Tete-a-Tete (27 page)

Beauvoir had Paris's café life; Algren had lonely Chicago. Beauvoir had Sartre; Algren had no one. He wrote that he felt the need to have a woman of his own. He did not think he would ever love another woman as much as he loved Simone, but “no arms are warm when they're on the other side of the ocean.”
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He hoped he would remarry one day.

His letter did not make her happy, Beauvoir wrote back, but she understood, and everything he said was fair. “You will be a nice fate for any woman, and I should have chosen that fate for myself heartily if other things had not made it impossible for me.”
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Algren's letters grew warmer again. He sent loving parcels to Beauvoir (and even to her mother), with tobacco, books, chocolate, and fine whisky concealed in a bag of flour. They agreed he would come to Paris the following May.

 

Beauvoir had lived in hotels for eighteen years, and she decided she'd had enough. The places were badly heated. The Louisiane was damp and musty, and her pink room needed a good coat of paint. In October 1948, she moved into a small fifth-floor apartment on Rue de la Bûcherie, one of the ancient, narrow streets near the Seine, in the Latin Quarter. It was a poor Arab district in those days. As dusk fell, Beauvoir would hear the strains of Arab music coming from the second-floor café across the street, the Café des Amis. There were frequent street fights. Her building was shabby, and her ceiling leaked when it rained. But she loved having her own place. From one of her windows she looked across to the Seine, the quays, and the turrets of Notre-Dame.

She put red curtains up at the windows and bought two white armchairs. The room looked cozy with the green-bronze lamps designed by Giacometti, the cubist watercolor Fernand Léger had given her, some colorful Van Gogh and Picasso prints, and her books.
From the ceiling beams she hung the colorful objects she had brought back from her travels in Mexico and Guatemala. From now on, she worked at home in the mornings. In the evenings, she sometimes ate at home. “I cook nice meals: chiefly, already cooked vegetables and cold ham,” she told Algren. “But I don't know very well how to manage the can-opener, I broke already two of them.”
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When the studio below became vacant, the Bosts moved in. The three often had dinner together in the café in the cobbled square, which looked out across the trees to Notre-Dame. Things seemed perfect until Olga had another X ray and discovered she still had a hole in her lung. Half crazed with fear and frustration, she went back to Laigle to convalesce in the country air.

Soon after Algren came into her life, Beauvoir stopped sleeping with Bost. At first Bost (who never had any shortage of girlfriends) was hurt—jealous, even. He had never seen Beauvoir so much in love. But their own relationship had been more tender than passionate for some time now. They would always remain the closest of friends.

Beauvoir would dedicate
The Second Sex
to Bost. She told him he was the least macho of all the men she knew.
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“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” It was to be the most famous sentence in
The Second Sex.
As an existentialist, Beauvoir did not believe in “human nature.” Her argument was that “femininity” is a social construct. Biology had no answer for the question: Why is woman the
Other
?

Her central thesis was that in all cultures, even those said to be matriarchal, man is regarded as the
Subject,
and woman as the
Other.
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She explored the data of physiology, psychoanalysis, history, and Marxist theory and found no satisfactory reason for this. Her conclusion was that otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. No group can set itself up as the One, without setting up another group as the Other.

She was working long hours on this book, determined to finish it before Algren's visit to Paris, in May 1949. Her research was vast, and yet she wrote
The Second Sex
in just two years. For her, this book was far easier to write than a novel. Fiction involved careful point-of-view
writing and considerable emotional energy.
The Second Sex
required research, a lucid mind, and organizational powers. For that, she was well trained.

Since her framework was existentialist, her yardstick was freedom. Her premise was that the ultimate goal of any responsible human subject should be “sovereignty.” But this was complicated. If a woman was not free, it could be for two reasons. Her lack of freedom could be inflicted, in which case it constituted oppression. Or it could be chosen, in which case it represented a moral fault. In both cases, it was an absolute evil.

Like Sartre, she argued that freedom requires moral courage. It is easier to forgo one's liberty and become a
thing.
As Beauvoir made clear, for women there were advantages to be gained from playing up to men, living through men, being kept by men. “It is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence.”

Several chapters in
The Second Sex
(“The Narcissist,” “The Woman in Love,” “The Mystic”) demonstrate the various ways women choose to avoid their freedom. But if
The Second Sex
is shot through with ambivalence, it is because Beauvoir shows that freedom itself is full of insurmountable obstacles for women. Society was not yet ready for the free woman.

One of the best chapters in the book, surely, is “The Independent Woman,” in which Beauvoir talks covertly about herself. She sums up the central problem thus:

In other words, whether she is a sovereign subject or an unfree object, woman cannot win. As Beauvoir portrays her, the independent woman suffers from an inferiority complex when it comes to
“femininity.” She can see that her intelligence and independence intimidate men. She knows that if she conducts her sex life too freely, she will be seen, humiliatingly, as “easy.” And she is only too aware of the double standard in society when it comes to aging.

Beauvoir knew plenty of women who lived through men, who foisted the burden of their existence onto a man. She herself knew the temptation. She also knew the price of independence. Indeed, as
The Second Sex
shows poignantly, the independent woman was doomed to feel divided.

 

Sartre had always thought of Michelle Vian as the wife of their friend Boris. The Vians made a beautiful, bohemian, hip young couple. But by the beginning of 1949, there were rumors that the marriage was crumbling.

In May, the Vians threw one of their famous parties. Sartre watched as Michelle danced the swing and the jitterbug in a little red dress and the very high heels she always wore. She was petite, with shapely legs, blue eyes, a warm smile, and long blond hair. Later that evening, Sartre said to her: “You're always in motion. Stop dancing a moment, and come and talk to me.” Michelle smiled and sat on the edge of the sofa, beside him. She wore theatrical makeup, like an actress. “But I'm boring,” she said. “I have nothing to say.”

Behind her extroverted façade, Michelle was painfully insecure. Her voice was sweet and clear, but she rarely spoke unless spoken to. Since the war, Boris Vian had become famous as a novelist and jazz trumpeter. He was also known for his humorous column in
Les Temps modernes.
By contrast, Michelle felt stupid. She was not a writer. She did not even have her baccalaureate.

She and Boris were twenty when they met at Capbreton in the summer of 1940, the summer when Paris fell to the Germans and Michelle's ten-year-old brother drowned in the currents. Her mother blamed Michelle, who was supposed to have been watching him. It was a trauma Michelle would never get over.

When America joined the war, and jazz was outlawed in occupied France, Boris and Michelle became part of the “Zazou” movement—young people whose resistance to the Germans took the form of
dressing provocatively, listening clandestinely to American jazz, and dancing the swing at underground parties. Michelle loved English and everything to do with the Anglo-Saxon world—British detective novels, American films, American jazz. She helped Boris translate his favorite jazz songs. As Zazous, Boris wore high collars and tiny English-knotted ties and Michelle bleached her hair peroxide-blond and took to wearing the highest heels she could find.

They married in July 1941. Both were virgins. Boris wore a condom, but it burst, and Michelle became pregnant that very night. Boris was not ready to become a father. By the time their son, Patrick, arrived, in April 1942, Boris was making his mark as a jazz trumpeter. After the Liberation, when the new basement dance cellars sprang up in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he and Juliette Greco became the stars at the famous club, the Tabou. A bevy of pretty girls hung around the stage door, and threw themselves at Boris Vian.

When Michelle complained about Boris's affairs, he snapped that she should take a lover herself, and learn something about sex. She said she had no interest in sleeping around; she loved
him.
At one of their parties, he pushed her toward a sixteen-year-old jazz clarinetist, André Reweliotty. During the summer of 1946, Boris was writing his second novel, and was busy. He invited Reweliotty on vacation with him and Michelle. Reweliotty and Michelle made love in the sand dunes.
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In April 1948, a second child, Carole, arrived.
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The marriage deteriorated further. Michelle turned more and more to Reweliotty. He was too young to give her the validation she needed, but he was a loving man, and he was faithful.

Then, in May 1949, after the party where they had talked on the sofa, Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous intellectual in France, phoned Michelle and asked her out. On their first evening together, they talked for three hours in the bar of the Pont-Royal. For a whole month, until Sartre left on a trip with Vanetti, he and Michelle Vian saw each other almost every day. Sartre did not touch her. They talked. Michelle was deeply moved. Sartre seemed so gentle, so sensitive to her feelings.

 

In May 1949, Algren came to Paris. The family had never seen Beauvoir look so soft and happy. “She was always asking Algren: ‘Are you alright? What would you like?'” Michelle Vian recalls. “They gazed into each other's eyes and held each other's hands like young lovers.”

Algren was nervous about meeting Sartre, but when the Little Man put his arm on Algren's back and guided him jovially into their first bar, Algren immediately felt at ease. He was especially fond of Olga and Michelle, who liked to speak English with him. Olga listened to his stories wide eyed. Michelle conscientiously acted as his interpreter in the group. Algren called her “the Golden Zazou.”

The first volume of
The Second Sex
came out in June 1949. Beauvoir's scandalous reputation was sealed. Even the title of the book shocked people. By talking frankly about the female body and female sexuality, Beauvoir had broken major taboos. She was considered even more outrageous than her cross-dressing female writer predecessors George Sand and Colette.

Beauvoir was roundly attacked. “Unsatisfied, frigid, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, a hundred times aborted, I was everything,” she writes, “even an unmarried mother.” She received hundreds of letters. People told her that her problem was that she did not believe in God. Some offered to cure her frigidity. Others offered, in the coarsest possible terms, to assuage her labial appetites. The Vatican blacklisted the book. The conservative Catholic writer François Mauriac told a member of the
Temps modernes
editorial board, “Your employer's vagina has no secrets from me.”
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Even Camus thought the book preposterous. (“Camus…a Mediterranean man, cultivating Spanish pride…accused me of making the French male look ridiculous.”
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) The fact that Beauvoir had discussed abortion was particularly shocking. Since she and Sartre had both written about abortion in their fiction, people had already come to the office of
Les Temps modernes
asking for addresses. The secretary had put up a sign:
WE DO IT ON THE PREMISES, OURSELVES.

Algren arrived at the height of it all. Beauvoir and Sartre had almost stopped going into cafés; people pestered them. But with Algren there, Beauvoir went out a great deal. When the two of them went into a public place, people would point to her and snicker. She
was glad Algren could not understand what they were saying, and relieved when they left on a two-month trip to Italy, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. On their return from North Africa, they stayed a few days with Bost and Olga, in their cottage at Cabris, in the hills of Provence. Bost and Olga were amused by Algren's wild stories, most of which demonstrated his heroism. Bost called him “Tough Algren.”

In mid-September, Beauvoir accompanied Algren to Orly Airport, feeling as if her heart would burst. Algren told her: “I've never been so happy; I've never loved so much.”
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During a stopover on his way home, he heard that his novel
The Man with the Golden Arm
had won the National Book Award.

 

While Beauvoir was with Algren, Sartre was traveling for three months in Central America with Vanetti. Before he left, he told Michelle Vian: “I'm going to put some order in my life.”
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When he came back, in October, he started to court Michelle seriously.

“I did not speak. I had no confidence. I was silent, always smiling, lost,” Michelle Vian recalls. “Sartre taught me to speak. He told me my ideas were good. It was his view that people must think, and talk. I found him very exciting. I didn't care about handsome. I liked his lips. They were the same type as Brigitte Bardot's. The upper lip the same size as the lower lip. Like his mother's…. When I saw him coming, my heart began to beat. I'd think to myself, here's joy, here's fun.”
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