Tete-a-Tete (37 page)

In his letters, Sartre tried, not very convincingly, to reassure Beauvoir that he was being abstemious:

These days, Sartre's nervous tension was such that he could not sit still. He kept shuffling his feet, to the point that he wore out a piece of carpet in Beauvoir's apartment. She covered it with a patch. His elbows were so busy that with their perpetual movement he made the arms of her chairs threadbare. For years he had not been able to sleep without earplugs and four or five strong sleeping pills.

 

In the early evening of January 4, 1960, the phone rang in Beauvoir's apartment. It was Lanzmann, telling her that Camus had been killed in a car accident. Camus was forty-six, six years younger than Beauvoir. She was aghast:

Camus had edited
Combat
during the Resistance; he had danced at the “family's”
fiestas;
he had sent Sartre and Bost to America. Camus and Sartre had fallen out over Stalinism. More recently, the Sartre clan despised Camus for what they saw as his sympathy to the French in the Algerian War.
³⁶
But as a person, they
missed
him.

In a poignant tribute to Camus, Sartre played down their rupture. “A quarrel is nothing—even should you never see each other again…. That did not prevent me from thinking of him.”
³⁷

At seventy, Sartre would remember Camus more fondly than ever: “There was a side of him that smacked of the little Algerian tough guy, very much a hooligan, very funny…. His language was very racy—so was mine, for that matter—we told filthy stories one after
another, and his wife and Simone de Beauvoir pretended to be shocked…. He was probably the last good friend I had.”
³⁸

 

Nelson Algren arrived in Paris in February 1960. Beauvoir, who was spending five weeks in Cuba with Sartre, had left him the key to her apartment and instructed Olga, Bost, and Michelle to look after him.

Algren was shocked by how ravaged Olga looked these days, but he enjoyed flirting with Michelle. “The Golden Zazou had lost some of her sheen,” he would write in his memoir
Who Lost an American?
, “but was still the Michelle who cared for people.”
³⁹
Michelle had been re-admitted into the family after she attempted suicide. She had been desperate without Sartre.

After Sartre and Beauvoir returned to Paris, Michelle and Algren continued to go out together some evenings. “Simone de Beauvoir organized our dates,” Michelle says. “We danced to ‘Night and Day,' and Algren tried to hold me tighter. In a taxi, as we passed the Palais de Chaillot, he took my hand and put it between his legs.” When she told this to Sartre the next day, Sartre, aroused by the story, made love to her—the first time in two years. After that, their physical relationship was back on.

Michelle was overjoyed that Sartre still desired her, but she no longer had any illusions that he would give her much of his time. They saw each other once a week for two hours. Michelle loved André Reweliotty, but she loved Sartre more. She was forty-two, and decided that it would fill the void in her life if she had a child by Sartre. “He didn't mind,” she says. “He wouldn't have looked after it, of course, but he was as happy to give babies as anything else.”
⁴⁰

As fate would have it, Michelle, who had always become pregnant so easily when she did not want to, could no longer conceive. She consulted an obstetrician (Dr. Lagroua Weill-Hallé) and discovered that she had blocked fallopian tubes. She underwent an operation, but still nothing happened. In the past, she had become pregnant three times by Sartre, and had had three abortions. It appeared that the last abortion had left her sterile.
⁴¹

 

Beauvoir and Sartre had come back very enthusiastic about Cuba. They were there for what Sartre called “the honeymoon of the Revolution.”
⁴²
There was a festive atmosphere on the island, the streets were full of people dancing, and the two writers had been fêted wherever they went. They even spent three days traveling around the island with Fidel Castro. Press photographs disseminated throughout the world showed Sartre and Beauvoir standing next to the handsome young Castro, who towered over them both; in another photo they were plowing through the water in a fast motorboat, with Castro standing at the helm; in a third they sat talking to the heavy-booted revolutionaries Castro and Che Guevara, all three men smoking thick Cuban cigars.

Back in Paris, Sartre wrote a series of articles about Cuba (“Hurricane over the Sugar Cane”), while Beauvoir devoted time to Algren. They had not seen each other for eight years, and were nervous at first. They soon relaxed. Algren wore the same old corduroy trousers and worn jacket. “Despite the years of separation and the stormy summers of 1950 and '51, we felt as close as during the best days of 1949,” Beauvoir writes in her memoirs.
⁴³

She and Algren spent cozy days in the Rue Schoelcher. Algren got up first and squeezed orange juice for them both. He installed his electric typewriter on the small desk Lanzmann had once used. They worked together in the mornings, and in the afternoons Beauvoir continued to work at Sartre's. They traveled to Marseille, Spain, Istanbul, Greece, Crete. Occasionally, it seems, they made love.

In August, Beauvoir flew to Brazil with Sartre, leaving Algren once again in her apartment. He stayed on a few more weeks. From Rio, Beauvoir wrote tender letters to her “subversive beast of my heart, my faraway love.” She loved him “more than ever and forever,” she said.
⁴⁴
Algren wrote three short letters, and then there was silence. When Beauvoir returned to Paris in November, she hoped to find a pile of letters from him. There was not one. He had left her some photos of their time in Istanbul, a book, some magazines, a nut bar, and a poem on her desk. But he had gone. She missed him.

 

Beauvoir had not enjoyed the Brazil trip. She was upset by the silence from Algren. She would have liked to go on walks with Sartre, just the
two of them. Instead, Sartre gave lectures on colonialism and the Algerian War, and there were endless meetings, interviews, press conferences, and dinners. Wherever they went, Sartre was greeted as a hero, particularly by young people. But he was suffering from shingles, caused by overwork and depression.

Then Beauvoir became ill. In Manaus, a godforsaken little town on the Amazon River she developed a high fever. She and Sartre were scared of her dying in that place, and took a plane at four in the morning back to Recife. By the time they arrived, Beauvoir felt half dead. She was in the hospital for a week with suspected typhoid fever. While Beauvoir lay in bed sweating, Sartre tried to seduce Cristina Tavaares, a twenty-five-year-old Brazilian journalist, a virgin, with flaming red hair. As soon as she felt strong enough, Beauvoir (whose English was not up to her usual standard) wrote to Algren, half amused, half despairing:

Beauvoir did not hear from Algren, but there were plenty of worried letters and phone calls from Paris. Before they left, Sartre and Beauvoir
had been among 121 French intellectuals to sign the “Manifesto of the 121,” demanding independence for Algeria and amnesty for all French soldiers who refused to take up arms against the Algerian people. An inflammatory petition, it advocated insubordination. Among the other well-known names were André Breton, Marguerite Duras, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Simone Signoret. And at the
Temps modernes,
Bost, Lanzmann, Pouillon, and Pontalis had all signed.

The other thing that was happening while they were away was the trial of Francis Jeanson, a militant member of the
Temps modernes
committee, who had worked for the Algerian National Liberation Front, the FLN. At the trial, which was making front-page news, one of Jeanson's defense lawyers read out a letter from Sartre: “If Jeanson had asked me to carry a suitcase or to give sanctuary to Algerian militants and I could have done it without putting them in danger, I would have done it without hesitation.”
⁴⁶
The letter caused an outcry. Sartre was widely accused of treason.

Near the end of October, when Beauvoir and Sartre were about to come home, Lanzmann phoned to say that under no circumstances should they land in Paris. There had been death threats made against Sartre. Five thousand war veterans had paraded down the Champs-Elysées shouting, “Shoot Sartre!” Thirty of the 121 signatories had already been charged. Some had been fired from their jobs. And all were threatened with five years in prison. The atmosphere in the country was so tense that Sartre risked being assassinated or thrown in jail as soon as he got back. Beauvoir was also in danger. The ultra-right-wing nationalists knew they could get at Sartre by threatening her. And she had incurred wrath in her own right with her spirited defense, published in
Le Monde,
of Djamila Boupacha, an Algerian Muslim and member of the FLN whom French soldiers had viciously tortured, including raping her with a broken bottle.
⁴⁷

At the insistence of their friends, Sartre and Beauvoir changed their flight to Barcelona. They were met there by Bost and Pouillon. Lanzmann joined them just outside Paris. They drove into the city by the back roads.

The next few months were a very strange time. Sartre and Beauvoir
were living together, and because of the death threats, they were scarcely able to go out. They ate ham, sausages, and lots of canned food. When Bost visited, he cooked them a decent meal. The Brazilian girl wrote passionate letters, but Sartre decided he would not marry her after all. Beauvoir's
The Prime of Life
came out in November, to huge acclaim. The critics agreed that Beauvoir's most exciting writing was about her own life.

Sartre called a press conference in Beauvoir's apartment to protest the charges against thirty of the signatories of the manifesto. “If those individuals are found guilty, then we all are. If not, let them withdraw the case.”
⁴⁸

In the end, the charges were withdrawn. The government was not prepared to press charges against Sartre. “You do not imprison Voltaire,” De Gaulle said, meaning Sartre. And so the others could not be punished either.

Sartre's name had protected them from prison, but he could not prevent his friends losing their jobs. In a gesture that reminded them of McCarthyist America, those who were employed by the state—teachers, radio and television people—were blacklisted and fired. Jean Pouillon, who worked for the National Assembly, was suspended for six months without a salary.

 

The end of the Algerian War was in sight: De Gaulle was talking about independence. The backlash from right-wing French nationalists was brutal. In July 1961, Sartre's apartment on the Rue Bonaparte was hit by a plastic explosive. The damage was not too bad, but Sartre moved his mother to a hotel on the Boulevard Raspail, and he himself camped out at Beauvoir's place. In October, some thirty thousand Algerians demonstrated against an eight-thirty
P.M
. curfew imposed on Muslims in Paris. It was a peaceful march until the French police swooped down on them, shooting, clubbing, and throwing them into the Seine. At least two hundred Algerians were killed. The mainstream press covered up the atrocity.
Les Temps modernes
told the truth about these and other horrors.

It was in a state of fury about colonialism and its crimes that Sartre
sat down to write a preface for Frantz Fanon's book
The Wretched of the Earth.
He and Fanon had met in Rome the previous summer, and though Fanon was dying of leukemia, he had talked to Sartre with feverish urgency for three days and nights, scarcely stopping to sleep. A black psychiatrist originally from Martinique, Fanon was involved with the FLN. In his book he argued that violence was a “cleansing force” for the third world, which restored pride and self-respect to the natives who had been colonized.