Tete-a-Tete (36 page)

In his frenzy to produce, Sartre was continually putting things aside to work on something else. He had shelved Flaubert, he had shelved his autobiography,
Words,
and he had abandoned his book on Italy. His book-length essay
Search for a Method
situated existentialism in relation to Marxism. As soon as he had finished that, he began a much longer and densely complex essay,
Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Sartre now argued that individuals had very little power in modern society: they could only regain their freedom by means of group revolutionary action.

In the spring of 1958 he put aside the
Critique
to write a play. Wanda was out of work again. Evelyne, ever since he had known her, had been begging him to write a part for her. Sartre wanted to write about a French soldier who had been in Algeria and had colluded with torture, then returns home as a hero, to face his family and their questions. Since he knew the censors would never allow him to write about the Algerian War, Sartre decided to set the play in postwar Germany, and make his protagonist a Nazi. He promised Simone Berriau, director of the Théâtre Antoine, that it would be ready in time for the 1958 fall season.

The growing crisis in Algeria was threatening to spill over into France, which was on the edge of civil war. The president of the Fourth Republic called upon the wartime Resistance hero General de Gaulle to come out of retirement to deal with the crisis. De Gaulle was made prime minister on June 1. He ordered the drafting of a new
constitution, which would give him far-reaching powers when he became president the following year. It was to be put to the people's vote in a public referendum on September 28.

Sartre and Beauvoir went down to Italy in mid-June, earlier than usual, convinced that De Gaulle was about to rule France as a dictator. It was stiflingly hot in Rome. Sartre poured his anger and disillusionment into his play
The Condemned of Altona,
about the use of torture by the military. But his fury got in the way of the drama. When Beauvoir read a draft, she was appalled.

She was trying to write the second volume of her memoirs, but was not in the mood. For the first time in six years she was not spending the summer with Lanzmann. He was traveling in China and North Korea with a team of journalists. She could sense that he was drifting away from her. Her journal entries during those weeks in Rome were filled with anxiety. “Sartre is working on his play: and I'm trying to interest myself in my past…. I've got to kill time somehow…. Didn't sleep much…. I'm so tense I've been taking sarpagan…. After the tension, depression…. I'm too down to write…. I slept badly and woke up with my nerves in knots…. I am always seized by panic just before I wake up…. Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.”
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Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
was going to be published in October, and Beauvoir was nervous. “I do feel uneasy—almost remorseful—when I think of all the people I've brought into it and who'll be furious.”
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The volume she was currently writing was even more delicate. How much could she say about her relationship with Sartre? She could not talk about her nine-year affair with Bost, because of Olga. Could she write about the trio with Olga? She had no desire to discuss Sartre's wartime relationship with Wanda. “Why are there some things I want so much to say,” she asked herself, “and others I want to bury?”
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In mid-August, Michelle arrived in Rome to spend a month with Sartre. Beauvoir returned to Paris alone, to an empty apartment.

 

All summer, Sartre had been upset by the lack of letters from Michelle Vian. He had written to his “darling little carp” (from the French expression “as mute as a carp”) and protested that he had
experienced too many “hellish silences” that year. “Ring me. Pick up the phone,” he implored Michelle. He added in English: “Have a heart.”
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Michelle Vian says today that she, too, was having a personal crisis that summer. For almost ten years, she had divided her life between two men. Neither of them knew that she slept with the other. It was tearing her apart, making her ill. She arrived in Rome desperately needing attention. Sartre was obsessed by his play. Michelle cried a lot, knowing there was nothing Sartre hated more than tears. She talked of killing herself. Sartre was cold.

“I felt I had no future,” says Michelle, “and I blamed André Reweliotty and Sartre. André was so temperamental, melodramatic, and Russian—always shouting at his fellow musicians and banging his fists against the wall. And Sartre was so indifferent. I knew he didn't want to be with me anymore. I knew he didn't need me. That whole summer in Rome, he said he didn't have time to go to lunch. He didn't want to go to museums. He told me to go out by myself. All he wanted to do was work.”
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Behind Sartre's back, Michelle wrote dramatic letters to Reweliotty, telling him she was contemplating suicide. One day, she and Sartre were in their hotel room—Sartre was cleaning his teeth—when there was a knock at the door. Michelle said: “Come in!” And there stood André Reweliotty. He had been on tour in Venice, playing with his friend Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans jazz clarinetist. When he got Michelle's last letter, Reweliotty had hurried to Rome to see her.

That afternoon, Sartre discovered the truth. For the last nine years—indeed, from the beginning of their relationship—Michelle had been unfaithful to him. That evening, Michelle disappeared with Reweliotty.
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Sartre was left by himself in Rome, feeling distraught. He had not been faithful himself over the years, but that did not stop him from being morally enraged by Michelle's lies. He knew, of course, that she and Reweliotty had been lovers before he came along. He also knew that Michelle spent a lot of time with Reweliotty at his country house, and that when Reweliotty and his band played in provincial towns, Michelle signed the contracts, arranged their itineraries, booked the hotels, and did the night-time driving when the musi
cians were tired. But he had always believed Michelle when she said that she and Reweliotty were simply friends. He had never thought—he had not allowed himself to envisage the hypothesis—that they had continued to be lovers.

Evelyne had often told him to wake up. But Evelyne had every reason to dislike Michelle, and so Sartre had never attached much importance to Evelyne's suspicions. It is true that even Bost had conjectured that Michelle probably slept with Reweliotty. But Sartre would not hear of it. To him, Michelle was the embodiment of innocence.

Sartre remained in Rome a few more days, struggling to write an article—the second of a series of three—that he had promised to
L'Express
about De Gaulle and the forthcoming referendum. He had called the first “The Pretender.” He called this one “The Constitution of Contempt.” And then, on the evening of September 14, he caught the night train back to Paris.

 

Beauvoir was at the Gare de Lyon early the next morning to meet him. It was raining. Sartre was emotionally exhausted, and so was she. They spent the day talking.

Sartre was about to start work on his third article for
L'Express,
but he had developed a liver infection. “He was so worn out, so feverish and weak-headed on Sunday afternoon that it looked as though it would be impossible for him to write it,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. “He worked for twenty-eight hours at a stretch, without sleep and almost without a break.”
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Sartre collapsed, and Beauvoir spent a whole evening editing his piece. She could hardly read his handwriting, and his spelling was appalling. She had to rewrite bits and make judicious cuts and links. “An ungrateful task, and pretty tiring when it's got to be done fast,” she observed. Eventually she thought the article “very good indeed.” Sartre called it “The Frogs Who Wanted a King.”

Lanzmann was back from Korea but absorbed in an article on China, and busy with the “no” campaign for the forthcoming referendum.
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Beauvoir hardly saw him. “I don't know if it's exhaustion or irritation,” she noted in her journal, “but my constant state of ten
sion, which I feel especially in the back of the neck, the eyes, the ears, the temples, makes work difficult.”
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In the referendum on September 28, the vote was a resounding “yes.” Beauvoir wept. “It's a sinister defeat…a repudiation by eighty per cent of the French people of all that we had believed in and wanted for France…. It's rather dreadful to be against a whole country, your own country.”
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Sartre was viscerally affected. He had vertigo, he had difficulty walking, and he stumbled over his words. But he refused to see a doctor. He had a play to write, he said. The deadline had passed. In early October, at lunch with Simone Berriau, the director of the Théâtre Antoine where the play was to be performed, Sartre carefully put his glass down an inch from the table. The glass fell and shattered. Simone Berriau was shocked. She finally managed to persuade Sartre to let her make an appointment with a doctor. Beauvoir was grateful to her.

The doctor said that Sartre's left ventricle was tired, and that he needed a good rest. Sartre went on working. Behind his back, Beauvoir went to see the doctor, who told her that Sartre had narrowly missed having a heart attack. “He is a very emotional man. He has overworked himself intellectually, but even more so emotionally…. Let him work a bit if he insists, but he mustn't try racing against the clock. If he does, I don't give him six months.”
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Beauvoir then went to see Simone Berriau, who agreed to put off
The Condemned of Altona
for a year, till the following fall. Sartre did not even have the energy to be angry about Beauvoir's interference. He greeted her news with an indifferent smile. But from that day on, he worked more slowly.

 

At first, Lanzmann tried to hide his new affair from Beauvoir. But she knew. One night, he returned at midnight to the Rue Schoelcher and found her sitting on her bed crying. “Tell me the truth,” she said.

He told her. He had fallen in love. The other woman was thirty-five, beautiful, rich, aristocratic. She had two children, her husband had died in a plane accident, and she lived in a sumptuous apartment on the Quai aux Fleurs, overlooking the Seine.

“The Beaver was immediately, as always, constructive and understanding,” Lanzmann recalls. “Her idea was, ‘Ok, we'll share you.' Three days with one, three days with the other. But it didn't work. Most women can't do that. They want to conquer and destroy.”
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The affair ended after six months, when Lanzmann discovered that his new love had lied to him about her age. (She was actually forty-five.) After that, Lanzmann and Beauvoir began to reconstruct their relationship, transforming it into a friendship. In the summer of 1959, they spent ten days together in Menton, on the Côte d' Azur. Both were relieved to be able to maintain a close bond.

 

The Condemned of Altona,
Sartre's ninth play, opened on September 23, 1959—a year later than planned. There had been the usual traumatic scenes during rehearsals. The play was once again too long, and as usual, Sartre hated to make cuts. The lead parts were demanding, and the producer did not consider Evelyne and Wanda up to it, but Sartre insisted. Wanda had at least had a chance to prove herself in the past, but Evelyne was just twenty-nine, and this was her first major part. Everyone in the theater world knew she had been Sartre's mistress and that she owed the role to him. The pressure on her was intense.

The Nazi soldier, stiff and unbending in his SS uniform, was brilliantly acted by the Italian-born actor Serge Reggiani. He was praised to the skies. Wanda and Evelyne were damned with faint praise.

Sartre was criticized for tedious passages, and some critics chose not to see the obvious allusions to the Algerian War. But many deemed it his finest play.

 

Now that he no longer saw Michelle Vian, Sartre was spending more time with Arlette Elkaïm. Previously they had met for two hours on a Sunday afternoon. Now he allotted her two evenings a week. And Michelle's annual three weeks of vacation with Sartre went to Elkaïm.

In September 1959, a few days after the premiere of
The Condemned of Altona,
Sartre and Elkaïm flew to Ireland, where they stayed with the American film director John Huston on his large estate near Galway.
Huston wanted to discuss the Freud screenplay Sartre was writing for him. Elkaïm, who spoke some English, acted as interpreter.

Huston wrote later:

Sartre thought Huston equally impossible to talk to. He wrote Beauvoir two long letters about the madness he encountered in that “huge barracks of a place,” surrounded by green fields, cows, and horses.

In Ireland, Elkaïm began to see for the first time that all was not well with Sartre. Until then, her admiration had blinded her. “Corydrane was a very negative aspect of our relationship,” she would tell John Gerassi in 1973. “The Beaver knew him so much better, and she says what she thinks. I was only too liable to be passive. After a while, I began to have my own thoughts at last…. Sartre was taking loads of corydrane. His tongue would be black with the stuff. It alienated me. But I didn't revolt; I would have been scared to.” Instead, she fell into a depression, which she had to hide from Sartre because he could not deal with it.
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