Letters to Sartre

by Simone de Beauvoir

  Your charming Beaver

  My Chicago friend has sent me a big parcel of books, and such a nice letter that I was moved by it. I can’t get over the kindness of people on all sides.

  [Williams, Arizona]

  Monday 16 March [1947]

  My dear little one, my love

  Where are you now? I’m afraid it may be a really long while before you receive these letters and I yours. You can wire me an address at the Gerassis’ on about 5 April, if we find ourselves too far separated. For my part, I left Los Angeles yesterday and am writing from my bed in a room at Williams, where I arrived yesterday evening with Sorokine and from where we’ll be leaving shortly for the Grand Canyon. My feelings are somewhat confused, because I miss that house where I so enjoyed myself, the red car, and — especially — Moffat. Of course, our departure more or less upset what had been a peaceful, tender friendship. Sorokine, Moffat and I spent all Saturday night together, at the house of some very nice friends who’d assembled for me some interesting directors, some very pretty girls, and a splendid collection of records. I met Man Ray there,445 among others, which brought back to me all my old memories of the Ursulines and avant-garde cinema. We played records and talked and drank whisky till 3 in the morning. At 5 we got up and Moffat took us to the bus, through a Los Angeles bathed in dawn like a European city and absolutely unfamiliar in its solitude and its silence. Meanwhile, and again at the bus depot, we kissed one another overcome by the emotion of our departure, we said the right words (more or less), he quarrelled with Sorokine, and everything became heavy and separation painful. You see what I mean. It’s above all such a definitive separation: not the least future, for all those pleasant days of friendship or those last hours of emotion. But it’ll pass, especially since Sorokine’s such a nice companion, and the bus journey should be magnificent. But what a funny thing it is to travel like that, leaving little fragments of one’s heart more or less everywhere. Through this departure I’m scared of my departure from America too, despite all the happiness of being back with you again. Here I am, at exactly the halfway stage, and I feel such strong bonds with this whole country.

  [...]

  Yesterday we caught the bus,446 then, and drove from 7 in the morning till 10 in the evening through magnificent scenery. It’s not at all tiring and I’m grateful to Bost for giving me the idea. Do tell him how I’m thinking of him as I repeat this journey in his tracks, but in the opposite direction. Tell him I don’t forget him for one moment.

  My love, goodbye. I’m in a state because of you too, and this break in our letters, and all that worry you had in Paris with the cinema and so on and so forth. Now I’m writing at the cafèteria while waiting for the bus. Basically, I’m extremely happy, because everything’s potent and so full and so rich — I’d never expected so much from this journey. And with you basically it’s security, joy, and calm love. Even this superficial melancholy doesn’t taste bad. Goodbye, my love. I kiss you with all my love.

  Your charming Beaver

  [New Orleans]

  Monday 30 March [1947]

  My dear little one, my love

  Once again you weren’t lying, and once again here I am full of emotion at finding myself on your trail. How agreeable New Orleans is, perhaps the most agreeable of all I wrote to you from Houston, I think, which is on the contrary really ugly, but where I wasn’t bored. I had a gloomy lunch with old university people, but in the afternoon they took me for a car jaunt — and it was very striking to see all those estates and opulent colonial residences belonging to the oil barons, with tall, calm Negroes mowing their lawns in the sunlight. Do you recall those trees bearing great veils of grey foam on their branches? I love that Southern vegetation, that rotten, melancholy side of the landscapes and houses which goes so well with the tragedy of the races. There was a dinner — in a nice spot that was typically Southern — and however dumb people are, they always have stories to tell the first time. After that my lecture, in a marvellous University full of azaleas and camellias. Then some guy took me to a wrestling match. It was very funny, totally faked in the style of a bad film, but with a delirious crowd shouting: ‘Kill him!’ or throwing the referee over the ropes, etc. Then the guy took me to drink beer (since whisky’s forbidden in Texas, except in the form of bottles purchased in advance and which people pull out of their pockets), in a typically Texan place decorated with steers’ horns and photographs of cows.

  The next day was a long bus drive. Sorokine groans and suffers as though I were making her do the journey on foot, but (as I’ve already told you) I quite like it. I read a lot and let myself be caught by the scenery — and this scenery in the South is incidentally pretty fascinating. We had a room reserved at the luxurious Roosevelt Hotel — is that where you stayed too? I’d so like to know, in order to follow you more closely. I just had time to eat dinner before we were fast asleep. Yesterday morning, the enchantment began. All morning we traipsed on foot round that neighbourhood you described so well to me, with its balconies of wrought iron; then by taxi through the parks and along blossoming avenues. It’s just the season for blossom and fresh leaves, and the spring here has marvellous autumn colours under a sultry, tropical sky. Lunch at the Louisiana Restaurant, with French cuisine. Afternoon in a boat on the Mississippi. Meanwhile, I’m reading a gripping book on Russia: it’s by Kravchenko,447 who used to be at the Soviet Embassy in Washington but left the party during the past few years. He tells the story of his own experience, which exactly matches Koestler’s accounts, and I think we honestly should publish extracts in the T.M.

  [...]

  On Wednesday I leave for N.Y. by the coast: Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston and Virginia. It will take 4 days by bus, and a night in the train at the end since I know the last part of the route. And Sunday — N.Y. and your letters. I feel myself drawing closer to your letters and drawing closer to you. I’m quite overcome with joy at this, at the same time that it breaks my heart to be leaving America. How I’d love to find myself here with you! Where are you? In Italy? Have you got my letters? Wire me an address, perhaps, c/o the Gerassis. Where’s Bost? I know nothing of him or of Kos, or of anybody. I feel quite lost. But always close to you and with you, my love. I kiss you with all my might.

  Your Beaver

  Williamsburg Lodge

  Williamsburg

  Virginia

  Saturday [6 April 1947]

  Most dear little being

  I’m writing to you from a place that strikes me as really strange: it’s an entire town that the Americans have reconstructed just as it was 200 years ago. I haven’t yet seen it, because it’s dark; I’ve merely had dinner in a fine hotel full of tourists here for the Easter holiday. Tomorrow evening I’m taking the train for N.Y., I have a Pullman ticket in my pocket and am really excited. Write to the Lincoln — I’ve booked a room there. My heart’s racing at the thought of seeing N.Y. again, but at the same time this scares me a bit. I’m going to find letters from you there, my love, and will write to you at once.

  My dear little one, how I did love New Orleans! More than anything — along with New York. I wrote to you from there, but before I’d been for an evening out. Apparently it wasn’t as good as it should have been, because due to Holy Week the places they really should have taken us were closed — but it was fantastic all the same. I had dinner with Sor. at the Patio Royal, which is charming. Then at the Absinthe House we found our jazz band with its 3 Negroes again, and also our white friend: a little Italian of 22, crazy about jazz and James Joyce and Stravinsky, but not out of snobbery — since he’s from the most modest middle-class background — but through a true vocation. He was remarkably intelligent and nice and lonely. And this, too, was a strange experience: to find in reality someone who seemed to come straight from the pages of Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Trumpet, or of Really the Blues — a book on jazz that I like very much.448 We listened to those three black men and chatted with them and we had the charming impression of being at home
. And then we went to another place with an excellent little black band, and our guide (who had with him a very nice Spanish friend) knew them too, which made for a powerful complicity in the midst of that white audience — as ugly, upright, and ill-flavoured as a Berlin crowd. We went to the Negro neighbourhood too — to clubs closed to whites — and felt a great deal of friendship for one another and a great joy in that jazz, which is the only really good jazz I’ve heard in America. What’s more, the weather was quite extraordinary — a pearly grey fog shedding an extremely bright light — so that at 2 in the morning you’d have thought it was dawn, while the lights of the city itself seemed to come from another planet. The air was as humid as in a greenhouse. It was one of the most poetic evenings of my life, perhaps the most poetic of all, and was so rich in meaning that a great deal of care would be needed to describe it properly. New Orleans was still extraordinary next day. In the morning there was still a pearly grey sky with great squalls of rain. In the afternoon, the people from the University took me by car to visit patios and old houses. There was such a downpour that we often couldn’t get out of the car or see through the windows — but it had a cataclysmic grandeur. At about 6 the storm abated and I saw the strangest sky I’ve ever seen, yellow and grey over the flooded city. How I did love that putrefaction, and that splendour of the vegetation and the houses and the whole civilization of the South. In the morning I’d walked a lot through the parks and streets, and my spirits were quite overwhelmed. I gave one lecture in English and one in French — with the aid of whisky and orthedrine, since I was exhausted by two almost sleepless nights. I saw some people who knew you — some of them idiots, others nice. We drank and talked. Again I went to bed late, and rose early to catch the bus. I drove all day on Wednesday — across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, all along the Gulf of Mexico, across muddy rivers and towns in blossom and tropical forests — it was intoxicating. This South says more to me than all of California and the Far West, yet at the same time I abhor it. On Thursday we went from Jacksonville to Savannah, a marvellous old city full of flowers and statues of the heroes of Independence: those men look as old as Caesar. Time is as contracted here as space is expanded - a century’s an enormous past. We went for a walk through the black part of town, and the women spat as we passed and the children shouted out: The enemy! The enemy!’ There was a weight of hatred everywhere that made your heart bleed. And so deserved! A pregnant Negro woman fainted in a bus, and all the whites including the driver laughed themselves silly without taking care of her — only Sorokine came to her aid. And the country areas, with all those squalid, unkempt ‘cabins’, are somehow pathetic. Yesterday we saw Charleston, a very pretty old English town, and some marvellous romantic gardens full of flowers, lakes, little bridges and great trees veiled in grey — gardens dating from 1700 in the middle of big plantations, the ultimate luxury in that delicious, horrible civilization. You can still see the slave market at Charleston on your way back from the gardens. Here, towards Richmond in the northern part of Virginia, the atmosphere is less stifling. But I shall never forget the black towns of Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, etc. — and the hatred and fear of the whites, which you can feel at every moment.

  My love, how I’d like to talk to you about all that. Today we reached northern Virginia, just 8 hours from N.Y.: it’s really the North and seems insipid to me. But finally it will be N.Y. the day after tomorrow - and other days. I’ve read a lot during these three weeks on the bus, and am starting to feel intensely something of America — with despair, on the whole.

  Write to me, my dear little one. How I’m longing for your letters! I’ll rush over to the Gerasssis’ place at 8 in the morning on Monday, to pick them up. In a month I’ll be close to you. I’m going to start waiting for that return. I still love you as strongly, my love.

  Your Beaver

  Hotel Lincoln

  New York 19, N.Y.

  Monday 14 [April 1947]

  My dear love

  What a joy to have some letters at last! The Lincoln one was ‘returned to sender’, while the Houston one I did receive was very old. But finally I’ve received the one from Paris, dated 25 March, and the one from Rome. Agreed for 10 May. I was just in the process of booking my seat for the 6th, but that makes hardly any difference. I’ll let you know for sure next time whether I’m arriving on the 10th or the 11th. I think it’ll be the 11th. All I ask is to have you for a fortnight to myself. Fix up a nice return for me (I mean seeing you and seeing Bost, but nobody else), for I’m a bit scared — in spite of all my joy at seeing you again — at the idea of leaving the life here, which is one perpetual party. It’s abnormal, and monstrous, and you know it can’t last, but at the same time it’s enchanting, and it seems terrible to have to return to a real life and return also to one’s own self. Above all, I do so love New York.

  [...]

  On Saturday morning, after 5 hours’ sleep, S. and I went to see the Charlie Chaplin film which has just opened on Broadway, Monsieur Verdoux — it’s not fantastic. Then an idiotic lunch at the Bruxelles, with Prolers from France-Amerique and a stupid American princess (?). Afternoon at the Sherry-Netherland with S., to talk to her about her book (the Sarbakhane family), and then whisky at the home of Dwight Macdonald from Politics, whom I like a lot. Everyone admires the way in which I’ve seen America and know it, and how fast I speak in English — I’m very proud. After that, a whole group of us went to the Chinese theatre — the Gerassis, S. and I, Odette Lieutier and some friends of hers. She took us backstage, which was fun, but it was much less good than in San Francisco. The Gerassis and S. gave up, but I went to eat and drink in a charming old cafè in Greenwich Village, which finally decided me to spend my last weeks in a Greenwich Village hotel.

  Tuesday

  Goodbye, my love. I had to go and give my lecture at Columbia and this morning I’m leaving for Smith College. I’ll write the continuation tomorrow. My love, I’m beginning to feel I’m going to see you again. I kiss you with all my might.

  Your Beaver

  Tell Bost I’ll be glad to see him again, though he’s a little bastard for not having written to me.

  Wellesley College

  Wellesley, Massachussetts

  Wednesday 16 [April 1947]

  My dear love

  Thank heavens, here I am far away from New York for a few days — I think I’d have died of alcohol and lack of sleep. In these wholesomely boring colleges, I suddenly feel how exhausted I was. It’s perfect, since otherwise these retreats would seem unbearable to me — I was terribly depressed taking the train yesterday. I had to stop my letter abruptly, so I’m going to pick it up again from Saturday. It’s a whole journal I’m sending you, but I know that every word is pregnant with memories and meanings for you and, through these listings, you’ll assuredly recognise the excitement and wonder of life here.

  [...]

  Then I went to write to you in a bar next door to Columbia. Dinner and lecture at Columbia: deadly. Drink with O’Brien and Thineray: deadly. At 11 I met Saenz at the bar of the Pink Elephant, and we drank whisky till 2 in the morning — partly because he’s nice and partly because, with my heart broken over leaving New York, I couldn’t make up my mind to go home to bed. Yesterday I left for Smith College, while S. took a plane in terror to go and see her father-in-law, on an island 1 hour away from N.Y. The people were nice at Smith. Today it was Wellesley and dreadfully boring. Tomorrow Wellesley again, then Harvard, then back to New York for three days, another three days of colleges, and two weeks of N.Y. which will certainly be fantastic, because everybody’s preparing parties, jam sessions, outings, etc. for me. I’m dead with exhaustion, my love. But I feel really happy. Happy, with a touch of dread and almost of tragedy, because I’ve attached myself very strongly to things and people here, but at the same time it’s such a fragile bond. I think I’ll be in agony till I see you again. Goodbye, my very dear love.

  Your Beaver

  University of Pennsylvani
a

  Philadelphia

  The College

  Romance Languages and Literatures

  Thursday 24 April [1947]

  Yourself, my love

  Well then, in a fortnight’s time (18 days to be precise) I’m going to see you. I’m as moved as I was 3 months ago at the idea of seeing New York. I have my aeroplane seat booked on Saturday 10th. So I’ll get to Paris at about 3 on Sunday. Ask Air France for the exact time. Come to the Invalides, or perhaps just wait for me at the Louisiane — you’ll be better off there if there’s any delay, and for me it’s only a quarter of an hour’s difference. Tell me what you decide. At any rate, of course, we’ll remain alone till the next day. I’d like to see Bost with you on Monday, and then for you and I to go away for the promised fortnight — anywhere. I have so many things to tell you, my love. The week before this was sweet and reposeful. Smith; Wellesley, from where I was shown the pretty villages of New England; Boston, where I lunched on the harbour in a charming restaurant, and from where I was taken for a drive up the coast. On the Friday evening I was speaking at Harvard, and I discussed with the students then returned to New York by plane, which delighted me. I spent three days in New York with Sarbakhane, in a real whirl because the articles are piling up and the invitations too. On Saturday I spoke in English on The Flies at the New School: it was a contradictory lecture, and I think people admired my courage more than my accent. After the lecture, dinner at Sweeney’s with Duchamp,449 which was very agreeable. After leaving them at midnight, big party in my honour at Piscator’s place: Kurt Weill was there, Le Corbusier, lots of important people, and above all Charlie Chaplin with his wife. The dreaded Collins made a speech that invited me in some way to acknowledge Chaplin as an existentialist — it was grotesque and embarrassing. Chaplin held forth for almost 3 hours, and I found him more or less as Sorokine had described him, but it was fun actually speaking to him. I went to bed at 4 in the morning.