Tete-a-Tete (53 page)

29
.
PL,
p. 649.

30
.
Ibid. A hostile press campaign had the play removed from the theater. As well as for Sartre and Olga, it was a blow for Charles Dullin, to whom Sartre, in his gratitude, had dedicated the play.

31
.
My interview with Dominique Desanti, Paris, August 27, 2003. Sartre asked permission from the resistant writers group, the CNE (the National Committee of Writers), to put on
The Flies.
They gave permission willingly and praised the message of the play in their newspaper,
Les Lettres Françaises.

32
.
PL,
p. 674.

33
.
Ibid., p. 673.

34
.
S to S de B, Monday, February 1946, in
Quiet Moments,
p. 275. (Trans. modified.)

35
.
Raymond Queneau,
Journaux 1914–1965
(Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 769.

36
.
Leiris, August 28, 1943,
Journal de Michel Leiris, 1922–1989
(Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 384.

37
.
A Very Easy Death,
p. 68.

38
.
PL,
p. 674.

39
.
Sartre dedicated the play “To That Lady,” the term he and Guille used for Madame Morel.

40
.
Arthur and Cynthia Koestler,
Stranger on the Square
(London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 67.

41
.
My interview with Robert Gallimard, Lourmarin, October 15, 2003.

42
.
S to S de B, early 1944,
Quiet Moments,
p. 264.

43
.
PL,
p. 689.

44
.
Ibid., p. 670. S de B inhabited room 36, on the corner of the Rue de Seine and the Rue de Buci.

45
.
Bost recalls the incident in the film
Simone de Beauvoir,
by Josée Dayan et Malka Ribowska (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).

46
.
PL,
p. 691.

47
.
Mouloudji,
La Fleur de l'âge,
p. 138ff.

48
.
Raymond Queneau, Monday, April 17, 1944,
Journaux 1914–1965,
p. 569. (The passage is wrongly placed in 1945 in the published journal; Queneau wrote April 17, but not the year. In fact, April 17 fell on a Monday in 1944. And all other accounts point to this event's occurring in 1944.)

49
.
PL,
p. 698.

50
.
Gibert Joseph,
Une Si Douce Occupation,
chap. 13.

51
.
Bost to Beauvoir, April 1944, unpublished letter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir archives.

52
.
Sartre to Lena Zonina, October 3, 1962, Masha Zonina private archives.

53
.
“A Walker in Insurgent Paris” consisted of seven articles, published between August 27 and Sept. 2, 1944, written through Sartre's eyes, in first-person reportage.

54
.
S de B,
Force of Circumstance
[hereafter
FC
], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 18.

55
.
PL,
p. 723.

CHAPTER SEVEN: FAME

1
.
Cohen-Solal,
Sartre: A Life,
p. 223.

2
.
Adieux,
p. 227.

3
.
FC,
p. 25.

4
.
Adieux,
p. 236.

5
.
Sartre,
Situations, III
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p. 113–15.

6
.
Nizan and Jaubert,
Libres Mémoires,
p. 365.

7
.
Sartre, “Individualisme et Conformisme aux Etats-Unis,”
Le Figaro,
March 29, 30, 31, 1945, reprinted in
Situations, III.

8
.
Camus was dismayed that Sartre gave his best essays to the conservative
Figaro,
and filed rather bland pieces to
Combat.

9
.
Dolores Vanetti Ehrenreich interviewed by Annie Cohen-Solal, May 4, 1983,
Sartre: A Life,
p. 237.

10
.
Cohen-Solal,
Sartre: A Life,
p. 237.

11
.
Gerassi interview with Sartre, December 31, 1971.

12
.
Sartre, “President Roosevelt tells French Journalists of his Love for Our Country,”
Le Figaro,
March 11 and 12, 1945.

13
.
Sartre, “Ce que j'ai appris du problème noir,”
Le Figaro,
June 16, 1945 (my trans.).

14
.
Adieux,
p. 306.

15
.
FC,
p. 34.

16
.
Useless Mouths
portrays an interesting moral dilemma. A community is under siege. Food is in short supply, and most important, the warriors need to be fed. What is the community's responsibility toward the women, children, and old people? Should they be thrown in the moat?

17
.
“He was a very exciting teacher,” Nadine Chaveau says. “All the girls fell in love with him.” Chaveau would become Maheu's lifelong mistress, and the mother
of his second son. “He always had affairs,” she says. “It was like a game with him.” My interview with Nadine Chaveau, Paris, October 5, 2003.

18
.
Jean Maheu private archives. Maheu did not tell his girlfriend, Nadine Chaveau, about his affair with Beauvoir. Beauvoir told Sartre about Maheu, but apparently kept quiet about the affair with Vitold. (Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir,
p. 302.)

19
.
FC,
p. 41.

20
.
Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir,
p. 302.

21
.
Whether or not he admitted this at the time to Beauvoir and Sartre, Bost told Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, in later years, that he went to bed with Dolores Vanetti. His more serious affair, while he was in New York, was with Vanetti's best friend, the artist Jacqueline Breton Lamba, who was strikingly beautiful. (My interview with Le Bon de Beauvoir, November 22, 2003.)

22
.
Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” interview with Michel Contat,
Nouvel Observateur,
June and July 1975.

23
.
FC,
p. 46.

24
.
The play was a fiasco, heavily criticized for its tedious moralizing, and it closed after fifty performances. Some reviewers praised Olga's performance, but nevertheless, she took the play's failure as a personal disaster.

25
.
Sartre had been planning a journal ever since he came back from the German prison camp. But he had been obliged to wait. During the war, there was censorship and a paper shortage. After Liberation, Gallimard offered financial support. The editorial committee was formed in September 1944.

26
.
This and the following quotations are taken from
Existentialism,
tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947).

27
.
L'Ecume des Jours
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947) has been variously translated as
The Froth of Passing Days, Foam of the Daze, Froth on the Daydream,
and
Mood Indigo.
Boris Vian dedicated the novel to his wife, Michelle. She would become one of Sartre's great loves.

28
.
Adieux,
p. 305.

29
.
S de B to S, December 19, 1945, in
Letters,
p. 392. The skiing holiday never took place, but there seems little doubt that Beauvoir would have liked an affair with Camus.

30
.
S de B to S, December 15, 1945, in
Letters,
p. 391.

31
.
S de B to S, February 13, 1946, in
Letters,
pp. 403–404. Sartre did write to Beauvoir in Tunisia, but since she left for Tunis a month later than she had originally anticipated, the letters were sent back to Paris. He, too, was slightly worried. In New York, a month went past before he received a letter from her. He surmised that Tunisia was not “particularly favored by the postal system” (S to S de B, February 1946, in
Quiet Moments,
p. 274).

32
.
FC,
p. 68.

33
.
FC,
p. 69.

34
.
My interview with J.-B. Pontalis, Paris, January 14, 2004.

35
.
Nizan and Jaubert,
Libres Mémoires,
p. 384.

36
.
S to S de B, December 31, 1945, in
Quiet Moments,
pp. 269–71.

37
.
Time,
January 28, 1946.

38
.
“Talk of the Town,”
New Yorker,
March 16, 1946.

39
.
She quotes her journal in
FC,
p. 88.

40
.
FC,
p. 78. (Trans. modified.) Sartre had written in
Being and Nothingness,
“Who would be content with a love given as pure loyalty to a sworn oath?”

41
.
All Said and Done
[hereafter
ASAD
], trans. Patrick O'Brian(New York: Paragon House, 1993), p. 91.

42
.
ASAD,
p. 92.

43
.
Jean Cau,
Croquis de mémoire
(Paris: Julliard, 1985), pp. 229–59. Cau remained Sartre's secretary until 1957. This book, published after Sartre's death, surprised everyone by its discretion. In the late 1950s, Cau became an arch reactionary, and he and Sartre fell out bitterly.

44
.
New York Herald Tribune,
November 20, 1946 (
The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre,
vol. 1, p. 139).

45
.
FC,
p. 113.

46
.
S to S de B, Friday, August 1946, in
Quiet Moments,
pp. 277–78. (Trans. modified.)

47
.
FC,
p. 114.

48
.
Ibid., p. 22.

49
.
Ibid., p. 56.

50
.
Although Sartre pressed him to, Merleau-Ponty refused to have his name on the cover alongside Sartre's.

51
.
FC,
p. 103.

52
.
Ibid., p. 117.

53
.
Beauvoir is not the only woman to suggest that Koestler was a sadist. At least one of his biographers describes him as a rapist.

54
.
Bost and Olga married on October 21, 1946. Sartre and Beauvoir were witnesses.

55
.
S de B,
America Day by Day
[hereafter
ADD
], (1953), trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

56
.
S de B to S, January 25, 1947, in
Letters,
pp. 407–09.

CHAPTER EIGHT: wabansia avenue, jazz, and the golden zazou

1
.
The quoted comments are taken from
ADD
and Beauvoir's correspondence to Sartre.

2
.
ADD,
pp. 10–11.

3
.
S de B to S, January 31, 1947.

4
.
Ibid. (Trans. modified.)

5
.
S de B to S, February 11, 1947.

6
.
Bernard Wolfe and Mezz Mezzrow,
Really the Blues
(New York: Random House, 1946).

7
.
“The Talk of the Town,”
New Yorker,
February 22, 1947.

8
.
ADD,
p. 72.

9
.
H. E. F. Donohue,
Conversations with Nelson Algren
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), pp. 180–81.

10
.
NA to S de B, February 27, 1947, Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir private archives.