Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  On their way back, they stopped for five days in Moscow to see Zonina. It was Sartre’s eleventh trip to the Soviet Union. He did not want to know it, but he knew, and Zonina knew. Their love affair was over.

  TWELVE

  TRAGIC ENDINGS, NEW BEGINNINGS

  November 1966–May 1971

  Her suicide created shock waves in the French Left Bank intelligentsia. Evelyne Rey, formerly Evelyne Lanzmann, killed herself on November 18, 1966. She was thirty-six. “All those who knew her loved her,” declared the obituary in the Nouvel Observateur, “because she was bursting with life and because she loved everything.”1

  There was nothing ambiguous about Evelyne’s death. She took an overdose of barbiturates and made sure no one would find her until the pills had done their job. She left several farewell letters on her table—to her brother Claude and to Sartre, among others—in which she scrupulously tried to relieve them of remorse. “I am suffering and it’s no one’s fault. My relationship with myself has gone off track.”2

  Evelyne’s acting career had not been a success. “In a way she didn’t have acting in her blood,” her brother Claude Lanzmann says. “She was afraid of the audience.”3 Her best role was as Estelle, in Sartre’s play No Exit (a part Sartre had originally written for Wanda), and she had been thrilled when O.R.T.F., French Radio and Television, broadcast a television adaptation of the play in October 1965. Tragically, her one really major role, the one Sartre had written for her—Johanna, in The Condemned of Altona—had proved too difficult for her. The “magnificent block of ice” remark had stung. On the whole, the theater had brought her a lot of heartache and humiliation.

  Her love life had been equally disastrous. She was beautiful, and men were readily attracted to her, but the men she loved were usually married, and in any event not committed to her. Her affair with Sartre had been clandestine. Of course, Sartre had been loyal to her in his way and had continued to see her three times a week, an hour and a half each time, and to support her financially. But she knew he was disappointed in her as an actress.

  Recently, both Sartre and Evelyne’s brother Claude had been pressing her to give up acting and take up journalism. “That would be to accept my defeat as an actress,” she had protested.4 The final straw was when her body failed her. In March 1966 she had been about to leave on tour with Altona when she contracted pleurisy. For weeks she was in the hospital, in a great deal of pain. When she came out, only one of her lungs functioned, and the slightest exertion left her breathless.

  From then on, she was tired and depressed, anxious about her career, and frightened about her health. In the late autumn, feeling slightly stronger, she went to Tunisia to participate in a documentary about Tunisian women. She came back exhausted, but seemed proud of the work she had done. While there, she had taken up with a former lover, a well-known television producer who had plans for her to play a leading role in his forthcoming television show.5 But she was not in love with him, and she was tired of acting. One morning in November, in the cold predawn hours, she chose death.

  Sartre reacted to the news with violent abdominal cramps. “There is, of course, the guilt,” he told Zonina three months later. “We all feel that. It weighs on us. Life wasn’t easy for her, and finally, I wasn’t easy on her either, despite appearances.” Since Evelyne’s death, he felt no joy in anything, he added, and no desire to do anything, except to plod on with Flaubert.

  “To tell the truth, of all the deaths that occurred among people I knew during these last years, only one really moved me very deeply, and that was Evelyne’s,” Beauvoir would write in All Said and Done. “But I have no wish to speak of it.”

  In truth, Beauvoir would have liked to talk about it, but couldn’t. She had promised Sartre she would not mention his passion for Evelyne, because of Michelle. She discussed the problem with Claude Lanzmann. Should she talk about Evelyne without talking about Evelyne’s relationship with Sartre? Lanzmann said no; that would completely falsify Evelyne’s life. But when Force of Circumstance came out, Evelyne was very hurt. She had been a close member of the family for years, and once again she had been left out of the public picture. Beauvoir had talked at length about Claude, but scarcely mentioned her. She seemed doomed to be hidden in the background.

  When Evelyne killed herself, she and Sartre had not been lovers for ten years. Nevertheless, Beauvoir felt sure that the unsatisfactory relationship with Sartre had played a role in Evelyne’s suicide. She told John Gerassi:

  To understand Evelyne you need to understand what her rather complicated relationship with Sartre was like, and perhaps this relationship was at the root of her suicide, though I don’t think so. Already because of Michelle, it was a mess. Sartre gave her a lot—his time, his energy, his presence, his tenderness—really, he gave her a lot…. But it stopped at a clandestine relationship. Everyone knew about it, but it was nevertheless not public…. Evelyne did not like that.6

  Ten years after that conversation with Gerassi, Beauvoir’s biographer, Deirdre Bair, asked Beauvoir about Evelyne’s suicide. Beauvoir became agitated and spoke with obvious distress. “It was this very, very, great, great friendship she had for Sartre that scarred her enormously,” Beauvoir said in such a low voice that Bair could hardly hear her. “I should have written about her…I saw her a lot and liked her very much. I owed that to her.”7

  Jacques Lanzmann is convinced that her men friends used Evelyne. She was known both for her beauty and for being the lover of famous men, and this made her something of a trophy. After Sartre there were many boyfriends. “They could join hands,” he says bitterly. “They had her hide.”8

  Evelyne’s former husband, Serge Rezvani, writes that though Evelyne’s death was a brutal shock to her family and friends, no one wanted to see the real tragedy behind it. “Today I can say that Evelyne was the consenting victim of a misogynous frivolousness which, until 1968, characterized the Left Bank intelligentsia.”9

  Rezvani received a lot of flak for that sentence. The Left Bank critics did not like it at all.

  In the early sixties, the second and third volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs aroused a febrile new interest in the Sartre-Beauvoir couple. The Prime of Life (1960) and Force of Circumstance (1963) were runaway successes. There were photos of Beauvoir and Sartre in all the magazines. The Sartre-Beauvoir legend was firmly in place.

  Beauvoir’s memoirs, the story of her life, inevitably had repercussions in her actual life. She received letters, many letters. Some readers were grateful; others were enraged.10 Some wished she had said more; many wished she had said less. There were frequent complaints about distortions and misrepresentation. Sartre’s other women were angry about being left in the background, as if they hardly featured in Sartre’s life.

  To anyone who knew the Sartrean clan, it was clear that Beauvoir was taking control of the public image. She was telling the story her way. It is not that she skimmed over all the anguished episodes in her past; she did not. Much of it was scrupulously honest. But the act of writing gave her immense power. She was publicly stating her position of primacy among Sartre’s women. She could leave Wanda out of the story. She could put in a withering comment here and there about Olga, Dolores, or anyone else who had once caused her torment. Above all, the tone and viewpoint of her narrative created the effect of control. She was looking back on her past from a position of triumph.

  “Everything changes when you tell about life,” the narrator in Sartre’s novel Nausea muses. “It’s a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the beginning: ‘It was a fine autumn evening in 1922….’ And in reality you have started at the end.”

  Wanda hated Beauvoir’s memoirs. She was jealous of the fuss surrounding them. She resented this idealized portrait, as she saw it, of the Sartre-Beauvoir relationship. To her, the books were full of lies. Beauvoir had hardly
mentioned Wanda’s role in Sartre’s life during the war. Worse, the books made Wanda wonder about Sartre. To her, he had always systematically denied his closeness to Beauvoir.

  Like her sister, Wanda had always been prone to wild rages, but after their mother’s death, in the early 1960s, Wanda developed paranoia. She thought everyone was plotting against her, and her hatred grew violent. Her mental state was not helped by drugs. For the past decade she had been rivaling Sartre with her intake of amphetamines and barbiturates. These days she was taking cocaine as well. There were sinister scrapes with drug dealers. Once, she fell in the street and did not know where she lived. The police picked her up and took her to a hospital. Finally, they contacted Sartre.

  These days, Wanda hated her sister, Olga, but there was no one she hated as much as Beauvoir. Whenever she came across Beauvoir’s photograph in the press, she would cover it with furious scribbling. She stuck pins in a voodoo doll, trying to will Beauvoir to an early death. After Force of Circumstance came out, Wanda obtained a gun—a “lady’s revolver,” which could kill from close range—and told Sartre she had every intention of committing murder.

  It was Sylvie Le Bon who took action. She formed a small “commando unit,” she says, with two girlfriends from the Ecole Normale. They rang Wanda’s bell on the Rue du Dragon and announced over the intercom that they were journalists from Elle magazine, hoping to be able to interview the famous actress Marie Olivier. Wanda let them in. While her girlfriends pounced on Wanda and held her captive, Le Bon went through Wanda’s drawers, looking both for the gun and for letters from Sartre. (Beauvoir was afraid Wanda would destroy the letters she had received from Sartre over the years.) Le Bon found the gun, but not the letters.11 The women left Wanda bruised and terrified.

  Beauvoir told Le Bon off in no uncertain terms. “I told her I intended to take the gun from Wanda. She did not try to stop me,” Le Bon says today. “It was the mid-sixties. They were radical times. I was a little terrorist.” She smiles. “It’s true, we were rather crazy. I’m not proud of this episode.”12

  Nelson Algren was the only person who vented his fury publicly about Beauvoir’s memoirs. America Day by Day and The Mandarins had already stretched his tolerance. “To publicize a relationship existing between two people is to destroy it,” he told an interviewer. “See, the big thing about sexual love is it lets you become her and lets her become you, but when you share the relationship with everyone who can afford a book, you reduce it. It no longer has meaning. It’s good for the book trade, I guess, but you certainly lose interest in the other party.”13

  That was before he read Force of Circumstance. The English translation came out in the United States in the spring of 1965. As a prepublication appetizer, extracts were published in the November and December 1964 issues of Harper’s magazine. The two installments were called “The Question of Fidelity.” The editors picked out those morsels that would most interest American readers: namely, Beauvoir’s account of her and Sartre’s “American affairs”—Sartre’s with Vanetti and hers with Algren. Dolores Vanetti was given the thinnest of disguises as “M.” Algren was called by his name. He was out in the open, swinging in the breeze.

  The November issue had a candy pink cover featuring two blue eyes. Beauvoir’s? On a wintry Chicago evening, Algren opened the magazine at the cover story. He read how excited Sartre had been to go to America after the Liberation. He read about Sartre’s affair with “M.” in New York. Then he read about Beauvoir’s own trip to America:

  I became attached to Nelson Algren toward the end of my stay. Although I related this affair—very approximately—in The Mandarins, I return to it, not out of any taste for gossip, but in order to examine more closely a problem that in The Prime of Life, the second volume of my autobiography, I took to be too easily resolved: Is there any possible reconciliation between fidelity and freedom? And if so, at what price?…

  There are many couples who conclude more or less the same pact as that of Sartre and myself: to maintain throughout all deviations from the main path a “certain fidelity.” “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.” Such an undertaking has its risks….

  If the two allies allow themselves only passing sexual liaisons, then there is no difficulty, but it also means that the freedom they allow themselves is not worthy of the name. Sartre and I have been more ambitious; it has been our wish to experience “contingent loves”: but there is one question we have deliberately avoided: How would the third person feel about the arrangement?

  In the December installment, subtitled “An American Rendezvous,” Algren was treated to details he himself had never been told:

  “When you get to Chicago, go and see Nelson Algren for me,” a young intellectual told me when I was in New York in 1947. I have given a faithful account of my first meeting with him in my book America Day by Day…but I did not mention the rapport that immediately sprang up between us…. I called him before I left for the railroad station; they had to take the telephone away from me by force….

  The weeks passed; Sartre asked me in one of his letters to postpone my departure because M. was staying another ten days in Paris. Suddenly that made me feel the nostalgia I described Anne as feeling in my novel The Mandarins: I’d had enough of being a tourist; I wanted to walk about on the arm of a man who, temporarily, would be mine. I called Algren….

  People would often talk about him to me; they said he was unstable, moody, even neurotic; I liked being the only one who understood him.

  Algren reviewed Beauvoir’s memoirs in the magazine Ramparts:

  “When you get to Paris, see Simone de Beauvoir,” a pseudo-intellectual once urged me. People claimed she was surprisingly sententious, humorless and tyrannical for a good writer. I liked being the only one to know she wasn’t a good writer. As soon as I reached the Deux Magots I phoned the native quarter.14

  He reviewed the book again in Harper’s. His piece was called “The Question of Simone de Beauvoir.” The following extracts give the gist:

  No chronicler of our lives since Theodore Dreiser has combined so steadfast a passion for human justice with a dullness so asphyxiating as Mme. de Beauvoir. While other writers reproach the reader gently, she flattens his nose against the blackboard, gooses him with a twelve-inch ruler, and warns him if he doesn’t start acting grown-up she’s going to hold her breath till he does….

  When Madame is right she is very very right. And when she’s wrong she’s preposterous….

  Mme. de Beauvoir’s world, that she reports with such infinite accuracy, is a reflected vision; no one ever lived behind that looking-glass. Which is why all the characters of her novels, although drawn directly from life, have no life on the printed page….

  Not one to risk her own freedom, Mme. de Beauvoir sensed she could trust Jean-Paul Sartre to be faithless. That was a shrewd move right there…. “Sartre and I have been more ambitious; it has been our wish to experience ‘contingent loves.’”…

  Put cats in the coffee and mice in the tea—

  And welcome Queen Alice with thirty-three!

  Anybody who can experience love contingently has a mind that has recently snapped. How can love be contingent? Contingent upon what?…Procurers are more honest than philosophers. They name this How-about-a-quickie-kid gambit as “chippying.”…

  Mme. de Beauvoir’s early determination “to write sacrificial essays in which the author strips himself bare without excuses” she has since employed with such earnestness and skill that practically everybody has now been sacrificed excepting herself….

  Saigon, they say, will fall one day. With a terrible rush and a horrible roar, nation upon nation will fall into riot, totter to anarchy, and plunge at last into endless night. Beaches whereon waters once met the land, and the sky came down to meet both, will shrink from the sea’s irradiated touch. Then a low dread pall of greenish-gray will enwrap and enwind earth, forest, skyscraper, and sky in an endless orbit through endless space through endless time
, in a silence without end.

  Except for one small hoarse human voice burbling up from the ancestral ocean’s depths—“In this matter man’s sexuality may be modified. Sartre needs peace and quiet. The dead are better adapted to the earth than the living. Bost is on the cinema Vigilance Committee. I want to go skiing. Merleau-Ponty”—

  Will she ever quit talking?15

  In the summer of 1966, Zeitgeist, a small literary magazine in the Midwest, published a poem by Algren called “Goodbye Lilies, Hello Spring.” He dedicated it to Simone de Beauvoir.16

  I was like Héloise You were Abélard

  On the paperback shelves it’ll sell by the yard—

  Avoid, avoid that shadowy plot

  And the old fraud below it who can’t shut her mouth—

  O wasn’t it magical O wasn’t it tragical

  Love like ours will never die out

  (Providing I tell it the way it was not)—

  The last of the three stanzas reads:

  Down in some basement below the bin

  Where baby-rats drown when water creeps in

  Straight down upside-down in the slag and the guck

  Stuff the yammering humbug straight down in the muck.

  Let her yack on forever way way down there

  Then slam the door and jump up the stair—

  Open the window and let in some air

  Each April should teach us how to swing:

  Saying Goodbye Lilies

  Hello

  Spring.

  In May 1981, Nelson Algren was seventy-two. He had moved to Sag Harbor, Long Island. He had just been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a journalist, W. J. Weatherby, came to his cottage to interview him.

  In the course of the conversation, Weatherby asked Algren about Beauvoir. Algren had not had any communication with Beauvoir for almost twenty years, but it did not take him long to become worked up. “I’ve been in whorehouses all over the world and the woman there always closes the door, whether it’s in Korea or India,” he said. “But this woman flung the door open and called in the public and the press…. I don’t have any malice against her, but I think it was an appalling thing to do.”17 Algren had previously mentioned seeing a doctor about a heaviness in his chest. Weatherby thought it wise to change the subject.