Becoming Beauvoir Page 9

  The spring and summer of 1929 were eventful seasons in Beauvoir’s life. But for Zaza they were disastrous. In July she went to their summer home as usual. But before she left she confided to Beauvoir that she and Merleau-Ponty had become secretly betrothed – he was going into military service and they would wait another year, or possibly two, before making the case to her parents. Beauvoir was astonished. ‘Why wait?’ she asked her friend, shocking Zaza with her frankness: their affection was clear.

  Figure 3 Zaza and Simone, September 1928.

  Zaza’s letters from the Landes became cryptic and confusing. Her Mama, she wrote, had told her something she couldn’t explain. The next post brought a letter with more: ‘Can children bear the sin of their parents? Are they guilty of it? Can they ever be absolved? Do others near them suffer from it?’41 The correspondence that followed revealed that Zaza was disappointed by the messages she was receiving from Merleau-Ponty, for despite their promise to each other his tone became increasingly distant and his letters increasingly sparse. She missed Simone and said she was suffering, but she tried to give meaning to her suffering by comparing it to Christ’s.42

  This situation continued for some time and Simone became seriously concerned, urging both Zaza and Merleau-Ponty to make their intentions public: perhaps Madame Lacoin’s hesitation was due to their lack of official announcement. But she met with resistance in both quarters: Zaza wrote to her that ‘he has reasons for not doing so which to me are as valid as they are to him’.43 Simone was not so easily satisfied, so she wrote to Merleau-Ponty, thinking he could not possibly act this way if he knew the suffering his so-called ‘reasons’ cost Zaza. But he wrote back explaining that his sister had just become engaged and his brother was about to go abroad, and his mother could not bear to lose all of her children at once.

  Zaza had grown thin; she was to be sent to Berlin again. At first she seemed resigned to Merleau-Ponty’s decision to sacrifice her for his mother. But not much later Madame Lacoin summoned Simone – Zaza was ill, very ill. Zaza had gone to see Merleau-Ponty’s mother, delirious, asking whether she hated her and why she objected to their marriage. Madame Merleau-Ponty attempted to calm her down before her son arrived: he called a taxi, worried by Zaza’s burning hands and forehead. In the cab she reproached him for never having kissed her and demanded that he make amends: he complied.

  Madame Lacoin called a doctor and had a long conversation with Merleau-Ponty, after which she relented. She would not oppose their marriage; she could no longer be the cause of her daughter’s unhappiness. Madame Merleau-Ponty agreed, it would all be arranged. But Zaza’s temperature was 104 degrees – she spent four days in a clinic and it did not fall.

  The next time Simone saw Zaza her body was cold, laid out on a bier clutching a crucifix.

  Zaza died on 25 November 1929. Beauvoir would have to wait nearly thirty years to discover the truth about what happened. As she sank into the hopelessness of grief, she felt confused, angry horror at her conversations with Zaza and correspondence with Merleau-Ponty – they both ‘spiritualized’ their suffering, trying to cultivate virtue in themselves instead of castigating the real culprit: the vicious injustice of ‘propriety’. It was the world, not them, that was at fault: and God had done nothing.

  4

  The Love before the Legend

  While Zaza’s hopes of a fulfilling fidelity were raised and dashed, Simone began to entertain hopes of a different kind. The friendship of Merleau-Ponty and Gandillac showed her that she was worthy of the interest of two normaliens – students at the École Normale Supérieure who were the crème de la crème of the Parisian intellectual elite. It also gave her confidence and during the spring and summer of 1929 she pursued the acquaintance of another normalien who attracted her – this time quite physical – attention.

  That normalien was not – as legend might have it – Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauvoir’s notebooks from 1929 paint a rather different picture of the genesis of their relationship from the one she made public during her lifetime. Once one accepts the premises that not all women want lifelong monogamy, and that not all original ideas come from men, the story of Beauvoir and Sartre reads rather differently from the start, for it is not true that once she met Sartre, he immediately occupied first place in her heart.

  In the spring of 1929, Beauvoir became a close friend of René Maheu (called ‘Herbaud’ in her memoirs, and by the affectionate nickname ‘Lama’ in her diaries). Maheu belonged to a clique of three young men – the other members being the future novelist, Paul Nizan, and the future philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. In her memoirs Beauvoir writes that although she had broken into the circles of some normaliens, Maheu’s group was the only one that remained closed to her. Beauvoir first noticed Maheu when he gave a talk at one of Brunzschvicg’s seminars in 1929. He was married. But she liked his face, his eyes, his hair, his voice: in fact, everything. She decided to approach him in the Bibliothèque Nationale during lunch one day, and before long Maheu was writing her poems and bringing her drawings.

  Maheu also gave Beauvoir the nickname that would stick with her for her entire adult life: Castor – the French word for beaver. One day he wrote in her exercise book, in capital letters: ‘BEAUVOIR = BEAVER’. He explained his logic: like her, beavers ‘like company and have a constructive bent’.1

  In her memoirs Beauvoir describes Maheu’s influence on her as similar only to Stépha’s. In 1929 she wrote that ‘I was tired of saintliness and I was overjoyed that [Maheu] should treat me – as only Stépha had done – as a creature of the earth.’2 Beauvoir described Maheu as a ‘real man’, with an ‘abundantly sensual’ face, who ‘opened up paths that [she] longed to explore without as yet having the courage to do so’. It is far from clear whether (and if so, when) the two became lovers – Beauvoir described their relationship guardedly – but certainly by the time she met Sartre Maheu occupied the central place in her affections. When she reflected on their time together she described it as one of ‘perfect joy and numerous pleasures’ during which she learned ‘the sweetness of being a woman’.3

  Many writers have claimed that Maheu was her first lover.4 But precisely what this claim means is unclear so it is difficult to evaluate the truth of it. When Bair asked Beauvoir to confirm this she vehemently denied it, claiming that despite her clandestine adventures with Gégé and Hélène she had never even kissed a man on the mouth before Sartre.5 But when Bair wrote her biography she did not have access to the letters and diaries that we now have.

  Although Beauvoir and Sartre had caught glimpses of each other – in lecture halls, seminars, the Luxembourg Gardens – their official meeting was a long time in the making. Maheu was possessive: he wanted to keep Beauvoir to himself and deliberately did not introduce her to the infamous womanizer, Sartre. But Sartre had wanted to meet Beauvoir since the spring and was not shy about his interest: he had heard that her thesis was on Leibniz, so he sent her a drawing he had made for her. It depicted a man surrounded by mermaids and bore the title ‘Leibniz bathing with the monads’ (Leibniz called the basic substances of the universe ‘monads’: the mermaids were artistic licence on Sartre’s part).6

  During the three weeks before the written part of the agrégation examination Beauvoir saw Maheu daily. The written exam, on 17 June 1929, was a gruelling seven hours long, and required writing a dissertation on the spot, on a subject close to Simone’s heart: ‘freedom and contingency’. On 18 June was a further four-hour dissertation on ‘intuition and reasoning in the deductive method’. And finally, on 19 June, four more hours on ‘morality in the Stoics and Kant’.7

  After the written component of the agrégation was completed, Maheu left Paris with his wife for ten days, telling Beauvoir that when he returned he would resume his studies with Nizan and Sartre. They all wanted her to join their elite group, he said – and Sartre wanted to take her out. Maheu delivered the invitation to the Beaver but asked her not to go without him. She liked the way he looked at her when he said
it; and she did not like the look of Sartre.8 So they decided that Hélène would go in her stead, to meet Sartre at the appointed place and time and tell him a white lie – that Simone had had to leave suddenly for the country.

  Simone was starting to find her life joyful again: she had more and more friends these days, but most importantly she had Maheu, Merleau-Ponty and Zaza – still five months from her death – to share her life with, and she was excited to be ‘creating’ herself in the company of people who wanted her to become the woman she wanted to be (even if it was, as Zaza teased her, ‘the amoral lady’).9 The evening that Hélène was out with Sartre, Beauvoir was euphoric, and wrote in her diary that she felt: ‘Curious certainty that this reserve of riches that I feel within me will make its mark, that I shall utter words that will be listened to, that this life of mine will be a well-spring from which others will drink: the certainty of a vocation.’10 That part, she put in her memoirs. But in the diaries themselves she added that she no longer felt her call a painful one – a via delarosa. She had the sense that she had been given something rare, something she could not keep to herself.

  When Hélène came home she told her sister she had done well to stay in: Sartre took her to the cinema and was kind but he was not the conversational genius she’d been led to expect. ‘Everything [Maheu] said about Sartre is pure invention.’11

  Despite his failed bids for attention, Sartre was not dissuaded. He was intrigued by Maheu’s praises of Simone’s intelligence and wit, but he didn’t have to rely on hearsay for what he could see for himself: her attractiveness. In 1973, Maheu wrote of her, ‘what a heart! She was so authentic, so courageously rebellious, so genuine […] and so distinctively attractive, her own genre and her own style, no woman has ever been like her’. Henriette Nizan (Paul’s widow) remembered Beauvoir as a young woman with ‘ravishing eyes’, extremely pretty, with a slightly broken voice that only added to her allure. She was an ‘unselfconscious beauty’.12

  Sartre, meanwhile, was a notorious figure at the École Normale Superieure, where he had a reputation for both his mastery of philosophy and his irreverent mischief. He performed nude in a satirical sketch and threw water balloons out of the university’s classrooms, shouting ‘Thus pissed Zarathustra!’ He was a prankster who – so he claimed – had been too bold in his exams the previous year: he was expected to place first in the nation but had failed because he wrote about his own philosophical ideas instead of following the rubric.

  Sartre was suspicious when Simone sent Hélène in her stead: when she walked up and introduced herself he asked her: ‘How did you know I was Sartre?’ Hélène’s reply gave her away: ‘because … you are wearing glasses’. Sartre pointed out that another man was also wearing glasses. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the adjectives she omitted from her sister’s description: very short and very ugly.13 Sartre was five foot one, and he knew he was ugly: it was one of the reasons he took such pleasure in seducing women – where looks failed, words conquered.

  When Beauvoir was elated to receive Maheu’s invitation to their study group it was because it meant more time with her Lama and also because it was a huge sign of respect. Sartre was a snob: he had had access to the best education Paris could offer a man and saw those who didn’t as inferior and unworthy. In a 1974 interview Beauvoir confronted him with his arrogance, reminding him that in his student days he, Nizan and Maheu ‘had the reputation of being extremely contemptuous of the world in general and of the Sorbonne students in particular’. His reply: ‘That was because the Sorbonne students represented beings who were not quite human.’14

  She was flattered and yet fearful, for the group’s disdain was reciprocated by spite from the Sorbonne students, who described these men as heartless and soulless – and Sartre had the worst reputation of them all.15

  When June ended, Sartre had still not met the woman he was ‘dead set’ on knowing. The legendary meeting finally occurred on Monday 8 July 1929, when Beauvoir arrived at the study group – ‘a bit scared’. Sartre welcomed her politely, and all day long she commented on Leibniz’s metaphysical treatise.16 It may not sound like an auspicious start to a romance: from her point of view, it wasn’t. But over the next few weeks the dynamics shifted.

  First, the trio became a quartet. They would meet daily for the next two weeks. But on that first day Beauvoir’s diaries leave little room to doubt the object of her affection: she describes the way Maheu’s body was half-stretched out on the bed in his shirtsleeves, and when they were walking home it is only after Sartre leaves that their walk became ‘delicious’: she didn’t remember what they discussed by the time she got home to her diary, but she filled it with praises for ‘her Lama’.17

  The next day they did more Leibniz, and Sartre gave Beauvoir a present – a Japanese painting, which she described in her diaries as ‘atrocious’. The day after brought more Leibniz and more unwanted presents from Sartre: this time some porcelains she deemed ‘absurd’.18

  By Thursday she had begun to be impressed by the way he thought. They had finished Leibniz and moved on to Rousseau, with Sartre now taking the lead of their revision. Beauvoir began to see Sartre in an unexpected light, as: ‘Someone who was generous with everyone, I mean really generous, who spent endless hours elaborating on difficult points of philosophy to help make them clear to others, without ever receiving anything in return. […] he was a totally different person from the one the Sorbonne students saw.’19

  But the day after that Beauvoir and Maheu slipped off and ‘rented a room in a small hotel in the rue Vanneau’ where she was, according to her memoirs, ‘ostensibly helping him to translate Aristotle’.20 In her diary that night she described the room, how the summer heat filtered in just enough to ‘feel deliciously protected’, how their friendship was ‘modified by tenderness’, in a way she would ‘always, always remember’.21 Maheu was worried that he had failed the written exams. Whatever else they did, the diaries are clear that they only worked a little.

  Over the days that followed the diary is full of references to ‘my Lama’, who tells her, among other things, that Sartre is enchanted with her.22 On 15 July the Lama teasingly whispered that he would kiss Simone and she confessed to her diary how disturbed she was by her desire for him. The day after that they told each other ‘I love you’ – je vous aime.23

  On 17 July the results of the written component of the exam were posted at the Sorbonne. Passing the agrégation guaranteed a teaching post for life in the French school system; the number of successful candidates was limited to the number of teaching places available in the nation. Beauvoir was going in the door as Sartre came out: he told her that she, he and Nizan were among the twenty-six who had qualified for the orals; Maheu had failed.

  Maheu left Paris that evening. And the same evening, Sartre swooped in. It is unclear how much he knew about Maheu and Beauvoir’s relationship at the time, but these altered circumstances certainly worked to Sartre’s favour. For one thing, Maheu no longer needed to prepare for the oral component of the agrégation, so the quartet became a trio again. Intellectually Sartre had already made a good impression on Beauvoir, so he had a foundation on which to build and now knew that the reports he had had of her were not exaggerated by affection or hyperbole: she was brilliant.

  In the memoirs Beauvoir reports that Sartre said, ‘From now on I’m going to take you under my wing.’24 In the diaries Beauvoir did not record this; instead writing that Sartre ‘makes me everything he wants’, but that she loved ‘his way of being authoritarian, of adopting me, and of being so harshly indulgent’.25 He delighted her by mocking the men who told her she was ‘unpleasant when she talked philosophy’26 – and by seeking out her company to talk about just this. They continued to study together, and people around them started to notice.

  After Maheu’s departure, Beauvoir and Sartre met every morning in the Jardin du Luxembourg or local cafés, starting a conversation that would continue for fifty-one years. The arrival of Castor disp
laced some of Sartre’s other friends: Raymond Aron wrote that ‘our relationship changed the day Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir. There was a time when he was pleased to use me as a sounding board for his ideas; then there was that meeting, with the result that suddenly I no longer interested him as an interlocutor’.27 It was also noted by Zaza, who did not like the ‘frightful, learned Sartre’, but who admitted that Beauvoir had chosen her path well before Sartre crossed it: ‘The influence of Sartre might have hurried things along a bit,’ she said, but he did not alter her course.28

  Nine days after meeting Sartre, Beauvoir was comparing the two men’s efforts for her attention in her diary, writing that the Lama could attach himself to a woman simply by caressing her neck; Sartre’s approach was to show her his heart.29 By 22 July Beauvoir described Sartre’s influence on her as ‘extraordinary’. In the thirteen days that she had known him, she wrote in her diary, he had ‘understood me, foreseen me, and possessed me’, such that she had an ‘intellectual need’ of his presence.30 They had discovered ‘a great resemblance’ in their attitudes and their ambitions: in addition to their joint passion for philosophy, they shared passions for literature and dreamt of literary futures. They could glide easily through philosophical views and literary allusions – with each other, there was no tedium of having to define concepts or explain plots. Both had longed to be writers from an early age but now faced the ambiguous prospect of life after studenthood, when such dreams are often waylaid by pragmatism and disenchantment.

  Of course, in significant respects, their dreams already had different degrees of reality: Sartre could name numerous men who had succeeded in his – the Panthéon was full of monuments glorifying the great writers of the nation, celebrating their literary and philosophical progeny. Beauvoir could name few women who were celebrated for their literature, and even fewer who were considered philosophers. Her predecessors had often had to pay a high price for their rejection of traditional values, frequently sacrificing their happiness in order to gain freedom. Beauvoir wanted better: why should freedom come at the cost of love? Or love at the cost of freedom?