by Hazel Rowley
After their month with Zonina, Sartre traveled for three weeks with Arlette, then two weeks with Wanda. Beauvoir went on vacation with a new friend, Sylvie Le Bon.
In the spring of 1960, Sylvie Le Bon, a seventeen-year-old baccalaureate student from Rennes, had written Beauvoir an admiring letter. A few months later, Le Bon came on a visit to Paris, and Beauvoir took her out to dinner. The girl was clearly extremely bright and had a lively, attractive face, but she was painfully shy, nervous, and fidgety. She wanted to study philosophy at the Ecole Normale. Beauvoir encouraged her. When they parted, Beauvoir bought her a bunch of newspapers and magazines from a press kiosk, telling her it was important to know something about politics.
Over the next three years they met from time to time. They drew closer after Françoise de Beauvoir’s death, in November 1963. Beauvoir found Le Bon a great comfort. By that time, Le Bon was living at the Ecole Normale for women on the Boulevard Jourdan (near the Cité Universitaire, where Sartre had once lived), and doing brilliantly in her studies. She and her girlfriends were often in trouble with the authorities for their unruly behavior, and Beauvoir enjoyed hearing about these wild doings. The two women liked to discuss books and films. By 1964 they were seeing each other regularly.
Le Bon was flattered to be sought out by the most famous woman writer in France. As for Beauvoir, with the twenty-one-year-old Le Bon as a companion, there were moments when she felt almost young again. The pages she would write about Le Bon in All Said and Done were as warm as any she ever wrote:
The better I knew Sylvie, the more akin I felt to her. She too was an intellectual and she too was passionately in love with life. And she was like me in many other ways: with thirty-three years of difference I recognized my qualities and my faults in her. She had one very rare gift: she knew how to listen. Her observations, her smiles, her silences, made one feel like talking…. I told her about my past in detail, and day by day I keep her in touch with my life…. I loved her enthusiasms and her anger, her gravity, her gaiety, her horror of the commonplace, her uncalculating generosity.
That summer, in August 1965, the two women went to Corsica. Le Bon had done extremely well in her agrégation, and they had reason to celebrate. Le Bon calls it their “honeymoon.”
After their travels with others, Beauvoir and Sartre spent six weeks together in Rome. They were besieged by desperate phone calls from Paris. Rehearsals were in progress for a new production of The Condemned of Altona. Six years after the original production, Serge Reggiani was again playing Frantz. The lead female roles had again gone to Evelyne and Wanda. Sartre had insisted on this.
According to the phone calls, the rehearsals were going badly, very badly. The producer, François Périer, and Serge Reggiani both told Sartre the same thing: Wanda had not been up to it six years ago, and now, after all the drugs she had taken, she was an embarrassment to the rest of the cast. She spent her time in the dressing room, she had not learned her lines properly, and she did not have her heart in it. Sartre was firm: “You play it with Wanda or you don’t play it.” There were tearful phone calls from Evelyne, who threatened to drop out of the play if Sartre did not do something about Wanda. Sartre lectured Evelyne about family loyalty.
The production was a disaster. Both the women, Evelyne and Wanda, were flayed by the press. One critic after another complained that they were inaudible and acted mechanically. It was as if Serge Reggiani were alone onstage, they said. “I have never seen an actress so completely without talent,” one critic said of Wanda. He described Evelyne Rey as a “magnificent block of ice.”35
On October 12, dreading the domestic scenes that awaited him, Sartre said good-bye to Beauvoir in Naples. He was taking the overnight train back to Paris; Beauvoir was driving back alone in her car. They arranged to meet in the evening of the fourteenth, at seven P.M., at her place.
Sartre’s train got to Paris on the morning of the thirteenth, and he launched straight into what he called his “official duties,” which meant seeing the women, one after the other. That night he went to bed early, exhausted. On the fourteenth, he got up and read through his correspondence, and was at his mother’s in time for lunch.
He and his mother were at the table when Lanzmann rang. It had been announced on the news that Beauvoir had had an accident, and was in a hospital in Joigny. That afternoon, Lanzmann and Sartre drove down the motorway at a hundred miles an hour. They found Beauvoir in a private room, fussed over by nurses, with four broken ribs, a swollen face, and a massive bruise over her left eye, where she had had stitches. She told them, with the febrile excitement of someone in shock, that she had rounded a bend too fast and found herself in front of a huge truck, and that the driver had saved her life by swerving to the left. The front of her sturdy Peugeot 404 was smashed in. The police had told her there were lots of accidents on that curve. She had not at first realized she was hurt. When she was helped out of the car, all she could think of was how she would get to Paris by seven that evening. And then the ambulance men had arrived and made her lie on a stretcher, and she saw that she was bleeding and felt the pain.
Lanzmann returned to Paris, and Sartre stayed the night in a nearby hotel. The next day, he accompanied Beauvoir back to the Rue Schoelcher in an ambulance. She was in pain, unable to undress herself. Sartre helped her upstairs and assured her he would stay with her until she could walk again. “What good are you to me,” she said, “since with your earplugs and sleeping pills I need to shake you to wake you up?” He promised to compromise and not use his earplugs.
She was in bed for three weeks. Sartre, Lanzmann, and Le Bon took turns looking after her. A nurse came for an hour every day to help. “The hardest thing is to keep people away,” Sartre told Lena. “Her apartment is literally invaded by flowers.”
Zonina came back to Paris in mid-November 1965, for three weeks. It had not been easy getting a travel visa from the Soviet government. Sartre had had to write letters stating that Zonina was his translator and she had been invited by the Temps modernes. She stayed in a hotel on the Boulevard Raspail, close to Sartre’s apartment. This time, Sartre did not tell the other women about her visit.
In December, Sartre and Beauvoir accompanied Zonina to St.-Raphael, a resort town on the Riviera, where Zonina was speaking at a conference. Sartre told the women he was with Beauvoir. France Soir reported that Sartre and Beauvoir had been seen walking around St.-Raphael with their Russian friend and interpreter Madame Zonina. As soon as Sartre was back in Paris, Michelle was on the phone:
“I knew you were with your Russian girlfriend.”
“Ah, the France Soir article. It’s quite wrong.”
“How can it be?”
“Zonina gave a talk at St-Raphael, but it was last year…. You know what newspapers are like.”
When Sartre went to see Elkaïm at their usual hour, he found a note on the door: “I’m not here. No point in ringing the bell. The dog won’t stop barking.” Sartre tore up the note, dropped the pieces on the doormat, and went to have a coffee. When he came back the shreds of paper had disappeared, so he knew Elkaïm was in. He rang the bell, setting off a racket of barking. Finally Elkaïm opened the door. For a long time she listened coldly while he gave his excuses. Then she went to the bathroom, and he heard her vomiting.
Sartre reminded her of their agreement. He had fully assumed his paternal role, he said, but she should not confuse it with another role. Her only demands of him should be filial. Elkaïm told him she did not like to be lied to.
In the end, she accompanied him as far as his mother’s hotel. It appeared, Sartre told Zonina, that they were more or less reconciled.
From May 2 to June 6, 1966, Sartre and Beauvoir were back in the Soviet Union. “What are you doing here in the midst of all this?” Ehrenburg asked them.36 He and Zonina and their friends could talk of little other than the disastrous trial and deportation of two young writers, Yuly Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, who as a result of publishing anti-Soviet works in the West
, under pen names, had been sentenced to years in hard labor camps. On Ehrenburg’s initiative, a petition was sent around calling for the writers’ immediate release. Zonina was one of sixty-two out of six thousand members of the Soviet Writers Union who dared to sign. “It called for a great deal of courage,” Beauvoir writes. “Putting one’s name to this petition meant taking the risk of never being sent abroad again, of losing one’s job and of remaining unpublished for ever.”37
It was the beginning of the dissident movement. Intellectuals were now furtively passing self-published, forbidden literature—samizdat—among themselves. But it was a depressing, frightening time. Sartre and Beauvoir returned with Zonina to Yalta and Odessa, then took the train to the Ukraine. They were constantly running up against prohibitions. Foreigners could not travel here; foreigners were not allowed to go there. It was absurd and immensely frustrating.
In 1965, the year after Sartre refused the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy had awarded it to the Soviet writer Sholokhov. When Zonina tried to arrange a meeting between Sartre and Solzhenitsyn in the summer of 1966, she was told that Solzhenitsyn had no desire to meet him. Solzhenitsyn was apparently enraged by Sartre’s comment that Sholokhov deserved the Nobel Prize more than Pasternak. The comment had no doubt influenced the Academy.
“Our trip was perfect happiness,” Sartre wrote to Zonina when he got back to Paris. “There was nothing gay about it, however. Your health, your moments of fatigue,…the depressing atmosphere of Moscow, the ‘affair,’ and all the serious things—painful things—we said to each other.”38
Zonina, as usual, was more blunt. She was angry about events in the Soviet Union, she told Sartre, and had resigned from the Writers Union in disgust. She felt very unhappy, and above all, terribly tired. Sartre did not understand her life. How could he, since he did not know its daily detail? He had disappointed her. She had loved him for his liberty, but she had come to realize that he was not free. He did not say what he believed. He did not do what he wanted to do.
Sartre was crushed, unable to work for a week. “Everything you said was so true in its hardness that I could only accept it,” he wrote back. It did not help, he said, that he was growing old. He had become less free as he grew older. There were so many accumulated obligations. His only real freedom was her, Lena, and the love he had for her.
Beauvoir’s story “Misunderstanding in Moscow,” discarded during her lifetime and published after her death, sheds interesting light on her feelings in the summer of 1966, as she traveled around the Soviet Union with Sartre and Zonina.39 Even the fictional transformations are revealing. The Sartre character is called André; the Zonina character is called Masha, the name of Zonina’s real-life daughter. In the story Masha is not André’s lover, but his daughter. And yet they act like lovers.
The story is set at the time of writing, in June 1966. André and Nicole are a French couple in their early sixties. Both are painfully conscious that they are aging. André is a well-known and politically committed intellectual, and in Paris he is in constant demand. Nicole is a retired schoolteacher. They have always told each other everything, at least in theory.
They have come to Moscow to see André’s daughter, Masha. She was brought up by her mother, and André saw very little of her while she was growing up, but in the last five years they have discovered each other with joy.
Masha is waiting for them at the airport. “A beautiful young woman,” Nicole thinks to herself. They wait an interminable time for the baggage to arrive. Nicole had forgotten; nothing happens fast in this country. Masha drives slowly (like everyone else in Moscow) to the Peking Hotel. André says how excited he is to be there again. Nicole is already missing Paris.
They get out of the car and breathe in the familiar smell of diesel fumes. The price of their hotel room has tripled in the last three years. At least the plumbing works, Nicole thinks to herself. And for the first time there are curtains covering the windows.
André has often said how pleased he is that the two women—“the two people he loves most in the world”—get on so well. Nicole, it is true, feels real friendship for Masha. But from the time they arrive, she also feels twinges of other things.
She feels old, for a start, and tells herself that it must be the contrast with Masha, who is so fresh and vigorous. And she can’t help it: she’s bored with Moscow. The city is uglier each time they see it. “It’s a pity that changes are almost always for the worse,” she muses, “whether places or people.”
Each time they visit the USSR, Masha acts as their guide and interpreter. She is the one who has to negotiate their itinerary with the Intourist authorities. She is the one who knows this country, its contradictions, and its frightful red tape. But it means they are in her hands. And sometimes Nicole would prefer not to have Masha decide everything—right down to the square they sit in to have lunch, the one Masha insists has the best view of the church.
Masha is admirably independent, Nicole reflects. She is submissive to no man. And yet she enjoys her femininity—far more so than she, Nicole, has ever done. Perhaps it is because Masha lives in a country where women do not suffer from an inferiority complex.
Nicole longs to be alone with André. On their previous visits to the Soviet Union, Masha had her own work to attend to as well. On this trip, she is with them all the time. André appears to like it. Nicole keeps wondering: doesn’t he ever want to be alone with me? They never have a chance to talk, just the two of them. It is making her morose.
Sometimes she finds herself forgetting that Masha is André’s daughter. There is a complicity between them, a freshness and tenderness. The two of them say “tu” to each other, and both say “vous” to Nicole. It hurts Nicole to see André use the same words and winning smiles with Macha that he once used with her. She is fed up with the interminable discussions between André and Masha about Soviet culture. And she can sense Masha’s impatience with André’s questions and comments. “‘You are too abstract,’ Masha kept telling him.”
The vacation lumbers past. In less than a week they will return to Paris. Nicole is looking forward to their departure. Then André ruins everything.
He smiled at her. “You wanted to go and see a dacha. Well, it’s arranged,” he told her.
“Oh, Masha is good.”
“It’s the dacha of a friend of hers, about thirty kilometers away. Yuri will drive us there, not this Sunday but the next.”
“The next? But we’re leaving on Tuesday.”
“No, Nicole. You know we decided to extend our trip by ten days.”
“You’ve decided that, without even telling me!” Nicole said.
Suddenly there was red smoke in her head, a red fog in front of her eyes, something red was screaming in her throat. He doesn’t give a damn about me! He didn’t say a word!
Did he really believe he had told her? she wonders. He was drinking a lot, far too much, and was often drunk. But, in fact, Nicole is sure he is lying. It would not be the first time. He lied about empty bottles, and sometimes he pretended he had seen a doctor when he hadn’t. When she caught him, he laughed. “It would have been too long to explain, so I took a shortcut.” But this time, she can hardly contain her fury.
The fact that he had lied was not the worst: he lied out of cowardice, like a child afraid of reprimand. The worst was that he had made this decision with Masha without taking her into account in the least…. In three weeks he had never once tried to wangle a tête-à-tête with her; all his smiles, all his tenderness went towards Masha.
Nicole is unable to hide her rage. She threatens to go back to Paris early. “If you want to,” André says. In front of Masha, they keep up a polite façade all day. In the evening, André drinks four glasses of vodka. There’s something senile about his attempts to converse with Masha in Russian, Nicole thinks to herself. Masha was giggling at his accent; the two were as thick as thieves. Nicole is beginning to wonder whether her past life with André was quite simply a mirage. So many wom
en lied to themselves about their lives. Perhaps she did, too.
She drinks too much and goes to bed feeling sad and lost. When she wakes up, her head is heavy. She opens her eyes. There’s André, sitting in an armchair at the end of her bed, watching her. Her lips tremble. He is speaking to her, in that caressing voice she liked so much. We can never be quite sure about our memories, he says. He comes toward her, puts his arms around her shoulders, kisses her on the temple, and tells her that even if he did forget to tell her, there is no reason to be so upset. She clings to him, her cheek on his jacket, and cries. What a relief! It is so tiring to hate someone you love.
In the corridor she takes his arm. They are reconciled. It was a misunderstanding.
Three months later, in mid-September 1966, Beauvoir and Sartre flew to Tokyo together. Seventeen hours of flight. A new country, a new adventure.
Sartre had more readers in Japan than in any other country. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, translated into Japanese in 1965, was a best seller. Nevertheless, they were by no means prepared for the reception awaiting them. There were more than a hundred journalists at the airport, blinding them with their flash bulbs. A vast crowd of mostly young people called out their names and tried to catch hold of their hands and arms as they passed. Their interpreter, Tomiko Asabuki, guided them into a room where they were bombarded with questions from the press.
For a month they traveled around the country, gave lectures, and met left-wing intellectuals. Sartre spoke at a huge meeting to protest the Vietnam War. Beauvoir, as usual, ploughed through a small library of books about Japan. Sartre, as usual, preferred to try to understand the culture by getting to know one person intimately. During their stay, the tiny, attentive, adoring Tomiko Asabuki became his lover.40 “In almost every journey we’ve made or that you’ve made, there’s been a woman who turned out to be the incarnation of the country for you,” Beauvoir observed.41