Tete-a-Tete (20 page)

Sartre knew the German censors would never allow a play about the Occupation, so he decided to convey his message through Greek mythology. He would write about Orestes's return from exile to his native Argos, a plague-ridden city ruled by the tyrannical Aegisthus and his consort, Clytemnestra. Orestes, in dialogue with Jupiter, comes to realize that the gods are not just. Throwing off the gods and assuming his freedom, he slays Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, his own mother. His act of violence frees the citizens of Argos and releases them from their plague.

Barrault agreed to direct
The Flies
but said he did not think the twenty-seven-year-old Olga up to the part of Orestes's sister, Electra. It was a demanding role, and Barrault worked with professional actors only. Sartre stood firm: Olga came with the play.

Rehearsals began. Barrault kept losing his temper with Olga. Behind Sartre's back, he muttered comments about Sartre promoting his mistress. Barrault was soon putting his energy into a production that was a far safer bet with the Vichy government,
The Satin Slipper,
an epic drama by the reactionary Catholic playwright Paul Claudel.

Finally Sartre decided to end their contract. “All this is my fault,” he wrote Barrault. “I do not generally like to talk about my private life and my silence reinforced this misunderstanding. I want to tell you…that Olga has never been and will never be my mistress; it's
her talent alone
that I wanted to serve.”
²⁸

Charles Dullin agreed to take the play on. He himself played Jupiter. Dullin worked patiently with Olga, and she threw herself into the part. Nonetheless, Dullin's temper was famous, and occasionally he erupted. Olga would burst into tears and threaten to give up. Their outbursts, writes Beauvoir, were “halfway between a family quarrel and a lovers' tiff.”
²⁹
The other students in the Atelier would look on jealously, hoping Olga would prove inadequate to the task.

Dullin was taking a big risk. Sartre was an unknown author, and Olga an unknown actress. The production was costly (involving a large crowd of extras), and the play was decidedly controversial. The opening night was June 3, 1943, at the Théâtre de la Cité. (The Vichy administrators had insisted that this theater change its name from the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, after the Jewish actress.) “How tense I
was when the curtain went up!” Beauvoir recalls. Olga, under the stage name of Olga Dominique, performed beautifully. It was a triumphant beginning to her career.

To the audience that night, a fresh breeze seemed to be blowing across the stage. “It was impossible to mistake the play's implications,” writes Beauvoir. “The word Liberty, dropped from Orestes' mouth, burst on us like a bomb.”
³⁰

Dominique Desanti agrees. “Yes, Sartre had to make compromises because of the German censors. But what could he do? Some writers chose to maintain silence throughout the Occupation, in order not to compromise at all. That was a noble stance. But we young people were so excited that Sartre was speaking out. And to us, his message was clear.”
³¹

 

If Beauvoir did not care all that much about losing her teaching job in the summer of 1943 it was because she and Sartre had entered a far more exciting sphere than the world of classrooms, blackboards, and chalk. In June, a couple of weeks after
The Flies
opened at the Théâtre de la Cité, Sartre's weighty philosophical tome
Being and Nothingness
was published, dedicated to “The Beaver.”

The book would not make a real impact until after the war, but some readers already recognized that it represented a landmark. Sartre had applied philosophy to everyday life, taking examples from the world around him. His portrait of a waiter in a café would become famous. Slightly affected, bearing his tray aloft, bending forward with eager solicitude to take a new order: was he free? Was he merely acting a role?

In August 1943,
She Came to Stay
appeared in the bookshop windows. After thirteen years of writing and rewriting, with dozens of drafts relegated to the back of her shelves, Beauvoir was a published author at last. For a brief time, she admits, she melted eagerly into her public image:

She Came to Stay
seeded the Sartre-Beauvoir legend. There were not many reviews—the censored wartime press did not exactly embrace this decadent novel—but the word flew around that it was a roman à clef, drawn from Beauvoir's open relationship with Sartre and the trio they had once formed with Olga Kosakiewicz, to whom the book was dedicated, the same woman, people said, who was acting the part of Electra in Sartre's play
The Flies,
at the Théâtre de la Cité. Rumor had it that Sartre, whose play hinted at a frisson of incest between Electra and her brother, Orestes, was now sleeping with Olga's younger sister, Wanda. The people in the Flore “looked somewhat askance at me,” Beauvoir writes.
³³

There were polarized reactions to the novel. Some thought it immoral and exhibitionist; others thought it a courageous act of resistance to the Vichy ideology of “work, family, country.” One thing was certain: Beauvoir, with her very first novel, had surrendered the last shreds of bourgeois respectability.

The book caused a frenzy of gossip. “It's Sartre portrayed in his entirety,” the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss told a friend, “and he comes over as a vile bastard.”
³⁴
Raymond Queneau noted in his journal: “Extraordinary veracity of the description, total lack of imagination. Even when S de B attributes a different childhood to one of her characters, it belongs to someone else—for example, the childhood of Gerbert (J-L Bost) is Mouloudji's.”
³⁵
As a portrait of an iconoclastic group of people, the novel was thought by Michel Leiris to be the French equivalent of
The Sun Also Rises.
But he observed that it lacked clarity on a central question: “Pierre and Françoise have been together for ten years. Are they people who still have a sexual relationship, or who don't anymore?…Without this basic information, it is difficult to understand how the equilibrium of the trio works.”
³⁶

Françoise de Beauvoir had already had to face the ignominy of having her daughter expelled from the teaching profession. Now she
had to endure another round of comments from family and friends. “Until
She Came to Stay
came out she knew almost nothing at all about my life,” Simone de Beauvoir writes. “She tried to persuade herself that at least as far as morals were concerned I was ‘a good girl.' Public rumor destroyed her illusions.”
³⁷

Beauvoir heard that
She Came to Stay
was a serious contender for the Prix Goncourt. This was the Vichy period. Jewish writers could not be published; their names could not even be mentioned in any piece of writing published under the Vichy regime. Although Beauvoir was disgusted by this, she writes, “If I had been awarded the Prix Goncourt that year I should have accepted it with wholehearted jubilation.”
³⁸

 

In the autumn of 1943, Sartre briefly put aside his trilogy and, in two weeks flat, wrote
No Exit,
a dazzling one-act play. An instant success, it would become a French classic, repeatedly revived on Paris stages.
³⁹

The three characters—one man and two women—are in Hell. They arrive one after another to find themselves locked in a room furnished with ugly antiques. At first they are relieved. They expected torture instruments and burning coals. Then they understand. There are no mirrors, no books, no toothbrushes, no distractions. All they have—for the rest of yawning eternity—is one another.

Garcin is a coward who desperately wants to be seen as a hero. Estelle is a narcissist who lives for the desire of men. Inès, a lesbian, likes to see others suffer. She is the first to understand their plight. “Each of us is a hangman for the two others,” she says. Near the end of the play, Garcin utters the famous Sartrean quip: “Hell is other people.”

Sartre wrote the role of Estelle for Wanda to play. For a year now, she had been going along to Dullin's classes at the Atelier and acting in minor roles. She did not show her sister's talent, but Sartre thought it only a matter of time. He wanted to give her a start.

A young actress friend, Olga Barbezat, played Inès. Sartre asked Albert Camus to play Garcin and to direct the play. The first rehearsals took place in December 1943, in Wanda's room at the Hôtel Chaplain.

 

“One would hardly dare to invent two figures in a drama of such contrasting physical appearance as Sartre and Camus,” Arthur Koestler writes. “Sartre looked like a malevolent goblin or gargoyle, Camus like a young Apollo.”
⁴⁰

Camus had walked up and introduced himself to Sartre at the dress rehearsal of
The Flies.
He was thirty and recently arrived from Algeria. His latest novel,
The Outsider,
was causing a splash. Sartre had written an appreciative review of it. Camus had also played a courageous role in the Resistance, editing the underground newspaper
Combat.

Sartre liked Camus immediately. So did everyone in the Sartre clan. Camus was a warm and passionate Mediterranean man. His roots were Spanish, French, and Algerian, and his accent sounded southern French. He was sensitive, funny, tragic, and full of stories, which he told in spicy language. His charm was extraordinary. “You'd be at a party, and you'd look around,” his publisher, Robert Gallimard, recalls, “and suddenly you'd see that nearly all the women in the room were clustered around Camus.”
⁴¹

Wanda had not heard of Camus before they started rehearsing. Over Christmas, she read
The Outsider
and thought it marvelous. She was fascinated by Camus—his exotic North African origins, his lifelong struggle with tuberculosis, the vulnerability beneath his swaggering surface.

Camus had no idea that Wanda and Sartre were lovers. One evening at the Flore, he confided to Sartre that he was captivated by Wanda's “Russian soul.” He even used the word
genius
to describe her.
⁴²

 

Sartre's and Beauvoir's social horizons began to open up. Through Camus, Sartre joined the writers' resistance group, the CNE—the National Committee of Writers. He became friendly with the former surrealist writers Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau, who were five or six years older than he was.

Sartre and Beauvoir were invited to dinners at Michel and Zette Leiris's apartment, on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, overlooking
the Seine. Leiris introduced them to Picasso, whose studio was just around the corner. On several occasions they had lunch with Picasso and his mistress, Dora Marr, in a Catalan restaurant up the street. “Picasso always welcomed us with sparkling vivacity,” writes Beauvoir, “but though his conversation was gay and brilliant, one didn't exactly talk
with
him. It was more a case of his holding forth solo.”
⁴³

For the first time in her life, Beauvoir entertained in her own home. She and the “kids” had moved to a much nicer hotel, La Louisiane, on the Rue de Seine, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Several of the Flore regulars lived there, including Mouloudji and his new girlfriend. Beauvoir had a large corner room on the third floor, with a kitchen and a view of rooftops. The day she moved in, Sartre spilled a bottle of ink and the manager had the carpet removed, leaving bare parquet flooring. Beauvoir did not mind. “None of my previous retreats had come so close to being the apartment of my dreams,” she writes, “and I felt like staying there for the rest of my life.”
⁴⁴

The room contained a divan, bookshelves, and a massive table, covered with books and papers, with Beauvoir's bicycle propped against it. One evening, Beauvoir cleared the table, took her bike down to Sorokine's room, and had their new friends around for a meal. Leiris and Queneau came with their wives; Albert Camus was there, and so were Sorokine and Bourla, Bost, Olga, and Wanda. Bost stood in front of a huge bowl of beans, dishing out with a ladle. Camus burst out laughing. “It's like the army barracks,” he said.
⁴⁵

That spring, they had a series of orgiastic all-night parties, which they called “fiestas.” Everyone saved up his or her coupons, so they could amass what seemed like prodigious quantities of food and drink. The surrealist writer Georges Bataille hosted the first party. Olga, Wanda, and Camus were the dazzling dancers in the group. Sartre sang lewd songs and danced a parody of the tango; Dora Marr mimed a bullfighting act; Queneau and Georges Bataille fought a duel with bottles. Leiris was so drunk he fell down the stairs. Once midnight struck, the revelers were imprisoned until dawn by the curfew. In the early hours of the morning, some of the company crept upstairs to sleep.

Two weeks after Bataille's party, Bost's mother lent them the family house at Taverny. “For a septuagenarian and clergyman's widow she was
remarkably broadminded,” Beauvoir writes. “She locked up her antique furniture and precious knick-knacks, put away some chessmen that normally stood on a table, and went off somewhere else for the night.”
⁴⁶
In June, Simone Jollivet and Charles Dullin threw a party in their grand apartment. Jollivet, who was already showing signs of the alcoholism that would destroy her, was drunk before the guests arrived.