Tete-a-Tete (34 page)

“Everybody praises the ‘American love story,'” she wrote to Nelson Algren.
⁷⁵
She hoped he would be granted a passport one of these days, so that he could come and see his friends in Paris. They missed him.

August 1955–February 1962

Beauvoir and Lanzmann were tired of the tiny studio in the Rue de la Bûcherie that leaked every time it rained. The atmosphere in the street had changed since the outbreak of hostilities in Algeria the previous November. There were no more knife brawls. These days, when they looked into the Arab-run Café des Amis, across the road, they saw neatly dressed men in leather jackets sitting in front of glasses of milk. The Arab districts in Paris were now dominated by Islamic militants, who forbade the sale of alcohol.

With her Goncourt prize money, Beauvoir bought an artist's studio in a cream-colored 1920s building on the Rue Schoelcher, a narrow street that skirted the Montparnasse Cemetery. It was in the heart of Montparnasse, a few blocks away from the Dôme and the Coupole, and twenty minutes from Sartre in the Rue Bonaparte, and yet it was quiet. “Nobody on the other side of the street except dead people,” she told Algren.
¹
She and Lanzmann moved in mid-August of 1955.

The studio was at street level, with a very high ceiling. A spiral staircase in one corner led up to a small bedroom and bathroom. A huge window, facing northwest, filled the space with sun and sky. It was a small, modest place, but by the time Beauvoir installed her writing desk in the corner by the window, bought two yellow divans and two purple armchairs, and arranged her books, paintings, masks,
travel souvenirs, and Giacometti lamps, she was convinced she had one of the nicest homes in Paris.

She liked the sense of permanence. As she unpacked her things, she mused that she was living five minutes from the apartment where she was born, and that this was no doubt the place where her friends would come to sort through her affairs after her death.

She loved to watch the evening sky turn pink and golden over the cemetery. And she cherished the moment, at around five in the morning, when she'd linger briefly at the upstairs window, breathing in the dawn and the promise of gathering heat, before going back to bed.

 

She did not even have time to buy a refrigerator, let alone put ice and whiskey in it, before she and Sartre left for China at the beginning of September. As always, she took with her a vast array of reading material about the country they were visiting. They stayed a month in Peking (“a big quiet peasant town”
²
), then traveled around the country. They were impressed by the victories Mao's communist government had made over malnutrition, epidemics, and infant mortality, and profoundly moved by the way the people worked with their bare hands—no machines—to build houses, schools, and dams.

But the trip was tiring. Never had they been confronted with such a radically foreign culture. Living conditions were Spartan, and conversations were often awkward. Apart from two or three French literature specialists, no one had heard of them.

On their way back, they stopped in Moscow and plunged into a busy week of sightseeing, talks, and interviews. Beauvoir could see why Sartre had ended up in the hospital the year before. Near the end of their stay they were invited to attend a critics' congress:

On their last day in Moscow, Sartre was still going strong. Beauvoir, worn out, spent the day in bed reading a novel about the Russian Revolution and reveling in her solitude.

 

By the fall of 1955, the Algerian War was blazing. Sartre and Beauvoir were sickened by the “great tide of chauvinism and racism” that had flooded the French press since the outbreak of hostilities the previous November.
⁴
The signs were clear enough that the colonial era was coming to an end. Morocco and Tunisia were about to gain their independence from France. It was time to get out of Algeria, too. But the majority of French people did not see things that way.

The defeat of the French army at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 had finally made France withdraw from Indochina. But humiliation in Indochina had made the French government even more determined not to give up Algeria.

Les Temps modernes
declared its support for Algerian independence, a stance that most of their countrymen bitterly resented. For the next seven years, while the Algerian War became more and more ugly, Sartre and Beauvoir were regularly denounced as “anti-French.” In cafés and restaurants, the anti-Arab talk at neighboring tables made them cringe. At the cinema, they had to watch newsreels that celebrated French military operations in Algeria. They felt like exiles in their own country.

 

Back from China, Sartre wrote a film script,
The Salem Witches,
adapted from Arthur Miller's play
The Crucible,
an allegory about the anticommunist witch hunt in the United States. (The movie would star Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.) And he began a new project, which he had been mulling over for years: on Gustave Flaubert. He had a love-hate relationship with Flaubert, the man and the writer. As an adolescent, Sartre had read and reread
Madame Bovary,
and knew whole
passages by heart. He was intrigued by the way Flaubert portrayed somewhat negative characters, with whom one nevertheless sympathized. During the war, Sartre had read Flaubert's correspondence with a similar uneasy fascination. Flaubert's conception of literature, with his endless painful search for
“le mot juste”
and his refusal of any type of political
engagement,
was the exact opposite of Sartre's own. So why Flaubert? “You have to knock heads with what challenges you,” Sartre told people.
⁵
Sartre loved to immerse himself in another person's world, turning it temporarily into his own. It was a form of traveling outside himself.

His aim was to use existentialist, Marxist, and Freudian methods to explain what Sartre called Flaubert's “neurosis.” He had written similar studies of Baudelaire and Jean Genet, but over the years Flaubert would become an all-consuming obsession for him. There was a wealth of material on Flaubert (his correspondence alone ran to fifteen thick volumes), and Sartre was convinced that if he studied the evidence carefully enough, he could come to a perfect understanding of the man. He disagreed with the basic tenet of psychoanalysis—that the unconscious makes us ultimately unknowable. “The fundamental project in my ‘Flaubert' is to show that at bottom…every human being is perfectly capable of being understood if the appropriate methods are used and the necessary documents are available.”
⁶

Beauvoir had decided to write a book about China.
The Mandarins
had drained her emotionally and spiritually; she did not want to write another novel straight away. Her book on China,
The Long March,
would involve a great deal of research, but hard work had never intimidated her. She saw it as a chance to learn more about China, while at the same time challenging the anticommunist prejudices of her Western readers. A travel book would date fast; she had to write it quickly. That year she worked as much as ten hours a day:

She did not speak Chinese, she had not been in the country long, and this time she had had no “local youth” to explain things. She was very aware of these limitations, and was pleasantly surprised by the good reviews the book received. Claude Roy, a specialist on China, wrote in
Libération
that he read the book with a pleasure that never subsided. “It's always refreshing and pleasant to travel in the company of an intelligent, sensitive and attentive writer…Simone de Beauvoir saw what everyone has seen, but she understood many things that no one has fathomed so well.”
⁸

 

The Mandarins
came out in the United States in May 1956. The dedication to Nelson Algren left American readers in no doubt as to the real-life model for Lewis Brogan, the Chicago writer depicted in the novel. Algren had not minded Beauvoir's travel book,
America Day by Day,
published in the United States three years before—where he had been easily recognizable as “NA.” In fact, he had been rather flattered by it. But this novel showed him, so to speak, in his pajamas.

It did not help that while Beauvoir was flying high with success, Algren was at an all-time low. He had thought he would make his fortune when Hollywood bought the film rights for
The Man with the Golden Arm,
but in the end he had not made a cent out of it, and the movie had been cut so drastically by Hollywood's zealously anticommunist censors that it no longer carried any punch at all. In desperation, Algren had churned out another book, and his publishers rejected it. He had divorced his wife for the second time and gambled away the last vestiges of his money. There was nothing he would have liked to do more than to run away to Paris for a time, but the State Department was not issuing passports to anyone who had ever had an affiliation with the Communist Party. When he was asked to swear that he never had, Algren lied. Then realized, too late, that he could be indicted for perjury.

If
The Mandarins
was receiving a lot of attention in the United States, it was partly due to the American love story. Algren resented this. “A good female novelist ought to have enough to write about without digging up her own private garden,” he ranted to a reporter. “For me, it was just a routine relationship, and she's blown it up.”
⁹

When the comment appeared beside his photograph in
Time
magazine, Algren felt embarrassed about sounding so sour. He tried to make a long-distance call to Paris to explain, but when Lanzmann picked up the phone, Algren hung up and wrote Beauvoir a letter instead. He had not been himself when he barked at the newspaper men, he told her, and had said dismissive things to show off. He had been hurt by the passage where Anne Dubreuilh declared that her love for Brogan was dead.

Beauvoir said she understood, and their friendship survived. Once again, Algren's letters were full of nostalgia for the past. He missed her, he said. He realized he had spent the happiest days of his life with his little French frog. One day, he had gone back to see his old street in Chicago. “It came back to me what a Wabansia miracle had happened there.” He kept thinking of moments on their travels, like the evening in Rome when they rode home in a horse and carriage, over the cobbles, in the rain. He was doing too much remembering, he said.

 

Early one morning, in July 1956, Sartre and Michelle met Beauvoir and Lanzmann at the Coupole. They were about to travel as a foursome to Greece and Yugoslavia. “I gazed, with incredulous gaiety bubbling up inside me, at our shiny cars parked at the kerb,” writes Beauvoir, “and pictured them as they would look in ten days, sweeping into Athens covered with dust.”
¹⁰

Beauvoir had traded in her Aronde for a larger Ford Versailles. Sartre had bought Michelle a secondhand two-door red Peugeot. Michelle had become a good driver. She often drove her friend André Reweliotty and his jazz musicians from gig to gig late at night.

The four made their way via Venice to Belgrade. For the most part, the two couples kept to their own cars. But since Sartre did not drive, this meant that Michelle had no rest. At one point, when the cars stopped for petrol, Lanzmann suggested a swap. “You must be tired,” he said to Michelle. “I'll drive for a bit, if you like.” Lanzmann clambered in behind the wheel, and Sartre got into the other car with Beauvoir.

Lanzmann fancied Michelle. In February 1955 they had driven
from Paris to Marseille together, taking turns at the wheel, and afterward he sent her a postcard complaining that “the wretched [
les damnés
] had no other possibilities than to move from the left side to the right.”
¹¹
This time, somewhere near Belgrade, he pulled off the road so they could admire the view, and put his arm around Michelle and tried to kiss her. She smiled and pushed him away. She could never quite warm to Lanzmann, she says. She found him insufferably vain and arrogant. And she was well aware of his reputation as a womanizer.

The two couples generally spent their time separately, but met up for either lunch or dinner as a foursome. According to Michelle, the three “intellectuals” were never short of something to say, but she herself said little. Beauvoir was perfectly nice to her and was always singing her praises to the others, but Michelle sensed that Beauvoir did not really like her.

Michelle called her “Beaver.” They all did. Nevertheless, for her, Beauvoir was like a mother-in-law—indulgent on the surface, but distant, and intimidating.
¹²

 

Sartre and Beauvoir had acquired a new routine, which they kept up for the rest of their lives: September and October in Rome. After spending five weeks with their other companions, this was
their
time. They took adjoining hotel rooms in the center of the city, and worked. They loved the ancient city, with its old squares and stone fountains. Most of all they loved the beauty of the Roman nights. They avoided the intellectuals' cafés—like Rosati, on the Piazza del Popolo, where people came up and asked for autographs, and journalists for interviews. They usually ate on the Piazza Navona, not far from the Spanish Steps and the Trevi fountain, and lingered in the square till midnight, talking over drinks, with the splash of the fountains in the background. Their Italian friends—writers, artists, film and theater people—were all communist sympathizers, and seeing them in the evenings was part of the pleasure of Rome.