Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Immediately after the first serious clashes between students and police in Paris, Sartre and Beauvoir published a brief statement in Le Monde giving their support to the students.38 In the next weeks, Sartre threw his weight behind what was now being called the “student revolution.” He did not give advice; he took the view that this was a moment for young people to speak, and that he had a great deal to learn from them. Indeed, it was he who interviewed the student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in the Nouvel Observateur, rather than the other way around. Whereas the mainstream press dismissed Cohn-Bendit as a flaming-haired rabble-rouser, Sartre gave him a platform.

  What Sartre found refreshing about May 1968 was that the students were asking not for power, but for freedom. They wanted a different type of society, a fundamental change in human relations. Their slogans gave free rein to the imagination. They were wary of institutional power structures and wanted universities to be less rigid and stultified. Sartre wholeheartedly agreed. The only way to learn, Sartre said, was to question what one was taught. This included questioning one’s teachers. “A man is nothing if he isn’t a contester.”39

  In August 1968, Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia. For the second time in twelve years, the USSR was being an outright aggressor. In Rome, Sartre gave an interview, calling the Soviets “war criminals.” At the end of November, he and Beauvoir made a trip to Prague to show their solidarity with the Czechs.

  Sartre wrote to Zonina that he would not be coming back to the Soviet Union. He and Beauvoir were breaking completely with the Soviet government. This meant he would not see Zonina, unless she came to Paris. “I want you to know that whatever you think about our relationship, this is terrible for me.”40

  Over the next few years, Sartre and Beauvoir’s Russian friends were no longer permitted to travel; many of them lost their jobs, and struggled to scrape together a living. Neither Sartre nor Beauvoir would ever see Moscow again.

  The Temps modernes committee now met in Beauvoir’s apartment, every two weeks, at ten-thirty on Wednesday mornings. Half a dozen young people had joined the group in 1968, among them several women, including Sylvie Le Bon. They generally gossiped for an hour—about films, books, and people—then set to work.

  Some of the former members had left because of intellectual clashes with Sartre.41 The remaining old-timers were Jacques-Laurent Bost and Jean Pouillon, who had been there since the beginning, André Gorz, an Austrian Jewish political scientist who had joined the team in the late 1940s, and Claude Lanzmann, who had been there since 1952. (These days, he was making Shoah, a film on the Holocaust, and was often away.) Beauvoir still conscientiously read through the submissions. And she and her feminist friends ran a column called “Everyday Sexism.”

  Sartre rarely turned up. Beauvoir would chide him: “Sartre, that makes three times that you haven’t come. This time you must.”42 Under pressure, he would come and give his opinion on things. But he no longer cared much about the journal. It was almost thirty years old. For him, it had become an institution.

  These days, Sartre was more excited by the young revolutionaries in the Maoist movement. The French Maoist newspaper, La Cause du peuple, had been repeatedly seized by the government, on the grounds that the articles were an incitement to illegal violence. Its editors had been arrested, charged with provoking crimes against national security. A Maoist leader, Pierre Victor, approached Sartre. Would he be prepared to assume temporary editorship of the paper, to prevent its being banned? Sartre had always felt strongly about freedom of the press. He agreed that the newspaper was one of the few organs in which workers were able to speak out. In April 1970, he became its editor in chief.

  In June, Sartre and Beauvoir distributed copies of La Cause du peuple among the bustle of the street market on the Rue Daguerre, near Denfert-Rochereau. As further protection, they had signed most of the articles in that issue with their own names. The police did not bother them, but they did arrest two Maoists who were distributing the paper the same day in another area. A week later, Sartre and Beauvoir repeated the performance. This time they were arrested, along with sixteen others. As soon as they arrived at the police station, the two of them, but not the other sixteen, were released.

  “There are two standards…for the distributors of La Cause du peuple,” Sartre declared. He explained that he had distributed the papers not because he had any desire to go to prison, but because he believed in a free press and wanted to show the double standard and cowardice of the so-called justice system.

  The trial of those arrested took place on September 11. “If they are guilty, I am even more so,” Sartre said. In October he and Beauvoir distributed the newspaper again. No one bothered them, and after that the paper was not confiscated again. Sartre and Beauvoir had braved possible legal reprisal to protect the liberty of the left-wing press in France.

  In November, Sartre visited the Renault factory in Paris. The newspapers printed a photo of him standing on a barrel with a microphone, talking to the workers. Even his friends at the Temps modernes considered that Sartre was making himself look foolish. These street actions were backfiring on him, they said. The media was trivializing him. Sartre was not deterred.

  He was seeing a lot of Pierre Victor and his Maoist militant friends. Sartre insisted “I am not a Maoist.” He had no time for Mao’s Little Red Book, and he did not put his faith in the Chinese Cultural Revolution—or in any other revolution, for that matter. But he felt close to the Maoists. He liked their rejection of elitism, hierarchies, and leaders. He liked the Maoist idea that the intellectual should listen to the masses and work with them, rather than attempt to lead them. He agreed that proletarian violence was simply “counterviolence”—a necessary response to the violence that was capitalist oppression.

  It seemed to Sartre that young men like Pierre Victor represented the “new intellectual.” They spoke street language, and used tu with everyone they met, including Sartre. They were physically tough, and dressed like thugs, in black leather jackets and heavy boots. At the same time, Sartre thought he saw in them a new kind of sensitivity—a softness he had previously associated with femininity.

  Pierre Victor was twenty-nine, long-haired, and good-looking. “I like him, I’m very fond of him,” Sartre told Beauvoir. “I know he’s not to everybody’s taste, but I think he’s intelligent.”43 Beauvoir was surprised to see Sartre, for the first time in years, spending a great deal of time with a male. “I find the adult male deeply disgusting,” Sartre admitted to her. “What I really like is a young man, insofar as a young man is not entirely different from a young woman. It’s not that I’m a pederast, but the fact is that at present young men and young women are not so very different in their clothes, their way of talking, and their way of behaving.”44

  Pierre Victor liked to challenge Sartre. They would argue about something, and Victor would say: “Haven’t you learnt anything, then, from 1968?” Sartre would consider himself reprimanded.

  Victor tried to persuade Sartre to give up his interminable work on Flaubert. The first two volumes were coming out soon. Why didn’t Sartre stop at that? The book was written in difficult language and not at all accessible to the common reader. Why didn’t Sartre write a novel for the common people? Or a revolutionary treatise?

  Sartre said he could not do that. Flaubert interested him. Sartre was too old to change his ways and put his intellectual work to the service of the masses. The best he could do was to make himself available for political tasks he considered important.

  The Maoists became Sartre’s new secret life. With Pierre Victor, he went to workers’ homes to talk about their working conditions. He attended meetings of immigrant workers. And sometimes he would join Victor and his friends for an evening meal in Victor’s commune in the suburbs.

  Through Pierre Victor, Sartre entered yet another world. He was embarking on another adventure, another beginning.

  Simone de Beauvoir did not share Sartre’s enthusiasm for the Maoists. She found the
m dogmatic and did not approve of their violence and police-baiting. It was Michelle Vian who followed Sartre down the Maoist path. Her son, Patrick, had been very involved in the 1968 student demonstrations. “I was in all the major demonstrations,” Michelle Vian says. “Near the front. Often walking beside Sartre.”45 In January 1971, Michelle and a small group of leftists protested conditions in Paris’s Santé prison with a hunger strike. They occupied Saint Bernard’s Chapel in the Montparnasse railway station, without eating a thing, for twenty-one days. Sartre visited them often, and encouraged them.

  Arlette Elkaïm says she grew much closer to Sartre after 1968. Her adoption by him three years earlier had given her a new status, but it was the student revolution that really changed their relationship. Sartre’s respect for youth culture gave her a new validity. He was no longer so impatient with her unstructured way of thinking. They started to discuss things. Sometimes they shouted at each other. At times Sartre called her a reactionary. But he listened to her more than he used to.46

  For three years in a row, Arlette brought a boyfriend along on her annual vacation with Sartre. It was Vladimir Dedijer, the Yugoslavian militant. Since Dedijer was a married man, Sartre provided a cover for Arlette, just as Beauvoir had done for him with Zonina. Sartre complained to Arlette that threesomes were a bore, but he put up with it.

  For the first time in their lives, Sartre and Beauvoir were involved in entirely different political battles. When they met to talk in the evenings, they reported to each other on two disparate worlds. Sartre was plunged in Maoism, Beauvoir in feminism. While Sartre was painfully conscious of his marginal status in the contemporary antihumanist intellectual climate, Beauvoir had become a leading icon of the international women’s movement.

  The first women’s liberation groups were founded in France in the summer of 1970. Abortion was still illegal in Catholic France. When two young women got in touch with Beauvoir and suggested a manifesto in which well-known women would declare they had had an abortion, she immediately said, “It’s an excellent idea.”

  For the next few months, a group of women activists met in Beauvoir’s apartment on Sunday afternoons to organize the campaign. One of the younger members of the group, Claudine Monteil, recalls that she would turn up just before five, and Beauvoir would open the door with the words, “Ah! You’re on time!” Beauvoir would sit on the yellow sofa that faced the clock. The other women sat around in a circle—on the other yellow sofa, or in the purple armchairs, or on the rug.

  Beauvoir’s manner was frank to the point of brutality, says Monteil, but she treated everyone as an equal, and she listened carefully. Around 6:45 P.M. Beauvoir would start to look at the clock, and speak even faster than usual. That was the sign that they had to wrap up the discussion. At 6:55 P.M., on the dot, the women were propelled out the door.47

  The campaign was a triumph. Due in large measure to the influence of Simone de Beauvoir, the organizers managed to collect 343 signatures. The “Manifesto of the 343” was published on April 5, 1971, in the Nouvel Observateur. The statement was brief: Every year a million women in France underwent abortions, and though the procedure was simple under medical supervision, these abortions were dangerous because they were clandestine. The women declared that each one of them had aborted. (In actual fact, many of them, including Beauvoir, never had.48) The signatories demanded the right to free contraception and safe legal abortion.

  Well-known signatories included Colette Audry, Dominique Desanti, Marguerite Duras, Gisèle Halimi, Simone Signoret, Catherine Deneuve, and Jeanne Moreau. Among the women in the Sartre-Beauvoir circle, Olga Kosakiewicz, Arlette Elkaïm, Michelle Vian, Hélène de Beauvoir, and Liliane Siegel signed.49

  The manifesto caused a major scandal. For the first time that taboo word abortion was being pronounced on French radio and television. Conservatives referred to “the 343 sluts.” The women were pleased. They had set the wheels in motion. In fact, it was a triumph. Four years later, in 1975, abortion would become legal in France.

  Every summer, as soon as Le Bon finished teaching, she and Beauvoir set off on their travels for five weeks. Sartre would go on vacation first with Arlette, then with Wanda.

  From mid-August, Beauvoir and Sartre were in Rome for two months. This was their time—the only time in the year when Beauvoir had Sartre more or less to herself. But Le Bon did not want to be apart from Beauvoir for so long. She wanted to be in Rome until school started again. “We’ll see how it goes,” Beauvoir said.

  In the first years, Sylvie stayed at the Albergo del Sole, in the Piazza della Rotonda, ten minutes away from Beauvoir, who shared an air-conditioned top-floor suite with Sartre at the Albergo Nazionale, in the Piazza Montecitorio. Le Bon never saw Beauvoir alone. (“Of course not. This was the Beaver’s time with Sartre!”) But she was invited to join Beauvoir and Sartre two or three times a week for meals.

  By the early seventies, Le Bon had passed the test. Sartre was not bored in her company. Beauvoir suggested she move to their hotel. After that, Le Bon joined them for one meal a day—lunch or dinner, alternately.

  “The evenings were the really special time,” says Le Bon. “The evenings were long, leisurely, and gay. We laughed a lot.” Sartre and Beauvoir were careful whom they spent their evenings with, Le Bon says. As they grew older, they liked more than ever to spend their precious time with intimate friends.

  Beauvoir continued to encourage Le Bon to lead her own life, to have her own lovers. Le Bon did not find this easy. In 1968, there was a romance with Bost, whom Le Bon thought inordinately handsome. “At first I didn’t want to,” Le Bon says. “Simone de Beauvoir said: ‘Why not? You must experience everything.’ No, she wasn’t jealous. She was happy for us both.”50

  When Le Bon had a friend or lover with her in Rome, her friend tended to resent Le Bon’s reverential attitude toward Sartre and Beauvoir, and the way everyone’s time was measured out in carefully preestablished doses. “The problems came from others,” Le Bon says. “Never from the Beaver.”51

  For several years in a row, Sartre and Beauvoir attempted an Easter vacation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the south of France, as a foursome. It had worked in the past, with Claude Lanzmann and Michelle Vian. Surely it could work with Elkaïm and Le Bon? Sartre and Elkaïm took the train down; Beauvoir and Le Bon drove. Sartre and Elkaïm had two rooms in the hotel annex; Beauvoir and Le Bon shared a cottage at the bottom of the garden. The lunch and dinner arrangements were organized as usual. Once a day the four ate together—either lunch or dinner. Otherwise they ate in pairs. Neither Le Bon nor Elkaïm was at all happy when they found themselves, just the two of them, across the table from each other.

  Elkaïm was only six years older than Le Bon, but to Le Bon she seemed like an old woman. “She was always cold or tired or sick. She didn’t care about good food. She didn’t drink; alcohol made her ill. She was incredibly passive. She never had anything to say. My god, she was a bore!”

  Tolerance was not Le Bon’s strong suit, and with Beauvoir she did not hold herself back. The minute they were together, she would explode: “Arlette is impossible!”

  Beauvoir would try to calm her down. “Personal hatred is degrading,” she would tell Le Bon. “And it gets us nowhere at all.”52

  “After the second sex comes the third age,” the critics joked. Beauvoir had started work on The Coming of Age, her book on old age, in June 1967. For months she rose early and took a taxi to the Bibliothèque Nationale, to make sure she got a seat when the library opened at nine A.M. (She refused to have a seat reserved for her. Why special privileges for her?) Just as she had done for her essay on women twenty years before, she studied the biological, ethnological, and historical data on old age. The second half of the essay was devoted to the lived experience. She visited homes for the aged. She read what writers had written in their memoirs about their old age.

  The book came out in January 1970. For weeks it was at the top of the best-seller lists. The reviewers declared it a ri
ch and lucid book that read like a novel. They pointed out that Beauvoir had again tackled a social taboo. Once again she had broken the conspiracy of silence.

  The book was translated into English in 1972, and given a spiteful review in the Los Angeles Times. “Reckless generalizations,” the reviewer said. “Having already served, unwittingly, as the sociologist behind much of the hearsay in America Day by Day, I wonder who’s feeding her airy persiflage now. I hope it isn’t Sartre.”53

  The reviewer was a rather jaundiced writer from Chicago called Nelson Algren.

  Sartre had been working on Flaubert for more than ten years. It was a major publishing event when two thick volumes called The Family Idiot appeared in bookstore windows in May 1971. Apart from his essays and interviews (brought out over the years in successive volumes collectively called Situations), there had been no new book by Sartre in seven years—not since Words, in 1963. His name was often in the newspapers, and he was frequently seen on television newsreels, but that was all.

  The first two volumes came to more than two thousand pages and merely covered the first thirty-six years of Flaubert’s life. This was just a beginning, Sartre said. He was revising the third volume. After that, he would embark on a fourth, which would explain Madame Bovary.

  “Sartre’s awe-inspiring book is without a doubt the most extraordinary work ever composed by one writer about another,” John Weightman would write in the New York Review of Books. “I have been reading it for a month in varying moods of exasperation, humility, exultation, and despair…. So far he has only got to the foothills of the subject. To deal with it completely he will have to digest the universe.”54

  Sartre told Beauvoir how happy he felt when his copies of the book arrived from Gallimard. It gave him as much pleasure, he said, as the publication of his very first book, Nausea.