty and romance and happiness of my life are with you, my little companion of 20 years,” she wrote to him. As for Vanetti and her “avarice,” she was glad that Sartre had for once managed to be firm.

  She was counting the hours until her return. “You’ll see what a beautiful life we’ll have from now on, as soon as we’re back together,” she told Sartre. As she was writing her letter, the moon was veiled by an orange dawn. She felt sure they were about to begin a happy old age.

  NINE

  CRYSTAL BLUE EYES

  January 1951–December 1954

  Sartre had changed, it was true. He had always worked hard, but now, with the help of corydrane, he had turned himself into a work machine. Gone were the evenings he and Beauvoir had once enjoyed at the cinema; gone were their strolls together through Paris. He did not have time.

  Corydrane, a stimulant or “upper,” was fairly widely used in the 1950s. But whereas journalists would take a tablet or a half-tablet to get them going, Sartre took four. Most people took them with water; Sartre crunched them. They tasted bad, very bitter, and whether or not it was masochism, Sartre liked to give himself a hard time. On top of the corydrane, he smoked two packets of unfiltered Boyards a day and consumed vast quantities of coffee and tea. In the evening, he drank half a bottle of whiskey, then took four or five sleeping pills to knock himself out.

  Increasingly, he felt that writing was a futile, self-indulgent pursuit in a world where children were starving and injustice was everywhere. He no longer read the novels Beauvoir enjoyed; he did not care anymore about fine sentences. He was convinced that politics mattered; literature did not.

  He took corydrane to stave off his anxiety about the utter irrelevance of what he was doing. Under the influence of the drug, instead of writhing in anguish, he wrote at white heat. For hours at a stretch he produced page after page, hardly able to keep up with his pen, borne away by a feeling of his own power.

  He had temporarily put aside a huge philosophical tome he called Ethics. His essay on Genet, begun as a preface, had grown into a thick book, something between philosophy and literature, a monumental portrait that would leave readers admiring and uncomfortable. (“Who can swallow such a thing?” Cocteau would ask in his journal, noting Sartre’s “will to be the center of attention in literature, and render everything else insipid.”1) He had begun a book on Italy, a country he loved with a passion. His intention, as usual, was to talk about “everything” (history, politics, social problems, the church, art, architecture, and tourism), and was enjoying writing it, but guilt got the better of him. Politics was calling; the project struck him as an indulgence and was permanently shelved. His writing on his favorite cities—Venice, Capri, Rome, and Naples—published posthumously, shows Sartre at his most sensuous and poetic. He spent pages describing the plashing sound gondolas make.2

  At the beginning of 1951, he put several projects aside to write a play. His secretary, Jean Cau,
observed that Sartre did not seem to enjoy writing plays nearly as much as other things, and that each time he embarked on one, it caused a major trauma in the Sartrean entourage. So why did he do it? He had initially written a part for Olga; these days it was for Wanda. “Others offered jewellery; he offered plays,” writes Cau.3

  Wanda loved the stage, and showed genuine talent. She was currently involved with a young man, but for Sartre she remained part of the family, part of the brood of women, including his mother, who needed his support and protection. He saw her regularly. When he went away, he wrote her affectionate, humorous letters. Financially, she was entirely dependent on him.

  The writing of The Devil and the Good Lord proved a nightmare. Sartre worked obsessively, but did not meet the deadline and kept adding scenes. Rehearsals began, and Sartre had still not finished it. Simone Berriau, the director of the Théâtre Antoine, was furious with him. She wanted cuts, not additions. Sartre refused to oblige. The tears, screams, and anger were reported in the press. When the curtain rose the first night, June 7, 1951, the play, which had finally been reduced to four hours, was already the talk of the Paris theater season. Wanda, under her stage name, Marie Olivier, played alongside Pierre Brasseur and Maria Casarès, two of the best known actors in France. All three were praised. The play was a triumph.

  The family had to be tactful about toasting Wanda’s success. Olga, who was generally considered a far better actress than her younger sister, had suffered a major humiliation. After her tuberculosis, she had been impatient to resume her career and had taken on small roles with success. But she also wanted to be in the new production of The Flies. She had been the original Electra, and she did not want to see anyone else in the part Sartre had written for her. Her doctor firmly advised against her taking on such a demanding role too soon. Olga insisted. Shortly before the opening night, it was reported in the press that the director, Raymond Hermantier, did not think Olga was up to it, but that Sartre had ordered him to keep her.