by Deirdre Bair
And now Simone de Beauvoir was dead. After I spoke to Hélène, I made a black-bordered box in the DD around this brief statement: Simone de Beauvoir died today, 4 p.m., in the Hôpital Cochin in Paris. Official cause of death is pulmonary oedema.” And then I just sat there, unable to move.
Almost immediately my friends heard the news and came to volunteer their help. I sent one to the dry cleaner’s with the black suit I would need for the funeral, and I put another to working the phone to get me on the first plane to Paris. The American friend with the Paris apartment came by to give me the keys and tell me to stay as long as I needed. Then the phone began to ring. First journalists in Paris from Libération, Figaro, Le Monde, asking for a comment, then from various American papers and periodicals. My children called from New York and San Francisco to offer comfort, and my husband canceled meetings and left work early. I went into my office and shut the door tightly, something I never do, as I always want to be alert for whatever is happening in the rest of the house. I wrote another entry that night: “Von comes home early absolutely bereft, feeling as if he has lost someone dear. He was unable to work all day long. Both kids are sad. Katney worries that I’m still too sick to fly to Paris; Vonn Scott keeps saying ‘But you didn’t tell me she was sick when you were here. What can I do to help?’ Amazing how we all feel such loss. Loss. Loss. Loss. I don’t think I realized how much I liked her until now that she’s gone. No—I didn’t realize until now that I more than liked her: I respected her, sure; but I think I loved her, too.”
* * *
—
There was little time to mourn privately. On April 15, I took the only flight I could find: last-minute, via Frankfurt on Lufthansa with a connection to Paris. I had given Hélène the phone number in my friend’s apartment, and she phoned shortly after I arrived. She asked if she could come to tea the next afternoon, and of course I said yes. She told me Sylvie was waiting for my call so that she could give me information about the viewing and the funeral and invitations to several private gatherings before and after. Hélène warned me, “You must be sure to address her now as Madame de Beauvoir when you first speak to her, for she is now Simone’s legally adopted daughter and the inheritor of her estate. You may call her Sylvie after that, but first you must pay her the honor.” I followed protocol when I reached Sylvie on the phone, and I did the same the first time I saw her; afterward, we returned to our usual greetings of Sylvie and Deirdre.
The viewing was scheduled for Friday, April 19. Beauvoir’s casket lay in a grim little room just off a lounge at the Hôpital Cochin. I remember a concrete floor and no decoration—no flowers next to the casket, only a few chairs brought in for the old and infirm. Hélène’s husband, Lionel de Roulet, sat in one of them. He was recovering from surgery for inner ear problems that created vertigo, and he was still very weak and fearful of falling. His wife, very tired and frail, did not sit but stood beside him to be ready to greet the friends who had been invited to share this private moment. I greeted Sylvie, then went to Bost, “who looks like a sleepwalker. Everyone is there: four ministers (former) that I know: Jack Lang, Laurent Fabius, Yvette Roudy, Lionel Jospin. I see Élisabeth de Fontenay, Claudine Serre, lots of others I know in the room.
“Simone de Beauvoir looked bloated and yellow. The red rag [as I called her turban] was on her head and she was in the (by now) ratty looking red robe. They had her head propped up in the coffin which gave her fat double chins she did not have in life. She had some sort of what looked like incipient ring-worm or open sores on her face. Hélène said she looked like she was sleeping but I thought she looked terrible. The hardest moment came for me as we filed past because at the same time as we were saying our last goodbyes, there were very businesslike little French men noisily and officiously screwing down huge screws into the coffin so they could close it.”
A cortege formed after the viewing. Lionel went to a friend’s house because he was too weak to make the final journey to the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where Simone was to be interred with Sartre and share his tombstone. Hélène went in a car with her two cousins Jeanne and Magdeleine, the irrepressible childhood friend Geraldine (GéGé) Pardo, and the young feminist who had been such a help to her, Claudine Monteil. The rest of us walked. Marie-Claire Pasquier came to stand beside me, as did Geneviève Fraisse and Marcelle Marini, still dealing with her husband’s recent death from cancer. Judy Friedlander, an American friend to us all, and the publisher Françoise Pasquier completed our little group.
I knew a real feeling of community as we marched with so many different people. There were young mothers with babies in strollers. A father with a toddler on his shoulders told us that she was too young to understand the occasion, but when she was older he would tell her that she had attended the funeral of a great lady. There were African men and women in colorful native dress, among them a group of women who said they had come from several African countries and who bore banners proclaiming themselves the daughters of Simone de Beauvoir. There were middle-aged women dressed in what I call “academic shabby,” with long hair and little round glasses, all proudly proclaiming that they had been on the barricades with Sartre and Beauvoir during the 1968 student uprisings. The famous were there—the actress Delphine Seyrig, who had joined Beauvoir in feminist protests, and another actor who my French friends told me was “one of those famous ones you see all the time but whose name you never remember.” Claude Lanzmann and Claudine Serre exchanged words with the lawyer-photographer Gisèle Halimi when they thought she was snapping photos too aggressively.
A small fracas interrupted our reveries and turned our sad faces into smiles and laughter when a taxi driver who had been honking his horn was told to shut up and show respect because this was the funeral of a very important woman. When told it was Simone de Beauvoir, he parked his cab and joined my small group, linking arms with us and saying we should probably sing patriotic songs at some point.
The cortege passed slowly down the rue Saint-Jacques because the crowd, estimated at between three and five thousand, pressed close to the hearse. People wanted to touch it, and it was swamped with flowers. It took quite a while for police to make enough room for it to pass. The car traveled slowly through Montparnasse, the arrondissement where Beauvoir had lived her entire life. Eventually it reached the boulevard du Montparnasse, where waiters stood respectfully outside the Dôme, the Select, and La Coupole, in honor of the woman to whom they had served countless meals and drinks. It wound its way to the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, past the building with Sartre’s last apartment, and finally to the cemetery entrance. The crowd had become so dense that the police escorts took to bullhorns to yell “Circulez!” (“Keep walking!”) in an attempt to get the crowd to let the several vehicles in and to close the gates behind them. The young and the enterprising climbed the high walls to look down on the gravesite, but everyone else just stood outside, even though they could not see or hear what was happening.
“The crush was frenetic. Lanzmann read the end of ‘Force des Choses’ and ‘Adieux.’ We all stayed—inside the cemetery and outside the gates—it seemed forever. Even though it started to rain, no one wanted to leave.”
Eventually a small group left to gather in an apartment on the rue Gay-Lussac, where friends of Hélène had sheltered Sartre and Beauvoir during the ’68 uprisings. We heard stories of how they watched when students on the street below tore up the cobblestones to make barricades and weapons to hurl at the authorities, and how the scent of tear gas was so strong they had to keep the windows closed. Hélène asked me to sit with her, Jeanne, Magdeleine, and GéGé, and between bouts of sobs and tears they told me stories of the elder sister she so loved who was now gone and how worried they were about how the younger one would cope. Hélène clutched my arm and whispered, “Simone always took care of me. Now it is all up to me to take care of myself.” I had no words of comfort to offer, but I did put my arm around her shoulder. The gesture s
ufficed; she leaned in and we stayed that way for a long time.
It was getting late and I was exhausted. Reliving the moment later that day: “I am suddenly deeply affected emotionally and I get very shaky and weepy. I know that I need to leave. I say goodbye to Hélène and Lionel with tearful embraces, and I promise Jeanne and Magdeleine that I will make one more visit to Meyrignac later [this] year. We agree that we will laugh and tell more stories about ‘the antics of Simone and Sartre.’ ”
I walked over to the Jardin du Luxembourg and sat in a café, drinking a large café crème and trying to unwind: “Now that I am alone, I can think about what has happened on this day. I try to read a newspaper; the rain stops and a few rays of the last of the sun peek through the clouds; I drink the warm milky coffee and feel better. Emotions under control now. I take the bus back to Bac/St. Germain and the apartment.”
In the apartment I managed a light dinner of fruit and cheese between telephone calls with friends, most of whom had been with me on that last sad walk from hospital to cemetery. “We all seem to need to touch base in our common emotional distress. Marie-Claire Pasquier tells me that on her way home, she ‘bought flowers for the living—myself!’ I go to bed and fall into deep sleep. At last this day is done.”
* * *
—
The next few days were devoted to all sorts of follow-ups before my departure. I added to my impressions of the funeral those of Sylvie, Bost, and Lanzmann, and I conferred with several journalists who had followed the crowd. I met with Claude Courchay, who had been so distraught by Beauvoir’s sudden death that he became ill with “zonas” (shingles) and was unable to attend the funeral. He could not accept that his dear friend was gone, so I found myself in the curious position of having to offer comfort when I so badly needed it myself. After all this activity, I telephoned Sylvie for a brief conversation, just long enough to settle that I would probably need to make another visit to Paris in the near future to confer with her and do my last fact-checking. She asked me to wait several months, and I told her I would probably wait until the fall. I did not tell her then that I would make one last push for new materials, anything that recent events might have brought to light, but I was certainly going to ask her when I returned.
At home, the book was waiting for me. For months I had been telling anyone who asked that it was almost finished, even though I kept realizing the need to cover “just one more topic,” or perhaps “just one more chapter.” But on my last day in Paris, when I walked the streets in gloom and steady rain, I stopped short with a stunning realization: the biography was nowhere near done. What had been a living, breathing, feisty document about a writer who was actively engaged in the writing life had to become a final, finished, and definitive account. With Simone de Beauvoir’s death, her canon was forged in perpetuity. Her life required a different focus and a suitable ending.
And then I had another thought that literally left me breathless: “I have to write this bloody book all over again, starting at the beginning and ending with something very different from the one with which I started.”
* He told me he had been “conned” by Beauvoir and Sartre into marrying Natalie Sorokin, the “Natasha” with whom they had both had relationships.
38
Life, as always, had a way of intruding on almost every plan or schedule I have ever made. As soon as I returned from Beauvoir’s funeral in Paris, I found requests for more articles about her than I could possibly have written. Elaine Markson told me to try to write as many as I could, for all the publications were prestigious and would be excellent publicity for the forthcoming biography. There were also multiple requests from scholarly journals that wanted articles on Beauvoir and, to my irritation, on Beckett. I did not want to think about him or his biography until I had sorted out all my thoughts and ideas about Beauvoir, and—to my surprise and concern—my far too emotional responses to her death. From the end of April until the beginning of September 1986, I worked on the book in fits and starts between other writing tasks. My calendar was filling up for the year to come with invitations, such as the one to preside over a day-long Beckett symposium at a Maryland university and to speak about Beauvoir at Harvard’s Center for European Studies with Sartre’s most recent biographer, Annie Cohen-Solal. I accepted all this, not only to stoke prepublication interest in the book but also for the eventual review of my credentials for promotion to full professor.
I wrote the Beauvoir biography on my first computer, a huge, heavy, and expensive IBM with only 64 kilobytes. I used the program called Wordstar when I started, and by the time I finished nine years later, I was using Wordperfect. These days, with Windows messing up my writing life by updating itself with new complications every other day, I still mourn Wordperfect, which was exactly what its name said. I also had a 10-megabyte external hard drive because the book, with its seven or eight full drafts, used up all the computer’s memory. Not trusting it, each day I saved everything onto a floppy disk and then printed what I wrote. My children called me their friendly local paranoid because of my anxiety that I would inadvertently delete or otherwise find a way to destroy what I had written. I did not go as far as some of my writer friends, who stored their printed manuscripts in the refrigerator or freezer just in case their houses caught fire, but by the time I finished the book, I had a seven-shelf bookcase filled with variously colored file folders that indicated the status of each revision. I went through a color spectrum, from beige to yellow, orange, red, blue, and green, which as my favorite color I thought would be the last. Now that I had to rewrite yet again, the only color left to buy for the final text was purple, a sad color that seemed fitting.
To this day I cannot cope with all the sophisticated possibilities computers offer, but I loved writing on one from the very first. When I used typewriters, as fast as I was composing a sentence, I was already thinking of three other ways I might phrase it better. Many reams of paper were sacrificed before the computer freed me to create every sentence I could imagine, one after the other, then to cut, paste, and rearrange the words until I had exactly the sentence that I wanted. A few of my notes from the period reveal how I agonized over the writing:
6/25: Today I re-wrote the first six pages of Chapter 7 three different times in three different ways. Maybe I’m trying for too much historical erudition and documentation. Maybe I should just get on with the life.
6/26: I am mired in detail, but I had better write it all, passionate purple prose or not. I can decide at the end what to cut.
7/22: Including revisions, I have 15 pages I think I can keep. I seem to be making a lot of statements about SdB and her relationships with women. They need to be integrated where appropriate.
7/30: Euphoria short-lived. Too much I can’t figure out where to put in. Must find the way to weave—intersperse—make it all agree. So hard.
* * *
—
And so it went, throughout a hot and sticky Philadelphia summer. Getting nowhere fast, with the ancient and noisy room air conditioner in my office that I called the “B-29” blasting away, I decided I needed to change direction by putting the book aside and trying something different. I began by typing all Beauvoir’s letters to me to see if there were any nuggets there that I might explore independently. Perhaps if I wrote a single self-contained episode based on something in the letters it would start the writing juices flowing. On “8/13” I wrote: “Finished typing SdB’s letters to me. They were deeply moving. Knowing her as I do now, I can place the evolution of her deepening affection for me and her trust in my work. Seeing this makes it very hard to work on the book because the shape of it has changed so much since her death. I think I am going to leave it that way, much of it as I originally wrote it, and then try to explain why I did so in a preface. Then it would stand as a sort of critical ‘explication de la méthodologie.’ But that, too, remains to be decided.” By September I was able to clarify the main problem with res
haping the text: “What makes it all so difficult is that now I have to fit in so many different concepts & ideas in the early part of the book to show the basic development of her personality, so that her later behavior will be understandable, especially when it comes to fitting her work into her life.”
This was a fairly obvious conclusion, but I was a long time coming to it. I felt very good when I had the breakthrough, because immediately after, “I wrote about ten pages that got her through meeting Sartre, and I had it happen in the middle of a chapter, uneventfully, in the ordinary course of things, because that was how it actually did happen—two students aware of each other who finally met.”
* * *
—
Things progressed smoothly after that, and I thought I had the manuscript well enough under control to make my last trip to France before publication in early October. For the first time in a long time, Von was able to come with me, and we looked forward to fitting some personal time in among all the work I had to do. Each of us had been so busy professionally during the past year that we felt the need to slow down and pay attention to our relationship. I was especially cognizant of my absence from family life, not only with husband and children—even though the children were now grown and living independently—but also with my brother and sister, with whom I have always been close. My mother was retiring from her work as a cardiac intensive-care nurse and planning a move to California to live near my brother. There were many decisions that involved us all during this move, and I felt I had not participated in all that I should.