Tete-a-Tete (14 page)

She admitted that she was frightened of Bost's remorse toward Olga. She was afraid it would go along with a vague hostility toward her. She would prefer not to see him than to feel she deserved his reproaches, but the idea of not seeing him was absolutely odious to her. “It is not a pleasant situation.”

 

“This morning, for the first time, I slept with her,” Sartre announced. It was late July 1939, and he was with Wanda in the south of France. “The result was that I left her on her bed, all pure and tragic, declaring herself tired and having hated me for a good 45 minutes.” He had sneaked out to a café to write to Beauvoir.

Marseille was full of the Beaver, he told her, and he felt very emotional sitting in places where they had dined together. With Wanda it was “perfect love, gazing into one another's eyes, holding hands.”

He and Wanda generally did not get to sleep till three in the morning. They woke up at seven and made love, he got dressed around ten and went to the post office, then to a café to write. Wanda showed up around noon, and they spent afternoons reading and sightseeing. She rested an hour before dinner, while Sartre wrote clandestine letters. They went to dinner, usually at Charley's Tavern, then sat drinking in the Old Port, looking at the lights. Sartre regretted that he had to tear up all incoming letters, even those Beauvoir asked him to keep. “It's impossible to hold on to them: we share the room and Wanda wanders around every morning while I'm still asleep.”

Sartre had been courting Wanda for two years. It was his longest seduction ever. This time, unlike with Olga, he had attained his goal.

 

At the beginning of August 1939, Wanda went back to Paris, and Beauvoir joined Sartre in Marseille. Bost came down for a few days, on leave. He considered war inevitable, and he and Sartre joked about whether it would be worse to return from the war without legs, without arms, or with one's face blown apart. Beauvoir was horrified.

Bost said that things were going unusually well between him and Olga. He thought Olga was developing new confidence as an actress. At Beauvoir's suggestion, Olga was taking acting workshops at Dullin's school, known as L'Atelier, and Charles Dullin considered her promising. Olga seemed at last to be committed to Bost, and this meant he felt more committed to her. He asked Beauvoir to burn all his letters to her, and said he was going to burn hers. “It would be too ignoble if ever anything should come out; it would be abject…. I don't regret anything, but I would feel profoundly guilty if Kos ever suffered
because of me. It embarrasses me to say this to you, but I can tell you anything. I know what you are like.”
⁴⁸

After Bost left, Sartre and Beauvoir were sitting one evening in the Old Port when who should walk past but Paul Nizan, with a large rubber swan under his arm! He was with his wife and two young children, on their way to Corsica. They had a drink together. Nizan, usually so gloomy, was convinced that Germany would be on its knees in no time. Sartre and Beauvoir were astonished, and heartened, by his optimism. They watched him walk off, the swan under his arm. It would be the last time they saw him.

They went to stay with Madame Morel in her villa at Juan-les-Pins, near Antibes. The large garden ran down to the Mediterranean. Sartre tried to teach Beauvoir to swim. He himself could swim quite a distance, but he would suddenly become terrified of the slimy creatures he imagined lurking in the depths, and would swim back in a panic.

In Juan-les-Pins, Beauvoir kept bursting into tears. The prospect of war was terrifying. It seemed to her she was losing her men, if not to the Kosakiewicz sisters then to the Germans. Sartre was obsessed with Wanda to the point that Beauvoir wondered what exactly she herself meant to him now. And Bost seemed to be hinting that his and Beauvoir's relationship was just an affair, and that only his relationship with Olga was serious. For Beauvoir, that summer was miserable.

 

War had been on the horizon for years. Everyone knew it was coming—everyone, that is, except Sartre, who kept assuring his friends it would not happen. “It's impossible that Hitler is thinking of starting a war, given the mental state of the German population. It's bluff,” he assured Bienenfeld on August 31, 1939. He and Beauvoir were back in Paris. Bienenfeld, distraught with worry, was with her parents in Annecy.

That same day, Bost was called up. The next day, Friday, September 1, German troops marched into Poland. Posters went up around Paris giving the order for general mobilization of all fit men between the ages of eighteen and forty. In the afternoon, Sartre went back to
the Mistral to pack. He and Beauvoir went down to the cellar and fetched two knapsacks and Sartre's ski boots. There were soon clothes, cans of food, tobacco pouches, notebooks, and books all over the floor.

After packing, Sartre went to a café and wrote to Bienenfeld. “I will come back to you. I'm the faithful type, and you'll find me again when the time comes, exactly like the person you left at the station square in Annecy. Nothing can change us, my love, neither you, nor the Beaver, nor I…. I'd like you to know that I love you passionately,
for ever.
”

His farewell with Wanda was emotional. “I'm terribly afraid you'll forget about me,” he told her.
⁴⁹
He promised to write to her every day, and asked her to try to do the same. He privately worried that she might have to go back to her family in Laigle. He had promised that he would support her in the coming year, so she could continue her painting in Paris, but he feared that if he were out of teaching for long, he would not be able to afford to do so.

Sartre spent his precious last hours with Beauvoir. They had dinner together, then went to bed at ten
P.M.
in Beauvoir's room, set the alarm, and tried to sleep. At three
A.M.
they dressed quickly. Sartre kept chewing on his nails. They slung his knapsacks over their shoulders and went for a morning coffee at the Dôme. It was a final glimpse of prewar Paris. From now on, cafés were to close at eleven
P.M.

Paris was dark and silent. The moon had disappeared behind clouds, and the streetlights had been dimmed. The café windows were covered with heavy blue curtains. In a subdued Montparnasse, the Dôme was an island of noise and smoke. Men in uniform had sprung up as if from nowhere, and were sitting at tables talking. A couple of prostitutes were plying their trade. Sartre and Beauvoir sat down on the terrace and ordered coffees. She felt as if they were in a Dos Passos novel, Beauvoir said.

At four-thirty
A.M.
they took a taxi to the mobilization depot at the Place Hébert. A policeman told them to go to the Gare de l'Est. They walked. Dawn was breaking. The sky was pink. They expected to find a crowd at the station, but the hall was almost empty. There was not a uniformed man to be seen. Sartre explained that three-quarters of the men had already been called up. The whole thing felt
Kafkaesque, he said. No one had come to fetch him away. It was almost as if he were leaving of his own free will.

There was a train at 6:24
A.M.
, but since no one else seemed to be taking it, Sartre decided to take the 7:50
A.M.
train. They went and had another coffee. Sartre assured Beauvoir once again that he wouldn't be in any danger in Nancy. This was simply another of their separations. They would write to each other regularly. She would send him parcels of books.

By the time they returned to the platform, there were more people around, including men with knapsacks. Near the entrance gate, a few couples held each other tightly. Beauvoir felt tears pricking her eyes. Sartre pressed her to him, then she watched him walk down the platform with a rapid, determined step. He looked small and vulnerable, and she could tell from his back that he was tense.

She turned around and walked toward the exit. She thought to herself that even if she cried for hours, she would not have finished crying. She would walk and not stop, or her heart would burst.

September 1939–March 1941

“La Guerre!” It was Sunday afternoon, September 3, 1939. That morning, Britain had declared war on Germany. Now France had too. Beauvoir took one look at the headlines and burst into tears. Her immediate thought was that Bost would be killed. “My love, if anything bad happens to you,” she wrote him from the Flore, “there will never be any more happiness for me in this life.” As a reservist, Sartre was in less danger, but for how long? If
he
were killed, Beauvoir told herself she would commit suicide. The thought was strangely consoling.

The young men had left, and in the next few days thousands of civilians fled the city, in cars stacked with suitcases. Paris had become a city of women, old people, and the infirm. Gas masks were distributed. In the cafés, clients had to pay as soon as they were served, in case the air raid siren sounded. Streetlamps were reduced to a dim yellow glow, the size of a candle. A midnight curfew was enforced.

Beauvoir had never envisaged the war lasting longer than a few months, and now people were talking about several years. She heard some women discussing the telegram they would receive if their husbands were killed on the battlefield. For weeks she was ravaged by dread, unable to settle down to any work. She lived for letters from Sartre and Bost. “History burst over me,” she writes, “and I dissolved into fragments.”
¹

 

For eight months it was the “Phony War”—neither war nor peace. There was a constant whiff of nightmare, and yet the enemy remained invisible. Sartre came up with the theory that just as modern music was without harmony, modern war was without death.

“The war
interests
me,” he wrote from Alsace. “I feel I'm in a foreign country, which I'm going to explore bit by bit.”
²
As usual, he had adapted well to communal life. There were four others in his meteorological unit, and they were billeted with an old priest. “An odd bunch. Who knows how many years I'll live with them? They aren't unlikable.”
³
He called them his “acolytes.” Apart from a meteorological reading every three hours—releasing a red balloon into the air, observing it through binoculars, and telephoning the wind direction to the artillery unit—they had little to do. On their first Sunday they walked in the countryside, and the acolytes picked plums while Sartre smoked a cigar. “My sole worry is I'll get fat.”
⁴

He settled into a work routine of ten to eleven hours a day, and made good progress on his novel
The Age of Reason.
He told Beauvoir he would send her chapters as soon as the postal service became more secure. The war gave him a new perspective, and for the first time he was keeping a journal. He was enjoying the freedom of writing spontaneously, following his thoughts where they led him. In addition, he was writing at least three letters a day.

He had finished the Kafka books he had brought with him, and was enjoying the journal of André Gide that Beauvoir had sent him. Yes, he would forward it to Bost when he had finished it, as instructed. (All three of them were keeping journals, and wanted to read others, for models.) He wrote a list of other titles he would like to read. There was no hurry; the Beaver should not send them all at once. Were there any new detective novels? And would she mail him the latest
Nouvelle Revue Française,
four notepads, and fifty envelopes?

 

“Believe it or not, when you wrote you would not survive me if there were some disaster, I felt a profound peace,” Sartre admitted to Beauvoir. “I wouldn't like to leave you behind, not because you'd be a free little consciousness sauntering around the world and I'd be jealous, but because you've persuaded me you would be in an absurd
world…. But don't worry, I was thinking about all that in the abstract, since I'm in a charming Alsatian village, very secure and comfortable. Besides, I also think, in the long run, that I'd definitely want you to go on with your own little life without me: a life cut short does seem, after all, a loss of something good. The fact is, in any case, I've never felt so intently that you are me.”
⁵

For years he had used the notion of “oneness” to assuage Beauvoir's occasional doubts about their relationship. “If there had been a need to feel how much we two are one, this phantom war would at least have had the virtue of letting us see that,” he wrote in another letter. “It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not ‘one thing in my life'—not even the most important—because my life no longer belongs to me, because…you are always
me.
”
⁶

Their tenth anniversary (dated from the first time they made love) was October 14, 1939. Looking back, Sartre realized more than ever what he owed to Beauvoir. He did not hear from her for three days, and afterward he wrote in his journal: “My irritation about the lateness of Wanda's letters is dreamed up. This, this is serious. Felt the world without the Beaver (not that I thought her dead but simply, there was no letter and I live her world and mine through her letters); it was a desert.”

Two days later he wrote: “I felt today that all my courage and even my appetite for experiencing the war come from the certitude of being understood, supported, and approved by the Beaver. If this approbation were not there, everything would fall apart and I'd be adrift.”
⁷

 

Sartre was greatly relieved to hear that as a civil servant he would continue to receive his full teaching salary while in the military. “I'll know that all of my little family has enough money and security, and I won't have the feeling—which was really beginning to gnaw at me—that it is you who are supporting the burden of the whole community,” he told Beauvoir.
⁸
The Kosakiewicz sisters would be able to stay in Paris. Olga could resume classes at the Atelier and try to establish herself as an actress. Wanda could continue her painting lessons. Neither would have to find a job.

In November, Sartre traversed a dark period. His eyes were hurting him. He was already almost blind in his right eye, and the fear hung over him that one day he might lose his sight altogether. But it did not occur to him to stop working for a few days, to rest his eyes. Instead, he took to writing with his eyes closed.

His main source of torment, however, was not his eyes, but Wanda. He was dependent on her letters, with their large, childlike handwriting. When he read, “I love you passionately” or “You must treat me like an adult,” he felt warm inside. He did not care about her atrocious spelling and grammar.
⁹
He did not mind her preening about her “Russian soul.” He needed her to tell him she loved him. By the beginning of November she was no longer writing every day. He was very far away, she wrote. He might as well be on another planet. She also made it clear that Roger Blin, one of the most talented young actors at her sister's Atelier, was courting her. Sartre confided to his journal:

Sartre would wonder, afterward, about the “paroxysm of passion” he suffered that November.
¹¹
His reaction to his jealousy was a pattern he knew well. He told himself he did not care and would not miss Wanda, and he hurled her little person into the void. As usual, he was unable to fool himself. The buoyant confidence he needed to write had completely deserted him. He lost all desire to start a new chapter of his novel. When he tried to imagine his postwar life without Wanda, it felt as if his world had shrunk. A vital dimension was missing.

He did his best to rationalize. An affair with Blin would probably not mean all that much to Wanda. “It's obvious…that her life is me—
less perhaps through the tenderness I inspire in her than through the intellectual and material need she has for me,” he told Beauvoir.
¹²
“She may deceive me, but for the moment I've become legendary to her, she ‘bows low' to me, as you know, and that provides her with her solemn, romantic little myth. Don't destroy that for me, please.”
¹³

In his journal—he called them his “war notebooks”—Sartre was making notes for the philosophical treatise that would become
Being and Nothingness.
A central argument was that relations with other people always involve conflict. The love between two people is necessarily a conflict:

Sartre saw love as a battle in which two free subjects each try to get hold of the other's freedom while at the same time trying to free themselves from the hold of the other. The scenario recurs throughout his work, just as it would recur throughout his life.

 

When Sartre left Paris, Beauvoir, feeling terribly alone, had written to Olga in Laigle, enclosing money for the latter's fare to Paris. Two days later, Beauvoir returned to the Mistral at midnight to find a note from Olga under her door: “I'm here, in room 20, at the end of the corridor.” The two fell into each other's arms and talked till three in the morning.

Olga had always disliked the Mistral, so Beauvoir moved with the Kosakiewicz sisters to the Hôtel du Danemark, on the Rue Vavin. The rooms were larger and more comfortable, and the hotel was closer to their favorite café, the Dôme, but Beauvoir felt sad to leave the home she had shared with Sartre. “I felt as though I were separating from you,” she wrote to him. “We'll both go back to the Hôtel Mistral, my love, won't we? We'll live together again? Promiscuously?
Little being, dear little creature, I love you so much—I can't stop crying today.”
¹⁵

With the men away, the women saw more of one another. Beauvoir was having breakfast in Olga's room one morning when Wanda came in. The three spent an enjoyable hour together. One evening, Wanda accompanied them to the Jockey, a dance bar in Montparnasse. Beauvoir found her strangely appealing with her skimpy black pullover, fresh complexion, short blond hair, and childlike expressions. For the entire evening, Beauvoir could not stop looking at her. She thought she could understand the attraction Sartre felt.

But she struggled with resentment. She herself was earning her income and working hard. The Kosakiewicz sisters, however, supported by her and Sartre, seemed to lack the slightest drive. Wanda shared Poupette's rundown artist studio near the Jardin des Plantes. (Beauvoir paid the rent.) Poupette had done a splendid portrait of Wanda working at her easel, but this was a rare sight. “She works for only one hour every three days,” Beauvoir reported to Sartre.
¹⁶
Olga had resumed her classes at the Atelier, and Dullin was encouraging, but Olga suffered from terrible anxieties. She was always telling Beauvoir about the latest catastrophe at a rehearsal. Either she had lost her voice or she had a dizzy spell or she had forgotten her words. She needed constant reassurance.
¹⁷

Beauvoir took great pleasure in writing to Sartre and Bost, and bundling up parcels for them—books, notebooks, tobacco, and anything else they might ask for. Occasionally these letters or parcels were “official,” but mostly they were clandestine. The “Kosaks” (as Sartre and Beauvoir called the sisters) had no idea that Beauvoir corresponded almost daily with Sartre and Bost. Meanwhile, Olga airily declared that long-distance relationships were abstract and unreal, and she would write letters to Bost only when she was in the mood.

After a morning's teaching, Beauvoir would pick up her clandestine mail from the local Poste Restante. Whenever she could, she went straight to a café to reply. One afternoon, she posted her letters to Sartre and Bost, then went to meet Olga, who also had had a letter from Bost, and hers was longer. As Olga folded it away, Beauvoir glimpsed the words “My dear love.” She felt as if she had been physi
cally struck. To her, Bost wrote “Dear Beaver.” She tried to reason with herself that Bost loved her as much as he did Olga, and that she should be satisfied with that. After all, she didn't give him all her love, either. But try as she might to be reasonable, she found that Bost's love for Olga remained an open wound.

 

Women were not allowed to visit their husbands at the front. They needed a safe-conduct pass to enter the war area, or they risked jail, and soldiers were punished if their women tried to see them. Women were also not supposed to know where their husbands were located; war censors opened letters randomly to ensure this. Nevertheless, in response to her pressing entreaties, Sartre sent Beauvoir instructions in code. “Emma” would like to see her in November, he wrote. He hoped she would have more luck than Emma's friends Bernard and René Ulmann, and Maurice, Adrien, and Thérèse Héricourt. He was spelling out the town of Brumath.

On October 31, Beauvoir got up at six-thirty
A.M.
, and dressed quickly. The Boulevard du Montparnasse was still in darkness as she walked toward the taxi stand; the Dôme and the Rotonde were just opening. She left from the Gare de l'Est, on the same train Sartre had taken two months earlier. She had faked illness in order to get a medical certificate and time off school, and had wangled a false certificate of residence in order to obtain a safe-conduct pass. It had not been easy.