Becoming Beauvoir Read online

  In the autumn of 1930 Simone began to think that her love of Sartre had taken too much of herself: that she had lived through him and ‘neglected her own life’. ‘I lost my pride,’ she wrote, ‘and that is how I lost everything.’32 Looking back on her giddily high reunion with him the previous October she felt strongly that Sartre loved her less than she loved him: it seemed now that she was just one of Baladin’s adventures, she had given him her soul in an awestruck moment, losing herself without realizing it.33 She still loved him, but she described her love as ‘more habitual, weaker, less purely tender’. He had lost the lustre of perfection: now she saw his desire to please, his amour-propre, the reddening of his face when he spoke loudly, and how easily he could be influenced.34

  Her love had lessened but there was also a physical problem: her body’s ‘tyrannical desires’ had been awakened and demanded satisfaction. This problem was made worse because Sartre did not suffer from it: he preferred seduction to sex. The circumstances in which Beauvoir agreed to the pact – namely, seeing both Maheu and Jacques as part of a present and future in which her heart and body would find love – may explain the readiness with which she accepted it. In their absence she was forced to admit the power of her physical appetites: but despite their promise to tell each other everything she did not, at first, raise this with Sartre.35 Beauvoir’s upbringing did not encourage her to express her desires or consider her emotions to be significant. But it is also possible that her censorious approach to emotion at this point in her life may have been exacerbated by Sartre’s behaviour – and the philosophy that underpinned it.

  Sartre, in his 1943 philosophical work Being and Nothingness, described sexual desire as ‘trouble’ because it clouded and compromised freedom. He was similarly intolerant of emotion, which he thought a free person could – and therefore should – choose not to feel. Once an ex-lover, Simone Jollivet, told the 21-year-old Sartre that she felt sad. The letter he sent by reply made no effort to conceal his disgust:

  Do you expect me to soften before this interesting pose you decided to adopt, first for your own benefit and then for mine? There was a time when I was inclined toward that kind of play-acting […]. Nowadays I hate and scorn those who, like you, indulge their brief hours of sadness. […] Sadness goes hand in hand with laziness […] You revel in it to the point of writing to me 500 km away, who will very likely not be in the same mood: ‘I’m sad.’ You might as well tell it to the League of Nations.36

  Beauvoir saw tears glisten in Sartre’s eyes in the cinema once – but that was art, and there was no place for crying in life. So Beauvoir’s mixed emotions and unwelcome sexual desire were committed to the pages of her journals, which didn’t offer such rebukes.

  In later life Beauvoir recalled having admired Sartre’s detachment – sometimes. He claimed that great writers had to cultivate dispassion if they wanted to capture emotion rather than be taken captive by it. But at other times she felt like words had to ‘murder reality before they can hold it’, and she didn’t want reality to die: she wanted to relish in it, to taste the richness of its flavours for herself rather than embalming it for posterity.37 Although they agreed that literature was important they disagreed about what it was, and what it was for: Sartre knew words were powerful, but he thought all literature consisted of deception and disguise. Beauvoir thought it could do more and read Virginia Woolf with awe: here was a woman who wanted to close the gap between literature and life. Beauvoir wanted to know the world and to disclose it, truly.38

  In her second volume of autobiography Beauvoir wrote that philosophically she frequently found Sartre to be careless and inaccurate; but she thought his bravado made his ideas more fruitful than her own precise and scrupulous thoughts.39 In this and in many other instances Beauvoir portrayed herself as responding with reverence rather than recognition that Sartre had had advantages, which developed confidence, that she lacked. In the Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Beauvoir described Sartre as the perfect companion, the man she had been dreaming of since she was 15: ‘I wanted husband and wife to have everything in common; each was to fulfil for the other the role of exact observer which I had formerly attributed to God. That ruled out the possibility of loving anyone different; I should not marry unless I met someone more accomplished than myself, yet my equal, my double.’40

  But his observations weren’t quite as exact as she later made them out to be: he refused to see her emotions as meaningful and dismissed her sexual desires.41 Twenty years later, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote about ‘the woman in love’ – a woman who makes her man so central to her life that she loses sight of herself.

  The woman in love abandons even her own judgement, trying to see everything through the eyes of her beloved, to follow his preferences in books, art and music. She loses interest in the world if he is not there to see it with her; she is only interested in his ideas, his friends, his opinions. She thinks her value is conditional: that she has value because she is loved by a man. When she hears him say ‘we’, Beauvoir wrote, it is her supreme happiness, because she has been ‘recognized by the beloved man as part of him; when he says “we” she is associated and identified with him, she shares his prestige and reigns with him over the rest of the world’.42

  Writers such as Hazel Rowley have taken such passages to be autobiographical descriptions of the young Beauvoir; after all, in her autobiography Beauvoir described her young self as an ‘ancillary being’ and an ‘intellectual parasite’.43 As we have seen, some pages of the diaries can be taken to suggest that instead of asking herself what she wanted or expressing what she wanted to him, she asked how she could be what he wanted. But although Beauvoir elided Sartre’s flaws in her memoirs, she chronicled them in her diaries. Before she met Sartre she was already reading the books he was reading: Gide, Claudel, Péguy, Alain, Pascal, Leibniz, Lagneau, Nietzsche – and a separate diet of English books that Sartre lacked the skill to read himself. She did use the word ‘we’, but not only with Sartre. And even if Beauvoir did portray herself as ‘the woman in love’ with Sartre in her memoirs, it is unclear whether she was that woman in real life. She may have depicted herself in this ancillary way not out of factual fidelity or narrative necessity, but feminist commitment – because she thought that telling the story in a certain way would give it greater power.

  Despite the confidence of her 18-year-old self that she had something to say, that her intelligence was keen and penetrating – the young Beauvoir does not always seem to have realized that her intellect, too, was fecund enough to attract parasites. As the memoirs recount them, Beauvoir and Sartre’s conversations about ideas continued on the railway platforms of Tours and Paris: Sartre would greet her excitedly and tell her about his latest theory, then she would point out the flaws in his argument. She helped him refine the ideas for which he became famous. He, in turn, told her she was not original: ‘when you think in terms of problems, you aren’t thinking at all’.44

  This criticism can be read as a dismissal, but it can also be read as harsh but fertile encouragement. In The Prime of Life Beauvoir wrote that Sartre began to be irritated by her dependence on him, not because she was dependent but because he thought she was less full of ideas than she had been when they met, that she was in danger of being the kind of woman who relinquished her independence and contented herself with being a man’s helpmate. When Sartre told her this she was furious with herself. But the reason she gave for her fury was that she had disappointed him.45

  There are different vantage points from which to view this dissonant blend of dependence and independence in Beauvoir: at some points she was unsure that Sartre was best for her, or brought out the best in her. But it seems clear that despite her early sense of vocation as a writer, she lacked confidence and would resist praise for decades, downplaying the positive aspects of reviews of her work and focusing on the negative. To an extent, the image of their relationship that has been passed down to posterity reflects Sartre’s self-confidence and her self
-doubt – but that is not all it reflects.

  By October 1930 her doubts about Sartre were strong enough that she imagined finishing it: at times she wanted to leave Sartre. She ached for Zaza and her previous self; although she had attained what she thought she wanted, she felt unfulfilled: ‘caresses, work, pleasures: is this all there is?’46 In the final entry of her diaries, we see Beauvoir grieve for lost futures, lost selves she should have become in the company of other friends:

  I have sinned, I have sinned, I have sinned! Oh! I do not want my life to be like this! Oh! This is not what I dreamed of. Tomorrow I will see the dear little man [Sartre] and all will be finished. But today I don’t know where these regrets are coming from. Oh! Jacques, my purity, my dream, my love. But you weren’t these things.

  Zaza. I cannot stand that you are dead. […] But I am alone without you and I don’t even know what I want. I want to go. I want to leave Sartre and go with you for a walk, just with you, to speak, and to love you, and to walk, far from here, far.47

  At this point we become much more reliant on her memoirs and letters for the details of her life and so temporarily lose access to the view from within. Despite Beauvoir’s doubts and fluctuations, she still chose Sartre. But she did not choose to restrict herself to his caresses, his pleasures, his work. Several writers and reviewers have speculated that Beauvoir would have been happier if she had married Sartre. But this claim overlooks two things: first, that she had already reached the conclusion that marriage was immoral before she met Sartre. And, second, Sartre’s primary role in her life was clearly defined from the beginning: he was ‘the incomparable friend of her thought’. It was in that respect that he was necessary to her. Sexually and emotionally, he was far from it.

  During her first year in Paris after the agrégation she had lost touch with many of her previous friends: Zaza was dead, Jacques was married, others had moved away. She no longer saw Merleau-Ponty or the ‘holy willies’. The only people she introduced to Sartre were Hélène, Gégé, Stépha and Fernando. But soon the Gerassis, too, left Paris for Madrid.

  Even so, Sartre’s friends provided ample diversion. Beauvoir later described this period of her life as ‘a delectable but chaotic stew’ of people and events.48 She described herself as lazy at first, decompressing after the intensity of the previous year’s studies, but eventually the scholar in her reasserted itself and she got back to reading and writing. She joined the Anglo-American library: ‘Over and above the books I read with Sartre,’ her memoirs say, Beauvoir read Whitman, Blake, Yeats, Synge, Sean O’Casey, ‘all of Virginia Woolf’, Henry James, George Moore, Swinburne, Frank Swinnerton, Rebecca West, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson. She attributed to Sartre ‘an interest in the psychology of mysticism’ (in fact an interest of her own in the diaries of the 1920s), so they read Catherine Emmerich and Saint Angela of Foligno alongside Marx and Engels.49 In most aspects of life she ‘liked overdoing things’.50 Even when she went on vacation it generally meant that she travelled and worked somewhere else.51

  In these early days, their pact met with disapproval from their families. Sartre’s stepfather, Joseph Mancy, flat-out refused to meet Beauvoir since they were not married or engaged.52 But Sartre offered no protest; he continued to make weekly visits to his parents’ house without her. His mother would sneak out to meet them on her own sometimes – but only rarely and always briefly.

  Further problems arose when Sartre, true to his word, did not conceal his admiration for his first serious ‘contingent’ lover, Simone Jollivet. In fact he used Jollivet as an example to ‘goad [Beauvoir] out of her inactivity’.53 Beauvoir felt upset and jealous, but she also thought Jollivet was a fraud. She was a high-end prostitute who recited Nietzsche to the lawyers and town clerks she ‘laid flat’; Beauvoir had never slept with a man she didn’t love and did not understand Jollivet’s ability to use her body so casually.54 Sartre, in turn, found Beauvoir’s feelings contemptible. He thought she should control her passions – since letting them rule her compromised her freedom. From his point of view, emotions were lame excuses: all she needed to do was use her freedom to choose otherwise.

  Beauvoir attempted to purge her jealousy, but at points during their life together it was a real struggle. In addition to facing jealousy in herself she was also sensitive to, and suffered from, the pain others felt as a result of their jealousy over her. Beauvoir had started her relationship with Sartre with multiple men in her heart. And she continued to find things to appreciate about other men. But they did not always appreciate her divided attention: once, she was about to take a ten-day road trip with Pierre Guille (a mutual friend of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s) when Maheu arrived in Paris. He was staying for two weeks, without his wife, and expected to spend time with Simone. They had made up after his discovery of Sartre’s letter the previous December, but now she told him that she was about to leave Paris for ten days with someone else. Maheu told her that he would never see her again if she went; she objected that it was hardly fair to let Guille down: she thought it was an offence against friendship to back out of a ‘joint project’ unless it was unavoidable to do so. They had reached an impasse – Maheu was unconvinced and did not retract his ultimatum – so they went to the cinema together, still at odds. Beauvoir wept all the way through the film.55

  Figure 4 Drawing by René Maheu, ‘The universe of Mlle Simone de Beauvoir’, May–June 1929. Under the elliptical shape Maheau has written: ‘Where the devil do you want me to go? Everything is packed.’

  Nevertheless she enjoyed her February vacation with Guille. Being in a car was still a novelty for her – she had enjoyed drives in Paris with the Nizans, but this would be many days of travel, seeing places that she’d only read about in books. They visited Avallon, Lyon, Uzerche, Beaulieu, Rocamadour and – her favourite – Provence. They spent leisurely days soaking in the heat of the Provençal sun. She loved seeing the Camargue, Aigues-Mortes, Les Baux and Avignon.

  Alongside the beauty of new places this trip brought inequality before her eyes in ways she had never seen before. Contrary to Simone Weil’s barb, Simone de Beauvoir had often been hungry. But she did not realize the extent of her privilege, even so. On their way south she visited a cousin who showed them around a factory: the workshops were dark and filled with metallic dust. During the preceding year Beauvoir had read Marx, and was beginning to see an important connection between labour and values – but what is read on paper in Paris can be rather removed from what is felt on the factory floor. She asked how long the labourers worked and her eyes teared at the answer: eight-hour shifts of hot monotony.56

  When they got back to Paris Sartre had had a letter informing him that he had not got the job he wanted in Kyoto and Beauvoir had a letter from Maheu saying things were over between them. Sartre was now waiting for his future to be decided by the French Ministry of Education. That spring he was offered a post in Le Havre, not far from Paris: he accepted.57 Beauvoir, too, was offered a post – in Marseille, 800 km away.

  As this distance loomed large before her she became very anxious, realizing that although she sometimes longed for solitude she was also afraid of it. The previous year had taught her things about herself that made this exile fill her with dread. Sartre, seeing her turmoil, suggested marriage: as husband and wife the state would be obliged to post them near each other. There was no point suffering on principle, he said: they were opposed to marriage, but what good did it do to be martyrs about it?

  Despite his protest that marriage was merely a legality, Beauvoir was surprised by his suggestion. She saw reasons against it from both of their points of view. Marriage ‘double’s one’s domestic responsibilities’ and ‘social chores’; she wanted neither. And she also did not want to be a source of resentment, and feared being Sartre’s wife would make her precisely that. Sartre was already experiencing a crisis with respect to disappointed expectations: he had dreamed of a bold posting in Japan, fitting glory for a Baladin, and instead was going to be
teaching in the provinces. Joining the order of married men was not what he needed. The memoirs put Beauvoir’s reasons first (although she didn’t spell out her philosophical objections). But nevertheless they have often been overlooked, with the result that it has been assumed that she accepted this arrangement for Sartre’s sake.

  In the memoirs Beauvoir said that the only thing that might have changed her mind about joining this bourgeois institution was children. And while in her teens she expected to be a mother she no longer foresaw this as a possible future: she had come to see childbearing as ‘a purposeless and unjustifiable increase of the world’s population’.58 Whether for rhetorical or genuine reasons, Beauvoir frames her decision not to have children in terms of her vocation: a Carmelite nun ‘having undertaken to pray for all mankind, also renounces the engendering of individual human beings’. She knew she needed time and freedom in order to write. So, as she saw it, ‘By remaining childless I was fulfilling my proper function’.

  So, instead of marrying, Beauvoir and Sartre revised the terms of their pact: their relationship had become closer and more demanding than it had been when they first made it. Now they decided that although brief separations were permissible, long solitary sabbaticals were not. Their new promise was not life-long; they decided they would reconsider the question of separation when they entered their thirties. So although Marseille would separate them, Beauvoir left Paris on a firmer footing – with a clearer future – with Sartre.