Bookplanet: Simone and Jean-Paul

Two reviews of Tête à Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley.

1. When Simone met Jean-Paul
Hazel Rowley extols the daring modernity of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in a fawning double biography, Tête à Tête. Peter Conrad isn't convinced
By Peter Conrad

Here, Hazel Rowley tells us, we have 'one of the world's legendary couples', snuggled in a shared grave like Abelard and Heloise. I've never been convinced that a love affair that ended in castration is one we should celebrate; to my way of thinking, a better comparison for Sartre and de Beauvoir would be the Macbeths, or perhaps Bill and Hillary Clinton. They were a hard-boiled, predatory pair, joined in a political alliance - co-dependents perhaps (as therapists might say), but not lovers.

Sartre's pet name for de Beauvoir was Beaver. In French the word is castor, which happens to be the title of the literary magazine to which the hero of Murger's Scenes de la vie de boheme contributes. But Sartre - who had a taste for tough American crime novels, with their lexicons of misogynistic slang - probably knew that in English the word refers, none too flatteringly, to the pudendum. Actually, he soon tired of de Beauvoir's nether parts; as a substitute for sex, they pimped for each other and shared titillating reports of their latest conquests. Rowley, credulously agog, extols the daring modernity of this open relationship.

Of course, their double-dealing mendacity looks better if you hide it behind philosophical jargon: the bits they had on the side, Sartre reasoned, were 'contingent' rather than necessary, like their own abiding collusion. The novelist Nelson Algren, one of de Beauvoir's cast-off quickies, called this pretentious bluff by demanding 'contingent upon what?' and concluding that 'procurers are more honest than philosophers'.

Procuring, indeed, is the subject of Rowley's book. Her narrative is a sordid and emetic chronicle of sexual abuse, emotional manipulation and moral blackmail. Sartre, a wall-eyed gnome who reeked of tobacco, prided himself on the success of his seductive blather, and throughout his life maintained a harem of abject women, between whose apartments he commuted. Usually they began as his pupils, or as subjects of the amateur psychoanalysis he doled out: this placed them in a convenient position of inferiority, ready to be plucked. When Sartre declared her to be physically superannuated, de Beauvoir solaced herself with toy boys and - while a schoolteacher - had extracurricular liaisons with selected female students.

Once, when she and Sartre were together in Brazil, she fell ill with typhoid and spent a week in hospital. Outside visiting hours, Sartre concentrated on seducing 'a 25-year-old Brazilian journalist, a virgin, with flaming red hair', to whom he idly proposed marriage. He dismissed such forays by explaining - with Clintonian finesse - that they were just a species of masturbation. He sadistically specialised in denying himself to his partners, and practised coitus interruptus to punish them, not as a contraceptive precaution.

On all this and much more, Rowley guilelessly smiles. For her, Sartre and his Beaver are gods, whose divinity cannot be questioned. Her 'worship' of de Beauvoir even survived what sounds like an inauspicious meeting. De Beauvoir made herself available for an interview in 1976 - or could it, given her tendency to bed acolytes, have been a prospective session on the casting couch? Rowley asked what she floridly terms 'burning questions'; de Beauvoir, who seems not to have fancied having Rowley as a temple maiden, returned icy answers and soon edged her devotee to the door. Retelling the story, Rowley hardly notices the brush-off. Just as benignly, she accepts Sartre's apology for terrorism in his preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. She is also naive enough to believe that the disdainful intellectual, after converting to communism, could make himself an honorary prole by wearing 'casual shirts and sweaters' when he gave public talks.

The romance persists because Rowley - who grew up in prim Adelaide - is also infatuated by the raffish squalor of what she calls 'cafe society', with which Sartre and de Beauvoir became synonymous: the square outside Les Deux Magots, where they wrote in the afternoons, is now named after them. Rowley chronicles their intake of stimulants with her own addictive enthusiasm. De Beauvoir took a Thermos of coffee with her to exams at the Sorbonne, and when Algren introduced her to pot she inhaled 'conscientiously'. Sartre serially knocked back three double espressos for breakfast and puffed his way through two packets of Boyards a day. When working as a schoolteacher, he let his pupils smoke in class. Wartime shortages stimulated his ingenuity: down on all fours in the cafe, he'd scavenge butts to be stuffed in his pipe. The tragic climax of Rowley's narrative comes when - threatened by doctors who wanted to resolve his circulatory problems by amputating his toes, then his feet, then his legs (and why, I wonder, did they think of stopping there?) - he hands over his cigarettes and lighters to one of his current doxies.

Rowley gets high on the second-hand smoke exhaled by her dead deities and attributes the book to her own caffeine habit: she thanks the friend who gave her the title - and what a brainstorm that was! - 'over lattes in Harvard Square'. Her style often hyperventilates, with sentences that she expels like hot gasps: 'It was afternoon. His mother was away. They made love.' But the addition of frothy milk has diluted the story. Rowley may think that she too is a coffee-drinking sophisticate, even if Starbucks is hardly Les Deux Magots. Her book, however, is as sweet, gooey and mind-numbing as a mug of cocoa.

2. Tête-à-Tête
Hazel Rowley's Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre
by Charles Marowitz

It may well be that the greatest achievement of the joint oeuvres of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir was neither the books, plays, journalism, nor criticism, but the relationship.

Beginning in 1929 and ending with Sartre's death in 1980, these two comrades, lovers, and collaborators shared a roller-coaster ride through the most seminal events of the 20th century. They shared ideas, controversies, lovers, and beds in what emerges, in Hazel Rowley's sweeping chronicle, Tête-à-Tête, as a supremely romantic love story interspersed with lecheries, treacheries, betrayals, reversals, and staggering accomplishments.

Infinitely describing the dizzying permutations of their fifty-one year association, it becomes clear that there is an indissoluble linkage between intellect and sexuality. Sartre outdoes Casanova or Don Juan in the number and variety of seductions he notches onto his belt suggesting that the intellectual energy that produced Being and Nothingness, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, Saint Genet, the plays and the novels, are in some inexplicable way the outgrowth of the erotic power that he wielded throughout his life -- even into his final days when he was blind, unable to walk without aid and dying of pulmonary edema. Throughout his life, he felt the compulsion to seduce, and then colonize women. It was more for the sake of ego than sensual pleasure, as he himself admitted. John Huston described him as "a little barrel of a man and as ugly as a human being can be. His face was bloated and pitted, his teeth were yellowed and he was wall-eyed." None of which seemed to diminish his allure.

Once the conquests were made, the women would become part of the Sartre-Beauvoir extended family. Sartre studiously parceled up his life so as to spend a certain amount of time with each; wrote amorous letters to all on a regular basis whenever he couldn't see them in person, and casually lied to suggest that each meant more to him than the other. Clearly, the most vital and irreplaceable was Beauvoir -- just as for her, it was Sartre. It belittles the depth of their union merely to say they had "a meeting of the minds." They were, as the title suggests congenitally Tête-à-Tête, criticizing one another, helping with each other's work and constantly reporting to each other the most personal details of their daily lives. One would call it "a blessed union" but for the fact that it was a non-marital concord in which each actively pursued alternative lovers and soul mates, in Beauvoir's case of both sexes. But perhaps that is what accounts for the longevity of the partnership. It was invulnerable to corrupting jealousies and the kind of shifting loyalties that usually destroy conventional marriages. There were many couples, both in Europe and America, who fiercely envied the unimpeachable solidarity of the Sartre-Beauvoir relationship and tried to duplicate it, usually without success.

Sartre was not internationally revered. He had a brief and inexplicable romance with Maoism and there were many who viewed him as a repellant apologist for Stalinism during those days when the writer was being fêted in Moscow and singing the praises of repressive Soviet policies. (It was that shortsightedness which mainly accounted for Albert Camus's break with Sartre. On a personal level, it was extremely hurtful to both men; ideologically, they remained daggers-drawn right up to Camus's early death in January, 1960.) When, after the Hungarian uprising, Sartre finally turned against the Soviet Union, it was for many too late an awakening to change their views of his political naiveté. But when one comes to tote up the literary and philosophical accomplishments, plays like The Flies, No Exit, and The Respectful Prostitute, novels like Nausea and The Wall, and criticism like The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert -- not to mention the endless stream of journalism, he dwarfs virtually all the other reigning intellectuals of the century.

But it is Hazel Rowley's fascination with Simone de Beauvoir that inspired the book and accounts for the main thrust of its narrative. One feels it was Beauvoir's work, particularly The Second Sex, The Mandarins, and the Memoirs which "made a woman" out of the author and inspired this homage, and because it was, Beauvoir's changing role in relation to Sartre (and other lovers like Nelson Algren and Sylvie le Bon) light up its pages like a series of tableaux vivant.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Beauvoir glowingly represents the feminist ideal of total independence and selfhood and yet is seen throughout the book tending, caring for, and even coddling Jean-Paul Sartre. She feeds him, bucks up his drooping spirits, chauffeurs him to his various meetings, and protects him from marauding sycophants. She accepts his numerous liaisons with other women and gallantly suppresses the twinges of jealousy she experiences when he is out romancing others. She stoically accepts the subtle lies he concocts to placate her. Occasionally, she procures women for him drawn from her own acquaintances. Presumably, the deep companionship and intellectual stimuli of her liaison with the helplessly promiscuous Sartre are so great it diffuses the normal burblings of jealousy and exploitation. Rowley clearly suggests that is the case and in a more emancipated society, liaisons of this type would be accepted and even encouraged. If one has someone like Sartre as a lover, the author seems to imply, it is incumbent upon the mistress to share him with several others, no matter what pain might ensue. It infers a highly uncommon degree of emancipation. That, more than anything else in the book, makes it a compelling read. It demonstrates a fascinating alternative to bourgeois marriage and extra-marital affairs which makes one question the strictures that underpin conventional morality, and it does so in such a way as to suggest that those who place marital fidelity above all else are sacrificing a bevy of exciting experiences which could profoundly enrich their lives.

The great trick of biography is being able to separate the wheat from the chaff and Rowley, who had a wilderness of letters, articles, and interviews to draw from, sometimes gives the impression that she is simply transferring information from Sartre's and Beauvoir's appointment books onto the page; more thorough than pertinent. But her style is fluidly unobtrusive and she charts the ups and downs of her subjects' exploits with a masterful restraint. Much of it reads like soap opera, but that's how it was lived, and often we have to pause to realize that these jealousies, agonies, and histrionics actually happened to persons who were probably the two most influential intellectuals of their age. Rowley wisely steers clear of analyses of Existentialism or politics and concentrates instead on the changing chemistry of the two, three, sometimes half-a-dozen triangular relationships that swirl around her primary subjects. The bed-hopping and frantic intrigues frequently conjure up Feydeau, but the impact is thoroughly Flaubertian.

The final deterioration of Sartre, saddled with a Ralph Schoenmann-like surrogate (Claude Lanzmann) who uses the enfeebled philosopher as a stalking-horse for his own ideas, lurching from one physical debility to the next until he is sightless, bedridden, and intellectually drained, limns an agonizing "dying fall" that inspires both pity and terror. Deprived of the ability both to write and to see (and it was the sight of what he wrote that made it possible for Sartre to think in print), the intellect stultifies and the body checks out. Rowley makes it feel like the fall of a Titan and whatever reservations one might have about Sartre the playwright-philosopher, or Beauvoir the paradoxical feminist, one realizes on closing the book that few intellectuals have cast such a pervasive influence or lived such formidable lives and so we tend to conclude, as with Lear, that we "shall never see so much nor live so long."