How the French Invented Love (37 page)

If Beauvoir refused Leduc’s overtures, it was not because of her sex, as we shall see in the next chapter.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Existentialists in Love

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

M
Y LOVE, YOU AND
I
ARE ONE, AND
I
FEEL THAT I AM YOU AS MUCH AS YOU ARE ME.

Simone de Beauvoir to Jean-Paul Sartre, October 8, 1939

N
EVER HAVE
I
FELT SO FORCEFULLY THAT OUR LIVES HAVE NO MEANING OUTSIDE OF OUR LOVE.

Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, November 15, 1939

Tombstone of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Montparnasse Cemetery, 2011. Author’s photograph.

L
ike their medieval ancestors Abélard and Héloïse, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir became an iconic couple during their lifetime. They remain the most famous French couple of the twentieth century, even though they never married, were frequently separated, and engaged in numerous affairs with other men and women. This unique relationship that endured for five decades shocked many of their contemporaries and still causes fierce debate among disciples and detractors, who write their biographies, attend conferences on their work, and sound off against each other in newspapers and academic articles. How is it that Beauvoir and Sartre still inspire and infuriate so many people?

When I first went to France as a junior-year student in the fall of 1952, Sartre and Beauvoir dominated the intellectual life of the Left Bank. Sartre, at forty-seven, had already published four novels, a collection of short stories, three plays, several books of literary criticism, a biography of Baudelaire, reflections on the Jewish question, and his major existential treatise,
Being and Nothingness
. My Wellesley College 1952 summer reading list for French majors included his popular
Existentialism and Humanism
. Beauvoir had not yet made it onto the Wellesley College reading list, though she was, at forty-four, the awesome author of three novels, a treatise with the paradoxical title
The Ethics of Ambiguity
, a journalistic account of her travels in the United States, and her revolutionary two-volume study of women,
The Second Sex
. Their prodigious output dwarfed that of all their rivals. Their legendary union offered a model of commitment, without legal or religious imprimatur, designed to enrage
les bien pensants
(the self-righteous) and to inflame the imaginations of the young, such as myself. Their shared philosophy of existentialism, based on the premise that God does not exist and that we are obliged to create meaning in a world devoid of predetermined meaning, encouraged myself and others in my student group to question our homegrown religious beliefs.

We looked for Sartre and Beauvoir in the haunts around Saint Germain-des-Prés and Montparnasse, where they were known to hang out. I never saw them, though others reported sightings that made me deeply envious. Existentialism infiltrated the air I breathed as I got off the number 63 bus that carried me five times a week from the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement, where I lived, to the Latin Quarter, where I attended classes. One day I spotted from the bus the elusive Samuel Beckett, whose astonishing play
Waiting for Godot
had left us collectively bewildered. Another day I saw Sartre and Beauvoir’s friend, the singer Juliette Gréco, dressed in her habitual black as she walked down the rue Bonaparte, with her long black hair dancing behind.

Even if I didn’t see Sartre and Beauvoir themselves, their image worked its way deeply and permanently into my psyche. They became my ideal couple, bound together by what appeared to be unswerving mutual devotion. Although they never lived under the same roof, except in hotels, they lunched or dined together every day, worked in different sections of the same café, critiqued each other’s manuscripts, traveled together, and were increasingly involved in left-wing politics.

The world would learn much more about the particulars of their relationship when Beauvoir’s memoirs started to appear in 1958. In the first volume,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, she recalled how she had been invited in 1929 to study with three male students, including Sartre, when they were all preparing their
agrégation
exam in philosophy—the exam that would permit them to teach at the lycée (secondary school) level. Twenty-six students were allowed to take the final oral exams at the Sorbonne, down from a total of seventy-six who had taken the written. In a country that has a long tradition of teaching philosophy, they were the cream of the French educational system.

The notoriously grueling orals consisted of four separate tests held publicly before a six-man jury and an audience of general spectators. You had to be prepared to explicate texts in Greek and Latin, as well as French, and to present a lecture on a subject pulled out of a hat. Of the thirteen successful candidates, Beauvoir placed second. She was twenty-one years old and only the ninth woman ever to have received the
agrégation
in philosophy. She was also beautiful and well born, though her family had fallen on hard times and she was obliged to work for a living. Sartre, two and a half years older, the brilliant star of the École Normale Supérieure, came in first, even though he had flunked the exam a year earlier. Despite his short stature, partial blindness, and homely face (Sartre was the first to acknowledge his walleyed ugliness), he had so much confidence in his intelligence and winning ways that he was not shy in courting the elegant, dark-haired Mlle de Beauvoir.

“From now on, I’m going to take you under my wing,” Sartre announced when he brought her the
agrégation
results posted at the Sorbonne.
¹
And, indeed, he did just that. He encouraged her to nurture what she valued the most: her love of personal freedom, her passion for life, her curiosity, and her desire to be a writer. Sartre had decided long ago that literature was his calling. Initially encouraged by his widowed mother and his maternal grandfather, he never wavered in his belief that he was a genius destined for great literary success. Neither Sartre nor Beauvoir were teachers by choice; they taught to support themselves as writers. Neither wanted to marry or have children, but once they recognized each other as soul mates, they vowed to spend their lives together.

    Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen: he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence. I should always be able to share everything with him. When I left him at the beginning of August, I knew that he would never go out of my life again.
²

In the second volume of her memoirs,
The Prime of Life
, Beauvoir described how they conceptualized their unconventional pact, renewable every two years. Sartre provided the terminology.

    “What
we
have,” he said, “is an
essential
love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience
contingent
love affairs.” We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.
³

Their pact included not only the freedom to have other lovers but also the understanding that they would never conceal anything. Theirs would be a tell-all relationship, with complete honesty about their sexual partners. They believed that such an arrangement would allow for maximum freedom and authenticity and make it possible to avoid the pettiness and jealousy they associated with conventional bourgeois marriage.

Hmm. When I read these words in the early 1960s, I was married, the mother of three children, a professor of French, and witness to a sexual revolution that was gaining momentum, especially where we lived in northern California. How did Sartre and Beauvoir manage to preserve their ideals in what Americans were beginning to call an “open marriage”? The full story of their complicated connections with third parties would not be known until after their deaths.

Beauvoir and Sartre remained lovers in the physical sense of the word for about ten years, but long after they had ceased sleeping together, in fact for the rest of their lives, they maintained their “essential” love. Together they directed
Les Temps Modernes
, a leftist existentialist journal that had enormous prestige during the postwar years. Together they traveled to distant countries—Cuba, Egypt, the Soviet Union—where they were received like celebrities of the highest order. Together they continued to write during the day and socialize at night with a select circle of friends who shared their political ideas and their whiskey. Both Sartre and Beauvoir were heavy drinkers, he augmenting his alcohol with cigarettes and pills that would eventually take a huge toll on his health.

Surrounded by other postwar intellectuals, such as Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Francis Jeanson, and the black American writer Richard Wright, Sartre and Beauvoir became a media sensation. Their photos, appearing in newspapers and magazines worldwide, were as recognizable to Americans, Russians, and Japanese as they were to the French. The image they consciously cultivated was based on the reality of their mutual commitment, but it also hid the presence of their many “contingent” lovers.

Both Sartre and Beauvoir had numerous sexual relations—some serious and long-term, others just passing affairs. These would come fully to light after Sartre died in 1980, and Beauvoir in 1987. Their posthumously published correspondence revealed a dizzying network of lovers on an international scale, but at the same time an unbreakable bond between the two of them.
⁴
Even as they graphically recounted their involvements with third parties, they professed to love one another.

Here is Beauvoir writing to Sartre on September 16, 1939, after he had been mobilized for the war: “I’ve just had your long Tuesday letter. The fact that it was so long and affectionate gave me real pleasure, my love. We’re as one—I feel that at every instant, I love you.”

Here is Sartre writing to Beauvoir on November 12, 1939: “How I love you, little Beaver, how I wish you were here. You know I love you just as much and as poetically as though it were the beginning of an affair. . . . My love, how dear you are to me, and how much I need you.”

“Beaver” (
Castor
) is the affectionate name that Sartre and his university friends had given Beauvoir ten years earlier. During those ten years and for the next four decades as well, Sartre and the “Beaver” would continue to see in each other a reflection of themselves. No matter how different they appeared physically, their bond was based on a profound sense of likeness: they shared the same ideas and lived according to the same principles. They were literally doubles for each other, two of a kind joined at the brain like Siamese twins. Their psychic union evokes one of my favorite Shakespearean lines: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.”

Nonetheless, given their pact of complete sexual freedom, each took full advantage of “contingent” love affairs, with consequences that led to unwieldy threesomes and foursomes. The late Hazel Rowley, in her remarkable dual biography of the couple, offered a revealing portrait of their “tumultuous lives and loves.”
⁵
Sartre, by his own admission, was less sensual than Beauvoir, yet driven by an incessant desire to seduce. He left no stone unturned in his efforts to bed Beauvoir’s former lycée student Olga, and when that failed, he turned to her younger sister, Wanda, pursuing her for two years before she submitted. His obsessional womanizing never interfered with his writing, but it did occasionally upset the Beauvoir-Sartre equilibrium. Although they believed that telling each other everything would eliminate jealousy, this “transparency” didn’t always work for Beauvoir. She was painfully jealous of Sartre’s attentions to Olga, Wanda, and several other women with whom he had long-term affairs.

Sartre’s affair with Dolores Venetti was especially threatening to Beauvoir. He met Dolores in January 1945, when he was visiting the United States as part of a French cultural delegation. A bilingual radio journalist for Voice of America, Dolores was the perfect guide for a man who had been captivated since childhood by all things American, ranging from comic books, movies, and jazz to novels by Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner. Of Italian and Ethiopan background, with an extremely pretty face, Dolores was easily seduced by the now-famous philosopher. After two days together in New York, they went to bed with each other and commenced a long-term relationship. By the following January, Sartre was again in New York and writing to Beauvoir: