Tete-a-Tete (46 page)

“Sartre's awe-inspiring book is without a doubt the most extraordinary work ever composed by one writer about another,” John Weightman would write in the
New York Review of Books.
“I have been reading it for a month in varying moods of exasperation, humility, exultation, and despair…. So far he has only got to the foothills of the subject. To deal with it completely he will have to digest the universe.”
⁵⁴

Sartre told Beauvoir how happy he felt when his copies of the book arrived from Gallimard. It gave him as much pleasure, he said, as the publication of his very first book,
Nausea.

May 1971–April 1986

Throughout her life, Beauvoir would suddenly be gripped by suffocating anxiety and despair, frightening crises in which she would be racked by sobs and which she explained as a fear of death and the metaphysical void. “For a few hours I would be ravaged by a kind of tornado that stripped me bare,” she writes. “When the sky cleared again I could never be certain whether I was waking from a nightmare or relapsing into some long sky-blue fantasy, a permanent dream world.”
¹
She preferred not to dwell on the anxieties that lurk so palpably beneath the surface of her writing: her fear of solitude, abandonment, and the loss of love.
²
But she openly admitted to being haunted by what she saw as the worst nightmare of all: Sartre's death.

The one book she would write after Sartre's death, the only book she ever wrote that he did not read,
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre,
was a poignant portrayal of Sartre's physical decline. He had abused his body recklessly, and it began to take its toll early on. In 1954, when he was hospitalized in Moscow with high blood pressure, Beauvoir was filled with foreboding. Sartre was forty-nine. Four years later, at the age of fifty-three, he narrowly avoided a heart attack. By his early sixties, he was having severe dizzy spells. Apparently there were problems with the blood circulation in the left hemisphere of his brain.
His doctors urged him to smoke and drink less. Sartre ignored their warnings.

On Tuesday, May 18, 1971, Sartre arrived at the Rue Schoelcher looking dreadful. His right arm was partially paralyzed, his mouth was twisted, and he was slurring his words. Beauvoir tried hard not let her panic show. Sartre said he had woken up like that, at Elkaïm's. He had not seen a doctor, and that evening he insisted on drinking four or five glasses of whiskey as usual. By midnight he could not pronounce his words at all, and was scarcely able to stagger upstairs to bed. Beauvoir spent a sleepless night tossing on the downstairs divan.

The next day the doctor confirmed her fears that Sartre had had a slight stroke. He forbade Sartre to walk. Le Bon drove them back to the Rue Schoelcher and stayed a while. Sartre's cigarette kept dropping from his lips. Le Bon kept picking it up and handing it to him. Sartre put it back between his lips, and it fell again. Conversation was impossible. Beauvoir put on Verdi's
Requiem.
“It's most appropriate,” Sartre said.

He remained in that state for ten days. He could not play the piano with Elkaïm, he could not write, and he did not seem to have the slightest interest in anything. Beauvoir had always found it painful to part from Sartre when he went off at the beginning of July, first with Elkaïm for three weeks, then with Wanda for two. That summer, she found their separation wrenching:

The two women drove down to Italy for their vacation. For the first few days, Beauvoir kept asking herself what she was doing there. Every night, for the entire five weeks, she wept herself to sleep. Sartre was sixty-six that summer; she was sixty-three. And already she feared the worst.

Telegrams assured her that Sartre was fine. Only later did she find out that he had suffered an even worse crisis in mid-July, in Berne. Elkaïm had not informed her. Since then, he had improved again. In Naples he had gone with Wanda for quite long walks.

This was to be the pattern for the next nine years. There would be a crisis, and Beauvoir would be gripped by terror. Then Sartre would recover, and she would allow herself to hope. It was exhausting.

In mid-August, they settled into their sixth-floor suite at the Hotel Nazionale in Rome. Sartre was correcting the third volume of
The Family Idiot.
Beauvoir was polishing
All Said and Done,
the fourth and final volume of her memoirs. When they got back to Paris, he read her manuscript carefully and offered helpful criticism, as usual.

 

In February and March 1972, Sartre, Beauvoir, and the
Temps modernes
team sat around for two weekends—first in Beauvoir's apartment, then in Sartre's studio—and talked about Sartre's past while the cameras whirred. Michel Contat and Alexandre Astruc were making a documentary on Sartre.

Between sessions, Jean Pouillon told Contat sadly, “He should have been filmed in 1950. Now you only have a pale notion of how brilliant he could be.”
⁴
Nevertheless, when the film,
Sartre,
was finally released, in 1976, after a series of budget problems, the French public was captivated. It was like sitting in on a family reunion, the reviewers said. Sartre looked like the eternal postgraduate student in his roll-neck black pullover, and he had not lost his considerable charm.

One critic, Gilles Lapouge, said he was particularly moved by Jacques-Laurent Bost, who spoke about his former teacher with great tenderness, and Simone de Beauvoir, “very beautiful, who sometimes, out of a stray memory, a mere nothing, made strange sparks burst forth.”
⁵

 

During the next two years there were more dizzy spells. Sartre suffered from incontinence. His legs hurt, and he could no longer walk far. In the fall of 1972, the dentist removed all his remaining teeth and fitted him with a plate. Sartre drank too much, but always, throughout his trials, he continued to work.

He had begun work on volume four of Flaubert. He wrote about the oppression of the Basques in Franco's Spain. He spoke out for the rights of immigrant workers and political prisoners. He denounced political repression in Cuba. Beauvoir joined him in signing an appeal demanding that not only Russian Jews but all Russian citizens be granted permission to leave the USSR, if they so wanted.

With his Maoist friends, Sartre helped found a new revolutionary daily,
Libération.
It was an ambitious project—a truly democratic venture, born of 1968—and he abandoned his
Flaubert
for six months to throw himself into it. He contributed money, wrote articles, and attended meetings. For a year, until he had to give up for health reasons, he was the official editor in chief. It was due to Sartre's prestige that the newspaper had the political freedom to take flight and become one of the most important left-wing papers in France. Sartre was delighted by its success.
⁶

 

All Said and Done,
dedicated to Sylvie Le Bon, was published in September 1972. For the first time Beauvoir had no project in mind. The women's movement kept her busy, and she found the distraction a godsend. She became the president of Choisir and the League of Women's Rights, groups that informed women of their rights, advocated free contraception and the legalization of abortion, and provided free defense for women in court. Beauvoir wrote prefaces, gave interviews, and met with feminists from around the world. Her main writing was her daily journal, in which she obsessively chronicled Sartre's deterioration.

 

Fortunately, she had Le Bon. “Joy of my Life,” Beauvoir called her.
⁷
Five years earlier, she had written to Le Bon from Japan: “My Sylvie, I am delighted to be returning to Paris, because of Paris and because I want to work, but most of all to see you again. It is a great happiness for me to know that you exist, a happiness that stays with me constantly.”
⁸

Le Bon had finally landed a teaching job in Paris. She was thirty now, and her father persuaded her that it was time to give up her
hotel life and invest in her own place. She bought a quiet courtyard apartment on the Avenue du Maine, twenty minutes from Beauvoir. It was a rare day when the women did not see each other.

Whereas Sartre saw his women strictly one at a time, Beauvoir had always enjoyed sharing her companions with Sartre. They spent Saturday evenings with Le Bon, mostly in Beauvoir's apartment. Occasionally the three of them went to the opera, which Le Bon loved. (They kept Sartre's one smart suit at Beauvoir's place for these outings.) On Sundays they had lunch at the Coupole. Every summer, Le Bon spent time with them in Rome. Sartre liked Le Bon to be with them. He was more cheerful when she was there.

At moments, there was a slight whiff of the old trios. There had been some sort of sexual encounter between Le Bon and Sartre in Rome in 1968. Sartre had let his hands wander. Le Bon had invited it. “I pretended I was drunk. For me, Sartre was the great writer. I was in awe of him.” Beauvoir did not seem to mind when Le Bon told her about it afterward.
⁹

One Sunday, Beauvoir and Sartre were invited by their friend Tomiko Asabuki, their former Japanese interpreter, to lunch at her house in Versailles. Le Bon went too. They ate stuffed duck and drank excellent wines, and on the way back in the car, Le Bon “made ardent declarations to Sartre.” He was, Beauvoir writes, “delighted.”
¹⁰

There were stormy scenes, too, which Beauvoir does not mention in
Adieux.
These usually occurred on Saturday evenings on the Rue Schoelcher, when they had had too much to drink. Sartre would complain about one or another of his helpless women. Le Bon would retort that he was paternalistic and macho, that he suffered from a “God complex,” and that he
made
these women helpless. They were always either sick or tired, she railed. From what? Doing nothing? For a man who never wanted a family, you have the worst of family life!

Sartre said he knew it, but he preferred to be a fool than a jerk. These women depended on him. He had obligations to them. He had no respect for men who left their women in the lurch.

“But that's such an old-fashioned way of thinking!”

“Well, I'm old-fashioned. And now I'm too old to change.”
¹¹

It was the height of the women's movement. Le Bon, along with Beauvoir, was spending considerable time discussing sexual politics in
various women's groups. In interviews, Beauvoir would assert that economic independence was the fundamental prerequisite for female independence. And here was Sartre supporting three women who spent most of their time, it seemed to Le Bon, giving him a hard time.

The subject that was most likely to cause Le Bon to explode was Arlette Elkaïm. She was Sartre's most expensive commodity. He had already bought her an artist's studio on the Rue Delambre, two minutes from the Dôme. But Elkaïm was asthmatic and she liked to escape from the city's pollution as often as possible, and so Sartre bought her a house in the south of France, as well. “I saw red,” says Le Bon. “Arlette never had a job. She was completely parasitical on Sartre. She was always saying she did not want his money, and she kept taking it from him. And there was Sartre, who by the end of the month could not even afford a pair of shoes for himself. The whole thing drove me mad.”

There were occasions when Le Bon stormed out in a fury, slamming the door behind her. The next day she would apologize, embarrassed. “Yes, your behavior was odious,” Beauvoir would agree. And Le Bon was forgiven.

These days, Le Bon is full of remorse about those outbursts. “I was brutal back then. I said exactly what I thought, no holds barred. It did not make life easier for the Beaver, who was in the middle, and worried sick about Sartre's health.”
¹²

 

In March 1973—when he was sixty-eight—Sartre had another stroke. He no longer recognized his friends, no longer knew where he was. The doctor said it was asphyxia of the brain, and pressed him again to give up his heavy drinking and smoking. Sartre made a vague effort, then went back to it.

In July, he spent three weeks with Elkaïm in her house in the village of Junas, near Nîmes. For hours he sat on the balcony, gazing ahead of him. He could barely make out the contour of the houses, he told her. At the end of the month, Beauvoir and Le Bon, who had been traveling in the south of France, went to fetch him in the car and take him to Venice, where (without Elkaïm's knowing it) he was to
spend two weeks with Wanda. Beauvoir was shocked to see him walking with small, faltering steps.

Beauvoir and Le Bon stayed on a few days in Venice, meeting Sartre at nine-thirty
A.M
., behind Wanda's back, for breakfast in the Piazza San Marco. Beauvoir was reassured to hear that Wanda was giving him his medicines carefully, and taking him on little walks. “Then one morning I left him,” she writes. “I did not want Sylvie to get bored with Venice, which she was beginning to know by heart.”
¹³
They left him their addresses, and wished him
bon courage
in putting up with Wanda. Sartre said he would miss them. And the two women set off for Florence.

Later, Beauvoir would tell her biographer, Deirdre Bair, that she felt a “double-edged guilt” in those years.
¹⁴
She had Le Bon to consider as well as Sartre, and she worried about imposing a tired old man on a vigorous young woman. Le Bon liked to explore new places. So did she. But if she enjoyed herself with Le Bon, she would feel bad about Sartre.

In mid-August, Beauvoir and Le Bon went to meet Sartre at Rome's Fiumicino Airport. He was almost blind. In Venice, the sun had hurt his eyes, he said. He had scarcely been able to see the city he loved so much. Beauvoir took him to a specialist, who said that Sartre had suffered hemorrhages behind his left eye (his only good eye), but that his sight would surely improve in time. For months Sartre clung to that hope.

They were a threesome in Rome that year. Beauvoir read to Sartre every morning. He slept in the afternoons, and Beauvoir and Le Bon went for a walk or read side by side in the shade. The most painful moments were meals. Sartre was pre-diabetic and had put on a lot of weight, and it worried Beauvoir to see him tuck in to huge quantities of pasta and ice cream. And then there was his messy eating. Sartre, who had spent his life being so self-conscious about imposing his body on others that he hated even to ask directions in the street, had no idea what embarrassment he was inflicting on his table companions. He could no longer see the food on his plate or at the end of his fork, and he had almost no sensation around his mouth. Afraid of vexing him, Beauvoir could not keep telling him to wipe his face with his napkin.