Tete-a-Tete (44 page)

Both women have always denied that it was a sexual relationship. Throughout her life, Beauvoir insisted, in public, that she had never had a sexual relationship with a woman. She would sometimes skirt around the question, saying that she thought all women were to some degree homosexual in their tastes, since women were more attractive, softer, their skin was nicer, and they were often more charming than men. “I have had some very important friendships with women, of course, some very close relationships, sometimes close in a physical sense,” she said, “but they never aroused erotic passion on my part.”
²⁸
Her letters to Sartre, published posthumously, would indicate the opposite.

Sylvie Le Bon talks about this subject with the same vagueness and ambiguity. She says it was love, not friendship, that she and Beauvoir felt for each other. They were “intimate.” Their relationship was “carnal but not sexual.” She claims they were both primarily male-oriented. Echoing Beauvoir, Le Bon speaks as if lesbian lovemaking were simply not the real thing. She balks at the word
couple.
They were not a couple, she says, because from the beginning, Beauvoir encouraged her to have relationships with other people, and she did.

Looking back, Le Bon thinks she was too young to understand certain things, but that Beauvoir wanted her to be independent and not make demands Beauvoir could not satisfy. “The Beaver often used to tell me that she had been very cautious with me,” Le Bon says. “She felt she had made mistakes in the past.”

By the time she met Le Bon, Beauvoir was painfully conscious of her own aging body. In 1968, she published
The Woman Destroyed,
three novellas that explore the theme of the older woman coming to terms with no longer being sexually desirable. After that, she began research for an exhaustive essay on old age.

Le Bon remembers an emotionally charged turning point. They were traveling together in the North of Scotland in 1969, and feeling very close one evening. Le Bon wanted more. Beauvoir told her gently, “Any man would love to have you in his bed. But I am, quite literally, like an impotent man.” Sylvie wonders what would have hap
pened if she had taken the initiative. Perhaps Beauvoir simply needed reassurance? But she was young at the time, Le Bon says, and she took everything Beauvoir said at face value.

After that, they felt freer together, Le Bon says. What had to be said had been said, and they could be intimate at certain moments, without making any demands on each other.
²⁹

 

Sartre liked to describe himself as “the district nurse.”
³⁰
“You're lucky,” he told his psychoanalyst friend Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. “Sick people come to your rooms, and they pay you. In my case, I'm the one who does the rounds, and I pay them.”
³¹

Sartre's schedule varied little over the years. He got up at eight-thirty. After breakfast in a local café, he worked from nine-thirty till one
P.M
. He had lunch with Michelle, Arlette, or Beauvoir, usually at the Coupole or the Palette, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, then went back to work from four-thirty till eight-thirty
P.M
., with Beauvoir working beside him. On Monday and Thursday evenings he ate at Arlette's apartment; afterward they talked or watched television, and he slept there—he upstairs, she downstairs. Tuesday and Saturday evenings were at Beauvoir's, and he slept at her place. He spent Wednesday evenings with Michelle, then went home. Friday evenings he was at Wanda's till eleven
P.M
., then went home.

The weekends were equally rigidly organized: Saturday lunch with Arlette, Saturday evening with Beauvoir, Sunday breakfast with Arlette; Sunday lunch with his mother at her hotel (roast pork and mashed potatoes), and the evening with Michelle. After Anne-Marie Mancy died, in 1969 (he seemed to deal surprisingly easily with her death), Sartre had Sunday lunch with Beauvoir and Le Bon at the Coupole.

Complain as he might about the demands made on him, Sartre
chose
to prop himself up with this schedule. It gave him a sense of stability. His women shielded him from the world. They provided a diversion from work. They made him feel loved and needed. Sartre needed to have company. One night, when for once he found himself on his own—he would normally have been with Arlette, but she was away—he let himself into Arlette's apartment to watch television.
When André Puig, Arlette's boyfriend, came in around midnight, he found Sartre lying on the floor dead drunk. It took Puig half an hour to help Sartre to his feet.

Beauvoir spent a lifetime observing how easy it was for women to drive Sartre into a corner. “That guilty conscience of his,” she said.
³²
Sartre felt beholden to his women for loving him. He often wondered to what extent he was responsible for their unhappiness, their failure to find fulfillment. Why was Wanda, who had once read Stendhal and Tolstoy with pleasure, no longer capable of reading even detective novels? “Madness always leaves one feeling guilty,” he told Lena. He knew there had been mistakes made somewhere, by someone.

He professed to hate the jealous scenes to which he was constantly subjected, but Sartre did more than most men to provoke them. His women all lived within ten minutes of him;
³³
they rarely saw one another, and none of them knew the truth about his life. Arlette had no idea that after going for three weeks' vacation every year with
her,
Sartre went away with Wanda for two or three weeks. Wanda did not know that Sartre still saw Michelle. When he slept at Beauvoir's, he told Wanda he was sleeping at home. His letters to Wanda were filled with outrageous inventions. He'd be late back to Paris, he once told her. He was locked up in a castle in Austria. When he went off with other women, his alibi, nearly always, was Beauvoir. “I told you from the beginning I'd have to spend time with Simone de Beauvoir,” he would say in an impatient voice to any woman who complained.

In September 1966, Sartre was in Japan, where he was having an affair with his Japanese interpreter, Tomiko Asabuki. “I want to fuck you,” he wrote to Michelle. “I often think about it.” By this time, Michelle Vian was beginning to wake up to Sartre's fabrications. “Before you lied well, but now you lie badly,” she complained. “I don't want the whole truth. I just don't want to say ‘How is the Beaver?' when you are with someone else.”
³⁴

Every so often, there was a leak. When John Gerassi interviewed Wanda in 1973, he remarked that Michelle was very jealous. There was a long silence. Finally Wanda said in a small, incredulous voice, “I sometimes ask Sartre about Michelle. He tells me he never sees her!” Gerassi, realizing his mistake, hastened to cover up for Sartre: “That's true
now.
But you know, I meant a time in the past. He must have seen her then.”
³⁵

In his letters to Zonina, Sartre recounted with amusement the lies he told his other women. At the same time, he assured Zonina that he was faithful to her and that she had nothing to be jealous about. He felt “vigilant friendship” for Wanda and Michelle, he said, and paternal feelings for Arlette. In reality, throughout his five-year affair with Zonina, Sartre continued to have a sexual relationship with Michelle, and possibly also with Wanda.

Although things between them had been at a low ebb for some time, Lena did not break off permanently with Sartre until the spring of 1967. She was hurt that Sartre had decided to spend three weeks in Spain that summer, instead of coming to the USSR as usual. Sartre explained that Beauvoir wanted to be with him a little longer that year. It was hard for Beauvoir in the USSR, he said, where she practically never saw him alone. “This is the least I can do for her, who twice a year acts as our chaperone without protesting, out of friendship for you and me.”

He told Michelle the same story. He was going to spend July in Spain with Beauvoir, he said. It was
France Soir,
once again, who gave him away. Michelle, an avid reader of the gossip columns, came across a photo of him in Barcelona with Arlette. When he got back, she pointed it out to him.

“That's not Arlette,” Sartre said.
³⁶

 

“For me, the most striking thing when I think about Sartre, it's how this man always tried to make a clean sweep of everything he was—
tabula rasa
—and start again at zero…as if he were nothing or no one,” says Claude Lanzmann.
³⁷

May 1968 marked an important turning point for Sartre. At the age of sixty-three, he underwent another transformation. Once again this involved a radical refusal of his earlier self. Throughout his life, the only identity Sartre had assumed whole-heartedly was that of the intellectual, the committed intellectual, who took political stands on important issues. Now he started to disparage himself as a “classical intellectual” who considered himself apart from the masses, as opposed to a “new intellectual” who was part of the masses and engaged in street action. As a first step toward becoming the latter, he changed the way he dressed. He stopped wearing suits and ties. From
now on, even when he gave public talks, he wore casual shirts and sweaters.

 

Immediately after the first serious clashes between students and police in Paris, Sartre and Beauvoir published a brief statement in
Le Monde
giving their support to the students.
³⁸
In the next weeks, Sartre threw his weight behind what was now being called the “student revolution.” He did not give advice; he took the view that this was a moment for young people to speak, and that he had a great deal to learn from them. Indeed, it was he who interviewed the student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in the
Nouvel Observateur,
rather than the other way around. Whereas the mainstream press dismissed Cohn-Bendit as a flaming-haired rabble-rouser, Sartre gave him a platform.

What Sartre found refreshing about May 1968 was that the students were asking not for power, but for freedom. They wanted a different type of society, a fundamental change in human relations. Their slogans gave free rein to the imagination. They were wary of institutional power structures and wanted universities to be less rigid and stultified. Sartre wholeheartedly agreed. The only way to learn, Sartre said, was to question what one was taught. This included questioning one's teachers. “A man is nothing if he isn't a contester.”
³⁹

In August 1968, Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia. For the second time in twelve years, the USSR was being an outright aggressor. In Rome, Sartre gave an interview, calling the Soviets “war criminals.” At the end of November, he and Beauvoir made a trip to Prague to show their solidarity with the Czechs.

Sartre wrote to Zonina that he would not be coming back to the Soviet Union. He and Beauvoir were breaking completely with the Soviet government. This meant he would not see Zonina, unless she came to Paris. “I want you to know that whatever you think about our relationship, this is terrible for me.”
⁴⁰

Over the next few years, Sartre and Beauvoir's Russian friends were no longer permitted to travel; many of them lost their jobs, and struggled to scrape together a living. Neither Sartre nor Beauvoir would ever see Moscow again.

 

The
Temps modernes
committee now met in Beauvoir's apartment, every two weeks, at ten-thirty on Wednesday mornings. Half a dozen young people had joined the group in 1968, among them several women, including Sylvie Le Bon. They generally gossiped for an hour—about films, books, and people—then set to work.

Some of the former members had left because of intellectual clashes with Sartre.
⁴¹
The remaining old-timers were Jacques-Laurent Bost and Jean Pouillon, who had been there since the beginning, André Gorz, an Austrian Jewish political scientist who had joined the team in the late 1940s, and Claude Lanzmann, who had been there since 1952. (These days, he was making
Shoah
, a film on the Holocaust, and was often away.) Beauvoir still conscientiously read through the submissions. And she and her feminist friends ran a column called “Everyday Sexism.”

Sartre rarely turned up. Beauvoir would chide him: “Sartre, that makes three times that you haven't come. This time you must.”
⁴²
Under pressure, he would come and give his opinion on things. But he no longer cared much about the journal. It was almost thirty years old. For him, it had become an institution.

 

These days, Sartre was more excited by the young revolutionaries in the Maoist movement. The French Maoist newspaper,
La Cause du peuple,
had been repeatedly seized by the government, on the grounds that the articles were an incitement to illegal violence. Its editors had been arrested, charged with provoking crimes against national security. A Maoist leader, Pierre Victor, approached Sartre. Would he be prepared to assume temporary editorship of the paper, to prevent its being banned? Sartre had always felt strongly about freedom of the press. He agreed that the newspaper was one of the few organs in which workers were able to speak out. In April 1970, he became its editor in chief.

In June, Sartre and Beauvoir distributed copies of
La Cause du peuple
among the bustle of the street market on the Rue Daguerre, near Denfert-Rochereau. As further protection, they had signed most of the articles in that issue with their own names. The police did not bother them, but they did arrest two Maoists who were distributing
the paper the same day in another area. A week later, Sartre and Beauvoir repeated the performance. This time they were arrested, along with sixteen others. As soon as they arrived at the police station, the two of them, but not the other sixteen, were released.