by Hazel Rowley
63. My interview with Claude Lanzmann, July 20, 2002.
64. Adieux, p. 309. Sartre was not talking specifically about Evelyne in this 1974 conversation with Beauvoir, but since Evelyne was his tallest female companion, he presumably was thinking of her.
65. Sartre to Michelle Vian, Sept. 9, 1956, Michelle Vian private archives.
66. This was Michel Rybalka, who taped hours of conversation with Michelle Vian in July 1985.
67. Jacques Lanzmann, Le Voleur de hasards, pp. 94–105.
68. Through the character of Kean, an actor, Sartre meditates that the actor’s curse is not to know who he really is; the actor “acts himself” every second.
69. Adieux, p. 317.
70. “Entretien avec Claude Lanzmann.”
71. S de B to S, June 1 and June 8, 1954.
72. FC, p. 318.
73. Sartre added that he had no idea at the time that the forced labor camps had continued to exist after Stalin’s death. “Self Portrait at Seventy,” Life/Situations(New York: Random House, 1977). (Trans. modified.)
74. FC, p. 323.
75. S de B to NA, January 9, 1955.
CHAPTER TEN: EXILES AT HOME
1. S de B to NA, September 1, 1955.
2. S de B to NA, November 3, 1955.
3. FC, p. 348.
4. Ibid., p. 352.
5. Jacqueline Piatier interview with Sartre, “A Long, Bitter, Sweet Madness,” Encounter, June 1964, pp. 61–63.
6. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka interview with Sartre, Le Monde, May 14, 1971 (The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1, p. 571).
7. FC, p. 358.
8. Claude Roy, Libération, June 19, 1957.
9. “People,” Time, July 2, 1956, p. 33.
10. FC, p. 363.
11. CL to Michelle Vian, February 1955, Michelle Vian archives.
12. My interview with Michelle Vian, Apt, October 13, 2003.
13. “Après Budapest, Sartre parle,” L’Express, November 9, 1956. What Sartre said about the Marshall Plan is supported by U.S. State Department documents from this time, and was even reported in the U.S. press. On May 9, 1947, a New York Times article, “Administration Now Shifts Its Emphasis on Foreign Aid,” had this to say about the U.S. Government’s change of rhetoric: “The Administration is not happy about the emotional response here and abroad to the military and ideological aspects of the Truman Doctrine. Consequently, a conscious effort is being made now to emphasize the positive economic problems of reconstructing Europe rather than the military and ideological program of blocking Russian expansion and Soviet communism. The Administration still has the same objective. It has not wavered in its sincere belief that Soviet expansion and infiltration must be stopped.”
14. John Gerassi interview with Arlette Elkaïm Sartre, March 5, 1973. Beinecke Library, Yale University.
15. Interview with Arlette Elkaïm Sartre in L’Express, April 8–14, 1983.
16. Gerassi interview with Arlette Elkaïm Sartre, March 5, 1973.
17. Cau, Croquis de mémoire, pp. 241–42. I am paraphrasing Cau.
18. Gisèle Halimi, Milk for the Orange Tree (London: Quartet, 1990).
19. FC, p. 466. Trans. modified [“Cette accablante année”].
20. Ibid., p. 398.
21. Beauvoir quotes these extracts from her journal in FC, pp. 404–463.
22. FC, p. 459.
23. Ibid., p. 443.
24. S to Michelle Vian, July 6, 1958, Michelle Vian archives.
25. My interview with Michelle Vian, July 11 and 12, 2002.
26. Gerassi interview with Sartre, October 27, 1972.
27. FC, pp. 455–56.
28. These days, Claude Lanzmann describes De Gaulle as “a great strategist, a great statesman, and a great writer into the bargain,” and wonders about the “mad romanticism” with which they were suffused at the time. “We were wrong,” he says. “I can’t really understand how Sartre, in particular, got De Gaulle so wrong.” “Entretien avec Claude Lanzmann,” Temps modernes, nos. 531–33, Oct.–Dec. 1990.
29. FC, p. 456.
30. Ibid., pp. 460–61.
31. Ibid., p. 465.
32. My interviews with Claude Lanzmann, Cap-Ferret, July 20, 2002 and Paris, January 27, 2004.
33. John Huston, An Open Book (1959) (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 295.
34. Gerassi interview with Arlette Elkaïm Sartre, March 5, 1973.
35. FC, pp. 496–97. Camus was driving back from the south with Michel Gallimard and Gallimard’s wife and daughter. Michel Gallimard, the driver, died five days later, in the hospital. The women, who were sitting in the backseat, survived.
36. Camus, who had grown up in poverty in Algeria, saw the only hope as Franco-Arab reconciliation. He condemned violence on both sides and warned that the FLN was authoritarian and not prepared to compromise. Sartre was also wary of the FLN. However, for him, the only response to the violence of colonialism was violence.
37. “Albert Camus,” Situations, p. 109.
38. Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy.”
39. Nelson Algren, Who Lost an American? (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 118.
40. My interview with Michelle Vian, July 11 and 12, 2002.
41. I have only Michelle Vian’s word to go on that Sartre was prepared to have a child with her. But since all her other statements appear to be correct, and since she gave the physicians’ names, I have no reason to disbelieve her. Mme Weill-Hallé became famous for founding family planning in France. Beauvoir wrote a preface to her 1960 book, La Grand’Peur d’aimer. The surgeon who Michelle Vian says performed the operation was Dr. Pierre Simon, famous for his writing on “birth without pain.”
42. FC, p. 503.
43. Ibid., p. 506.
44. S de B to NA, August 26, 1960 and September 23, 1960.
45. S de B to NA, October 29, 1960. Sartre wrote to her, and gave her a long list of books to read, mostly on aspects of Marxism. Cristina Tavares (1936–1992) would become an important socialist political figure in the Recife area, and also a militant feminist, before dying of cancer in her fifties.
46. Cohen-Solal quotes this statement in Sartre, p. 422.
47. Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).
48. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, p. 429.
49. Liliane Siegel, In the Shadow of Sartre (London: Collins, 1990), p. 24.
50. Ibid., p. 18.
51. S de B to NA, April 14, 1961.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: WHITE NIGHTS, VODKA, AND TEARS
1. There had been earlier moments of “thaw”—in 1954 and 1959, both short-lived. The term owed its name to Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw, published in Novy Mir in the spring of 1954.
2. In the next few years, Zonina would translate Sartre’s play The Flies and Beauvoir’s novel Les Belles Images, and would co-translate Sartre’s autobiography, Words, which he dedicated to her, “Madame Z.” Sartre’s plays Nekrassov and The Respectful Prostitute had already been put on in Moscow. In the sixties, he had large sums of rubles from Russian translations of his work, but of course he could spend them only in the USSR.
3. FC, p. 651.
4. My interview with Masha Zonina, Paris, July 16, 2002.
5. ASAD, p. 286.
6. Sartre to Zonina, July 2, 1962, Macha Zonina private archives. The letters rarely contain a date, since they were generally written over several weeks.
7. See Michel Antoine Burnier, L’Adieu à Sartre (Paris: Plon, 2000), and Ewa Bérard-Zarzycka, “Sartre et Beauvoir en U.R.S.S.,” Commentaire 14, no. 53 (Spring 1991). Neither writer claims that Zonina was a KGB agent herself, but they both wonder about the extent of her connection with the KGB.
8. Gerassi interview with Sartre, October 27, 1972.
9. Zonina’s report after Sartre’s June 1–24 visit is among the Soviet Writers Union files in the Moscow State Archives of Art and Literature. Ewa Bérard-Zarzycka quotes several of her reports in “Sartre et Beauvoir en U.R.S.S,” in Commentaire (my trans.
).
10. It is now generally accepted that the Peace Movement, established in Paris in April 1949, and directed from Moscow, was an important vehicle for Soviet propaganda. While preaching peace all around the world, the Soviets were scrambling to build up their own weaponry. In 1975, Sartre told Michel Contat: “I continue to think that during the years of the Cold War the Communists were right. The USSR—in spite of all the mistakes we know it made—was nevertheless being persecuted. It was not yet in a position to hold its own in a war against America, and so it wanted peace” (Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy”).
11. Lena Zonina’s translation of Words was published in Novy Mir in late 1964.
12. My interview with Gilbert and Marie-Chantal Dagron, Paris, October 6, 2003.
13. Beauvoir’s account of their June 1962 trip, in Force of Circumstance (1963) was largely positive. Her report on their later trips to the USSR in All Said and Done (1972) was far less so.
14. When John Gerassi asked Sartre, “Did they know about the affair in USSR?” Sartre answered, “I think they knew from the beginning” (interview, October 27, 1972).
15. My interview with Lucia Cathala, Paris, July 24, 2002.
16. Sartre passed in a script that was almost eight hundred pages long. When Huston cut it, Sartre decided it had been mutilated, and withdrew his name altogether from the film.
17. This was Barbara Aptekman.
18. André Puig would become Sartre’s new secretary in 1963, an arrangement that lasted until Sartre’s death, in 1980. Puig collaborated on Les Temps modernes. Sartre would write a long preface to Puig’s novel L’Inachevé (Gallimard, 1970), which Puig dedicated to Arlette Elkaïm.
19. ASAD, p. 287.
20. Adieux, p. 214.
21. Ehrenburg’s memoirs, which had been appearing in serial form in Novy Mir, talked about the “conspiracy of silence” in the 1930s. This was too uncomfortable for Khrushchev. If intellectuals such as Ehrenburg admitted that they had known about Stalin’s abuses, Khrushchev, who had been close to Stalin, could hardly claim he did not.
22. Undated letter, courtesy Masha Zonina, quoted by Gonzague de Saint-Bris and Vladimir Fedorovski in Les Egéries russes (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1994), p. 282.
23. S de B, A Very Easy Death, p. 31.
24. Ibid., p. 83.
25. Michel-Antoine Burnier, L’Adieu à Sartre.
26. Adieux, pp. 344–45.
27. Unpublished report by Curtis Cate, quoted by Thomas Molnar in Yale Literary Magazine 150, no. 1 (1981).
28. My interview with Masha Zonina, Paris, March 25, 2004. Masha telephoned Irina Kreindlina, Zonina’s closest friend, in Moscow to check this with her.
29. Gerassi interview with Sartre, October 27, 1972.
30. Words, p. 14.
31. Michelle deplored the fact that Sartre had given Arlette his name. Michelle Vian felt it would have been more appropriate for her. My interview with Michelle Vian, October 13, 2003.
32. Siegel, In the Shadow of Sartre, pp. 66–67.
33. S to A. I. Mikoyan, August 17, 1965. The letter is printed in Ewa Bérard-Zarzycka’s article “Sartre et Beauvoir en U.R.S.S.,” Commentaire (Spring 1991).
34. Zonina report, July 1–August 5, 1965, in “Sartre et Beauvoir en U.R.S.S.”
35. Pierre Macabru, “Reggiani fascine et irrite,” Candide, September 20–26, 1965.
36. ASAD, p. 321.
37. S de B, ASAD, p. 320. According to her friend Lucia Cathala, Lena did have difficulties, and soon resigned from the Writers Union. My interview with Lucia Cathala, Paris, July 24, 2002.
38. S to Zonina, June 1966.
39. “Malentendu à Moscou,” Roman 20–50, Revue d’étude du roman du XX siècle 13 (juin 1992).
40. Tomiko Asabuki, a married woman, does not mention this in her book Sartre et Beauvoir au Japon en 1966 (Paris: L’Asiathèque, 1996). It is, however, a known fact in Sartre circles, and confirmed by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
41. Sartre conversation with Beauvoir, summer 1974, in Adieux, p. 303.
CHAPTER TWELVE: TRAGIC ENDINGS, NEW BEGINNINGS
1. Le Nouvel Observateur, November 23, 1966.
2. Sartre tells this to Lena in a letter written three months later.
3. My interview with Claude Lanzmann, July 20, 2002.
4. S tells this to Lena Zonina, August 25, 1965.
5. This was Claude Loursais.
6. John Gerassi interview with Simone de Beauvoir, January 30, 1973.
7. Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, pp. 462–63.
8. Jacques Lanzmann, Le Voleur de hasards, p. 49. Jacques Lanzmann is unable to explain exactly what he means by this, though he talks about “a certain intellectual perversion.” He admits that in the final analysis, Evelyne chose her life herself (My interview with Jacques Lanzmann, Paris, April 22, 2004).
9. Rezvani, Le Testament amoureux.
10. For example, Judith Magre, Claude Lanzmann’s actress wife, hated the portrait of Lanzmann. She thought Beauvoir made him sound like her porter, her case-carrier—young, insignificant, and merely useful to her. Magre had a major row with Beauvoir about it (My interview with Judith Magre, May 7, 2004).
11. When Wanda died in 1989, Le Bon went around to Wanda’s apartment with Bost, at the time of the official police inspection. While Bost talked to the police, diverting them, Le Bon found the bundles of letters from Sartre, and took them. Today they are in Le Bon’s possession.
12. My interview with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Paris, June 10, 2004.
13. H. E. F. Donohue, Conversations with Nelson Algren, p. 269.
14. Ramparts 4, no. 6 (October 1965).
15. Nelson Algren, “The Question of Simone de Beauvoir,” Harper’s, May 1965.
16. Zeitgeist 1, no. 4 (Summer 1966).
17. W. J. Weatherby, “The Life and Hard Times of Nelson Algren,” Sunday Times, London, May 17, 1981.
18. Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, pp. 502–503.
19. Gerassi interview with Claude Lanzmann, June 5, 1973.
20. Elkaïm had an affair with their guide, Ely Ben-Gal. Sartre encouraged her. He encouraged everyone in his entourage to have affairs. For him, it was part of living to the fullest.
21. ASAD, p. 404 ff. Beauvoir explains her point of view in detail in these pages.
22. There was also another cause of tension between them. Shortly before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, Lanzmann had asked Sartre and Beauvoir to sign a petition stating that it was misguided to associate Israel with aggression and imperialism and Palestine with peace and socialism. They signed. As a result, some Arab countries banned Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s books. Frantz Fanon’s widow was so furious with Sartre that she refused to include his preface to The Wretched of the Earth in all future editions of the book. Sartre was dismayed that his position of neutrality had been undermined, and held it against Lanzmann for pressing him to sign a petition in the street, without giving him time to think about it.
23. Adieux, p. 276. (Trans. modified.)
24. Cau, Croquis de mémoire, pp. 282–83, my trans.
25. Arlette Elkaïm helped edit the collection of documents and evidence for publication in Tribunal Russell: Le Jugement de Stockholm (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
26. ASAD, pp. 63–64.
27. Halimi, Milk for the Orange Tree, p. 315.
28. S de B interview with Alice Schwarzer, 1972, in Alice Schwarzer, After the Second Sex.
29. My interview with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Paris, April 12, 2004.
30. My interview with Michel Contat, Paris, July 4, 2002.
31. My interview with J.-B. Pontalis, Paris, January 14, 2004.
32. S de B interview with Alice Schwarzer (1982), After the Second Sex, p. 110.
33. Sartre had bought apartments for Wanda and Arlette. Michelle had bought hers with money from Boris Vian’s literary estate.
34. My interview with Michelle Vian, Apt, July 11–12, 2002.
35. John Gerassi interview with Wanda Kosakiewicz,
March 23, 1973.
36. My interview with Michelle Vian, July 11 and 12, 2002.
37. “Entretien avec Claude Lanzmann.”
38. Other signatories were Colette Audry, Michel Leiris, and Daniel Guérin.
39. Sartre, “Les Bastilles de Raymond Aron,” Nouvel Observateur, June 19–25, 1968.
40. S to Zonina, undated letter [late 1968].
41. J.-B. Pontalis and Bernard Pingaud resigned in 1969 after Sartre insisted on publishing a transcript of a dialogue between a psychoanalyst and his patient that, in Sartre’s view, showed psychoanalysis as a therapy based not on reciprocity but on violence. Sartre had a major influence on the “antipsychiatry” movement, associated with R. D. Laing and David Cooper.
42. Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy.”
43. Adieux, p. 280.
44. Ibid., p. 285.
45. My interview with Michelle Vian, October 13, 2003.
46. Gerassi interview with Arlette Elkaïm Sartre, March 5, 1973.
47. Claudine Monteil, Simone de Beauvoir: Le Mouvement des femmes, mémoires d’une jeune fille rebelle (Quebec: Alain Stanké, 1995).
48. Sylvie Le Bon says she is one hundred percent sure that Beauvoir never had an abortion.
49. Wanda did not sign. Nor did Sylvie Le Bon. Her job was secure, Le Bon says, but she had students and parents to face, and Beauvoir did not want her to sign.
50. There were too many obstacles, Le Bon says, and the affair did not last long. For almost twenty years, she and Bost were simply friends. After Beauvoir’s death, in their mutual grief, they turned to each other again. Olga had died by then. Le Bon inherited Beauvoir’s apartment on the Rue Schoelcher, and in the last years of his life, she let Bost live there. Le Bon kept her apartment on the Avenue du Maine.
51. My interview with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Paris, June 10, 2004.
52. Ibid., April 12, 2004.
53. Nelson Algren review in the Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1972.
54. John Weightman, “Battle of the Century—Sartre vs. Flaubert,” New York Review of Books, April 6, 1972.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE FAREWELL CEREMONY
1. PL, p. 75.
2. Toril Moi gives an insightful analysis of Beauvoir’s anguish and displacement strategies in chapter eight (“The Scandal of Loneliness and Separation: The Writing of Depression”) of her book, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman.