by Hazel Rowley
The following evening, Algren was due to have a party in his cottage, to celebrate his new award. The first guest to arrive found Algren’s dead body lying on the floor. He had died of a massive heart attack.
In France, too, the newspapers reported his death. Poupette rang Simone to offer her condolences. Beauvoir was cold. “Aren’t you sorry?” Poupette asked. “Don’t you feel anything for him?”
“Why should I?” her elder sister answered. “What did he feel for me that he could have written those horrible things?”18
But she did not take off Algren’s ring. She would wear it to her grave.
Sartre was under a lot of pressure, emotionally and politically, and was drinking heavily. In February 1967, three months after Evelyne’s suicide, he and Beauvoir made a trip to the Middle East—first to Egypt, then to Israel. The Temps modernes was doing a special issue on the Israeli-Arab conflict, with Claude Lanzmann coordinating the Israel section and Ali el Samman, a young Egyptian journalist who was studying in Paris, the Arab section. The four of them traveled around Egypt together, seeing the sights, visiting Palestinian refugee camps, and talking to left-wing intellectuals. They even met President Nasser.
On their last night in Cairo, they were given a lavish farewell dinner in a sixteenth-century Arab palace, with a floor show that included belly dancing and a whirling dervish. When Beauvoir went to bed it was after midnight, and the men were still going strong. Sartre, according to Claude Lanzmann, was by this time “dead drunk”:
He drank because there was a woman he wanted to seduce. He was very nervous, tense and aggressive. If you asked the Beaver, she would probably say we’d just got back from Gaza and he had seen refugees. It’s true, but not the whole truth. There was this woman and he had to leave her. It was the day before we were flying out. We were with an Egyptian fellow who had been our guide—a journalist, a very nice, funny guy, Ali. And in this hotel room, stuffed with microphones, Sartre said: “You’re a homo, Ali, you’re a dirty homo.”
The guy did not know what had hit him. He laughed at first, a forced laugh. I said, “Sartre, stop it. You’re nuts.” Sartre said “You fuck off, Lanzmann.” And then he called me a homo, too. And finally I said to Ali, “Listen, we’re going to have to put him to bed.” We had to pick him up, undress him, and so on.
The next morning, at 8 or 9, there was a press conference, the big one before we left. I went to wake the Beaver in her room, and told her Sartre wouldn’t be able to do it. Sartre had bloodshot eyes, but he did it. He has an iron constitution…. But he’s aggressive, this guy…. and macho. When he’s in a bar with a woman at 3 am and there are guys who piss him off, he speaks their language, like a gangster. I’ve seen him intimidate tough men.19
After Egypt, Sartre and Beauvoir spent two weeks in Israel. Claude Lanzmann flew home after three days, and Elkaïm flew in to Tel Aviv. Sartre thought it important for his adoptive Jewish daughter to see Israel.20
The Arab-Israeli issue went to press at the end of May. In his introduction, Sartre said how divided he and his friends felt in this conflict. They had lived through World War II and been horrified by anti-Semitism in Europe. During the Algerian War, they had sided with the Arab freedom fighters in their struggle against colonialism. “We are living this conflict as if it were our personal tragedy.”
A few days later, on June 5, 1967, Israel bombed Egypt. By the end of the Six-Day War, as it came to be known, Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. French intellectuals were once again divided. Had Israel acted in self-defense, as it claimed, or had it been the aggressor? It was like the Dreyfus affair, Sartre wrote to Zonina. Everyone had strong opinions, and he himself risked falling out with his best friends.
The Arab-Israeli conflict was one of the few subjects on which Sartre and Beauvoir slightly diverged. They both firmly believed that the Jews had the right to a nation and that the Palestinians had a right to Palestine. But Sartre was dismayed by the policies of the Israeli government, who seemed determined to make negotiation with the Palestinians impossible. Beauvoir, convinced that the Palestinian leaders would not be content until they had destroyed Israel, was more sympathetic to Israel. “I was not in complete agreement with any single one of my friends,” she writes, “and with some of them I was in total conflict.”21
The Six-Day War caused a wariness between Sartre and Claude Lanzmann that would never entirely disappear. Lanzmann was passionately pro-Israel; Sartre was sharply critical of Israeli expansionism. Lanzmann, who had once been so impressed by Sartre’s book on anti-Semitism, was now calling Sartre an “anti-Semite.” Sartre told Lanzmann he was an “imperialist.”22
But Lanzmann could not bear to fall out with Sartre. Nor could Bost. Sartre had once thrown Bost out of Beauvoir’s apartment because Bost had sided with Jean Cau in an argument. On that occasion, Sartre ended up running after him, and they made up over a drink.
In their old age, Beauvoir remarked to Sartre: “Bost would have done anything not to remain on bad terms with you. And there’s someone else who did a great deal not to break with you when there were disagreements, and that is Lanzmann.”23
After Sartre’s death, Jean Cau wrote:
Sartre does not get angry. He expels people. There is no other choice…. If the Other takes a distance from Sartre, it can only lead to rupture…. And Sartre’s entourage loudly approves of the exclusion. Out of servility? Not at all. His entourage breathes the Sartrean air. It’s comprised of planets orbiting, as if nature intended it, around their night star. (A planet is not servile.) No, on the contrary, between Sartre and his satellites there reigns an atmosphere of cordiality, complicity, coded language, and humor. The relationship is not that of a master pontificating to his disciples…but rather that of a “great guy” professor with students who are utterly disrespectful of his function (Sartre himself invites this disrespect), but fanatical about his person.24
Few had the privilege of observing Sartre close up, in his own home, as Cau did for eleven years. Cau’s insights came from years of intimacy, followed by exclusion.
Sartre and Beauvoir had been outraged when the Americans began bombing North Vietnam in February 1965. Two years later, they participated in the Russell Tribunal, established by Bertrand Russell (who was ninety-four at the time) to arouse world opinion against American atrocities in Vietnam.
In May 1967, the tribunal met in Stockholm. The discussions lasted ten days. In November, the group met again, this time in Copenhagen. There were horrific reports from witnesses, including John Gerassi, the son of Stépha and Fernando—who had been in Vietnam collecting evidence—and Gisèle Halimi, Sartre and Beauvoir’s lawyer friend.
The days were grueling, but the evenings were sociable. Sartre and Beauvoir met old friends from around the world. At some of the meetings, Claude Lanzmann stood in for Sartre. Bost was reporting for the Nouvel Observateur. Sylvie Le Bon came for the weekend, and she and Beauvoir hired a car and explored the region. Arlette Elkaïm participated in the capacity of Sartre’s secretary.25 Beauvoir and Sartre particularly liked Vladimir Dedijer, the Yugoslavian intellectual and militant, who presided over some of the meetings. Elkaïm, no doubt influenced by their affection for him, had an affair with him.
Sylvie Le Bon was teaching philosophy at the very school in Rouen—the Lycée Jeanne d’Arc—where Beauvoir had once taught. The minute her classes were over, Le Bon would take the first train back to Paris. In Rouen, she stayed in the Hôtel La Rochefoucauld, near the station, where Beauvoir had lived for two years. She took her morning coffee and croissant in Beauvoir’s old haunt, the Métropole. “All this gave me a certain feeling of being reincarnated,” Beauvoir would write in All Said and Done.26
Friends were struck by Le Bon’s resemblance to Beauvoir. “Sylvie…expressed herself a bit like the Beaver—an unaffected, rather staccato way of talking—and seemed to echo her thoughts. She wore her hair in a chignon like the Beaver and there
was something similar about her profile,” Gisèle Halimi writes. “And she had the same friendly disposition.”27
In All Said and Done, Beauvoir would write about her relationship with Sylvie in much the same way she had described her relationship with Lanzmann:
I was wrong in 1962 when I thought nothing significant would happen to me any more, apart from calamities; now once again a piece of great good fortune was offered to me…. There is no one who could have appreciated more than I what I have received from her…. She is as thoroughly interwoven in my life as I am in hers…. We read the same books, we see shows together, and we go for long drives in the car. There is such an interchange between us that I lose the sense of my age: she draws me forwards into her future, and there are times when the present recovers a dimension that it had lost.
Both women have always denied that it was a sexual relationship. Throughout her life, Beauvoir insisted, in public, that she had never had a sexual relationship with a woman. She would sometimes skirt around the question, saying that she thought all women were to some degree homosexual in their tastes, since women were more attractive, softer, their skin was nicer, and they were often more charming than men. “I have had some very important friendships with women, of course, some very close relationships, sometimes close in a physical sense,” she said, “but they never aroused erotic passion on my part.”28 Her letters to Sartre, published posthumously, would indicate the opposite.
Sylvie Le Bon talks about this subject with the same vagueness and ambiguity. She says it was love, not friendship, that she and Beauvoir felt for each other. They were “intimate.” Their relationship was “carnal but not sexual.” She claims they were both primarily male-oriented. Echoing Beauvoir, Le Bon speaks as if lesbian lovemaking were simply not the real thing. She balks at the word couple. They were not a couple, she says, because from the beginning, Beauvoir encouraged her to have relationships with other people, and she did.
Looking back, Le Bon thinks she was too young to understand certain things, but that Beauvoir wanted her to be independent and not make demands Beauvoir could not satisfy. “The Beaver often used to tell me that she had been very cautious with me,” Le Bon says. “She felt she had made mistakes in the past.”
By the time she met Le Bon, Beauvoir was painfully conscious of her own aging body. In 1968, she published The Woman Destroyed, three novellas that explore the theme of the older woman coming to terms with no longer being sexually desirable. After that, she began research for an exhaustive essay on old age.
Le Bon remembers an emotionally charged turning point. They were traveling together in the North of Scotland in 1969, and feeling very close one evening. Le Bon wanted more. Beauvoir told her gently, “Any man would love to have you in his bed. But I am, quite literally, like an impotent man.” Sylvie wonders what would have happened if she had taken the initiative. Perhaps Beauvoir simply needed reassurance? But she was young at the time, Le Bon says, and she took everything Beauvoir said at face value.
After that, they felt freer together, Le Bon says. What had to be said had been said, and they could be intimate at certain moments, without making any demands on each other.29
Sartre liked to describe himself as “the district nurse.”30 “You’re lucky,” he told his psychoanalyst friend Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. “Sick people come to your rooms, and they pay you. In my case, I’m the one who does the rounds, and I pay them.”31
Sartre’s schedule varied little over the years. He got up at eight-thirty. After breakfast in a local café, he worked from nine-thirty till one P.M. He had lunch with Michelle, Arlette, or Beauvoir, usually at the Coupole or the Palette, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, then went back to work from four-thirty till eight-thirty P.M., with Beauvoir working beside him. On Monday and Thursday evenings he ate at Arlette’s apartment; afterward they talked or watched television, and he slept there—he upstairs, she downstairs. Tuesday and Saturday evenings were at Beauvoir’s, and he slept at her place. He spent Wednesday evenings with Michelle, then went home. Friday evenings he was at Wanda’s till eleven P.M., then went home.
The weekends were equally rigidly organized: Saturday lunch with Arlette, Saturday evening with Beauvoir, Sunday breakfast with Arlette; Sunday lunch with his mother at her hotel (roast pork and mashed potatoes), and the evening with Michelle. After Anne-Marie Mancy died, in 1969 (he seemed to deal surprisingly easily with her death), Sartre had Sunday lunch with Beauvoir and Le Bon at the Coupole.
Complain as he might about the demands made on him, Sartre chose to prop himself up with this schedule. It gave him a sense of stability. His women shielded him from the world. They provided a diversion from work. They made him feel loved and needed. Sartre needed to have company. One night, when for once he found himself on his own—he would normally have been with Arlette, but she was away—he let himself into Arlette’s apartment to watch television. When André Puig, Arlette’s boyfriend, came in around midnight, he found Sartre lying on the floor dead drunk. It took Puig half an hour to help Sartre to his feet.
Beauvoir spent a lifetime observing how easy it was for women to drive Sartre into a corner. “That guilty conscience of his,” she said.32 Sartre felt beholden to his women for loving him. He often wondered to what extent he was responsible for their unhappiness, their failure to find fulfillment. Why was Wanda, who had once read Stendhal and Tolstoy with pleasure, no longer capable of reading even detective novels? “Madness always leaves one feeling guilty,” he told Lena. He knew there had been mistakes made somewhere, by someone.
He professed to hate the jealous scenes to which he was constantly subjected, but Sartre did more than most men to provoke them. His women all lived within ten minutes of him;33 they rarely saw one another, and none of them knew the truth about his life. Arlette had no idea that after going for three weeks’ vacation every year with her, Sartre went away with Wanda for two or three weeks. Wanda did not know that Sartre still saw Michelle. When he slept at Beauvoir’s, he told Wanda he was sleeping at home. His letters to Wanda were filled with outrageous inventions. He’d be late back to Paris, he once told her. He was locked up in a castle in Austria. When he went off with other women, his alibi, nearly always, was Beauvoir. “I told you from the beginning I’d have to spend time with Simone de Beauvoir,” he would say in an impatient voice to any woman who complained.
In September 1966, Sartre was in Japan, where he was having an affair with his Japanese interpreter, Tomiko Asabuki. “I want to fuck you,” he wrote to Michelle. “I often think about it.” By this time, Michelle Vian was beginning to wake up to Sartre’s fabrications. “Before you lied well, but now you lie badly,” she complained. “I don’t want the whole truth. I just don’t want to say ‘How is the Beaver?’ when you are with someone else.”34
Every so often, there was a leak. When John Gerassi interviewed Wanda in 1973, he remarked that Michelle was very jealous. There was a long silence. Finally Wanda said in a small, incredulous voice, “I sometimes ask Sartre about Michelle. He tells me he never sees her!” Gerassi, realizing his mistake, hastened to cover up for Sartre: “That’s true now. But you know, I meant a time in the past. He must have seen her then.”35
In his letters to Zonina, Sartre recounted with amusement the lies he told his other women. At the same time, he assured Zonina that he was faithful to her and that she had nothing to be jealous about. He felt “vigilant friendship” for Wanda and Michelle, he said, and paternal feelings for Arlette. In reality, throughout his five-year affair with Zonina, Sartre continued to have a sexual relationship with Michelle, and possibly also with Wanda.
Although things between them had been at a low ebb for some time, Lena did not break off permanently with Sartre until the spring of 1967. She was hurt that Sartre had decided to spend three weeks in Spain that summer, instead of coming to the USSR as usual. Sartre explained that Beauvoir wanted to be with him a little longer that year. It was hard for Beauvoir in the USSR, he said, where she practically n
ever saw him alone. “This is the least I can do for her, who twice a year acts as our chaperone without protesting, out of friendship for you and me.”
He told Michelle the same story. He was going to spend July in Spain with Beauvoir, he said. It was France Soir, once again, who gave him away. Michelle, an avid reader of the gossip columns, came across a photo of him in Barcelona with Arlette. When he got back, she pointed it out to him.
“That’s not Arlette,” Sartre said.36
“For me, the most striking thing when I think about Sartre, it’s how this man always tried to make a clean sweep of everything he was—tabula rasa—and start again at zero…as if he were nothing or no one,” says Claude Lanzmann.37
May 1968 marked an important turning point for Sartre. At the age of sixty-three, he underwent another transformation. Once again this involved a radical refusal of his earlier self. Throughout his life, the only identity Sartre had assumed whole-heartedly was that of the intellectual, the committed intellectual, who took political stands on important issues. Now he started to disparage himself as a “classical intellectual” who considered himself apart from the masses, as opposed to a “new intellectual” who was part of the masses and engaged in street action. As a first step toward becoming the latter, he changed the way he dressed. He stopped wearing suits and ties. From now on, even when he gave public talks, he wore casual shirts and sweaters.