Letters to Sartre

by Simone de Beauvoir

  327Sartre was about to set off to the United States again, this time aboard a Liberty Ship.

  328Sorokine was now living in the same hotel as De Beauvoir — the Hôtel de la Louisiane — and was engaged to an American G.I., Ivan Moffat, whom she was preparing to join in California.

  329Being and Nothingness, begun during Sartre’s captivity and completed in November 1942, had been published in 1943.

  330De Beauvoir had met the novelist Violette Leduc through a mutual friend in a cinema queue in the autumn of 1945 (see Force of Circumstance, p.19) and was to befriend (and sometimes support) her until the publication of La Bâtarde in 1964 brought her success. Leduc left Paris for good a year later, and died of cancer in 1972.

  331One of the protagonists of All Men Are Mortal.

  332Raymond Rouleau, actor-director, had produced Sartre’s Huis Clos (translated into English as No Exit) at the Vieux Colombier in June 1944. The reference here is to the beginning of laborious negotiations for the staging of Sartre’s new play, Men Without Shadows, in the course of which first Rouleau, then Hébertot, then Beer were to withdraw.

  333She was pregnant.

  334The Alliance Française had invited De Beauvoir to give some lectures at Tunis and Algiers, but it was still very hard at this time to get a berth on a boat or plane.

  335The journal Les Temps Modernes had been launched by Sartre in October 1945, with Aron, De Beauvoir, Michel Leiris, Merleau-Ponty, Albert Ollivier and Paulhan on the editorial board.

  336‘Existentialism and Humanism’.

  337Raymond Aron, a friend of Sartre since their days at the École Normale Supérieure and instrumental in steering him first towards meteorology for his military service, later towards phenomenology (and in helping him to spend a year in Berlin to study it in 1933-4), joined the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes from the start, but was to resign less than a year later over differences on the Cold War.

  338A lecture on the novel and metaphysics, first delivered in February 1945 to the students of the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel and to be given on this occasion at the Club Maintenant. It was to be the basis for her April 1946 essay ‘Littérature et métaphysique’ in Les Temps Modernes. Terre des Hommes, a weekly founded by Herbart, lasted only a few months.

  339The military plane that took Sartre to the United States on his first visit in January 1945.

  340The novelist Nathalie Sarraute, a Russian Jew settled in Paris whose first book Tropismes had appeared in 1939, offered her services to Les Temps Modernes — as a writer and translator from Russian — shortly after it was launched. Sartre directed her to De Beauvoir, but the two women did not hit it off and Sarraute later claimed that De Beauvoir had seen her as a potential rival for Sartre’s affections, to be headed off.

  341The adaptation was by Dasté’s father, Jacques Copeau.

  342M. Perrichon: protagonist of a farcical comedy by Eugène Labiche (1860).

  343The poet and prose writer Jean Genet became a friend of De Beauvoir and Sartre in May 1944 (see The Prime of Life, pp.579-81).

  344A former pupil of Sartre.

  345Camus edited a series of his own called Esprit for the publisher Gallimard.

  346Men Without Shadows.

  347Henry Bernstein (1876-1953) was a major playwright of the day in France.

  348A former pupil of Sartre and friend of Bourla, a psychoanalyst.

  349Armand Salacrou (1899-1989), one of the main French playwrights of the day.

  350De Beauvoir had never previously travelled by plane.

  351Lucien Beer, manager of the Theatre de I’Oeuvre.

  352Jean Vilar (1912-71), actor and theatrical producer, a former pupil of Dullin.

  353T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

  354By Robert Sherwood (1935).

  355See note 332 above.

  356Giacometti (see note 282 above).

  357A satirist friend of Bost.

  358Alexandre Astruc (1923- ), the film director, who also scripted Sartre’s La Putain Respectueuse.

  359Claude Roy (1915- ), pseudonym of C. Orland, poet and prolific essayist — on travel, love, painting, theatre, music, etc. — who at this time was a Communist. Always maintaining friendly relations with De Beauvoir and Sartre, he was the lover of Évelyne Rey before her relationship with Sartre (see note 517 below).

  360Adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel (1937).

  361Written in the autumn of 1942, De Beauvoir’s Useless Mouths had been staged (by Vitold) only in December 1945.

  362Actor and playwright, a former pupil of Sartre.

  363Grand Guignol: exaggerated acting of the kind seen at the Théâtre du Grand Guignol in Paris, specializing in crude representations of horror and violence.

  364See note 338 above.

  365René Leibowitz, a musicologist and composer, whom she had known since 1945 and to whose book L’Artiste et sa Conscience Sartre wrote a preface in 1950.

  366Allusion to the poem Les Assis by Rimbaud.

  367Michel Leiris, the surrealist writer, had been a friend of De Beauvoir and Sartre since 1943 (see The Prime of Life, pp.559-60), and was on the first editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes. On tension between him and De Beauvoir, see Force of Circumstance, p.47: ‘Leiris was in charge of poetry, and our tastes rarely coincided.’

  368Zette Leiris, Michel’s wife, who ran a modern art gallery.

  369This had been her first flight, and she had been allowed to spend it in the cockpit with the pilots.

  LETTERS

  JANUARY 1947 - OCTOBE 1951

  America

  1947

  Newfoundland

  Air France

  New York — Paris — New York

  Saturday 6 p.m. (Paris Time) [25 January 1947]

  My dear love,

  I’m so happy — and also so moved — to be here, since I know that you were here:370 it’s the big foyer-cum-bar-cum-waiting-room of the French and American airlines. I’ve just eaten at the hotel where you too ate and slept. I find your tracks everywhere and that’s another way of feeling how tightly joined we are.

  Well, after phoning you I sat down at the bar and downed a couple of brandies while finishing reading Maurice Sachs.371 I felt very nervous, even though everything around me was calm — quite different from the previous day.372 At 11 they called all passengers for New York. ‘Air France wishes you a safe flight’, the loudspeaker intoned solemnly. I was feeling more and more excited and when I saw the huge plane, as imposing as a ship, my heart missed a beat. I climbed aboard and settled into my seat. We were lost, just ten passengers in that big cargo-plane with its 40 seats: apparently they’re carrying too heavy a load of mail and goods to take any more. I also learned from the stewardess that it wasn’t at all due to bad weather that we didn’t leave yesterday — it was the plane that was out of order. As for the weather, it was probably as fine on Thursday as on Friday. They’d told me the weather would be good — which made me feel quite relaxed during the final preparations — and they weren’t deceiving me. The journey has been wonderful so far. First there was that take-off in the dark, which I found truly splendid: you have the impression you’re falling into the sky, into the darkness, and all the lights of Paris were shining while above them flashed the reds and greens of the runway beacons. It was like a festival in the sense in which Genet understands festivals — a festival of man and nature together — and also something at once non-human and against nature. I knew we were to fly via the Azores and Newfoundland, and it struck me as very mysterious and poetic to be combining South and North in this way, and the memory of your two journeys into a single one. A strange night then began, a night of the kind you’ve known too, which began at 11 o’clock in Paris, resumed at 3 in the Azores — though on my watch it was 6.30 — and ended in a magnificent sunrise lasting two hours over a sea of cloud, at an hour which no longer had a name in any language: 10 o’clock in Paris, 2 in New York — but where was I? The sky was wonderfully clear, t
hough I could vaguely discern the carpet of cloud. I slept, or rather dozed, a bit till the Azores amid joy, love for you, and a vague fear that was very poetic. As soon as you’re in that civilized plane where they serve you little brandies and so on, you no longer think of a possible accident, just as in daily life you no longer think of death. But every so often you’re struck by the obvious fact that you’re mortal, the plane can crumble, and your passage through the air is almost supernatural — disquieting. It’s the contrast, I think, which makes such an impact. You know the stop-over at the Azores — a night landing’s wonderful and the air was so mild. In the restaurant, I was amused to see black Portuguese in trilby hats just as I’d known them in Lisbon — and also the lightweight furniture and bright fabrics of those hot countries and, in a shop, souvenirs from Madeira. We were served fried eggs and white coffee. I poked my nose outside, but there was nothing to see except the airport lights — so I went back inside to read Koestler’s Arrival and Departure, which is very bad. From the Azores to Newfoundland is 9 hours. I slept, and then saw the day break. I was overwhelmed by that landscape of clouds — just like the North Pole or the Moon — and found it fantastically beautiful. We flew all the time at 4,000 metres, which gives one a bit of a headache, especially as the heat is stifling. But not a tremor. I slept; I read (you can read perfectly well in a plane, what on earth’s Bost talking about?); they served us a little cold meal with champagne — and when I’d drunk my two quarter-bottles of champagne I felt at the peak of happiness. You were as close to me as if you’d touched me. I really feel I shan’t be separated from you for an instant — nothing can separate us. In order to land we had to go down through layers upon layers of cloud, then suddenly — at barely 300m. — Newfoundland came into sight: white and black, harsh, and very beautiful. We circled and wobbled a great deal, and I felt a bit queasy on the way down. I nevertheless managed to do justice to the meal, poor though it was. I sampled a ‘fruit-pilly’ which was already pure America. But now I’ve had a brandy and feel sprightly again, just a bit soporific. Apparently it will take 5 hours to get to New York, because the winds are against us. So I shan’t be there till 7 in the evening (New York time) and shan’t see much — especially as I’ll be longing to sleep. But tomorrow everything will begin. I can’t yet grasp it. I’m still immersed in the journey, and would like the final take-off to be over so that there’s no further apprehension. I’m stopping because we’re about to leave. Do you remember that hall where I’m writing to you, with its pale blue walls? You’re so present to me there. Goodbye, my love. This evening I’ll send a cable, and tomorrow or Monday another letter. This trip has been wonderful — it was really worth paying a bit. Also, I really loved our little evening yesterday. I love you with all my might — you’ve been so nice, so warm, I have such trust in you, my heart, my dear heart. I hold you tight, as I do in the morning. Near or far, I’m all yours.

  Your charming Beaver

  Kisses to Bost. Tell him I’m really thinking about him.

  Hotel Lincoln

  44th Street

  8th Avenue

  Sunday 26 January [1947]

  My love

  It’s 5 in the afternoon and I’m very sleepy — I scarcely slept yesterday from jubilation. But I want to write to you, because I feel so close to you through this New York where I find you everywhere. You’d told me all about it, of course, but it’s a thousand times more wonderful than what I’d imagined and I’ve been put in such a whirl that I wonder how I’ll ever manage to prepare a lecture and deliver it the day after tomorrow. I think it’s partly because I recognise New York, just as you and Bost described it to me, that I feel so well here. As soon as I arrived here, it seemed like a country that belonged to me.

  Well, I wrote to you yesterday from the airport in Newfoundland. We set off again, and then I did find the time dragging somewhat. It was foggy, so one was obliged to either read or sleep, and I had a bit of a headache. But the first miraculous effect came at sunset, when the fog gave way to a landscape of cloud, sea and land — it was the American coast, with a marvellously clear sky and extravagant clouds pierced by blue water and flat ground. I slept a little longer, and when I opened my eyes my heart leapt. Did you see the same thing? No more cloud, just a vast black material as far as the eye could see, and against its background girandoles of light of every hue. It was extraordinary, that discovery of America through stars and chains of glittering sequins. They told me it was Boston. Afterwards there were still other lights, and after that the most intense emotion of my travelling life: as far as the eye could see, red, blue and green, motionless or scintillating — the lights of New York. They looked just like jewels or boiled sweets: something to take — whether for eating or adornment — and at all events to hold in your own hands. Nothing can be more extraordinary than a beautiful arrival. For a moment the plane circled before touching down, and as at every landing I felt a hint of fear. Generally I disregard it, telling myself that whatever has to happen will happen. But this time I felt a passionate dread: I told myself I didn’t want on any account to die having seen what I was seeing, but not having touched it — upon which the plane touched down obediently. They inspected my teeth and eyes, asked for 8 dollars, and kept me waiting for an hour in overheated corridors; but then I was happily surprised to find a good lady from the Cultural Section, Denise Perrier — the mother of a former pupil of mine, moreover — who’d come to pick me up by car. She asked a fellow from Air France to find me a room, and he gave me a note for the Hotel Lincoln. Fresh delight. The weather was as mild as during a Midi winter, very different from Paris, and you could almost taste its aroma. She took me by car along the East River and into the heart of New York — and even into Central Park to view the extraordinary skyscrapers. I was dazzled once more. What most struck me was the silence of those teeming streets, the buses gliding silently along — no horns — and the people scarcely talking or laughing. It’s surprising set beside Paris or Madrid — you’d almost think yourself at Leysin.373 Or rather, it’s like a silent film — you have your eyes full and your ears empty. It was pleasing as a first impression. At the hotel, another piece of luck: the porter said they’d keep me ‘indefinitely’, and the room costs only $3. It’s a vast building with 30 floors, between 44th and 45th and 8th Avenue — i.e. bang in the middle of town. My room’s ghastly, but decent, with a bathroom and fairly quiet. The good lady took me off to eat lobster in a scarlet cavern of Hell with gold-leaved palm trees, which absolutely bowled me over. I’ve realized that Bost and you weren’t lying about the martinis: they bear no relation — it’s like night and day. I’ve accordingly promised myself to put plenty of them away. She left me at 10 and I walked like a zombie down 42nd St., Broadway, etc. — still amid that same silence. The shops are dreadful, but funny. I adore drugstores. I find you gave me a very good description of the poetry of comfort here — it’s fantastic. Having everything you need to live and enjoy yourself right there in your hotel — detective stories as well as a toothbrush — is a joy I hope I shan’t tire of too quickly. I got in at midnight, utterly exhausted, but so keyed up that at 5 I woke up thinking in my sleep: ‘Something’s happening to me . . . What’s happening to me?’ — and was scarcely able to get back to sleep again. The good lady has asked me to dinner, but I didn’t want to phone anyone — I wanted a day just to myself. And I was right. I rose at 8, took a shower, and by 9 I was on the street. It was lovely it being Sunday: all the ‘natural’ side of New York — all the cliffs, canyons, sky, sea, horizons — stood out more dramatically. I walked the whole length of Broadway, and found that this city has a beauty and grandeur resembling that of mountains. At the same time, it’s so much a city that you no longer have any desire to visit another after this. The sky was one of those skies you told me about, and everything lay deserted and silent. I saw Wall Street and the Battery, and took the boat to the Statue of Liberty; I didn’t go right up to it, I just- wanted the view of arriving in New York by the Battery — and it
really is an extraordinary view. I walked around in this way for almost 3 hours, quite beside myself. I had lunch for $1.50 at the corner of Beaver Street and Broad Street — not too bad. I liked the white coffee and the big raisin pastries they serve with it for breakfast in the cafèterias. I find there’s hardly any problem with food here. You can eat anything, anywhere, very quickly — I like that. After lunch I went over towards the Bowery, and that staggered me even more than what I’d seen in the morning. I saw the Chinese streets, the Jewish streets, Chatham Square, etc., and find the unity of Wall Street and Chatham Square (I mean the fact that they comprise a single ensemble, a single city) something quite extraordinary. I was so dazed by looking at things that I had to stop. I went to a Greenwich cinema (Greenwich is the only thing I haven’t found very fantastic, but I’ll have to see it by night) and saw Journey into Fear,374 which is enjoyable. Then I took the bus back up 5th Av., and came to my room to write to you. It’s 5.30. In an hour the lady’s coming, but I don’t care if I’m bored at her place — I’m too exhausted anyway to go out properly. I’ll have to go to bed early. I’m telling you everything in detail, because I know it will conjure up very clear images for you, and that you like all that. What amazed me was how accurate everything Bost and you had told me was: the drunks on the Bowery pavements, the sky, the street horizon, everything. Only I don’t feel in the least terrorized. On the contrary, I’d like to remain for a time without knowing anyone here, just because this city so warms my heart. You feel free here. Nobody looks at you, even at the hotel it’s impersonal — and that’s pleasant. However, tomorrow I’ll make some telephone calls. The only trouble is that I’m really going to [be] penniless. I don’t know how they went about it, but I’ve got very few lectures — none in the South, despite what Soupault said375 — and the dates are so damn stupidly arranged that there are some I’ll be absolutely unable to give if I want to spend any time at all in California.376 I’ve cabled Soupault about this and am writing to him. Mme Perrier says it’s outrageous that they haven’t financed this trip for me — Lévi-Strauss377 was sure they’d do so. Since Joxe378 is coming in the next few days, they’re going to speak to him about it. At all events, don’t worry, I’ll manage. She says there are already heaps of people telephoning her in order to see me. I’m going to try and see the Saunders woman379 as soon as possible, and Dolores,380 to find out how much I can be sure of. At any rate, I’ll easily be able to live on $12 a day in New York, and if I can’t buy myself anything, who cares? I just want to be able to travel round a bit, and see New Orleans. But even if I were to see only New York, I’d be in seventh heaven. Well, the harsh side of this city doubtless reveals itself a bit later on, and the weather can change too — the kind we’ve been having yesterday and today is apparently unusual for this time of year.