Parisian Lives

by Deirdre Bair

  The conference happened, but no French feminists came, and neither did those from other countries who had volunteered to pay their own way just to honor Simone de Beauvoir. The program became decidedly American and focused on women’s issues that had little or nothing to do with her. With attendance dropping off, the conveners moved the event to coincide with the spring semester break, and hardly anyone came. I left, not only the city but also the country. I went to Oaxaca and spent the spring vacation visiting artisans in Mexican villages and scouting for the ceramic Trees of Life (Árboles de la vida) that I collected.

  * * *

  —

  As soon as I resigned from the conference, I hauled out my credit card and flew to Paris to tell Beauvoir in person what had happened. On that rainy afternoon, as darkness fell in her apartment, she expressed a range of emotions—at first dismay, then sadness, and then I think resignation. When she twisted her body to turn on the Giacometti lamp beside her, I saw that in the end she had settled on compassion. It was one of the very few times that I saw her express genuine concern for me as a woman and a person, not just as the writer with whom she maintained a professional relationship and with whom she was collaborating on a book she very much wanted to see published in her lifetime.

  I had always found her awkward whenever I saw her try to comfort her friends, and some of that awkwardness inflected her speech as she tried to be kind to me. She volunteered stories of disappointments she had suffered in her professional life and insisted that none was equal in magnitude to mine, even though they seemed far more significant to me.

  She insisted that I stay resolute, and while she spoke, I thought of phrases I often used in such situations: “what’s done is done,” and “things beyond repair should be beyond reproach.” I told her I would have to express my personal way of coping with adversity in English because I could not think of the French slang equivalent: I told her I dealt with rejection, failure, or disappointment by saying, “Cut your losses and run.” By that I meant that since nothing can change the past and we cannot be sure of the future, we have only the present and should make the most of it. She said yes, that was always how she lived her life, too. I flew home feeling much better.

  * * *

  —

  My peace of mind lasted for a good long while, because at last I could devote myself to finishing the book. It was 1984, and I had been awarded two fellowships, the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim. At first the English Department’s chairman said that I could be released from teaching for only one year and would have to decide which I wanted to accept, but when I said I would not allow the university to take credit for these prestigious awards unless I could accept them both, the decision came down from the powers that be to let me have them. I could not believe my good fortune: two years to sit in my office and finish my book, or so I thought. My new agent, Elaine Markson, had placed the book with the visionary publisher Jim Silberman at Summit Books, and he was starting to press for a manuscript that was long overdue. It was high time I knuckled down, because Elaine was running out of excuses to persuade Jim to be patient a while longer.

  I worked steadily through the winter of 1984–1985, until I arrived at a point where I needed more conversations with Beauvoir and a break from the daily grind. An American friend offered to let me use her apartment in Paris for three weeks starting at the end of January, a stroke of good fortune that would let me dig into two important topics in Beauvoir’s life that she had hitherto kept firmly behind the Lucite curtain. I could proceed no further on the book: in order to write about them, I had to make her explain them.

  When I wrote to tell Beauvoir that I was coming to Paris, I said that I had specific topics we would need to cover in greater detail than we had before, but I did not mention what they were. Sometimes I found that if I gave just enough information to pique her curiosity, I would get fuller responses, because she would not have had the time to prepare her answers in advance. The first topic was her doctoral dissertation on the German philosopher Leibniz, which I thought might offer an important glimpse into her development as a philosopher. Beauvoir claimed the document had been lost years before; she insisted she did not have a copy, nor could I find one in any library or archive even loosely connected to the École normale supérieure. I had searched every possible academic archive and so had most of the French friends who had volunteered to help me. I could not understand why Beauvoir refused to talk about something so seemingly straightforward. Usually when I wanted to see something specific—a manuscript, photo, or letter—it was best to be upfront with her beforehand, but in this case I knew she would make the same excuses as before, so a more oblique approach was best.

  When we met for our first conversation, I told her I had been reading Leibniz’s philosophy in preparation for meetings and I was struck by the notion then current among philosophers and Leibniz scholars (before being disavowed and then accepted again) that he had been influenced by the Kabbalah. At the time Beauvoir was writing the dissertation, some scholars proposed that mystical and occult writings contributed to the development of general scientific theory, and they argued that Leibniz enfolded some of these studies into his theory of monadology, or monads. I asked Beauvoir if she had included any of this thinking in her dissertation or if she had been influenced by what was then called the kabbalistic philosophy of optimistic perfectionism and universal salvation, and if she had perhaps accepted it as her own. One of the arguments prevalent when she was writing was that Leibniz took these various theories and incorporated them into his notion of reality. He melded this collection of separate and individual entities into the idea of a unified infinity.

  I remembered that she had been writing this dissertation before she began her involvement with Sartre and his student-philosopher friends. It coincided with the last years of her infatuation with her cousin Jacques, before she came under the influence of their existential theorizing and when she was fascinated by the romantic character of Alain in Le Grand Meaulnes. Both schoolgirl anguish over unrequited passion for her cousin and the heavily romantic fictional character she so admired were the exact opposite of Sartre’s theory and fully aligned with certain interpretations of Leibniz that she might have embraced.

  Non-philosopher that I am, no doubt everything I said as I tried to explain why I was asking about the dissertation was confused and unscholarly, but when I got around to what I really wanted to know, my language was perfectly clear: Was the reason she never wanted anyone to read her dissertation that she was embarrassed or ashamed of it, as it had no basis in or correspondence with Sartre’s existentialism? Had she perhaps put forth a totally opposite view from his, one that she had wholeheartedly embraced at the time?

  She seemed astounded that I could even ask such a question, or so I thought when I saw the expression on her face. Rather than let her anger build, I kept up a rapid-fire commentary of possible differences between what I thought she had probably written and Sartre’s burgeoning theory. When I ran out of nervous chatter, I concluded by saying that perhaps she did not want anyone to write about her thesis because, for whatever reason, she wanted to disown it.

  Meanwhile she just sat there and stared without speaking. In my mind I saw the Lucite curtain hurtling down, and I could only sit there silently until it crashed. Silence is a well-known journalistic technique with less-than-forthcoming sources, but on that occasion I was using it only because it was my last resort, and this was probably my last chance to get her to talk about Leibniz. If I was kicked out of her apartment again, so be it, but I was determined that she would be the one to break the silence, and eventually she did.

  She did not tell me to leave, but I could tell there would be no ritual scotch that afternoon. When she spoke, all she said was, “No.” When I still said nothing, she elaborated, claiming to have no memory of “schoolgirl thoughts,” which was interesting, because she could remember in full detail so many other things
she had written during that period, or books she had read and films she had seen. All she could say was that the dissertation was lost and she was tired of talking about it, and she warned me never to bring it up again. I knew when I was defeated, and on this topic I had to accept what she told me. My speculation could not go into the biography with no one’s testimony to back it up. Thus I wrote another of my very careful endnotes to explain the true beginning of her philosophical writing and quite possibly her earliest credo.

  * * *

  —

  Beauvoir’s reluctance to discuss the second major topic of my trip—how she had colluded with Sartre in the seduction of one of her pupils, Bianca Bienenfeld Lamblin—was much easier to understand.

  When I had asked about Sartre’s liaisons in previous sessions, Beauvoir had usually been blunt and candid, no matter how seamy her participation in helping him to seduce women had been. She insisted that their own sexual relationship had continued for many years and that they had each found it (among the many expressions she used over time) “loving” or “tender” or, most often, “satisfying” and “necessary.” Yes, he liked beautiful women, and because she knew how much she meant to him, first above all others, it did not matter how many other women he took to bed, for they meant little beyond physical release. And if she had to help persuade reluctant women to be with such an ugly man who had bad breath and body odor, she did what had to be done.

  Her sister, Hélène, explained Simone’s complicity in much the same way, as she implored me to understand the role that Sartre’s physical ugliness played in his need for a constant stream of sexual partners. Although Hélène never assisted in these tawdry acquisitions, she urged me to accept that her sister’s unconditional love for Sartre was the reason she helped make them happen. I accepted this explanation for most of the other cases, but it did not explain Beauvoir’s attitude toward Bianca. Whenever I asked about the affair they both had had with her lycée student, she always said we were not going to talk about it and tried to change the subject. After a while I stopped persisting so that she would not send me away without the ritual scotch, which was her way of letting me know that I had gone too far.

  I saved the topic of Sartre’s women for our next session, two days later. It began on a somewhat strained footing, as I could see that she was still wary after the intense exchanges about Leibniz. Since I could not think of any other casual conversation after we compared notes about the dreadful winter weather, her head cold, and my sniffles, I went directly to the point. I asked her the one question that I knew angered her more than any other: was her “essential” relationship with Sartre a construct of her own determined creation? This time I couched it in the context of why she had chosen to publish Sartre’s letters but not hers: by suppressing her half of the correspondence, did she not give credence to Arlette and everyone else who claimed that their “essential” relationship was her fiction? Once again her face was black with rage.

  Beauvoir had gone against almost everyone’s wishes after Sartre’s death when, in 1983, she had published his letters to her. She told me she had done this to preempt Arlette’s claim that she held copyright, for she feared that not only would Arlette never publish them but, worse, she would destroy them (she did destroy the originals). Beauvoir believed that Arlette was determined to undermine her, if not to remove her entirely from the supreme place she had held in Sartre’s life, and by publishing his letters she could guarantee that it was indeed her rightful position. She took this action despite the fact that everyone in “the family” advised against it. The general attitude was best expressed by Bost, who told me that she should not “air such dirty—no, no, such filthy—family linen.”

  Some of the dirtiest of this linen described how she colluded in his seductions, and how, as in the case of the eighteen-year-old Bianca (called Louise Védrine in the letters), she had seduced the girl first so she and Sartre could compare notes that would be useful for when he seduced her. These letters do not make for pleasant reading. I could sense Beauvoir’s reluctance to take the girl to bed, and there was no question in my mind that Beauvoir was ashamed of her intimacy with Bianca. Why, then, did she publish her role in this sordid episode when she could so easily have left out those letters and no one would ever have known of their existence? In one respect, the Bianca episode serves as an accurate reflection of how she never evaded her own unsavory behavior. It also shows how she usually acted when it came to Sartre: his desires, whether valid or not, always came before her own. Coupled with her unflinching honesty, she chose not to hide what she had done.

  But that answer seemed only a partial explanation for her anger (or embarrassment) whenever I asked about Bianca. Finally, after several years of tiptoeing around it, I was ready to ask if it had something to do with how she defined her own sexuality and her insistence that she was not a lesbian. Was she afraid that if she admitted to the Bianca affair (which she verified) and to several other same-sex “friendships” (which I was never able to verify as anything more), and now her adoption of her boon companion, Sylvie, that her leading role as feminist icon and luminary would be tarnished? In previous sessions, when we had talked about her feminist activities, she had spoken disparagingly or dismissively of “those” lesbians, so was it possible that she retained some of the prejudices of her conservative Catholic upbringing? She was her usual brusque self in her answers: No, she did not have a prejudiced bone in her body. Yes, she had done things she was careful to say she was “not proud of” rather than admit to anything more, such as (my words here) embarrassment or shame. As for the role history would assign to her, she only hoped her written contributions to her time would be lasting.

  Bianca Bienenfeld Lamblin was the only one of Sartre’s major relationships with women who was still alive and mentally competent to talk when I was conducting research. Simone Jollivet was dead, and Michelle Vian was suffering from memory loss complicated by alcoholism. Dolores Vanetti, whom I did talk to in New York, was an unreliable subject. Olga Bost was angry, and after a brief sentence or two about her and her sister Wanda’s sexual relationships with Sartre and Beauvoir, she told me the subject was closed. I searched for Bianca because she was the last possible source. In those pre-Google days I used every reporter’s and scholar’s trick I could muster, but no one knew anything about her, where she lived or even if she was still alive. Beauvoir claimed she had not seen her for forty years and had no idea what had become of her, or even if she had survived the war. I had access to Beauvoir’s address book and her daily appointment calendars. I never saw Bianca Lamblin’s name in either one. After several years, I gave up trying to find her.

  Imagine, then, my surprise when she published her book, Mémoires d’une jeune fille dérangée, in 1993, claiming that she had seen Beauvoir regularly at least once every month since the war ended and that she had been living all that time in Paris, close enough to walk to Beauvoir’s apartment had she wanted to do so. She had been married to Bernard Lamblin (who died in 1978), a prominent philosophy professor who had been Sartre’s pupil at the Lycée Pasteur and whom Beauvoir had known since his school days. She was also the cousin of the writer Georges Pérec, whom Sartre and Beauvoir knew as well. Much of what she wrote can be described only as her own version of reality or, more accurately, as a fantasy. But it’s also perfectly understandable that she would want justification, if not revenge, given her schoolgirl seduction and Sartre and Beauvoir’s callous abandonment of her during the war, when as a Jew she had pleaded for their help and received none. Their actions must have paled before the public humiliation when Sartre’s letters were published in 1983 and Beauvoir’s were published in 1990. My biography was published three years before Bianca Lamblin’s memoir, and, not surprisingly, she had issues with it. She was entitled to her own memories, and I did nothing then (and will do little now) to dispute them.

  Now, so many years after those conversations with Beauvoir, I realize how
difficult, if not painful, they were for her. I think of some contemporary terms used by feminist writers: “self-authorship,” “agency,” and “control.” Self-authorship begins with women who, for whatever the reason, were originally unable to tell their own stories truthfully, or honestly, or objectively. The first story they told may have begun in “bad faith,” which was their way of evading their “real truth,” defined by the term “agency,” or the assumption of taking responsibility for truthful self-definition. “Control” of one’s personal narrative can come only through agency. Retroactively applying these ideas to Beauvoir, I wonder, was she claiming her own version of self-authorship when we talked about Bianca so that she could fashion the story of herself to fit the narrative of agency she wanted the world to remember? And if so, had she been doing this throughout our years of interviews and conversations?

  It made me think all the way back to our very first meeting and ask myself if, through Bianca, she was simply exhibiting another version of what she had told me about how we would write the book—that she would talk and I would write down what she said, and then (as she gleefully clapped her hands together a single time), we would have her biography?

  This is another of the nightmares that brings on the 4 a.m. anxieties among biographers. In the cases of Leibniz and Bianca, I came away without absolute certainty; I had had such high hopes for nailing down the truth about these topics, but in the end I couldn’t get through the Lucite curtain. Such circumstances create the galloping insecurities that make biographers worry that they might inadvertently—unconsciously—assign their own truths to the people they write about.