Letters to Sartre

by Simone de Beauvoir

  I’m going to start again from the beginning. I was in a bar and writing to you. Then I went off to 13 Charles Street to see R. Wright, who received me like an angel. He’s the only person I’m really fond of here, and whom I see with warm pleasure. He says I’ve made extraordinary progress in English, and it’s true that I could almost give lectures — I talk for hours — and I understand almost everything too, though understanding’s still the hardest part. He introduced me to his little daughter, who’s as cute as can be, and along with his wife — whom I like a great deal too — they took me first of all to an excellent Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, after which we went to Harlem to pick up two black friends of his (a couple) and then on to the Savoy. Did you go there? It’s phenomenal. The Kos. sisters would go crazy about it. At any rate Bost has been there, I think. We were the only two white women, and not a single white man. We drank whisky and watched the marvellous Negro women dance. Then we went to a little club — Jack’s or Jackson’s, perhaps Bost knows — with very good jazz. At around 1 we went home. The young woman was tired, because she has to work hard in the morning. These outings are rather awkward in a sense — like the other day at the Politics party — because lots of the girls there also work, and what’s a pleasure and curiosity for me is a strain for them. Wright’s wife told me too how stressful an American woman’s life is. I was so delighted: on Sunday morning, that angel Richard Wright’s going to take me to a Gospel Church in Harlem — apparently it’s astounding. I’m also going with his recommendation to see the authors of Black Antiquities,403 in Chicago. He has taken charge of my interests in a fantastically kind way.

  On Tuesday, which was the next day, I had to work a bit in the morning, then I went to the Metropolitan Museum — there’s a fine English exhibition on: Hogarth, Turner and especially Constable, whom I don’t know but who’s a good painter. I visited the picture galleries and there are some fine paintings; but it’s all too muddled up to be very agreeable and by the end of two hours I was bored stiff with it. I went back to my neighbourhood and ate in a cafeteria. There was snow in New York, which was suddenly a totally new dimension and wonderfully agreeable — children were tobogganing and skiing in Central Park. I went to the cinema and saw Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake,404 which interested me because it has that technique you want to use with Clouzot,405 of seeing everything through the eye of the camera. But he hasn’t done much with it. It comes over as contrived, and strikes me as being unsuitable for a thriller. Then I went to doll myself up a bit before meeting up with the Macht woman at the Plaza. She wanted to introduce me to some guy from Town and Country — but the guy was drunk, and anyway I was to meet some far more important people an hour later at Jean Condit’s. I hate that [Macht] woman: it’s her fault I shan’t get your money in time, which I need (I’ll borrow it from L[evi]-S[trauss] for a month, but it’s the principle of the thing). You’re amazingly indulgent towards women like Macht or Knopf — in fact, towards American women in general, it seems to me. I’ll speak of this again. At all events, Macht is a real bitch and I bawled the living daylights out of her. She persecutes me by telephone because I haven’t asked her for anything. I have another persecutor, that Collins friend of Piscator’s, who wants The Flies and is just like Génina-Rassini.406 Eventually, after I’d bawled out the Macht woman, we went to Jean Condit’s. Arrival at 6, cocktail, then they took me to dinner and kept me till midnight. For 6 hours I argued in English, alone against them all, passionately. I was battling with Greenberg, Phillips, Rahv,407 and a tall, pretentious young man who says we have no right to dabble in philosophy because we don’t know Russell. We discussed politics and they simply turned my stomach. Abel and Chiaromonte had already disappointed me, with the total emptiness of their thinking: but they’re nice and I like them. Whereas this lot, with their so-called cultural internationalism and freedom of spirit, are pure American imperialists. They attacked me about Merleau-Ponty,408 and came out with two real gems: ‘It wasn’t Stalin who fed you, but UNRA’, and: ‘Stalingrad? Of no importance! We’re the ones who won the war for you.’ For them, dollars count far more than all the blood shed by others. We went at it hammer and tongs, I felt like quitting the table — and at any rate left all the steak on my plate. They were very upset, because personally they were congratulating me on my success and feting me. They served me up the argument of the firing-squad victim, of course. They don’t give a shit about anything, except Partisan Review: they’d send the whole world up in flames to ensure the survival of their worthless rag. I’ll never give another article to that filthy outfit. And all with such arrogance! You feel UNRA and dollars behind them, just as you feel 160 million people behind Ehrenburg. But it’s less candid. I’ve been pretty disgusted these past two days. With the people from Politics and Partisan Review; with publishers and magazine editors; and with that purely commercial way of inspecting your brain, as if it were a dancer’s legs. They talk about existentialism as they would about a worm powder, and they award marks: Camus so many, Sartre so many — My God! by the end I was quite scared. I thought: Bost began with fear when he was alone; I’m scared now that I know people. What is everything we write for them? A product that’s consumed in six months. As I don’t think there’s any more to be hoped for from the ‘other side’, it’s discouraging — for I don’t have any impression of hope here. And yet, though it’s perhaps the worse world at present, it’s the only one concerned with intellectual matters. I’ll see what conclusion I’ve reached a month from now.

  Anger had so exhausted me that for the first time I slept, really slept, from 1 to 11.30 in the morning. I felt ‘relaxed’, despite everything, and really at home in N.Y. It was a fine, icy morning. I went to the N.Y. Times, which requested just a short article for $75 — that’s how it always is. I took the opportunity of visiting the building. An American newspaper is something quite phenomenal. After that I went to meet Chiaramonte, who’d been kind enough to telephone, and who organized lunch for me with Abel and Schapiro in a little Italian restaurant in the Village. Afterwards I went to see D. Nordman, who gave me a $100 advance against Prostitute409 and my article. Aaahh!

  Very important

  1. send me immediately, in small packages, the last section (4th and final) of Ethics of Ambiguity?410

  2. do not publish the Pilorge, which R. Wright says is full of crude mistakes and would risk having the most disastrous effect.

  Reply on this point, and act.

  After that, I went to see a very nice German woman whom you met, and who gave me heaps of tips for the German issue. Then: evening with the Gerassis, who are quite angelically kind to me. We had dinner at cafè Society Down Town — but there was only a half-hour show, because it was empty — then on to Nick’s, very agreeable but equally empty. Apparently, for the past two months there has been a ‘recession’, as they now call it rather than ‘depression’, and the nightclubs are emptying.

  Yesterday, Thursday, telephone calls and work in the morning — I’m doing the article for Vogue. Lunch with the abominable Knopf woman, who no longer wants to publish me — she’s a pain in the neck. Excellent afternoon with the Boubou. We went to 155th street on the top of a bus, all along the Hudson — there was snow everywhere and kids playing. We saw a Spanish library with very good paintings, and next door the Indian museum. Then by taxi over Washington Heights to the tip of New York,’where there’s a cloister full of mediaeval objects imported from Europe by Rockefeller. Did you go there? You can see Washington Bridge and the Hudson, and big cliffs, and with the snow and the setting sun and the children playing on sledges it was fantastic. I returned by subway to La Fayette, where I drank whisky with Chiaramonte’s wife and Abel’s girl friend, who are very nice. I made an appointment to talk about American women. Then 5 hours at the cinema, until 1.30 in the morning. I saw Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V in technicolour, with L. Olivier. I’m not yet quite sure what to think of it, but I wasn’t bored, which strikes me as a success. Then Conflict,411 with Humphrey Bog
art. This morning, a bit of work. Then day at Vassar.

  My dear love, goodbye. I still have so many things to tell you. I’m going to sleep now. Write to me. I’d be so totally happy if I could keep some contact with you. You’re so present to me everywhere here. Goodbye. I still love you just as dearly, I feel myself at one with you. How we’ll talk, when I get back! A big, big kiss.

  Your charming Beaver

  For Bost

  Best beloved Little Bost. Write to me too, if you’re not a brute. I’ve already told Sartre to explain to you how much I think about you over here. However, just to make more certain, I’m writing it down for you. Has he told you everything properly? I’m enjoying myself madly — I haven’t been scared so far, but perhaps I’m about to start.

  A big kiss.

  Your Beaver

  [New York]

  Tuesday [11 February 1947]

  My dearest love

  As soon as I arrived back from Vassar on Saturday morning I found your Thursday letter, and then yesterday the Sunday one arrived. My beloved, I do so hope you’ve received mine and seen how I experienced the whole of this N.Y. with you. That’s over now, though. I mean, I think just as much about you, but it’s no longer your N.Y., it’s mine. I’m writing to you from the Sherry-Netherland: there’s a little band and people eating, since it’s 2.30 in the afternoon. There’s a beautiful blue sky over the park, and I feel completely at home. It even makes my heart ache — this beautiful day, when N.Y. has recovered all its mildness — to think how tomorrow’s my last day. It’s yet another departure for me, and one that causes me some pain — even though I’m terribly happy to be going to California, to be seeing Sarbakhane,412 and to be taking a big trip. But I enjoy this life so much. On Saturday I came back by train. Being a weekend, it was full of little, twittering college girls, who’d exchanged their ‘pants’ for fur coats and little hats and looked like real ladies. I went back to the hotel, collected my telephone messages, and made some telephone calls: it’s crazy the time you spend on the telephone here. It starts at 8.30 and lasts until I go out, and after that there are ten messages every evening — it’s quite entertaining. I went to have lunch with Prolers from France-Atnerique, who’s a filthy creep but he’ll bring me in $150-200. I promptly got him to stand me a meal at the Chambord. There was some other woman too. It was entirely devoid of interest, but we ate well. After that, I spent an hour at the Frick Gallery. Did you see it? It’s on 5th Av. — there are some fine Vermeers and Holbeins, and I thought about the museums in Holland where I went with you.413 Then I had one of my best moments in N.Y. A very nice white friend of Wright’s took me to the Carnegie Hall, to a Louis Armstrong concert. Apparently it was the most fantastic stroke of luck, because these days he himself does commercial jazz and there’s never any real jazz in New York; but this time he played first-class jazz and the whole hall was carried away, me included. Armstrong casts quite a spell too, and the best record’s no match for that kind of live jazz. I went for a drink at the home of a guy who’s very famous here in his milieu, because he’s the only white man who can play with a black band, having lived for twenty years in Harlem exactly like a black man, after marrying a Negro woman.414 They gave me a book they’ve written together: it’s called Really the Blues and is being translated by Duhamel.415 I think it would be a good idea to get an extract for Les Temps Modernes. There was also a very young American writer, a friend of Farrell416 — to whom he’s going to introduce me — and Wright, terribly American with his red hair and all of 24.417 He gave me his book — about a military academy in the South — and it looks quite good. I was in seventh heaven with those people, it’s the only milieu I really like. But I had to leave them, loaded down with books and records, in order to go and meet the people from Partisan Review. We had dinner in a charming Spanish restaurant in the Village, then drank a lot of reconciliation whiskies at Phillips’s place. They were profuse in their apologies and assented to everything I said — they even made a mistake once or twice and assented when I meant the opposite. They were so nice, in fact, that they disarmed me somewhat and I no longer detest them so much. There’s one called Barrett who’s quite charming.418 Do you know him? But why do they have such a high opinion of Georges Blin,419 that’s a real mystery. I spoke English all the time yesterday and drank at least 6 whiskies. I had quite a head on Sunday, but was really pleased because Wright — whom I’ve come to love with all my heart — came to fetch me and took me to the big Abyssinian church in Harlem, the biggest Gospel Church in the world. We heard the singing and the sermon, and saw how the people reacted — they were middle-class Negroes and pretty restrained, but very impassioned all the same. In April he’ll take me to another one, smaller and more popular. He took me back to lunch at his house. He has a little daughter who’s a real little marvel, and even I who don’t like children am friends with her. His wife is very nice too, and they’re like a proper family for me in New York, something really warm and agreeable. The friends I’d seen the evening before came, just two of them, and we chatted peacefully till 4. I’m having lunch with them again on Wednesday and I’ll take the little girl a nice present.

  After that I went to visit Mme Perrier, the woman from the Institute who wanted to give me a Rorschach Test. It’s really very amusing, more than those ones of Van Lennep’s.420 After my own test, she showed me some very odd responses from the American war veterans she has been studying for the past two years. She has a whole file of them, really interesting.

  After that I went to have dinner with little Mary Guggenheim,421 who’d invited me with a girl from Harper’s Bazaar who was much nicer than she was. She’s very unlikeable, an old maid riddled with neuroses. I barely saw her, because she spent the two hours of the meal laboriously concocting a zabaglione, which she ended up by ruining and had to throw away — that too seemed pretty neurotic. When I left she said, very indiscreetly: ‘I’m sure you’re off to see Dolores, aren’t you?’ In fact I was going to the Gerassis, who are as nice as can be. I explained to them how spiteful they’d been to you with all those reproaches, and now they’re keeping mum. We talked about Tito, who’s a very interesting example of the confusion in the younger generation today — exiled and rootless, without a country and strongly affected by it. They’re having problems with him, but I don’t have time to tell you about those. Then the Boubou took me to the Bowery — to Sammy’s Follies422 — and I must admit that you and Bost weren’t kidding me, it’s a fantastic place. The clientele in particular is amazing. There was one woman of about 35, the Scottish type, very tough, all alone, who was drinking whisky after whisky and watching everything avidly. I was in seventh heaven. In a sense it’s disgusting, and I think Dolores must feel quite ill when she goes there. But it’s the culminating point of the whole sordid side of N.Y. and America, and as such takes on a certain poetry and is ultimately less revolting than the real reasons that allow it to exist. Well, once again it would take too long to discuss it now. (Make certain you keep these letters, which will be my only memento from here and which I really want to get back.)

  On Monday, which was yesterday, I worked in the morning on my article for Vogue, made telephone calls, and went to the hairdresser’s. After that, a lunch I couldn’t avoid with Thineray and a lecturer from Columbia, very glum. We ate at the Beaujolais, and the occasion lacked gaiety. But I dropped them very quickly. I went to work on the article at the Sherry-Netherland, where I felt like a princess. After that, an interview with Brun from France-Forum: a wretched nobody who’s organizing this evening’s lecture, along with M. Morton and an

  American — Sweeney — who’s supposed to introduce me. After that, an interview with an exiled German poet whom O. Lieutier absolutely insisted on presenting to me. After that, I spent a very enjoyable evening. Do you remember that charming American from Berne, a friend of Moffat’s, who was my neighbour? He came to a party the other day just to see me and invite me out, so yesterday we met up. He took me to visit a young American novelist ca
lled Mary McCarthy, who’s the rising star of Partisan Review. She’s very beautiful and seems intelligent, but without the least charm or interest other than documentary (and as such she fascinated me), being so typically the American intellectual woman — I could write pages about her. She has a very insignificant husband (No. 3, not counting two official lovers). The four of us went to a restaurant called Lindy’s — I’d wanted one that was typically American, and it really was. Do you know it? One couldn’t imagine anything more like Hell. Then the new ‘in’ nightclub. The Blue Angel, with an agreeable funereal decor and good numbers. After that, a place which seems to me the best I’ve seen in N.Y., Torcy’s, just opposite Billie Holiday. It’s the place you’d go to every evening if you were a New Yorker, intimate and a bit shady, with a dash of music, whisky and hookers.