Tete-a-Tete (43 page)
Authors: Hazel Rowley
Algren reviewed Beauvoir's memoirs in the magazine
Ramparts
:
“When you get to Paris, see Simone de Beauvoir,” a pseudo-intellectual once urged me. People claimed she was surprisingly
sententious, humorless and tyrannical for a good writer. I liked being the only one to know she wasn't a good writer. As soon as I reached the Deux Magots I phoned the native quarter.
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He reviewed the book again in
Harper's.
His piece was called “The Question of Simone de Beauvoir.” The following extracts give the gist:
No chronicler of our lives since Theodore Dreiser has combined so steadfast a passion for human justice with a dullness so asphyxiating as Mme. de Beauvoir. While other writers reproach the reader gently, she flattens his nose against the blackboard, gooses him with a twelve-inch ruler, and warns him if he doesn't start acting grown-up she's going to hold her breath till he doesâ¦.
When Madame is right she is very
very
right. And when she's wrong she's preposterousâ¦.
Mme. de Beauvoir's world, that she reports with such infinite accuracy, is a reflected vision; no one ever lived behind that looking-glass. Which is why all the characters of her novels, although drawn directly from life, have no life on the printed pageâ¦.
Not one to risk her own freedom, Mme. de Beauvoir sensed she could trust Jean-Paul Sartre to be faithless. That was a shrewd move right thereâ¦. “Sartre and I have been more ambitious; it has been our wish to experience âcontingent loves.'”â¦
Put cats in the coffee and mice in the teaâ
And welcome Queen Alice with thirty-three!
Anybody who can experience love contingently has a mind that has recently snapped. How can love be
contingent
? Contingent upon
what
?â¦Procurers are more honest than philosophers. They name this
How-about-a-quickie-kid
gambit as “chippying.”â¦
Mme. de Beauvoir's early determination “to write sacrificial essays in which the author strips himself bare without excuses”
she has since employed with such earnestness and skill that practically everybody has now been sacrificed excepting herselfâ¦.
Saigon, they say, will fall one day. With a terrible rush and a horrible roar, nation upon nation will fall into riot, totter to anarchy, and plunge at last into endless night. Beaches whereon waters once met the land, and the sky came down to meet both, will shrink from the sea's irradiated touch. Then a low dread pall of greenish-gray will enwrap and enwind earth, forest, skyscraper, and sky in an endless orbit through endless space through endless time, in a silence without end.
Except for one small hoarse human voice burbling up from the ancestral ocean's depthsâ“In this matter man's sexuality may be modified. Sartre needs peace and quiet. The dead are better adapted to the earth than the living. Bost is on the cinema Vigilance Committee. I want to go skiing. Merleau-Ponty”â
Will she ever quit talking?
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In the summer of 1966,
Zeitgeist,
a small literary magazine in the Midwest, published a poem by Algren called “Goodbye Lilies, Hello Spring.” He dedicated it to Simone de Beauvoir.
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I was like Héloise You were Abélard
On the paperback shelves it'll sell by the yardâ
Avoid, avoid that shadowy plot
And the old fraud below it who can't shut her mouthâ
O wasn't it magical O wasn't it tragical
Love like ours will never die out
(Providing I tell it the way it was not)â
The last of the three stanzas reads:
Down in some basement below the bin
Where baby-rats drown when water creeps in
Straight down upside-down in the slag and the guck
Stuff the yammering humbug straight down in the muck.
Let her yack on forever way way down there
Then slam the door and jump up the stairâ
Open the window and let in some air
Each April should teach us how to swing:
Saying Goodbye Lilies
Hello
Spring.
In May 1981, Nelson Algren was seventy-two. He had moved to Sag Harbor, Long Island. He had just been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a journalist, W. J. Weatherby, came to his cottage to interview him.
In the course of the conversation, Weatherby asked Algren about Beauvoir. Algren had not had any communication with Beauvoir for almost twenty years, but it did not take him long to become worked up. “I've been in whorehouses all over the world and the woman there always closes the door, whether it's in Korea or India,” he said. “But this woman flung the door open and called in the public and the pressâ¦. I don't have any malice against her, but I think it was an appalling thing to do.”
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Algren had previously mentioned seeing a doctor about a heaviness in his chest. Weatherby thought it wise to change the subject.
The following evening, Algren was due to have a party in his cottage, to celebrate his new award. The first guest to arrive found Algren's dead body lying on the floor. He had died of a massive heart attack.
In France, too, the newspapers reported his death. Poupette rang Simone to offer her condolences. Beauvoir was cold. “Aren't you sorry?” Poupette asked. “Don't you feel anything for him?”
“Why should I?” her elder sister answered. “What did he feel for me that he could have written those horrible things?”
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But she did not take off Algren's ring. She would wear it to her grave.
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Sartre was under a lot of pressure, emotionally and politically, and was drinking heavily. In February 1967, three months after Evelyne's
suicide, he and Beauvoir made a trip to the Middle Eastâfirst to Egypt, then to Israel. The
Temps modernes
was doing a special issue on the Israeli-Arab conflict, with Claude Lanzmann coordinating the Israel section and Ali el Samman, a young Egyptian journalist who was studying in Paris, the Arab section. The four of them traveled around Egypt together, seeing the sights, visiting Palestinian refugee camps, and talking to left-wing intellectuals. They even met President Nasser.
On their last night in Cairo, they were given a lavish farewell dinner in a sixteenth-century Arab palace, with a floor show that included belly dancing and a whirling dervish. When Beauvoir went to bed it was after midnight, and the men were still going strong. Sartre, according to Claude Lanzmann, was by this time “dead drunk”:
He drank because there was a woman he wanted to seduce. He was very nervous, tense and aggressive. If you asked the Beaver, she would probably say we'd just got back from Gaza and he had seen refugees. It's true, but not the whole truth. There was this woman and he had to leave her. It was the day before we were flying out. We were with an Egyptian fellow who had been our guideâa journalist, a very nice, funny guy, Ali. And in this hotel room, stuffed with microphones, Sartre said: “You're a homo, Ali, you're a dirty homo.”
The guy did not know what had hit him. He laughed at first, a forced laugh. I said, “Sartre, stop it. You're nuts.” Sartre said “You fuck off, Lanzmann.” And then he called me a homo, too. And finally I said to Ali, “Listen, we're going to have to put him to bed.” We had to pick him up, undress him, and so on.
The next morning, at 8 or 9, there was a press conference, the big one before we left. I went to wake the Beaver in her room, and told her Sartre wouldn't be able to do it. Sartre had bloodshot eyes, but he did it. He has an iron constitutionâ¦. But he's aggressive, this guyâ¦. and macho. When he's in a bar with a woman at 3 am and there are guys who piss him off, he speaks their language, like a gangster. I've seen him intimidate tough men.
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After Egypt, Sartre and Beauvoir spent two weeks in Israel. Claude Lanzmann flew home after three days, and Elkaïm flew in to Tel Aviv. Sartre thought it important for his adoptive Jewish daughter to see Israel.
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The Arab-Israeli issue went to press at the end of May. In his introduction, Sartre said how divided he and his friends felt in this conflict. They had lived through World War II and been horrified by anti-Semitism in Europe. During the Algerian War, they had sided with the Arab freedom fighters in their struggle against colonialism. “We are living this conflict as if it were our personal tragedy.”
A few days later, on June 5, 1967, Israel bombed Egypt. By the end of the Six-Day War, as it came to be known, Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. French intellectuals were once again divided. Had Israel acted in self-defense, as it claimed, or had it been the aggressor? It was like the Dreyfus affair, Sartre wrote to Zonina. Everyone had strong opinions, and he himself risked falling out with his best friends.
The Arab-Israeli conflict was one of the few subjects on which Sartre and Beauvoir slightly diverged. They both firmly believed that the Jews had the right to a nation and that the Palestinians had a right to Palestine. But Sartre was dismayed by the policies of the Israeli government, who seemed determined to make negotiation with the Palestinians impossible. Beauvoir, convinced that the Palestinian leaders would not be content until they had destroyed Israel, was more sympathetic to Israel. “I was not in complete agreement with any single one of my friends,” she writes, “and with some of them I was in total conflict.”
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The Six-Day War caused a wariness between Sartre and Claude Lanzmann that would never entirely disappear. Lanzmann was passionately pro-Israel; Sartre was sharply critical of Israeli expansionism. Lanzmann, who had once been so impressed by Sartre's book on anti-Semitism, was now calling Sartre an “anti-Semite.” Sartre told Lanzmann he was an “imperialist.”
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But Lanzmann could not bear to fall out with Sartre. Nor could Bost. Sartre had once thrown Bost out of Beauvoir's apartment because Bost had sided with Jean Cau in an argument. On that occa
sion, Sartre ended up running after him, and they made up over a drink.
In their old age, Beauvoir remarked to Sartre: “Bost would have done anything not to remain on bad terms with you. And there's someone else who did a great deal not to break with you when there were disagreements, and that is Lanzmann.”
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After Sartre's death, Jean Cau wrote:
Sartre does not get angry. He expels people. There is no other choiceâ¦. If the Other takes a distance from Sartre, it can only lead to ruptureâ¦. And Sartre's entourage loudly approves of the exclusion. Out of servility? Not at all. His entourage breathes the Sartrean air. It's comprised of planets orbiting, as if nature intended it, around their night star. (A planet is not servile.) No, on the contrary, between Sartre and his satellites there reigns an atmosphere of cordiality, complicity, coded language, and humor. The relationship is not that of a master pontificating to his disciplesâ¦but rather that of a “great guy” professor with students who are utterly disrespectful of his function (Sartre himself invites this disrespect), but fanatical about his person.
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Few had the privilege of observing Sartre close up, in his own home, as Cau did for eleven years. Cau's insights came from years of intimacy, followed by exclusion.
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Sartre and Beauvoir had been outraged when the Americans began bombing North Vietnam in February 1965. Two years later, they participated in the Russell Tribunal, established by Bertrand Russell (who was ninety-four at the time) to arouse world opinion against American atrocities in Vietnam.
In May 1967, the tribunal met in Stockholm. The discussions lasted ten days. In November, the group met again, this time in Copenhagen. There were horrific reports from witnesses, including John Gerassi, the son of Stépha and Fernandoâwho had been in Vietnam collecting evidenceâand Gisèle Halimi, Sartre and Beauvoir's lawyer friend.
The days were grueling, but the evenings were sociable. Sartre and Beauvoir met old friends from around the world. At some of the meetings, Claude Lanzmann stood in for Sartre. Bost was reporting for the
Nouvel Observateur.
Sylvie Le Bon came for the weekend, and she and Beauvoir hired a car and explored the region. Arlette Elkaïm participated in the capacity of Sartre's secretary.
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Beauvoir and Sartre particularly liked Vladimir Dedijer, the Yugoslavian intellectual and militant, who presided over some of the meetings. Elkaïm, no doubt influenced by their affection for him, had an affair with him.
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Sylvie Le Bon was teaching philosophy at the very school in Rouenâthe Lycée Jeanne d'Arcâwhere Beauvoir had once taught. The minute her classes were over, Le Bon would take the first train back to Paris. In Rouen, she stayed in the Hôtel La Rochefoucauld, near the station, where Beauvoir had lived for two years. She took her morning coffee and croissant in Beauvoir's old haunt, the Métropole. “All this gave me a certain feeling of being reincarnated,” Beauvoir would write in
All Said and Done.
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Friends were struck by Le Bon's resemblance to Beauvoir. “Sylvieâ¦expressed herself a bit like the Beaverâan unaffected, rather staccato way of talkingâand seemed to echo her thoughts. She wore her hair in a chignon like the Beaver and there was something similar about her profile,” Gisèle Halimi writes. “And she had the same friendly disposition.”
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In
All Said and Done,
Beauvoir would write about her relationship with Sylvie in much the same way she had described her relationship with Lanzmann: