by Hazel Rowley
Michelle Vian says today that she, too, was having a personal crisis that summer. For almost ten years, she had divided her life between two men. Neither of them knew that she slept with the other. It was tearing her apart, making her ill. She arrived in Rome desperately needing attention. Sartre was obsessed by his play. Michelle cried a lot, knowing there was nothing Sartre hated more than tears. She talked of killing herself. Sartre was cold.
“I felt I had no future,” says Michelle, “and I blamed André Reweliotty and Sartre. André was so temperamental, melodramatic, and Russian—always shouting at his fellow musicians and banging his fists against the wall. And Sartre was so indifferent. I knew he didn’t want to be with me anymore. I knew he didn’t need me. That whole summer in Rome, he said he didn’t have time to go to lunch. He didn’t want to go to museums. He told me to go out by myself. All he wanted to do was work.”25
Behind Sartre’s back, Michelle wrote dramatic letters to Reweliotty, telling him she was contemplating suicide. One day, she and Sartre were in their hotel room—Sartre was cleaning his teeth—when there was a knock at the door. Michelle said: “Come in!” And there stood André Reweliotty. He had been on tour in Venice, playing with his friend Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans jazz clarinetist. When he got Michelle’s last letter, Reweliotty had hurried to Rome to see her.
That afternoon, Sartre discovered the truth. For the last nine years—indeed, from the beginning of their relationship—Michelle had been unfaithful to him. That evening, Michelle disappeared with Reweliotty.26
Sartre was left by himself in Rome, feeling distraught. He had not been faithful himself over the years, but that did not stop him from being morally enraged by Michelle’s lies. He knew, of course, that she and Reweliotty had been lovers before he came along. He also knew that Michelle spent a lot of time with Reweliotty at his country house, and that when Reweliotty and his band played in provincial towns, Michelle signed the contracts, arranged their itineraries, booked the hotels, and did the night-time driving when the musicians were tired. But he had always believed Michelle when she said that she and Reweliotty were simply friends. He had never thought—he had not allowed himself to envisage the hypothesis—that they had continued to be lovers.
Evelyne had often told him to wake up. But Evelyne had every reason to dislike Michelle, and so Sartre had never attached much importance to Evelyne’s suspicions. It is true that even Bost had conjectured that Michelle probably slept with Reweliotty. But Sartre would not hear of it. To him, Michelle was the embodiment of innocence.
Sartre remained in Rome a few more days, struggling to write an article—the second of a series of three—that he had promised to L’Express about De Gaulle and the forthcoming referendum. He had called the first “The Pretender.” He called this one “The Constitution of Contempt.” And then, on the evening of September 14, he caught the night train back to Paris.
Beauvoir was at the Gare de Lyon early the next morning to meet him. It was raining. Sartre was emotionally exhausted, and so was she. They spent the day talking.
Sartre was about to start work on his third article for L’Express, but he had developed a liver infection. “He was so worn out, so feverish and weak-headed on Sunday afternoon that it looked as though it would be impossible for him to write it,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. “He worked for twenty-eight hours at a stretch, without sleep and almost without a break.”27
Sartre collapsed, and Beauvoir spent a whole evening editing his piece. She could hardly read his handwriting, and his spelling was appalling. She had to rewrite bits and make judicious cuts and links. “An ungrateful task, and pretty tiring when it’s got to be done fast,” she observed. Eventually she thought the article “very good indeed.” Sartre called it “The Frogs Who Wanted a King.”
Lanzmann was back from Korea but absorbed in an article on China, and busy with the “no” campaign for the forthcoming referendum.28 Beauvoir hardly saw him. “I don’t know if it’s exhaustion or irritation,” she noted in her journal, “but my constant state of tension, which I feel especially in the back of the neck, the eyes, the ears, the temples, makes work difficult.”29
In the referendum on September 28, the vote was a resounding “yes.” Beauvoir wept. “It’s a sinister defeat…a repudiation by eighty per cent of the French people of all that we had believed in and wanted for France…. It’s rather dreadful to be against a whole country, your own country.”30
Sartre was viscerally affected. He had vertigo, he had difficulty walking, and he stumbled over his words. But he refused to see a doctor. He had a play to write, he said. The deadline had passed. In early October, at lunch with Simone Berriau, the director of the Théâtre Antoine where the play was to be performed, Sartre carefully put his glass down an inch from the table. The glass fell and shattered. Simone Berriau was shocked. She finally managed to persuade Sartre to let her make an appointment with a doctor. Beauvoir was grateful to her.
The doctor said that Sartre’s left ventricle was tired, and that he needed a good rest. Sartre went on working. Behind his back, Beauvoir went to see the doctor, who told her that Sartre had narrowly missed having a heart attack. “He is a very emotional man. He has overworked himself intellectually, but even more so emotionally…. Let him work a bit if he insists, but he mustn’t try racing against the clock. If he does, I don’t give him six months.”31
Beauvoir then went to see Simone Berriau, who agreed to put off The Condemned of Altona for a year, till the following fall. Sartre did not even have the energy to be angry about Beauvoir’s interference. He greeted her news with an indifferent smile. But from that day on, he worked more slowly.
At first, Lanzmann tried to hide his new affair from Beauvoir. But she knew. One night, he returned at midnight to the Rue Schoelcher and found her sitting on her bed crying. “Tell me the truth,” she said.
He told her. He had fallen in love. The other woman was thirty-five, beautiful, rich, aristocratic. She had two children, her husband had died in a plane accident, and she lived in a sumptuous apartment on the Quai aux Fleurs, overlooking the Seine.
“The Beaver was immediately, as always, constructive and understanding,” Lanzmann recalls. “Her idea was, ‘Ok, we’ll share you.’ Three days with one, three days with the other. But it didn’t work. Most women can’t do that. They want to conquer and destroy.”32
The affair ended after six months, when Lanzmann discovered that his new love had lied to him about her age. (She was actually forty-five.) After that, Lanzmann and Beauvoir began to reconstruct their relationship, transforming it into a friendship. In the summer of 1959, they spent ten days together in Menton, on the Côte d’ Azur. Both were relieved to be able to maintain a close bond.
The Condemned of Altona, Sartre’s ninth play, opened on September 23, 1959—a year later than planned. There had been the usual traumatic scenes during rehearsals. The play was once again too long, and as usual, Sartre hated to make cuts. The lead parts were demanding, and the producer did not consider Evelyne and Wanda up to it, but Sartre insisted. Wanda had at least had a chance to prove herself in the past, but Evelyne was just twenty-nine, and this was her first major part. Everyone in the theater world knew she had been Sartre’s mistress and that she owed the role to him. The pressure on her was intense.
The Nazi soldier, stiff and unbending in his SS uniform, was brilliantly acted by the Italian-born actor Serge Reggiani. He was praised to the skies. Wanda and Evelyne were damned with faint praise.
Sartre was criticized for tedious passages, and some critics chose not to see the obvious allusions to the Algerian War. But many deemed it his finest play.
Now that he no longer saw Michelle Vian, Sartre was spending more time with Arlette Elkaïm. Previously they had met for two hours on a Sunday afternoon. Now he allotted her two evenings a week. And Michelle’s annual three weeks of vacation with Sartre went to Elkaïm.
In September 1959, a few days after the premiere of The Condemned of Al
tona, Sartre and Elkaïm flew to Ireland, where they stayed with the American film director John Huston on his large estate near Galway. Huston wanted to discuss the Freud screenplay Sartre was writing for him. Elkaïm, who spoke some English, acted as interpreter.
Huston wrote later:
Sartre was a little barrel of a man, and as ugly as a human being can be. His face was both bloated and pitted, his teeth were yellowed and he was wall-eyed…. There was no such thing as a conversation with him; he talked incessantly, and there was no interrupting him. You’d wait for him to catch his breath, but he wouldn’t. The words came out in an absolute torrent.33
Sartre thought Huston equally impossible to talk to. He wrote Beauvoir two long letters about the madness he encountered in that “huge barracks of a place,” surrounded by green fields, cows, and horses.
In Ireland, Elkaïm began to see for the first time that all was not well with Sartre. Until then, her admiration had blinded her. “Corydrane was a very negative aspect of our relationship,” she would tell John Gerassi in 1973. “The Beaver knew him so much better, and she says what she thinks. I was only too liable to be passive. After a while, I began to have my own thoughts at last…. Sartre was taking loads of corydrane. His tongue would be black with the stuff. It alienated me. But I didn’t revolt; I would have been scared to.” Instead, she fell into a depression, which she had to hide from Sartre because he could not deal with it.34
In his letters, Sartre tried, not very convincingly, to reassure Beauvoir that he was being abstemious:
I’m not drinking (except one little dry martini, sometimes 2. No scotch. Except for the first two nights)…. I’ll be back on Thursday at 11:30…. I’ll drop Arlette at her place and come rightover to you. I’ve told no one else my arrival time…. If I write to Evelyne before then to make a date, it will be for late afternoon. Tell her you don’t know.
Warmest greetings, my sweet, I send you a great big kiss. I’ve talked only about myself, but that was to entertain you. Till Thursday, little Beaver.
These days, Sartre’s nervous tension was such that he could not sit still. He kept shuffling his feet, to the point that he wore out a piece of carpet in Beauvoir’s apartment. She covered it with a patch. His elbows were so busy that with their perpetual movement he made the arms of her chairs threadbare. For years he had not been able to sleep without earplugs and four or five strong sleeping pills.
In the early evening of January 4, 1960, the phone rang in Beauvoir’s apartment. It was Lanzmann, telling her that Camus had been killed in a car accident. Camus was forty-six, six years younger than Beauvoir. She was aghast:
I put down the receiver, my throat tight, my lips trembling. “I’m not going to start crying,” I said to myself, “he didn’t mean anything to me any more.” I stood there, leaning against the window, watching night come down over Saint-Germain-des-Prés, incapable of calming myself or of giving way to real grief. Sartre was upset as well, and we spent the whole evening with Bost talking about Camus. Before getting to bed I swallowed some belladénal pills…I ought to have gone to sleep; I remained completely wide awake. I got up, threw on the first clothes I found, and set out walking through the night.35
Camus had edited Combat during the Resistance; he had danced at the “family’s” fiestas; he had sent Sartre and Bost to America. Camus and Sartre had fallen out over Stalinism. More recently, the Sartre clan despised Camus for what they saw as his sympathy to the French in the Algerian War.36 But as a person, they missed him.
In a poignant tribute to Camus, Sartre played down their rupture. “A quarrel is nothing—even should you never see each other again…. That did not prevent me from thinking of him.”37
At seventy, Sartre would remember Camus more fondly than ever: “There was a side of him that smacked of the little Algerian tough guy, very much a hooligan, very funny…. His language was very racy—so was mine, for that matter—we told filthy stories one after another, and his wife and Simone de Beauvoir pretended to be shocked…. He was probably the last good friend I had.”38
Nelson Algren arrived in Paris in February 1960. Beauvoir, who was spending five weeks in Cuba with Sartre, had left him the key to her apartment and instructed Olga, Bost, and Michelle to look after him.
Algren was shocked by how ravaged Olga looked these days, but he enjoyed flirting with Michelle. “The Golden Zazou had lost some of her sheen,” he would write in his memoir Who Lost an American?, “but was still the Michelle who cared for people.”39 Michelle had been re-admitted into the family after she attempted suicide. She had been desperate without Sartre.
After Sartre and Beauvoir returned to Paris, Michelle and Algren continued to go out together some evenings. “Simone de Beauvoir organized our dates,” Michelle says. “We danced to ‘Night and Day,’ and Algren tried to hold me tighter. In a taxi, as we passed the Palais de Chaillot, he took my hand and put it between his legs.” When she told this to Sartre the next day, Sartre, aroused by the story, made love to her—the first time in two years. After that, their physical relationship was back on.
Michelle was overjoyed that Sartre still desired her, but she no longer had any illusions that he would give her much of his time. They saw each other once a week for two hours. Michelle loved André Reweliotty, but she loved Sartre more. She was forty-two, and decided that it would fill the void in her life if she had a child by Sartre. “He didn’t mind,” she says. “He wouldn’t have looked after it, of course, but he was as happy to give babies as anything else.”40
As fate would have it, Michelle, who had always become pregnant so easily when she did not want to, could no longer conceive. She consulted an obstetrician (Dr. Lagroua Weill-Hallé) and discovered that she had blocked fallopian tubes. She underwent an operation, but still nothing happened. In the past, she had become pregnant three times by Sartre, and had had three abortions. It appeared that the last abortion had left her sterile.41
Beauvoir and Sartre had come back very enthusiastic about Cuba. They were there for what Sartre called “the honeymoon of the Revolution.”42 There was a festive atmosphere on the island, the streets were full of people dancing, and the two writers had been fêted wherever they went. They even spent three days traveling around the island with Fidel Castro. Press photographs disseminated throughout the world showed Sartre and Beauvoir standing next to the handsome young Castro, who towered over them both; in another photo they were plowing through the water in a fast motorboat, with Castro standing at the helm; in a third they sat talking to the heavy-booted revolutionaries Castro and Che Guevara, all three men smoking thick Cuban cigars.
Back in Paris, Sartre wrote a series of articles about Cuba (“Hurricane over the Sugar Cane”), while Beauvoir devoted time to Algren. They had not seen each other for eight years, and were nervous at first. They soon relaxed. Algren wore the same old corduroy trousers and worn jacket. “Despite the years of separation and the stormy summers of 1950 and ’51, we felt as close as during the best days of 1949,” Beauvoir writes in her memoirs.43
She and Algren spent cozy days in the Rue Schoelcher. Algren got up first and squeezed orange juice for them both. He installed his electric typewriter on the small desk Lanzmann had once used. They worked together in the mornings, and in the afternoons Beauvoir continued to work at Sartre’s. They traveled to Marseille, Spain, Istanbul, Greece, Crete. Occasionally, it seems, they made love.
In August, Beauvoir flew to Brazil with Sartre, leaving Algren once again in her apartment. He stayed on a few more weeks. From Rio, Beauvoir wrote tender letters to her “subversive beast of my heart, my faraway love.” She loved him “more than ever and forever,” she said.44 Algren wrote three short letters, and then there was silence. When Beauvoir returned to Paris in November, she hoped to find a pile of letters from him. There was not one. He had left her some photos of their time in Istanbul, a book, some magazines, a nut bar, and a poem on her desk. But he had gone. She missed him.
Beauvoir had not enjoyed the Br
azil trip. She was upset by the silence from Algren. She would have liked to go on walks with Sartre, just the two of them. Instead, Sartre gave lectures on colonialism and the Algerian War, and there were endless meetings, interviews, press conferences, and dinners. Wherever they went, Sartre was greeted as a hero, particularly by young people. But he was suffering from shingles, caused by overwork and depression.
Then Beauvoir became ill. In Manaus, a godforsaken little town on the Amazon River she developed a high fever. She and Sartre were scared of her dying in that place, and took a plane at four in the morning back to Recife. By the time they arrived, Beauvoir felt half dead. She was in the hospital for a week with suspected typhoid fever. While Beauvoir lay in bed sweating, Sartre tried to seduce Cristina Tavaares, a twenty-five-year-old Brazilian journalist, a virgin, with flaming red hair. As soon as she felt strong enough, Beauvoir (whose English was not up to her usual standard) wrote to Algren, half amused, half despairing:
The girl…believes in God, and when she understood Sartre should not have hated to sleep with her, she thought he was the Devil himself. They quarrelled. Sartre had a hell of a life in this dreary hostile town with me in the hospital and the half friendly, half scared red-headed girl; he drunk a little heavily and at night, to sleep, he swallowed heavy doses of gardenal. The result was that when he get up at morning, he could not stand on his legs; he went banging against the walls and walked in zig-zag all long. When coming to the hospital he looked groggy—that enraged me but I could do nothing. The girl drank too, when I had recovered we spent a crazy night, she broke glasses in her naked hands and bled abundantly, saying she should kill herself, because she loved and hated Sartre and we were going away the next day. I slept in her bed, holding her wrist to prevent her to jump by the window…. She will come to Paris and Sartre says maybe he will marry her! What of the Algerian one then? Well, that is the future.45