Tete-a-Tete (22 page)

Their names were everywhere.
Existentialism
had become a buzzword. Sartre's play
No Exit
had been the talk of the theater season. In September and October 1945, Beauvoir's novel
The Blood of Others,
and the first two novels of Sartre's trilogy,
The Age of Reason
and
The Reprieve,
all appeared at the same time in the bookstore windows. At the end of October, Beauvoir's play
Useless Mouths
opened at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, with Olga in the lead female role.
²⁴
And the news kiosks sported a new journal,
Les Temps modernes
(named after the Charlie Chaplin film
Modern Times
), with Jean-Paul Sartre as editor-in-chief, and Simone de Beauvoir among the names on the editorial committee.
²⁵
Sartre had always maintained that everything, however banal, shed light on society. The aim of the journal was to comment and take a position on “modern times.”

On October 29, Sartre was billed to give a talk at the Club Maintenant. The title of his talk, “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” was staid, and Sartre expected his audience to be small. It was a warm autumn evening. Sartre took the metro there. When he turned the corner, he was taken aback to see a vast crowd milling outside. It took him fifteen minutes, battling his way through the mob, to reach the podium.

Sartre talked animatedly and unpretentiously, as if he were in front of his students. He pointed out that though the word
existentialism
was highly fashionable, almost no one knew what it meant. Surprisingly, it usually had connotations of decadence. He had heard about a lady who, feeling frazzled, had uttered a swear word, and by way of apology, declared, “I must be becoming an existentialist.”
²⁶

In truth, existentialism was neither a pessimistic nor a negative philosophy, Sartre told the audience. Its doctrine was that since God does not exist, man makes himself. There is no a priori human nature or essence. We are not born cowardly or lazy; we choose to be these things. “Man is responsible for what he is…. We are alone, without excuses. This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”

If many people disliked this philosophy, Sartre went on, it was because they preferred to make excuses for themselves, to tell themselves that circumstances were against them. “I have not had a great love, or a great friendship, but it's because I did not meet the right man or woman,” they would say. “If I have not written very good books, it's because I haven't had the leisure time to do it.” According to Sartre, they were lying to themselves about their freedom. This was “bad faith.”

Existentialism was not about possibilities or intentions, Sartre said, but about concrete projects. No one was a genius unless it was expressed in his or her works. The same applied to love. “There is no love except that which is constructed, there is no possibility of love except that which is manifested in a loving relationship.” Hence the existentialist slogan: “Existence precedes essence.”

The room was crowded and hot. In the jostle and excitement, chairs were broken and people fainted. It was, one journalist quipped, “a
No Exit
situation.” A hip young jazz trumpeter, Boris Vian, would
immortalize that evening in his first novel,
L'Ecume des Jours
(
The Froth of Passing Days
). In the novel, Paris is crackling with excitement: its new intellectual star, Jean-Sol Partre, is to give a talk. He has written a book called
Vomit.
The event is sold out, and there's a vigorous black market in forged invitations. People arrive via the sewers; some parachute in on a special plane. The Duchess of Bovouard and her circle, sitting in the gallery, attract excited looks from the crowd. Blasts from an elephant trunk announce Partre's arrival. He makes his way to the stage.
²⁷

After that memorable evening, not a week went by without some gossip about the existentialist couple in the tabloid newspapers. Sartre and Beauvoir could no longer walk in the street without photographers darting in front of them or people asking for autographs. When they went into a café or restaurant, people stared, nudged one another, and whispered. The newspapers reported that the two writers were now frequenting the Pont-Royal, instead of the Flore.

No sooner had the curfew been lifted than new cellar jazz clubs and dancing places sprang up in Saint-Germain. According to the tabloids, these were full of young drifters called “existentialists,” who spent their days in existentialist cafés and their nights listening to existentialist jazz. A wild and gloomy bunch, they sometimes resorted to existential suicides.

It was no coincidence that existentialism struck a chord in the postwar world. Sartre's readers had experienced the Holocaust and the atom bomb. Having discovered history, with its most savage face, they had lost their faith in eternal progress. What was so refreshing was that existentialism acknowledged the horror and absurdity of the human condition, while at the same time insisting on individual freedom and choice.

Ignored in 1943,
Being and Nothingness
now became a fashionable book, especially among the young, where Sartre had a cult following. The communists said Sartre was a nihilist, who “wallowed in nothingness.” Conservatives saw him as godless and depraved.

Beauvoir was known mostly because of Sartre, but she also greatly enhanced the public's interest in him. This strikingly handsome woman—who had come second in the
agrégation
the year Sartre had come first, who wrote books in cafés alongside Sartre, who shared his
ideas about liberty and contingency, and whose first novel had portrayed their scandalous relationship—was an essential ingredient in Sartre's iconic stature.
Samedi Soir,
the new sensationalist postwar tabloid, disparagingly called her “la grande Sartreuse” or “Notre-Dame de Sartre.”

 

Sartre and Beauvoir had become a famous couple, yet their relationship had never been more precarious. Three decades later, looking back on the many women in Sartre's life, Beauvoir told him that Dolores Vanetti was the hardest of all for her to accept: “You were immensely attached to her. Furthermore, she was the only woman who frightened me. She frightened me because she was hostile.”
²⁸

Sartre's introduction to the first issue of
Les Temps modernes,
a manifesto of “committed literature,” was dedicated to Vanetti. Readers wondered who she was, this Dolores, whose name was emblazoned at the top of the first page of the new magazine. Beauvoir had hoped Sartre would come skiing with her at Christmas, in Mégève. Instead, on December 12, he took the train to Marseille, then boarded a military cargo boat to New York. He was going to spend two months with Vanetti.

In her letters to Sartre, Beauvoir admitted that it was hard for her to contemplate the idea of more time apart: “It's especially in the mornings on waking that it causes me a little anguish.” But she did her best to appear calm and breezy. She was busy with
Les Temps modernes,
finishing her novel
All Men Are Mortal,
and editing Sartre's lecture “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” for publication. “I'm very happy with our life and with you,” she declared bravely. “I want you to have a good stay over there.”

She was seeing friends, she told him, and had spent a “marvelous evening” with Camus:

If everything works out well, we'll go and spend a fortnight winter-sporting in February—he seemed really to like the idea too.
²⁹

Underneath the feisty bravado, a loneliness seeps through Beauvoir's letters. Her room at the Louisiane was icy cold; the hotel was not heated. She had felt very bad after an evening with Bianca Bienenfeld, who was back in Paris with her husband, having spent the war in hiding. Bienenfeld was a changed woman, Beauvoir told Sartre. Soon after the trio collapsed, Bienenfeld had had a nervous breakdown. Five years later, she was still not better:

In the late 1940s, Bienenfeld's psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, would come to the same conclusion. It was his view that Sartre and Beauvoir had had a quasi-parental relationship with Bienenfeld, and Bienenfeld's traumatized reaction was partly because they had broken the incest taboos by sleeping with her.

Nathalie Sorokine, who also had a room at the Louisiane, was pregnant and about to leave for California to join her boyfriend, a handsome American GI who hoped to become a screenwriter. In the
last year, Sorokine had made a sport of seducing GIs. She could not wait to get to the land of plenty.

Beauvoir and Bost were still occasional lovers, but he was away a great deal, and they were no longer as intimate. Over dinner one night, he confessed that if he had appeared somewhat indifferent recently it was because he did not feel he had any place in a life in which Sartre loomed so large.
³⁰

At Christmas, Beauvoir went to Mégève with Bost, Olga, and Wanda. The Kosakiewicz sisters rarely put on skis; they mostly lay on the terrace, sunbathing. Beauvoir and Bost would go off together, taking local trains and cable cars, sweeping through fields of fresh snow to lunch in little chalets, and returning to the hotel at sunset.

Beauvoir told Sartre she was “bursting with tenderness” for him. She kept thinking of him skiing beside her on those same slopes in the past, wearing a blue ski suit she could still see as if it were yesterday. These memories had a “rather harrowing” effect on her. “I'd so like to think that we'll come back here together some day, just the two of us on our own and perfectly happy.” She wished they could go away for several months, somewhere where they could write. She had dreamed so long of traveling with him, and now their travels were more often than not apart. She missed working beside him at the Flore.

“Like you, I feel we must make changes in our lives,” Sartre wrote back. “Only my mother and Wanda keep me from leaving with you to work anywhere at all for six months a year. But between that and the daily Café de Flore, there are intermediary positions.”

After three weeks in Mégève, Beauvoir returned to Paris. She was tanned and healthy, she wrote to Sartre, and “stunningly handsome.” She saw to business matters, mostly his, and then, at the end of January, took the train to Marseille, from where she flew—
her
first flight—to Tunisia. She had been invited by the Alliance Française to give lectures in Tunis and Algiers. But she was worried. She had not heard a word from Sartre, and was banking on a letter waiting for her in Tunis:

Two weeks later, she was on the edge of the Sahara desert and about to travel around the south of Algeria. She had seen many interesting things, and attendance at her talks had been overwhelming: “the wild success of existentialism—people fought with their bare hands to get into my lectures!” she told Sartre. But she
still
had not heard from him. Nothing for two months, no letter since he set foot in America. Fifteen years' experience had taught her that he was an “unblemished marvel,” and she knew there must have been some hitch. “Only I'm a bit distraught every night to feel that I'm cut off from you. A swift word, my dear little one, my love. Don't forget me. Don't forget how passionately I love you. I kiss you with all my might—and for a long, long time.”
³¹

 

When Beauvoir returned to Paris, Sartre was still not back. Bost was traveling with a group of journalists in Italy. Olga was with her parents in Laigle, feeling feverish and tired. Sorokine had left for America. Camus was about to go to New York. Beauvoir worked and “moped a bit.”
³²
She tried to write at the Pont-Royal, but the barrels that served as tables were hardly conducive to serious work. It was there, at the bar, that Raymond Queneau introduced her to Boris Vian, whose novel
L'Ecume des Jours
(featuring Jean-Sol Partre and the Duchess de Bovouard) Queneau thought quite brilliant. Beauvoir told Vian that they would like to publish an excerpt of it in
Les Temps modernes.
Soon afterward, she was invited to a party at the Vians':