How the French Invented Love (38 page)

    Here life is calm and uneventful. I get up around 9 o’clock . . . and I lunch with Dolores. . . . After lunch I take a walk all alone till 6 o’clock around NY, which I know as well as Paris; I meet Dolores again here or there and we stay together at her place or in some quiet bar till 2 in the morning. . . . Friday night I’m going up to her place and I’m staying there till Sunday afternoon. . . . Incidents, none. Except that Dolores’s love for me scares me.
⁶

I can imagine that Beauvoir was less scared by Dolores’s love for Sartre than by Sartre’s love for Dolores. Still, in that same letter Sartre continued to profess his attachment to Beauvoir and to insist: “I’m at my best with you and I love you very much. Au revoir, little one, I’ll be so happy to be with you again.”

A year later, Beauvoir began a passionate affair with the American writer Nelson Algren. It started on February 21 in Chicago, Algren’s home city, which she was visiting on a tour that would result in her book
America Day by Day
. Algren was a rising literary star, having published two novels and almost completed a third,
The Man with the Golden Arm
, which was to be his most successful. Despite his lack of French and her heavily accented English, they communicated well enough to make love twice during her thirty-six hours in Chicago and to commence a long-distance relationship that would last for several years. Beauvoir seems to have experienced a kind of uninhibited physical awakening with Algren that she had not known before, not even in the early years with Sartre when, by her own account, she had given herself fully to “feverish caresses and love-making.”
⁷
With Algren, physical desire was so intense that she had her “first complete orgasm,” as she later related to her biographer Deirdre Bair.
⁸
Algren gave her a silver ring, which she wore for the rest of her life. From 1947 to 1964, she wrote him a total of 350 letters.
⁹
He wanted to marry her, but she could never pry herself away from the primary bond she shared with Sartre.

Beauvoir’s relationship with Algren became public knowledge during her lifetime, but she managed to keep hidden an earlier affair that lasted nine years with Jacques-Laurent Bost, known as “little Bost.” Bost had been one of Sartre’s lycée students at Le Havre, and he would eventually marry Olga Kosakiewicz, Beauvoir’s former student, whom Sartre had unsuccessfully tried to seduce. They were all part of what the Beauvoir-Sartre couple referred to as the “family.” Beauvoir seems to have cared very deeply for Bost in ways that complemented her feelings for Sartre. Eight years younger, Bost shared her passion for nature and hiking, pleasures that left Sartre indifferent. Bost also awakened in Beauvoir the maternal sentiments she reserved for her younger lovers. Her journal entries from 1939 and 1940 (not published untiI 1990) gave expression to her constant worries about both Bost and Sartre after they had been mobilized. Each day she wrote faithfully to each of them and waited anxiously for return letters. She sent them parcels containing books, tobacco, and other hard-to-obtain items. When Bost was injured early in the war, it caused her no end of anxiety, shared by Sartre as well.

But the most unexpected material in Beauvoir’s posthumous publications concerned her lesbian affairs with several of her students during her years as a lycée professor, and the threesomes that were subsequently established between Beauvoir, Sartre, and the female students in question. To the very end of her life, Beauvoir maintained publicly that her relations with other women, however close, had never been sexual. This was, we now know, untrue. Beauvoir’s relations with Olga, Bianca, and Natalie were passionate affairs in every sense of the word.

True to their pact, Sartre and Beauvoir confessed everything to each other in detailed revelations that sometimes provoked tearful outbursts from Beauvoir, which she confided to her journal if not to Sartre. Sartre, too, though generally immune to jealousy, was occasionally ruffled by Beauvoir’s confessions. And certainly, the two of them were often oblivious to the callous way they sometimes treated third parties.

Take the case of Bianca Bienenfeld Lamblin, who had been one of Beauvoir’s students in 1937–1938 at the Lycée Molière in Paris. She was seventeen and Beauvoir thirty when their personal relationship began. As she wrote in her memoir,
A Disgraceful Affair
, published after Beauvoir’s death, Bianca had been seduced both intellectually and sexually by her lycée professor.
¹⁰
After the first year, she was then passed on to Sartre, who was apparently dispassionate in taking her virginity, though verbally passionate in his letters. As a writer, Sartre worked himself up to romantic emotions that he may not have experienced in real life.

For more than a year, the older couple and the lycée student constituted a threesome. Sartre’s letters to Bianca—she is called Louise Védrine in the published edition of his and Beauvoir’s correspondence—attest to a very deep affection for her, or at least the semblance of one. Then, in 1940, at the outbreak of World War II, Bianca found herself abandoned by her dual mentors and lovers. The fact that Bianca Bienenfeld was Jewish and likely to be deported by the Nazis did not seem to have worried either Sartre or Beauvoir. Their reprehensible behavior in 1940 has been a source of dismay for even their staunchest admirers.

During the war, Bianca married Bernard Lamblin, one of Sartre’s former lycée students, and together they escaped to the Vercors region in southeastern France, where several hundred resistance fighters managed to survive. When the war was over, Bianca and Beauvoir rekindled their friendship, which was to last until Beauvoir’s death. But the posthumous publication of Beauvoir’s war years journal and her letters to Sartre—works that referred directly to Bianca in a tone of ridicule—was devastating for Bianca, and she responded by writing her own version of the affair. It was this story that I arranged to publish in English translation for a university press. When I met Lamblin in Paris, she was still bitter about events that had occurred more than forty years earlier. She had learned the hard way that Sartre and Beauvoir’s high-flown ideas about essential and contingent relationships could be noxious to the add-on lover. She attributed her periodic bouts of severe depression, which had begun in 1941, not only to the Nazi horrors but also to the manipulation she had experienced at the hands of Beauvoir and Sartre. To her credit, Beauvoir took responsibility for Lamblin’s deteriorating mental condition when she wrote to Sartre in 1945: “I think it is our fault. . . . She is the only person we have really harmed.”

Thirty years later, when Sartre and Beauvoir discussed their personal relationship in a 1974 interview conducted by the German filmmaker Alice Schwarzer, they admitted that their lifelong union had been paid for, in part, by the emotional and sexual contributions of third parties. Modestly, they didn’t mention the fact that they themselves contributed financially to the upkeep of several lovers long after the sexual liaisons were over. To the end of his life, Sartre paid monthly allowances to Wanda, Michelle Vian (the divorced wife of writer Boris Vian), and the daughter he adopted in 1965, Arlette Elkaïm. Beauvoir, too, was extremely generous toward former lovers, friends, and her widowed mother.

Since the film focused on Beauvoir, Sartre played only a small role in it, and his speech was halting, perhaps because his health was already on the decline. Beauvoir, on the other hand, spoke quickly and decisively. At that time, she was the darling of the French women’s liberation movement, a group from which Sartre felt excluded. Beauvoir was so loquacious in the film that, without much prompting, she discussed female bisexuality. She presented bisexuality as natural in women, given their initial attachment to their mothers and the sense of complicity they experience with others of their same sex and gender. That complicity was apparent in a part of the film that showed Beauvoir presiding over a lively dinner in her Left Bank apartment, surrounded by half a dozen women, including her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon. Both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s adopted daughters would eventually become their inheritors and literary executors.

For Sartre’s seventieth birthday, in June 1975, he granted a long interview to
Le Nouvel Observateur
. He admitted that there were several women in his life, but added, “Simone de Beauvoir is the only one.” His tribute to her was unequivocal:

    I have been able to formulate ideas to Simone de Beauvoir before they were really concrete . . . she was the perfect person to talk to . . . we have even insulted one another. . . . That’s not to say that I accepted all her criticisms, but I did accept most of them. . . . There is no point in not criticizing very severely when you have the good fortune to love the person you are criticizing.
¹¹

L
ike many of Sartre and Beauvoir’s readers, I have had to revise my idealized picture of them and come to terms with their failings. Initially, they gave me a philosophic vocabulary with terms such as being and nothingness, existence and essence, authenticity and bad faith, and, yes, essential and contingent love. Their model of an intellectual partnership was one I formed and lived with my psychiatrist husband. Their books—Sartre’s plays and his autobiography
The Words
, and Beauvoir’s
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
,
A Very Easy Death
, and
The Second Sex
—were on the syllabus of college courses I taught for over thirty years. When I became involved in women’s studies, I realized over and over again the extent to which
The Second Sex
had raised and sometimes answered the most important feminist questions. Beauvoir’s conviction that women would remain the second sex unless they could support themselves rings as true today as when she expressed that idea in 1949. For a woman born in 1908 within a class that considered work for women demeaning, Beauvoir proved that she could earn her own keep and become the full-fledged equal of a man and more. In that respect, Beauvoir and Sartre did not disappoint, for they treated each other as economic and intellectual equals till the end.

I am not the only one to quarrel with Beauvoir’s negative view of motherhood. She had her reasons, and very good reasons, for seeing motherhood as an impediment to self-realization. Even today, if a woman wants to succeed in the world of business, politics, or academia, she has more chance of success if she is childless. In this respect, as in all others, Beauvoir assumed that the male model of success is what counts. She simply had no appreciation for the emotional depth and psychological growth that can be derived from parenting. It makes no sense to judge Beauvoir and Sartre according to a nuclear family model, because this is something they consistently rejected as a stifling bourgeois construct, and God knows they hated anything that smacked of the bourgeoisie from which they had come. Oddly enough, they referred to their famous threesomes as “the family,” perhaps craving—despite themselves—the biological kinship they consciously eschewed.

For a long time I have been a Beauvoir groupie. I was and still am on the editorial board of the Simone de Beauvoir Society, founded some thirty years ago by my former colleague Professor Yolanda Patterson. In addition to teaching works by Sartre and Beauvoir, I wrote about her in academic books and articles. Most recently I wrote a letter to the
New York Times
in defense of the 2010 retranslation of
The Second Sex
—Beauvoir’s feminist masterpiece—by my friends Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, after the entire work had been trashed in the
Times
by Francine du Plessix Gray.
¹²

But my most moving association with Simone de Beauvoir concerns a 1987 conference on autobiography that I organized at Stanford University under the auspices of the Center for Research on Women (now the Clayman Institute for Gender Research). With a small stipend at my disposal, I invited Beauvoir to speak at the conference; she sent her sister Hélène instead, along with Hélène’s paintings. It was at this conference in April 1987 that Hélène received word of Simone’s death, and she immediately flew back to Paris accompanied by a number of professors.

Simone de Beauvoir was buried next to Jean-Paul Sartre in the Montparnasse Cemetery. A single ledger tombstone covers their adjoining plots. For anyone unfamiliar with their story, it might seem strange to come upon a double tombstone, similar to those used for married couples, and find two different surnames on it. In death, their physical remains were united, but unlike Abélard and Héloïse, they had no belief in an afterlife. As Beauvoir poignantly wrote: “His death separates us. My death will not reunite us. . . . It is splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.”
¹³

What, then, is the legacy that Sartre and Beauvoir bequeathed to the history of love? I see them, first and foremost, as proponents of freedom in love, as in all other aspects of life. Without the traditional legal or religious bonds of marriage, they declared themselves free to love each other in every sense of the word. They also considered themselves free to have sexual partners outside their primary couple, with an honesty about their secondary relations that still astonishes. Though a certain French tradition going back to the Middle Ages had countenanced outside lovers for married couples, none expressed that right so unconditionally, and none incorporated it into a love pact that applied equally to the man and the woman. In this respect, Sartre and Beauvoir were pioneers in the women’s movement, though they might not have recognized themselves as such. Beauvoir would not make common cause with women as a group until the movement claimed her in the 1970s.