Tete-a-Tete (23 page)
Authors: Hazel Rowley
It was dawn when Beauvoir left the party. She and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (a former pupil of Sartre's and a future psychoanalyst) went
to a café in Saint-Germain to sober up. Beauvoir told him about Vanetti and wept floods of tears.
34
Everyone around him knew how infatuated Sartre was this time. Henriette Nizan, who had left New York and was back with the two children in Paris, encountered Sartre's mother, Madame Mancy, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Madame Mancy asked her point-blank, “Rirette, I would like to ask you: would Dolores Vanetti make a good wife for Poulou?”
35
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Sartre's voyage to New York on the
Liberty
had taken eighteen days. The weather was stormy and the sea was rough. He was not seasick. “It's surely a matter of will,” he joked to Beauvoir. But he was unable to write. “You get the impression that the wind and the rocking empty your head.” He couldn't even read. “I don't just mean Malraux, but not even the detective novels I'd brought along.” He walked around the deck staring at the sea, chatting to his fellow passengers, and trying to keep his balance. One evening he gave a lecture on existentialism. “I must be
truly
famous, poor little Beaver, because though I'm only identified by mangy tags on my suitcases, the whole ship knew who I was.”
In the evenings, he got drunk with his shipboard companions and tried to seduce the wife of the Brazilian consul. (“She's thirty-five and beautiful, with the pampered look of an Egyptian dancing girl. Stupid, actually, and terribly flirtatious.”) She ended up preferring his better-looking rival, the ship's captain. Sartre was mortified. “I couldn't stop seeing myself with horror as an insect. The sea air must really turn a person slightly batty.”
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To pay for his trip, Sartre had arranged with French Cultural Relations in New York to give some lectures on French literature. He had become famous since his last American sojourn, and the Americans were eager to hear about this new European intellectual fashion, existentialism. Sartre's books had not yet been published in English, but some of his writing had appeared in American journals, and
No Exit
was about to be staged in New York. Wherever he wentâHarvard, Princeton, Yale, and various venues in New Yorkâthe lecture theaters were packed.
The press trail built up a picture of an intriguing personality. A flattering photo in
Time
âVanetti's favorite photo of Sartreâbore the caption “Philosopher Sartre. Women swooned.” If the “Bible” of existentialism was Sartre's 724-page treatise,
Being and Nothingness,
the article declared, its “foremost disciple” was “authoress Simone de Beauvoir, who lives in the same hotel on the same floor as the master.”
37
After Sartre's talk at Carnegie Hall,
The New Yorker
's “Talk of the Town” columnist reported:
Mr. Sartre, a rumpled little man who wears tortoise-shell glasses with very large lenses, wound a shepherd's-check scarf around his neck as soon as he stepped down from the lecture platform. He told us at once that he approves of New York without qualification. “Here there are no restaurants of an exclusively intellectual clientele,” he said, “so it is easy to keep out of fights. Also, the hotels have the very good custom of throwing out the guests after a sojourn of three or five days. I prefer three. If one takes the precaution of leaving no forwarding address, it is impossible for anybody interested in literature to find one. So one never risks being bored. One is free to promenade oneself in the streets but relieved of the necessity of conversation. That is, if one has taken the precaution not to learn spoken English. I have guarded myself well from it, although I read. Two phrases only are necessary for a whole evening of English conversation, I have found: âScotch-and-soda?' and âWhy not?' By alternating them, it is impossible to make a mistake.”
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Harper's Bazaar
paid Beauvoir a generous fee to write a portrait of Sartre. Her short essay, translated by Malcolm Cowley, was given the alluring title “Jean-Paul Sartre: Strictly Confidential.” Had Beauvoir set out to create a legend, she could not have done it better. Sartre, she declared, was “a new sort of figure in life and letters.”
He hates the country. He loathesâit isn't too strong a wordâthe swarming life of insects and the pullulation of plants. At most he tolerates the level sea, the unbroken desert sand, or the mineral coldness of Alpine peaks; but he feels at home only in cities.
Sartre, she went on, affirmed himself as “consciousness and pure liberty”:
From the very beginning, Sartre was fiercely determined to be a free man; he kept clear of everything that might burden him down or chain him to one place. He has never married; he has never acquired any possessions; he doesn't own so much as a bed or a table, a picture, a keepsake, or a book. Nevertheless, he has always spent his money as fast as he earned it, and sometimes a little fasterâ¦. One characteristic that impresses all his friendsis Sartre's immense generosity. He gives without reckoning, gives his money, his time, and himself; he is always ready to be interested in others, but he doesn't wish for anything in return; he doesn't need anybody.
Vanetti was jealous of Beauvoir, and Sartre rarely mentioned her. It was on this, his second trip, Vanetti says, that she fell in love. She was seeking a divorce, and hoped to marry Sartre. Meanwhile, she was terrified of roving photographers employed to provide evidence of adultery.
Sartre was staying in a midtown hotel. At weekends the two either remained holed up in Vanetti's uptown apartment out of sight of the doormen (“she calls me the prisoner,” Sartre told Beauvoir) or they went to Connecticut to stay with her friend Jacqueline Lamba, a talented painter, who had separated from André Breton and was now living with the American sculptor David Hare.
I get up around 9 o'clock and never manage, despite all my efforts, to be ready before 11 (bath, shave, breakfast), I go to some appointment, and I lunch with Dolores or various people wanting to see me. 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. I'm drinking heavily, but without any problems so far.
His letters were full of mixed messages. “Dolores's love for me
scares me. In other respects she is absolutely charming and we never get mad at each other. But the future of the whole thing is very grimâ¦. Au revoir, my dearest, my darling little Beaver, au revoir. 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.”
At the end of February, Sartre wrote that he was busy giving lectures and writing articles. He would tell her more when he got back:
I'll also tell you about Dolores, who is a poor and charming creature, really the best I know after you. At present we are involved in the agonies of departure, and I'm not having fun every dayâ¦. Her passion literally scares me, particularly since that's not my strong suit, and she uses it solely to her disadvantage, but she can display the candor and innocence of a child when she is happyâ¦. I yearn to go home, I'm half dead from passion and lecturing.
Sartre postponed his return by two weeksâostensibly to give lucrative lectures in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. He did not tell Beauvoir that Columbia University had offered him a job for two years, and that he had considered the proposition seriously. Nor did he tell her that he had asked Vanetti to marry him.
Since Vanetti was not yet divorced, they agreed that Sartre would return to Paris and they would spend three or four months together later in the year. After that, they would see. On March 15, 1946, Sartre went home, this time by plane.
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“I seem to be working at half speed,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. “It's so annoying to have obstacles in one's head.”
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She had constant headaches and was plagued by bad dreams. Sartre's conversation was full of Vanetti. Such was their harmony, he told Beauvoir, that when they walked around New York together they always wanted to stop and go on again at exactly the same moment. Beauvoir was frightened. At parties, with the slightest amount of alcohol, she would weep into her glass.
One dayâshe and Sartre were about to go for lunch with
friendsâshe blurted out, “Honestly, who means the most to you, Dolores or me?” Sartre told her: “Dolores means an enormous amount to me, but it's you I'm with.” Beauvoir thought he meant that he was respecting their pact, and she should not ask more than that. She could barely pull herself together during lunch, and used the fish bones as her excuse for being unable to swallow. She saw Sartre watching her uneasily. That afternoon, when they were alone again, he told her he thought it was obvious that they were together; it did not need explaining.
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So many aspects of their past seemed to Beauvoir to be unraveling. They were too famous to be able to work quietly in cafés. When Sartre got back from America, it was in the din and smoke of the Méphisto, a new jazz cellar on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, that he read the last chapters of her novel
All Men Are Mortal.
But this was about to change. Some months earlier, Sartre had agreed to share an apartment with his mother. Anne-Marie Mancy had found a fourth-floor apartment at 42 Rue de Bonaparte, on the corner of Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In May 1946, they moved in.
After fifteen years of living in Spartan conditions in hotels, Sartre was suddenly living the bourgeois life. From his large study at the far end of the apartment, he looked across the cobblestone square to the old church, the terrace of the Deux Magots, and right up the Rue de Rennes. The living room was fitted out with his mother's fake Louis XVI furnishings, which he hated. The large oak desk and black leather armchair in his study had belonged to his stepfather, whom he hated. But the apartment was very comfortable. He enjoyed having access to a piano again. For the first time in his life, he began to build up a library. Until then he had always given his books away.
Anne-Marie Mancy was ecstatic. “This is my third marriage,” she told friends proudly.
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From now on, it was she who bought Sartre his ties and shirts. Her old Alsatian maid, Eugénie, who had a small bedroom at the other end of the apartment, took care of Sartre's washing and ironing. His mother glowed with pleasure when Sartre occasionally had lunch or dinner with her. “She was completely devoted to her son,” Beauvoir writes, “just as she had been to her husband, and she liked to believe that she was necessary to him.”
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Beauvoir and Madame Mancy had never warmed to each other.
Sartre had only just moved into his new abode when he heard devastating news. Olga was about to begin rehearsals for a new production of
The Flies,
but she had been feeling weak for some time. Now chest X rays showed tuberculosis. Both lungs were infected. Olga was just twenty-nine, and facing possible death.
She was sent to the Beaujon hospital in Clichy, on the northern outskirts of Paris, and given a pneumothorax, an operation that involved cutting a hole through the chest wall and using a tube to collapse the affected lung by pumping air into the pleural cavity. Bost had no time to enjoy the success of his novel,
Le Dernier des Métiers
(
The Last Profession
), based largely on the letters he'd written to Beauvoir during the war. He went to visit Olga every day and Beauvoir often went with him. In those dark days, the two were a great comfort to each other.
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After Sartre got back from America, he received a letter from Jean Cau, a twenty-one-year-old student who was preparing for the competitive entry exam to the Ecole Normale. He wanted to know if Sartre could use a secretary. The two met. Sartre liked the eager young man with his ironic smile, sense of humor, peasant good sense, and working-class southern accent. He agreed to employ him for three hours each morning.
“Sartre's secretary! Never has a title been worn so comically. Never under the sun will such a âboss' appear again.” After Sartre's death, Jean Cau would paint an affectionate picture of his generous, trusting boss.
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The arrangement was to last eleven years. Cau would turn up at 42 Rue Bonaparte at ten
A.M.
on the dot, climb the four flights of stairs, and ring the bell. Madame Mancy, “the very beautiful, tall, elegant, adorable âlittle mama,' with her superb bearing, fine ankles, blue eyes, and her clear and musical voice,” would come to the door. On occasion, it was Eugénie who let him in, in which case Cau invariably found Sartre and his mother playing a duetâusually Schubert or Chopinâon the upright piano in the living room. Cau's arrival would interrupt the idyllic scene. Sartre would lower the lid and cry, “To work!”
More often Cau would go straight to the foldup bridge table in the drawing room, which was separated from Sartre's study by an opaque glass door, and would already be going through the mail when Sartre emerged from his room, unshaven and in pajamas and a badly tied dressing gown. He'd been working, and now he was heading to the bathroom for his morning ablutions. His fast walk, head bent forward, always reminded Cau of a boxer: “He does not walk, he charges.”
When Sartre had slept at home, Cau would open the study door and reel, slightly nauseated, from the stench of sleep and tobacco. If Sartre had slept at a girlfriend's, he would turn up around the same time as Cau. On those mornings, Cau writes, Sartre was in such a huge hurry to get to work that he often went straight to his desk without even bothering to take off his jacket and tie.
Cau was dumbfounded by Sartre's capacity for work. He worked, Cau says, “like a mule.” All morning he would smoke like a train, either a pipe or cigarettes, and drink tea from a thermos on his desk. He wrote by hand, rarely crossing things out. If he didn't like what he was writing, he preferred to start again, on a fresh page. He disliked messy drafts.
