Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Zonina asked for time to think about it. As she pointed out to Sartre, it was a wrenching decision for her to make. If she left the Soviet Union, she would never be allowed to go back. She loved French culture, but was intensely wary of the West, and she despised the ruthlessness of capitalism. She would never be allowed to bring her mother with her, and how could she leave her behind? She would not easily find work in France, and she would never agree to be one more of Sartre’s dependent women. She did not think she could do it.

  After their long sojourn in the Soviet Union, Sartre and Beauvoir went, as usual, to Rome. They stayed in their favorite lodgings, the Minerva, a rundown hotel located in an ancient palace right in the center of the city.

  Sartre was writing an essay on the problems of revolution in the third world. Beauvoir, having handed in Force of Circumstance, was mostly reading that summer. Sometimes they took the car and went away for a few days—to Sienna, Venice, or Florence.

  As soon as they returned to Rome after a short absence, they would hurry over to the Poste Restante. Sartre was hoping for a letter from Zonina. For weeks there had been silence. He worried that she might be ill, or that she did not love him anymore. At night he tormented himself. If he had to choose between the two explanations, which would he choose?

  In early October, a letter finally arrived from Moscow. Sartre read it in the Piazza della Minerva, in front of their hotel. “Your hands are trembling,” Beauvoir said to him. It was true. His legs were trembling, too.

  “It does not just depend on us,” Zonina wrote to Sartre. “The more I read the Beaver’s memoirs, the more I understand that I could never decide to change things. And this kills something in me. You know that I feel friendship for the Beaver. I respect her, I admire the relationship you have…. But you and the Beaver together have created a remarkable and dazzling thing which is so dangerous for those people who get close to you.”22

  He was thinking about their siestas on the Black Sea, Sartre wrote back. Their lovemaking. Did Zonina realize that he and Beauvoir never spent an evening alone together without talking about her?

  At the end of October, the day before Sartre and Beauvoir were due to return to Paris, Bost phoned to say that Beauvoir’s mother had fallen and broken her femur bone.

  November 1963 was a long, sad month. Simone and Poupette took turns beside their mother’s bed. Françoise de Beauvoir was seventy-seven and had been fragile and in pain with arthritis for some years. Now her surgeon discovered a massive cancerous tumor. The night after the operation, Poupette stayed at the hospital and Simone went home to spend the evening with Sartre at the Rue Schoelcher:

  We played some Bartók. Suddenly, at eleven, an outburst of tears that almost degenerated into hysteria…. This time my despair escaped from my control: someone other than myself was weeping in me. I talked to Sartre about my mother’s mouth as I had seen it that morning and about everything I had interpreted in it—greediness refused, an almost servile humility, hope, distress, loneliness—the loneliness of her death and of her life—that did not want to admit its existence. And he told me that my own mouth was not obeying me any more: I had put Maman’s mouth on my own face and in spite of myself, I copied its movement. Her whole person, her whole being, was concentrated there, and compassion wrung my heart.23

  In those few weeks, Beauvoir felt closer to her mother than at any time since her childhood. Françoise was gentle and thoughtful; she even apologized to the nurses for taking up their time. At times, on her dying mother’s face, Beauvoir saw the smile of the young woman in love she had seen when she was five. Françoise treasured every last drop of life. At the end, when she slept nearly all the time, Françoise mourned: “But these are days that I lose.”24

  It was Sartre who suggested that Beauvoir write about the tragic adventure she and Poupette were undergoing with their mother. Beauvoir was scandalized, but tempted.

  When her mother died in early December, Beauvoir could think of little else. She found that writing about it helped her deal with her grief. A Very Easy Death was the most tender book she would ever write. She dedicated it to her sister, Poupette.

  Words was published in January 1964, and Sartre, once again, had money in his bank account. He was fifty-nine. One day, in the bar of the Pont-Royal, Robert Gallimard, his publisher, asked him about his plans for his literary estate. Sartre had never thought about it:

  “At my death everything will go to the Beaver.”

  “Have you married Simone de Beauvoir?”

  “No, of course not. You know that.”

  “Have you made a will?”

  “No.”

  “Then everything will go to your family. To the Schweitzers.”25

  It made no sense for Sartre to appoint Beauvoir as his literary heir and executrix: they were almost the same age. Sartre thought of Arlette Elkaïm. She was the youngest member of the family. He had always liked the fact that she seemed less interested in money than his other women. If anything, Elkaïm was too thrifty; she protested when he spent money on her. These days he saw her as a daughter. She was as jealous as the other women about Zonina’s forthcoming visit to Paris, but she was the only one who aroused Sartre’s sympathy. “She’s really the daughter whose father is re-marrying,” he told Zonina. He decided to adopt her legally.

  Beauvoir had no great liking for Elkaïm, who had always been envious of her. And she was privately contemptuous of Elkaïm’s financial dependence on Sartre. (“Would you have agreed to be supported yourself, when you were twenty?” Beauvoir once asked Sartre. “No one has ever blamed Van Gogh for having been more or less supported by his brother. Because he painted, because he really had reasons for accepting…. But the people who settle down in that kind of life…. Don’t you find that it warps your relations with those people? Giving them money, for life, without any reciprocity?”26)

  Beauvoir always tried to see things from Sartre’s point of view, and she accepted his decision. She could see that he was determined. But she worried about the other women. They would never be able to accept this, she told Sartre. She hoped it would not destroy them.

  In mid-October 1964, the Figaro Littéraire reported that the Swedish Academy favored Jean-Paul Sartre for that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. The journalist observed wryly that Sartre’s “controversial political past would not be held too much against him.”

  Sartre and Beauvoir talked it over. The risk was clear. If Sartre accepted, he would be seen as capitulating to the bourgeoisie, the bad boy who had finally fallen into line. The money was a small fortune. There was a lot Sartre could do with 250,000 Swedish kroner, both for good causes (he thought of the antiapartheid committee in London) and for his dependents. (He wanted to buy Wanda an apartment, for example.) They decided to ask some younger people what they thought.

  The Temps modernes committee was elated by the news. They were unanimous: Sartre should accept. Beauvoir was not at all convinced. She asked a twenty-three-year-old female friend who was an active member of the Socialist Party, and the verdict was quite different. The young woman wrote an impassioned letter to Sartre, telling him that she and her militant friends agreed: Sartre would not be Sartre if he took the prize. She reminded him that the Nobel had been awarded to Boris Pasternak in order to embarrass the USSR.

  Sartre and Beauvoir were strongly affected by this reaction. It was true that in 1958, Pasternak had been awarded the prize for Doctor Zhivago, a novel that was too critical of postrevolutionary Russia to find a publisher in the USSR, but had been published in the West to great acclaim. Communists the world over had been disgusted by what they saw as the perversity of the Nobel jury’s decision.

  Sartre fired off a letter to the Swedish Academy. He apologized for being so presumptuous as to write to them before the vote was taken, and assured the Academy of his profound respect, but he wanted to ask the members, for reasons that were personal as well as objective, not to include him among the possible prize recipients. He was hereby informing t
hem that if he were awarded the prize, he would not accept it.

  The news came over the wire services on Monday, October 19, around midday: Sartre had been named for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In Paris, the journalists set off like a pack of hounds. One of them finally ran Sartre down at the Oriental, a hotel at Denfert-Rochereau, where he was having lunch with Beauvoir. The young man burst in and announced: “You’ve won the Nobel Prize!”

  Sartre put down his knife and fork. He would await confirmation, he said, but if the prize were offered to him, he would turn it down. Why? “I have nothing to say. I reserve my explanations for the Swedish press.” Sartre returned to his lentils and lamb. The evening headlines read: “Sartre refuses.”27

  For days, the literary world was abuzz. Would the Swedish Academy nevertheless award Sartre the prize? Why was he refusing it? Was this yet another instance of what Sartre liked to call his “aesthetic of opposition”? Was he sulking because Camus had been awarded the prize five years earlier? Was he afraid Simone de Beauvoir would be envious if he accepted? More serious journalists pointed out that Sartre had always hated elitism, and that none of his books showed this more clearly than Words. The last sentence reiterated his desire to be “a whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.”

  The Swedish committee held to its decision. Sartre was formally announced as the winner on October 24, 1964. The evening before, Sartre went to Beauvoir’s apartment to hide from the press. His mother, whose hotel was a little farther up the Boulevard Raspail from Sartre’s apartment, rang to say there was a crowd of reporters in front of his building. A small group of journalists doggedly rang Beauvoir’s doorbell. At two in the morning, Sartre finally went out and made a brief statement.

  “The writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution,” he declared in an explanation published in Le Monde. He would have been glad to accept the prize during the Algerian War, after he had signed the “Manifesto of the 121,” he said, because it would have honored the freedom they were fighting for. But nobody had offered it to him then. He feared that his acceptance would be taken in right-wing circles as a sign that he had been forgiven for the sins of his controversial political past.

  He went on to say that though this was perhaps not at all the intention of the Swedish Academy, the Nobel Prize looked as if it were a distinction reserved for writers of the West or rebels from the East. He added: “It is regrettable that the prize was given to Pasternak before being given to Sholokhov, and that the only Soviet work to be crowned so far is one that is not published—in fact, it’s forbidden—in its own country.”

  In November, Sartre wrote to Zonina. He had not heard from her. He did not even know what she thought about his decision. Until now he had taken for granted that she would understand him and agree with him. But now he was hesitating. How had she reacted?

  Zonina came to Paris in December 1964. Sartre had been worried about her visit. His apartment was Spartan. Would she be comfortable there? He planned to have her sleep on his narrow divan, with him on a folding bed by her side. Beauvoir insisted they should have her Rue Schoelcher apartment. She moved to Sartre’s place.

  Sartre had thought Zonina would be impressed by his decision to turn down the Nobel Prize. She wasn’t. She deplored these accommodating gestures he kept making towards the Stalinists, she told him.28 In the last few weeks, Khrushchev had been forced out of power, and there were going to be further restrictions on liberties in the USSR. It was a dark time for the Russian people. The Soviet intellectuals fervently wished that Sartre had taken the opportunity to speak out, rather than playing up to the communists as he had. And why on earth had Sartre claimed that Sholokhov deserved the prize more than Pasternak? Didn’t he realize that Sholokhov was a Stalinist lackey? In Russia, her dissident friends were laughing at him.

  In the end, Sartre said they should not argue anymore about what they were saying in the USSR. The fact is, he was also concerned with reactions in the West.29

  There were other strained conversations. Sartre had to break the news to Zonina that he was going to adopt Elkaïm. Despite her reservations, Zonina could hardly doubt Sartre’s love. If he had won the Nobel Prize, it was for Words, the book he had dedicated to her, which she had translated into Russian, and which had been a best seller these last few months in the USSR. And if he had refused the Nobel Prize, Zonina could see that his decision was largely an expression of solidarity with her homeland, Russia, and partly, at some level, with her.

  Zonina stayed for three weeks. Sartre and Beauvoir both went to the airport to see her off. The three of them wondered how on earth she would get through Soviet customs with the presents she was taking back.

  “I love you more than ever,” Sartre wrote to Zonina the next day. He had spent the night at Beauvoir’s apartment on the Rue Schoelcher, and it was still full of memories of Zonina. He and Beauvoir had talked till one-thirty A.M. “About you,” he told Zonina. He had gone upstairs to sleep. Beauvoir had slept downstairs on the sofa, as usual. At three in the morning she had woken up and, noticing light under Sartre’s door, had come upstairs to enjoin him to sleep. She had found him on the floor, his head on a detective novel, his glasses beside him. Apparently he had murmured, “Lena darling,” and without opening his eyes, had slipped into bed and gone straight back to sleep.

  On March 18, 1965, Arlette Elkaïm, at the age of twenty-eight, became Sartre’s legal daughter. Beauvoir and Sylvie Le Bon were the official witnesses at the signing ceremony. Arlette was being given legal and moral rights that Sartre had never given to any other woman. She was now officially called Arlette Elkaïm Sartre. After Sartre’s death, she would become his heir and the manager of his literary estate. Along with Gallimard, she would inherit the money that came in over the years from Sartre’s royalties, copyright permissions, and translations. One day, she would be a very wealthy woman.

  The news made the front page of France Soir, with a large photograph of Sartre and his “Jewish-Algerian daughter.” Readers were shocked. Sartre a father? Had he not declared in Words: “There are no good fathers…. It is not the men who are at fault but the paternalbond which is rotten?”30 Sartre’s friends and acquaintances, none of whom had been forewarned, were hurt and bewildered. They felt abandoned, left out of a family secret. As for Wanda, Michelle, and Evelyne, they were beside themselves with grief and rage.

  A few months earlier, when he first tried to broach the subject with his women, Sartre had promised each in turn that he would not adopt Arlette without that woman’s consent. He made the same promise to Liliane Siegel, whom he had been psychoanalyzing for the past five years. Siegel recalls that Sartre kept asking her: “Have you changed your mind yet?” She had not. Nor had the others.

  That evening, when the news burst over Paris, Wanda started breaking the furniture in her apartment. Evelyne wept. “You didn’t have the right to do that to me,” she told Sartre. “You told me you would never do anything to hurt me. Well, you have hurt me.” Michelle had threatened to kill herself if Sartre went ahead with the adoption. She did not carry out her threat, but she felt utterly betrayed.31 Liliane Siegel, who was never a lover of Sartre’s (though he had pressured her) found herself unable to finish the yoga class she was teaching that evening. She went home and sobbed. Finally, when she was able to speak, she phoned Beauvoir:

  “Liliane, what is it? Talk to me. Get a grip on yourself.”

  “He said…he said, Beaver, that he’d never do it without my consent!”

  “Ah, so you know. He wanted to tell you himself…”

  “But he promised, Beaver…”

  “Come on, calm down, you know very well that it doesn’t mean a thing to him.”

  “He’d promised, Beaver.”

  …

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s late, Liliane, take a sleeping pill, you can talk about it with him tomorrow. Are you listening to me, Liliane?” />
  “Yes.”

  “Then do as I say. Take care, my dear.”32

  Sartre told both Beauvoir and Zonina that the reaction of the other women left him cold. He saw envy and material interest behind their sobs and complaints, he said.

  Soviet intellectuals kept wishing that Sartre would take more advantage of his influence, which, since his rejection of the Nobel Prize, was greater than ever before. When Sartre and Beauvoir returned to the Soviet Union in July 1965, Zonina and her friends were outraged by the Brodsky trial. Joseph Brodsky, a young Jewish poet, had been condemned to five years of forced labor in a remote state farm, accused of “social parasitism.” Although he earned his living as a translator, he did not belong to the Writers Union, or any other state organization, so this was “parasitism.” At Ehrenburg’s urging, Sartre, for the first time since he had started regularly coming to the USSR in 1962, made an intervention. He wrote to the president of the Supreme Soviet, asking for Brodsky to be pardoned. His letter was so courteous that it verged on sycophantic: “Mr. President, If I take the liberty of addressing you, it’s because I am a friend of your great country…. I know perfectly well that what the western enemies of peaceful coexistence are already calling ‘the Brodsky affair’ is a regrettable exception.”33

  Zonina was more forthright in the report she wrote the Soviet Writers Union about Sartre’s visit. “The arguments of [Brodsky’s] accusers are so absurd and incredible that the friends of the USSR, including Sartre, have trouble defending our country.”34