Becoming Beauvoir Read online

  So was Maheu Beauvoir’s first lover? The diary leaves this obscure. We have seen already that at the time of her interviews with Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir denied that her relationship with Maheu had been sexual. But Sartre and Maheu both said the opposite: Sartre confirmed to John Gerassi (Stépha’s son) that ‘Maheu was in love with her […] And she was in love with Maheu; in fact he was her first lover.’17 On this basis some have concluded that their ‘translating Aristotle’ was not what Beauvoir claimed. In The Prime of Life, Beauvoir wrote that she surrendered her virginity ‘with glad abandon’ – but she does not specify to whom.18 However, a passage in the diaries may support Beauvoir’s denials: she wrote that ‘it was beautiful that with this sensual man [Maheu] nothing physical intervened between us, while with Sartre, who isn’t sensual, the harmony of our bodies has a meaning that makes our love more beautiful’.19

  This relationship presents us with a strange conundrum: Beauvoir denied that it was sexual; the men claimed it was. When I asked Beauvoir’s friend and adopted daughter Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir she confirmed that Simone was attracted to Maheu and their relationship was intimate but not consummated in the period before Beauvoir met Sartre: at this stage, Beauvoir was a respectable Catholic woman, and there were things a respectable Catholic woman didn’t do. In an interview given later in life Beauvoir was asked if there was anything she wished, in hindsight, that she had included in her memoirs. Her answer was ‘a frank and balanced account of her own sexuality. A truly sincere one, from a feminist point of view’.20 Even in her own diaries Beauvoir did not give an altogether frank account of her experiences. Did she fear that her mother might read them? She had yet to discover the way her personal life would be distorted by fame, used to distract attention from her philosophy and her politics.

  6

  Rooms of Her Own

  When the 21-year-old Beauvoir returned to Paris in September of 1929 she moved out of her parents’ apartment, renting a fifth-floor room in her maternal grandmother’s property at 91 rue Denfert-Rochereau. Her grandmother had several lodgers and Simone had the same independence, and rent, as the rest. She decorated the walls with orange wallpaper; Hélène helped her redecorate some second-hand furniture. Her mother had tears in her eyes when she moved out; Simone was grateful to her for not making a scene.1 Apart from during brief summer visits to Meyrignac she had always shared a bedroom with Hélène, so she was delighted to have – for the first time in her life – a room that was hers alone.

  Simone did not yet have a job of her own: but she and Sartre had discussed their future as their future. While he was doing military service they would see as much of each other as possible. Beauvoir would stay in Paris rather than taking up a full-time teaching post, since that would give her time to start on a novel. She did some part-time tutoring and taught Latin and Greek at the Lycée Victor-Duruy a few hours a week, which gave her enough to live on.2

  After the exacting schedule that led up to her examinations, Beauvoir found that working life was not as onerous as her parents had implied: without the constant threat of obstacles and failure life felt like she was permanently on vacation. She could now do – and dress – as she wanted to. Her mother had always dressed her in drab and durable cotton and wool: she now bought silks, crêpe de Chine, velours. One of Beauvoir’s literary characters from the 1930s, Chantal, was a philosophy teacher who took pleasure in dressing stylishly; she describes the ‘wonder-struck gaze of the pupils, who probably do not think I am quite real’.3

  In The Prime of Life Beauvoir wrote that by the time she met Sartre again in October she had ‘jettisoned’ all other attachments and thrown herself into the relationship with Sartre wholeheartedly.4 But once more the diaries tell a different story: from September to November Jacques and the Lama both still featured in her deliberations, with tenderness and love expressed for both. Again, Beauvoir’s contradictory accounts raise the question: why? Why did she gloss over the other men in her life when she wrote her memoirs, assigning Sartre a more dominant place in narrative than he occupied in life?

  In 1929 Beauvoir was still weighing up his merits. On 27 September she wrote that Sartre did not understand love because despite being an experienced player of the game he had never truly experienced love itself.5 Her doubts persisted: on 8 October she wrote that she ‘must learn not to regret this love any more than when I am near him.’6 She had seen Jacques again when she got back to Paris in September, which renewed her interest and briefly demoted the Lama from her considerations. She thought her future required a choice between ‘happiness with Jacques’ and ‘unhappiness with the help of Sartre’.7 ‘It is not funny,’ she wrote, ‘to love two men, and each one so passionately.’8

  According to Beauvoir’s memoirs, in the autumn of 1929 Sartre told Beauvoir that she had a double personality. Given the various disjointed accounts she gives, and her obvious feelings of being torn between possible lives, it doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to see how he might have felt this way. (She even had a name for her possible lives – she called them mes possibles, my possibles.) Normally, he said, she was the Beaver. But sometimes the Beaver disappeared, and the less enjoyable (from his point of view) Mademoiselle de Beauvoir took her place. Mademoiselle de Beauvoir felt sadness and regret; the Beaver did not.9 Episodes like this could be taken to support suspicions that Sartre gaslit Beauvoir, making her doubt herself in order not to challenge his dubious behaviour. But Sartre did not invent this distinction: we have already seen Beauvoir’s diaries use a similar one as early as 1927, when she enjoined herself: ‘Don’t be “Mlle Bertand de Beauvoir.” Be me. Don’t have a goal imposed from outside, a social framework to fill. What works for me will work, and that is all.’10

  On Monday 14 October Sartre and Beauvoir met in the Luxembourg gardens and went for a walk. That afternoon’s conversation would inspire thousands of people to try to emulate them, because it contained the defining discussion of their open relationship: the pact. They would have a two-year lease, forsaking no others. And they would tell each other everything. To distinguish his relationship with Beauvoir from his relationships with lesser lovers, Sartre said to her: ‘What we have is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.’11 They called their relationship a ‘morganatic marriage’ – a marriage of people of unequal social rank, like Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon. (They did not clarify for posterity which of them was considered royalty, and which the commoner.)

  In the second volume of her memoirs Beauvoir wrote that at first she found their commitment to telling each other everything embarrassing. But then she came to see it as liberating: in Sartre she thought she had found an observer who saw her with much greater impartiality than she could ever have about herself: he would be her life’s witness. They would be open books to each other, comfortable in the knowledge that their reader meant no harm.12

  She trusted him so completely that he provided the ‘absolute unfailing security’ that she had once had from her parents or God.13 Given her early insistence on the importance of ‘the view from within’ in her diaries, and the benefits of hindsight, it is difficult to know what to make of her confidence in Sartre’s ‘view from without’. Was her trust warranted? Truly mutual?

  The Sartre and Beauvoir described in The Prime of Life were careful with the truths they told each other, since truths can be sharp weapons. Beauvoir made no claim, in later life, to having a timeless formula of successful communication – she thought that nothing she could say would grant couples perfect understandings of each other. She was often asked how they made their relationship work and her response was that people need to work together to decide the nature of their own agreements. In her youth she made the mistake of thinking that what worked for her was right for everyone; but it irritated her, by 1960, to be praised or criticized for the way they conducted their relationship.14 (It’s not hard to see why, given how little they really knew about it.)

  As even
ts unfolded in 1929, Beauvoir did reach giddy heights of love for Sartre. But she had also wavered since meeting him in July, and in the week after they made their pact she continued to have doubts. On 15 October they were together again and ‘Mademoiselle de Beauvoir’ threatened to appear: she felt dejected and regretted her choice, but managed to conceal her sadness from Sartre before he left and she broke down in tears.15 On 21 October 1929 she decided, and underlined in her diary, ‘I cannot live this year without Sartre.’16

  It was just as well, for two days later Jacques embarrassedly informed her that he was engaged to someone else.17 The next day the Lama and Stépha both came to console her. The Lama told her that men like Jacques were attractive at 18 but soon lost their lustre because they lived on their fortune instead of making it – Jacques had inherited his father’s business; he accepted his place in the pre-established order of things in a way that Simone never would. Stépha took her for a hot chocolate at Les Deux Magots. She was grateful for their comfort: despite her growing attachments to other men, she still had tears to cry – whether for Jacques, the imagined future in which she fulfilled her family’s expectations, or some combination of both.18

  In The Prime of Life Beauvoir wrote that she and Sartre, in the early days of their relationship, succumbed to ‘spiritual pride’: they thought they were ‘radically free’ but in fact fell prey to several illusions. They didn’t acknowledge any emotional obligations to others. They took themselves to be pure reason and will, failing to recognize how dependent they were on others and how sheltered they had been from the world’s adversities. They didn’t have much money, but they met luxury with disdain: what was the point of grasping for things that weren’t within reach?19 Instead they cultivated the riches of a shared imagination, stocking it with stories, ideas, images: when it wasn’t literature it was Nietzsche, Marx, Freud or Descartes, regularly punctuated by excursions to galleries or the cinema.

  In November Sartre went to Saint-Cyr to serve in the meteorological corps. After the two years were up, Sartre envisaged spending some time apart from Beauvoir: he had applied for a job in Kyoto, Japan, which – if he got it – would begin in October 1931. But then, he told her, they would meet each other in distant locations around the world (perhaps Istanbul?) to be together before parting ways again for new adventures alone.

  Beauvoir did not share exactly the same dreams of solitary expeditions, but she did not feel able to tell Sartre what she wanted.

  Even so, Sartre was still only part of her life. In the same 3 November entry of her diary she wrote about how she wanted Sartre’s ‘mouth against her mouth’, followed by a paragraph about a letter from Jacques, happiness to have seen Stépha, and another paragraph in which she describes wanting the Lama’s hands in her hair, his body to brush her body.20 It is unclear, at this stage, why Beauvoir took such pains to protect Sartre from her thoughts. But it is clear that she saw no contradiction in loving several people at the same time, whatever their respective faults.

  Sartre’s military service involved training at Saint-Cyr, which was close enough to Paris that three or four days per week Beauvoir could travel to meet Sartre for dinner – sometimes with their mutual friends Pierre Guille and Raymond Aron. On Sundays, Sartre came to Paris to see her. After the training was finished Sartre was sent to Saint-Symphorien meteorological station, not far from Tours. They wrote to each other most days, and Sartre had a week off each month plus Sundays, so between his trips to Paris and Beauvoir’s weekly visits to Tours they saw each other regularly (even if it wasn’t as often as she would’ve liked). He called her ‘my dear little wife’; she called him ‘my little husband’. But the euphoric highs of the previous summer quickly dissipated.

  The next month, on 25 November 1929, was when Zaza died. Beauvoir recorded only the date in her diary; a teardrop blurred the ink.

  Beauvoir’s diaries go silent after Zaza’s death, only resuming the next month after Sartre upset her. When she joined the study group at the Cité Universitaire she thought she had met people who accepted her as she was: a philosopher who wanted to seek the truth, and live it. But now Sartre seemed to have grating expectations: was he too telling her what to be and not to be, what she did and didn’t understand? Among other things, she wrote, ‘I understand the contingent life better than he wants to say.’21

  The disagreement broke out the day before Zaza’s funeral because Sartre had told her that she was too ‘encrusted’ in her own happiness. So again tears flowed: ‘Tears not bitter, tears where already a force is born, tears from which I feel that the Valkyrie will rise, awaken from this long sleep of happiness.’22 At this stage in their relationship a pattern was starting to form: as the years went on Beauvoir would often turn to people other than Sartre when she needed emotional support. After Zaza died, Simone turned to Hélène, but even so at the funeral on 13 December she was overcome by the mournful vision before her – these were the same faces in the same spaces where she had imagined Zaza’s wedding.23

  Sartre clearly thought she had the capacity to write great things, but it is just at clear that at important moments he lacked compassion for her suffering. And over the first year of their pact Beauvoir had many doubts – about Sartre, herself and the impact of the pact on others. In December of 1929, when Maheu (her Lama) was visiting Paris, he discovered a letter from Sartre on her desk. She had not been open with Maheu about the changing nature of her relationship with Sartre; now the Lama said he could never trust her again, and wrote her a letter insisting that she see him while he was in Paris. Beauvoir copied out Maheu’s words in a letter of her own to show them to Sartre: ‘I have had my fill of the pretty situation that now exists, as a result of that September of yours and the two months of lying which followed it, and I deserve something better than the crumbs […] that you both offer me with such elegance.’24

  So Maheu did not want ‘crumbs’ – but what did he expect? He was married himself, so it was hardly consistent to expect her to be faithful to him when he clearly didn’t practise fidelity himself. To Sartre she expressed little sympathy, condemning Maheu’s jealousy as ‘disagreeable’. But she was beginning to understand that ‘contingent life’ meant different things for Sartre and for her: she didn’t want to hurt the people she loved, she wanted to be with them, and, frankly, this life ‘didn’t throw her into anything’ now that Jacques was married, Maheu was far away, and Sartre was leaving.25 But it is unclear at this stage whether she was starting to doubt the value of ‘the contingent life’ itself, or just this particular chapter of it.

  During Beauvoir’s first year on her own, she continued to see her parents for lunch regularly but told them little about her life. Although she missed Sartre when he was away she enjoyed her curiosity-quenching pursuits of the previously forbidden: she went on ‘dates with almost anyone’ and visited a brothel. Her father didn’t understand why she hadn’t taken a teaching post, and dismissively told his friends that she was having her ‘Paris honeymoon’. But she knew that her first teaching post was likely to be in the provinces, and she did not want to leave the Paris she was only just discovering. She briefly entertained the idea of becoming a journalist since that might allow her to stay in the capital, but the pull of teaching philosophy prevailed.26

  In June 1930 she wrote in her diary that she had always had a desire to be strong, to work, to create her own works; and she could only agree with Sartre that she should give this first place in her life. But she had already begun to dread the end of their ‘two-year lease’, comparing it to a looming death. She was certain she wanted to write. But she underwent doubts about her abilities to realize her dreams of writing, thinking: ‘I have no talent, I can’t!’ She berated herself for her laziness and lack of will power, on the one hand; on the other hand she could not tell whether Sartre was ‘helping’ as much as she anticipated. ‘He speaks to me like one speaks to a little girl; he only wants to see me happy; but if I am satisfied with myself he isn’t happy. […] I have lied to him e
very time I was sad.’27 Initially, she found his friendship incomparable: when they talked philosophy he seemed to be dedicated to the same thing she was: uncovering the truth. So why would he stop short of the truth when it concerned her feelings? And why was she, having rejected the role of dutiful daughter, accepting the part of a woman who pretends to be happy even when she is spoken to like a girl?

  She felt like she had lost her joy, her inspiration to write, even her ability to believe his words when they said ‘I love you’.28 There is no record of exactly what Sartre said that she found so discouraging. But her father and her culture instilled in her the message that women were not creative: history was a testament to their lack of originality. Hélène de Beauvoir wrote that although the sisters clearly enjoyed literature and art in their childhood, neither she nor Simone had a eureka moment in which it was decided that they would be a painter or a writer. It took Hélène years to exorcize these words as she developed her painting. Simone, too, would later reflect on her youth as a time when she felt despair at her own lack of originality despite her strong sense of vocation. Letting her imagination speak, creating something herself, seemed impossible.29

  Georges de Beauvoir’s damning view of women’s capabilities was shared, to some degree, by many of the philosophers Simone read: in her student diaries she quotes several lines from Arthur Schopenhauer, who, in an essay ‘On Women’, wrote that women are ‘the second sex, inferior in every respect to the first’, which exists solely for the continuation of the human species. He thought that it was possible for women to have talent, but never genius.30

  When Simone was considering a career in journalism, one of her wealthy cousins (the same one who had helped her father in the past) had arranged a meeting for her with Madame Poirier, one of the joint editors of L’Europe nouvelle. She told Beauvoir that to succeed in journalism she needed to have ideas to contribute, and asked her: Do you have any ideas? ‘No, I said, I didn’t.’31 Meanwhile Monsieur Poirier, the husband of this editor, suggested another kind of career progression, making unwanted sexual advances and telling Beauvoir that he would introduce her to powerful people if she was willing to get ahead that way. Beauvoir declined the advances and his offer, but when the couple invited her to a cocktail party she decided going along was worth a shot. When she arrived she felt very out of place; her wool dress was conspicuously modest in a room full of satin.