Tete-a-Tete (42 page)

When Sartre went to see Elkaïm at their usual hour, he found a note on the door: “I'm not here. No point in ringing the bell. The dog won't stop barking.” Sartre tore up the note, dropped the pieces on the doormat, and went to have a coffee. When he came back the shreds of paper had disappeared, so he knew Elkaïm was in. He rang the bell, setting off a racket of barking. Finally Elkaïm opened the door. For a long time she listened coldly while he gave his excuses. Then she went to the bathroom, and he heard her vomiting.

Sartre reminded her of their agreement. He had fully assumed his paternal role, he said, but she should not confuse it with another role. Her only demands of him should be filial. Elkaïm told him she did not like to be lied to.

In the end, she accompanied him as far as his mother's hotel. It appeared, Sartre told Zonina, that they were more or less reconciled.

 

From May 2 to June 6, 1966, Sartre and Beauvoir were back in the Soviet Union. “What are you doing here in the midst of all this?” Ehrenburg asked them.
³⁶
He and Zonina and their friends could talk of little other than the disastrous trial and deportation of two young writers, Yuly Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, who as a result of publishing anti-Soviet works in the West, under pen names, had been sentenced to years in hard labor camps. On Ehrenburg's initiative, a petition was sent around calling for the writers' immediate release. Zonina was one of sixty-two out of six thousand members of the Soviet Writers Union who dared to sign. “It called for a great deal of courage,” Beauvoir writes. “Putting one's name to this petition meant taking the risk of never being sent abroad again, of losing one's job and of remaining unpublished for ever.”
³⁷

It was the beginning of the dissident movement. Intellectuals were now furtively passing self-published, forbidden literature—
samizdat
—among themselves. But it was a depressing, frightening time. Sartre and Beauvoir returned with Zonina to Yalta and Odessa, then took the train to the Ukraine. They were constantly running up against prohibitions. Foreigners could not travel here; foreigners were not allowed to go there. It was absurd and immensely frustrating.

In 1965, the year after Sartre refused the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy had awarded it to the Soviet writer Sholokhov. When Zonina tried to arrange a meeting between Sartre and Solzhenitsyn in the summer of 1966, she was told that Solzhenitsyn had no desire to meet him. Solzhenitsyn was apparently enraged by Sartre's comment that Sholokhov deserved the Nobel Prize more than Pasternak. The comment had no doubt influenced the Academy.

“Our trip was perfect happiness,” Sartre wrote to Zonina when he got back to Paris. “There was nothing gay about it, however. Your health, your moments of fatigue,…the depressing atmosphere of Moscow, the ‘affair,' and all the serious things—painful things—we said to each other.”
³⁸

Zonina, as usual, was more blunt. She was angry about events in the Soviet Union, she told Sartre, and had resigned from the Writers Union in disgust. She felt very unhappy, and above all, terribly tired.
Sartre did not understand her life. How could he, since he did not know its daily detail? He had disappointed her. She had loved him for his liberty, but she had come to realize that he was not free. He did not say what he believed. He did not do what he wanted to do.

Sartre was crushed, unable to work for a week. “Everything you said was so true in its hardness that I could only accept it,” he wrote back. It did not help, he said, that he was growing old. He had become less free as he grew older. There were so many accumulated obligations. His only real freedom was
her,
Lena, and the love he had for her.

 

Beauvoir's story “Misunderstanding in Moscow,” discarded during her lifetime and published after her death, sheds interesting light on her feelings in the summer of 1966, as she traveled around the Soviet Union with Sartre and Zonina.
³⁹
Even the fictional transformations are revealing. The Sartre character is called André; the Zonina character is called Masha, the name of Zonina's real-life daughter. In the story Masha is not André's lover, but his daughter. And yet they act like lovers.

The story is set at the time of writing, in June 1966. André and Nicole are a French couple in their early sixties. Both are painfully conscious that they are aging. André is a well-known and politically committed intellectual, and in Paris he is in constant demand. Nicole is a retired schoolteacher. They have always told each other everything, at least in theory.

They have come to Moscow to see André's daughter, Masha. She was brought up by her mother, and André saw very little of her while she was growing up, but in the last five years they have discovered each other with joy.

Masha is waiting for them at the airport. “A beautiful young woman,” Nicole thinks to herself. They wait an interminable time for the baggage to arrive. Nicole had forgotten; nothing happens fast in this country. Masha drives slowly (like everyone else in Moscow) to the Peking Hotel. André says how excited he is to be there again. Nicole is already missing Paris.

They get out of the car and breathe in the familiar smell of diesel
fumes. The price of their hotel room has tripled in the last three years. At least the plumbing works, Nicole thinks to herself. And for the first time there are curtains covering the windows.

André has often said how pleased he is that the two women—“the two people he loves most in the world”—get on so well. Nicole, it is true, feels real friendship for Masha. But from the time they arrive, she also feels twinges of other things.

She feels old, for a start, and tells herself that it must be the contrast with Masha, who is so fresh and vigorous. And she can't help it: she's bored with Moscow. The city is uglier each time they see it. “It's a pity that changes are almost always for the worse,” she muses, “whether places or people.”

Each time they visit the USSR, Masha acts as their guide and interpreter. She is the one who has to negotiate their itinerary with the Intourist authorities. She is the one who knows this country, its contradictions, and its frightful red tape. But it means they are in her hands. And sometimes Nicole would prefer not to have Masha decide everything—right down to the square they sit in to have lunch, the one Masha insists has the best view of the church.

Masha is admirably independent, Nicole reflects. She is submissive to no man. And yet she enjoys her femininity—far more so than she, Nicole, has ever done. Perhaps it is because Masha lives in a country where women do not suffer from an inferiority complex.

Nicole longs to be alone with André. On their previous visits to the Soviet Union, Masha had her own work to attend to as well. On this trip, she is with them all the time. André appears to like it. Nicole keeps wondering: doesn't he ever want to be alone with me? They never have a chance to talk, just the two of them. It is making her morose.

Sometimes she finds herself forgetting that Masha is André's daughter. There is a complicity between them, a freshness and tenderness. The two of them say “tu” to each other, and both say “vous” to Nicole. It hurts Nicole to see André use the same words and winning smiles with Macha that he once used with her. She is fed up with the interminable discussions between André and Masha about Soviet culture. And she can sense Masha's impatience with André's
questions and comments. “‘You are too abstract,' Masha kept telling him.”

The vacation lumbers past. In less than a week they will return to Paris. Nicole is looking forward to their departure. Then André ruins everything.

Did he really believe he had told her? she wonders. He was drinking a lot, far too much, and was often drunk. But, in fact, Nicole is sure he is lying. It would not be the first time. He lied about empty bottles, and sometimes he pretended he had seen a doctor when he hadn't. When she caught him, he laughed. “It would have been too long to explain, so I took a shortcut.” But this time, she can hardly contain her fury.

Nicole is unable to hide her rage. She threatens to go back to Paris early. “If you want to,” André says. In front of Masha, they keep up a
polite façade all day. In the evening, André drinks four glasses of vodka. There's something senile about his attempts to converse with Masha in Russian, Nicole thinks to herself. Masha was giggling at his accent; the two were as thick as thieves. Nicole is beginning to wonder whether her past life with André was quite simply a mirage. So many women lied to themselves about their lives. Perhaps she did, too.

She drinks too much and goes to bed feeling sad and lost. When she wakes up, her head is heavy. She opens her eyes. There's André, sitting in an armchair at the end of her bed, watching her. Her lips tremble. He is speaking to her, in that caressing voice she liked so much. We can never be quite sure about our memories, he says. He comes toward her, puts his arms around her shoulders, kisses her on the temple, and tells her that even if he did forget to tell her, there is no reason to be so upset. She clings to him, her cheek on his jacket, and cries. What a relief! It is so tiring to hate someone you love.

In the corridor she takes his arm. They are reconciled. It was a misunderstanding.

 

Three months later, in mid-September 1966, Beauvoir and Sartre flew to Tokyo together. Seventeen hours of flight. A new country, a new adventure.

Sartre had more readers in Japan than in any other country. Beauvoir's
The Second Sex,
translated into Japanese in 1965, was a best seller. Nevertheless, they were by no means prepared for the reception awaiting them. There were more than a hundred journalists at the airport, blinding them with their flash bulbs. A vast crowd of mostly young people called out their names and tried to catch hold of their hands and arms as they passed. Their interpreter, Tomiko Asabuki, guided them into a room where they were bombarded with questions from the press.

For a month they traveled around the country, gave lectures, and met left-wing intellectuals. Sartre spoke at a huge meeting to protest the Vietnam War. Beauvoir, as usual, ploughed through a small library of books about Japan. Sartre, as usual, preferred to try to understand the culture by getting to know one person intimately. During their
stay, the tiny, attentive, adoring Tomiko Asabuki became his lover.
⁴⁰
“In almost every journey we've made or that you've made, there's been a woman who turned out to be the incarnation of the country for you,” Beauvoir observed.
⁴¹

On their way back, they stopped for five days in Moscow to see Zonina. It was Sartre's eleventh trip to the Soviet Union. He did not want to know it, but he knew, and Zonina knew. Their love affair was over.

November 1966–May 1971

Her suicide created shock waves in the French Left Bank intelligentsia. Evelyne Rey, formerly Evelyne Lanzmann, killed herself on November 18, 1966. She was thirty-six. “All those who knew her loved her,” declared the obituary in the
Nouvel Observateur,
“because she was bursting with life and because she loved everything.”
¹

There was nothing ambiguous about Evelyne's death. She took an overdose of barbiturates and made sure no one would find her until the pills had done their job. She left several farewell letters on her table—to her brother Claude and to Sartre, among others—in which she scrupulously tried to relieve them of remorse. “I am suffering and it's no one's fault. My relationship with myself has gone off track.”
²

Evelyne's acting career had not been a success. “In a way she didn't have acting in her blood,” her brother Claude Lanzmann says. “She was afraid of the audience.”
³
Her best role was as Estelle, in Sartre's play
No Exit
(a part Sartre had originally written for Wanda), and she had been thrilled when O.R.T.F., French Radio and Television, broadcast a television adaptation of the play in October 1965. Tragically, her one really major role, the one Sartre had written for her—Johanna, in
The Condemned of Altona
—had proved too difficult for her. The “magnificent block of ice” remark had stung. On the whole, the theater had brought her a lot of heartache and humiliation.

Her love life had been equally disastrous. She was beautiful, and men were readily attracted to her, but the men she loved were usually married, and in any event not committed to her. Her affair with Sartre had been clandestine. Of course, Sartre had been loyal to her in his way and had continued to see her three times a week, an hour and a half each time, and to support her financially. But she knew he was disappointed in her as an actress.

Recently, both Sartre and Evelyne's brother Claude had been pressing her to give up acting and take up journalism. “That would be to accept my defeat as an actress,” she had protested.
⁴
The final straw was when her body failed her. In March 1966 she had been about to leave on tour with
Altona
when she contracted pleurisy. For weeks she was in the hospital, in a great deal of pain. When she came out, only one of her lungs functioned, and the slightest exertion left her breathless.

From then on, she was tired and depressed, anxious about her career, and frightened about her health. In the late autumn, feeling slightly stronger, she went to Tunisia to participate in a documentary about Tunisian women. She came back exhausted, but seemed proud of the work she had done. While there, she had taken up with a former lover, a well-known television producer who had plans for her to play a leading role in his forthcoming television show.
⁵
But she was not in love with him, and she was tired of acting. One morning in November, in the cold predawn hours, she chose death.

Sartre reacted to the news with violent abdominal cramps. “There is, of course, the guilt,” he told Zonina three months later. “We all feel that. It weighs on us. Life wasn't easy for her, and finally, I wasn't easy on her either, despite appearances.” Since Evelyne's death, he felt no joy in anything, he added, and no desire to do anything, except to plod on with Flaubert.

 

“To tell the truth, of all the deaths that occurred among people I knew during these last years, only one really moved me very deeply, and that was Evelyne's,” Beauvoir would write in
All Said and Done.
“But I have no wish to speak of it.”

In truth, Beauvoir would have liked to talk about it, but couldn't.
She had promised Sartre she would not mention his passion for Evelyne, because of Michelle. She discussed the problem with Claude Lanzmann. Should she talk about Evelyne without talking about Evelyne's relationship with Sartre? Lanzmann said no; that would completely falsify Evelyne's life. But when
Force of Circumstance
came out, Evelyne was very hurt. She had been a close member of the family for years, and once again she had been left out of the public picture. Beauvoir had talked at length about Claude, but scarcely mentioned
her.
She seemed doomed to be hidden in the background.

When Evelyne killed herself, she and Sartre had not been lovers for ten years. Nevertheless, Beauvoir felt sure that the unsatisfactory relationship with Sartre had played a role in Evelyne's suicide. She told John Gerassi:

Ten years after that conversation with Gerassi, Beauvoir's biographer, Deirdre Bair, asked Beauvoir about Evelyne's suicide. Beauvoir became agitated and spoke with obvious distress. “It was this very, very, great, great friendship she had for Sartre that scarred her enormously,” Beauvoir said in such a low voice that Bair could hardly hear her. “I should have written about her…I saw her a lot and liked her very much. I owed that to her.”
⁷

Jacques Lanzmann is convinced that her men friends
used
Evelyne. She was known both for her beauty and for being the lover of famous men, and this made her something of a trophy. After Sartre there were many boyfriends. “They could join hands,” he says bitterly. “They had her hide.”
⁸

Evelyne's former husband, Serge Rezvani, writes that though Evelyne's death was a brutal shock to her family and friends, no one
wanted to see the real tragedy behind it. “Today I can say that Evelyne was the consenting victim of a misogynous frivolousness which, until 1968, characterized the Left Bank intelligentsia.”
⁹

Rezvani received a lot of flak for that sentence. The Left Bank critics did not like it at all.

 

In the early sixties, the second and third volumes of Beauvoir's memoirs aroused a febrile new interest in the Sartre-Beauvoir couple.
The Prime of Life
(1960) and
Force of Circumstance
(1963) were runaway successes. There were photos of Beauvoir and Sartre in all the magazines. The Sartre-Beauvoir legend was firmly in place.

Beauvoir's memoirs, the
story
of her life, inevitably had repercussions in her actual life. She received letters, many letters. Some readers were grateful; others were enraged.
¹⁰
Some wished she had said more; many wished she had said less. There were frequent complaints about distortions and misrepresentation. Sartre's other women were angry about being left in the background, as if they hardly featured in Sartre's life.

To anyone who knew the Sartrean clan, it was clear that Beauvoir was taking control of the public image. She was telling the story
her
way. It is not that she skimmed over all the anguished episodes in her past; she did not. Much of it was scrupulously honest. But the act of writing gave her immense power. She was publicly stating her position of primacy among Sartre's women. She could leave Wanda out of the story. She could put in a withering comment here and there about Olga, Dolores, or anyone else who had once caused her torment. Above all, the tone and viewpoint of her narrative created the
effect
of control. She was looking back on her past from a position of triumph.

“Everything changes when you tell about life,” the narrator in Sartre's novel
Nausea
muses. “It's a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the beginning: ‘It was a fine autumn evening in 1922….' And in reality you have started at the end.”

Wanda hated Beauvoir's memoirs. She was jealous of the fuss surrounding them. She resented this idealized portrait, as she saw it, of
the Sartre-Beauvoir relationship. To her, the books were full of lies. Beauvoir had hardly mentioned Wanda's role in Sartre's life during the war. Worse, the books made Wanda wonder about Sartre. To her, he had always systematically denied his closeness to Beauvoir.

Like her sister, Wanda had always been prone to wild rages, but after their mother's death, in the early 1960s, Wanda developed paranoia. She thought everyone was plotting against her, and her hatred grew violent. Her mental state was not helped by drugs. For the past decade she had been rivaling Sartre with her intake of amphetamines and barbiturates. These days she was taking cocaine as well. There were sinister scrapes with drug dealers. Once, she fell in the street and did not know where she lived. The police picked her up and took her to a hospital. Finally, they contacted Sartre.

These days, Wanda hated her sister, Olga, but there was no one she hated as much as Beauvoir. Whenever she came across Beauvoir's photograph in the press, she would cover it with furious scribbling. She stuck pins in a voodoo doll, trying to will Beauvoir to an early death. After
Force of Circumstance
came out, Wanda obtained a gun—a “lady's revolver,” which could kill from close range—and told Sartre she had every intention of committing murder.

It was Sylvie Le Bon who took action. She formed a small “commando unit,” she says, with two girlfriends from the Ecole Normale. They rang Wanda's bell on the Rue du Dragon and announced over the intercom that they were journalists from
Elle
magazine, hoping to be able to interview the famous actress Marie Olivier. Wanda let them in. While her girlfriends pounced on Wanda and held her captive, Le Bon went through Wanda's drawers, looking both for the gun and for letters from Sartre. (Beauvoir was afraid Wanda would destroy the letters she had received from Sartre over the years.) Le Bon found the gun, but not the letters.
¹¹
The women left Wanda bruised and terrified.

Beauvoir told Le Bon off in no uncertain terms. “I told her I intended to take the gun from Wanda. She did not try to stop me,” Le Bon says today. “It was the mid-sixties. They were radical times. I was a little terrorist.” She smiles. “It's true, we were rather crazy. I'm not proud of this episode.”
¹²

 

Nelson Algren was the only person who vented his fury publicly about Beauvoir's memoirs.
America Day by Day
and
The Mandarins
had already stretched his tolerance. “To publicize a relationship existing between two people is to destroy it,” he told an interviewer. “See, the big thing about sexual love is it lets you become her and lets her become you, but when you share the relationship with everyone who can afford a book, you reduce it. It no longer has meaning. It's good for the book trade, I guess, but you certainly lose interest in the other party.”
¹³

That was before he read
Force of Circumstance.
The English translation came out in the United States in the spring of 1965. As a prepublication appetizer, extracts were published in the November and December 1964 issues of
Harper's
magazine. The two installments were called “The Question of Fidelity.” The editors picked out those morsels that would most interest American readers: namely, Beauvoir's account of her and Sartre's “American affairs”—Sartre's with Vanetti and hers with Algren. Dolores Vanetti was given the thinnest of disguises as “M.” Algren was called by his name. He was out in the open, swinging in the breeze.

The November issue had a candy pink cover featuring two blue eyes. Beauvoir's? On a wintry Chicago evening, Algren opened the magazine at the cover story. He read how excited Sartre had been to go to America after the Liberation. He read about Sartre's affair with “M.” in New York. Then he read about Beauvoir's own trip to America:

In the December installment, subtitled “An American Rendezvous,” Algren was treated to details he himself had never been told: