Their revision sessions turned into trips to riverside bookstalls and the cinema, cocktails and jazz. He sang her Old Man River, talked about his dreams, and asked her questions about herself. Beauvoir later wrote that he tried to understand her in her own terms, ‘in the light of my own set of values and attitudes’. He encouraged her to ‘try to preserve what was best in me: my love of personal freedom, my passion for life, my curiosity, my determination to be a writer’. Even so, when she saw ‘her Lama’ again on 27 July everything changed. She asked herself why, when Sartre and Lama were in the same room, the former lost his importance? Her answer was that the second absorbed her more passionately.31 But on 28 July she read Sartre’s early attempt at a novel, Er L’Armenien, and they spent the following day together. Er L’Armenien includes dialogues with Chronos, Apollo and Minerva (among others) on topics such as time, art, philosophy and love.32 Beauvoir started to use the same endearing epithets in her diary that she had previously reserved for her Lama. She slept poorly, feeling troubled.33
There is an essay by William James entitled ‘What Makes a Life Significant?’, in which he asks what is it that makes every Jack see his own Jill as charmed and perfect – as a beautiful wonder of creation – when she leaves the rest of her observers stone cold. Who sees Jill more clearly – the enchanted eyes of Jack? Or the eyes that are blind to Jill’s magic? Surely, James writes, it is Jack who sees the truth when he ‘struggles toward a union with her inner life’. Where would any of us be if no one was willing to see us truly and seriously, ‘to know us as we really are’?
Beauvoir had eyes like Jack: but the trouble was, they saw Maheu’s perfections and Sartre’s charms (and to be honest, they still saw beauty in Jacques too). What was she to do?
In Beauvoir’s memoirs, this dilemma was dramatically downplayed, whether for her reputation’s sake or her readers’. It was the late 1950s, after all: would they be ready for the idea that a Jill could love a Jack – and a Jean-Paul and a René, too? In the simplified story she told in The Prime of Life, after Beauvoir met Sartre she recedes from the foreground. In the diaries she wrote that with Sartre, Maheu and Nizan she could finally be herself; in the memoirs she described her time with Sartre as the first time in her life that she ‘had felt intellectually inferior to anyone else’.34 This mood of inferiority intensified after the famous conversation – near the Medici fountain in the Luxembourg gardens – in which Beauvoir confided that she had been thinking up her own theory of morality. Sartre demolished it, and eventually she declared herself beaten. She found this disappointing in hindsight, but she looked back on it with humility: she wrote that, ‘My curiosity was greater than my pride; I preferred learning to showing off.’35
Beauvoir’s ‘humility’ in this instance – while laudable insofar as it expresses a preference for learning over blinding forms of pride – has perplexed feminists for decades. At many points in her life Beauvoir defined Sartre as ‘the philosopher’, despite the fact that when they took the oral part of the agrégation exam, she not only took second place but, at the age of 21, she was the youngest person ever to pass it. When the three-man jury deliberated, one judge held out for Beauvoir as ‘the true philosopher’, and at first the others favoured her too. But in the end their decision was that since Sartre was a normalien (someone who had studied at the elite École Normale) he should receive first place. (It is unclear whether the fact that he had sat and failed it the year before entered into their deliberations.36)
Beauvoir’s memoirs imply that it wasn’t just Sartre who ‘forced’ her to take ‘a more modest view’ of herself. Her other normalien friends – Nizan, Aron, Politzer – had had several years longer to prepare for their exams, and their preparation was built on a foundation laid by much better educational opportunities. The situation in which they became philosophers was radically different from her own, because only men could be normaliens at that time, only men could get the most elite teachers and the confidence that ensued from debating with people who believed themselves to be the best.
Beauvoir’s diaries support this story – to an extent. Shortly after the agrégation exams, she was having a drink with Sartre and Aron; they spent two hours discussing good and evil. She got home feeling crushed. It was so interesting! She wrote – but it was also a revelation: ‘I’m no longer sure what I think.’ Their intellectual lives were so rich compared with the ‘too-closed garden in which she had been imprisoned’. She envied their mental maturity, the strength of their thought – and she promised herself that she, too, would achieve it.37
Despite her lack of access to the most elite philosophical pedigree, Beauvoir was remembered by her contemporaries as an excellent philosopher who wanted to live philosophy. Maurice de Gandillac described her as: ‘Rigorous, demanding, precise and technically stringent, […] everybody agreed that she was philosophy.’38 It is perplexing, therefore, that she ever denied the title ‘philosopher’ and positioned herself in this subordinate way. ‘Why,’ Toril Moi asks, ‘does she seize every possible opportunity to declare herself intellectually inferior to Sartre?’39
Moi’s conclusion is that Beauvoir sacrificed success for seduction.40 And as she recounts the story in her early memoirs, Beauvoir gives the appearance of having done so: in the public persona she leaves philosophy to the ‘great man’, Sartre. But in her diaries we see that Beauvoir’s early philosophical success occurred at the same time as a rather different seduction – of René Maheu, a man who failed his exams. In that case seduction required no sacrifice on her part. So why should it be different with the then-unknown Sartre? Moreover, we shall see that Beauvoir did not seize every opportunity to declare herself inferior – in fact, she publicly owned and in places fought to defend her own originality. Could it be that she described herself as inferior with a certain reader in mind: the kind of reader who doubts herself, who wonders whether she should listen to the voices that tell her not to try? For that kind of reader, it was remarkably bold of Beauvoir to comment publicly on the ‘clumsiness’ of the young Sartre’s essays: after all, he was a genius.41
But in 1929, he wasn’t the giant ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’ yet. He was barely 25 (three years older than her), had over twice as long to prepare for the exam, and was taking it for the second time. That Beauvoir’s memoirs do not dwell on the uniqueness of her achievement may reflect insecurity, modesty or political savvy on her part. It may be a concession to the power of this institution (the École Normale) in the cultural landscape of France. The way she described herself as inferior to Sartre drew attention not to their relative abilities, but rather to differences in their confidence and cultural capital. He, prior to being a normalien, had attended the Lycée Henri IV, then Louis le Grand. On paper you couldn’t be better qualified. Sartre did not have to list his certificats de licence because, as Toril Moi writes, ‘a consecrated genius does not need to justify himself in such petty ways’.42
A female genius, by contrast, had to be careful not to shine too blazingly. In 1929, the French education system had also been trying to tread carefully through the delicate matter of women outperforming men in the agrégation exams. The outcome was public knowledge because agrégation results were publicly announced, like sports rankings. The candidate with the highest number of points came first, and so on. So, although their jobs were not under threat, the male students still had to experience the embarrassment (as some saw it) of being ranked lower than women in an official and influential context. (To avoid this humiliation the ministry of education separated the lists into male and female from 1891; they saw the better of this move and reintroduced the joint ranking system in 1924.)
To put Beauvoir’s experience in perspective, it is worth noting that when Sartre’s father died, not much more than twenty years before, his mother quickly left Paris because she was concerned that Jean-Paul would be taken away from her. As a woman, her legal rights to her own child were weaker than those of her dead husband’s family. When Beauvoir was studying, women in Franc
e still didn’t have the right to vote or open their own bank accounts. The year Simone took the agrégation female university students made up 24 per cent of the student population – a massive increase since the previous generation (in 1890 there were 288 female students, 1.7 per cent). But if a woman didn’t have the right to vote, to open a bank account – or even to her own child – what right did she have to first place?
It was not that long ago that Simone had been reading philosophy by herself in the ladies-only section of the Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève, writing in her diary that she wanted to vivre philosophiquement – to live a thinking life, rather than to just live, to just think – and to write out the riches she felt welling up within her. Later on she would read Ralph Waldo Emerson (an unrequited love of her beloved Louisa May Alcott) but even before she read him she had already come to share his conclusion that ‘our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can’.43
By 22 July 1929 she knew that being with Sartre would force her to be a ‘real someone’. He could be annoying. She felt afraid. But, be that as it may, she wrote that day: ‘I will abandon myself to this man with absolute confidence.’44
Eventually, even she would wonder if she sold herself short.
5
The Valkyrie and the Playboy
When Beauvoir arrived at Meyrignac in August 1929, she needed to take stock of her situation. Meyrignac was the only place she had ever had a room to herself, so she took advantage of the privacy to do what she called ‘an appraisal’ of her life. She believed in Sartre, and believed that her growing tenderness towards him was not an infidelity to the Lama or to Jacques.1 In the weeks since Maheu had left Paris, Beauvoir and Sartre became closer in mind and body: they had not yet consummated their relationship but in his room in the Cité Universitaire it was a case of, Beauvoir later told Bair, ‘everything but sex itself’.2
Over the next week, as Beauvoir carried out her appraisal, she catalogued memories and feelings – which, being human, changed from day to day: ‘doubts, devastation, elation’.3 She didn’t take this variation as a reason to upbraid herself but rather as deserving reflection. While she ‘needed’ Sartre, she ‘loved’ Maheu. In her own words: She loved what Sartre brought her; and she loved what Maheu was.4 At this point, Sartre was not yet essential.
The weather in the Corrèze was beautiful and the family was drawn close by the recent death of Grandfather Bertrand de Beauvoir: this was the first summer without him. Gandillac, Merleau-Ponty’s Catholic friend, came to visit and proposed that the sisters should visit him, too – he was only an hour’s train ride away. Françoise forbade it even though he was a respectable Catholic man, and she liked him: it wasn’t proper. What about a day trip to Tulle? Gandillac asked. It was about half as far away. Their mother permitted this on one embarrassing condition – she was coming too, to chaperone.5
On 9 August Simone visited Uzerche with Gandillac and thought of nothing but Sartre; the day after, they walked on the banks of the Vézère and she thought of the Lama.6 The workings of her mind were invisible to Françoise’s escorting eyes, but it soon became evident that there were other means of escaping her vigilance. On 19 August the Bertrand de Beauvoirs moved from Meyrignac to La Grillère, Georges’ sister’s estate. At breakfast the next morning her cousin Madeleine rushed into the kitchen and told Simone that there was a man waiting for her in a nearby field.
It was Sartre.
She knew he would come: the prospect of his visit made her passionately happy.7 At this point Beauvoir’s diaries, in which she so regularly confided, stop. They are resumed after Sartre’s stay, when she recounts their ‘perfect days’ of ‘ideas and caresses’.8 It seems reasonable to speculate that she found her usually regimented time too valuable to waste in writing when it could be spent with Sartre.
On the first day of his visit she suggested that they should go for a walk but Sartre declined, telling her that he was ‘allergic to chlorophyll’. They sat in a meadow and talked instead; there was not enough time in the world to dry up the wells of their conversation. Sartre stayed in the Hôtel de la Boule d’Or in Saint-Germain-les-Belles. Simone woke up each morning feeling elated, running through the meadows thinking about what she would tell him that day. They lay in the grass and she talked to him about her parents, Hélène, Zaza, her school, Jacques. On hearing about the latter Sartre said that he thought marriage was a trap, although he knew it was hard for women of her background to avoid. He admired her ‘Valkyrie spirit’ and told her he would be sad to see her lose it.
In parched August fields they began to plan a different future, together: they would travel, have adventures, work hard, write famous works and live lives of passionate freedom. He would give her much, he said, but he could not give her all of himself: he needed to be free. He had been engaged once already but now was terrified of marriage, children and possessions: she found ‘sensitive Sartre’ surprising when he told her. His goal was to be the great writer he was destined to be, and it was during this trip that Sartre gave her the spiel about how he needed to preserve his freedom in order to realize his destiny as a great man. He was a ‘Baladin’, a wanderer who needed to travel the world untethered in order to gain material for his great works. In characteristic Sartrean style this proposal was made with literary and philosophical sophistication: the ‘Baladin’ he fashioned himself on was the ‘Playboy’ of the Irish playwright J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.
The memoir version of this conversation has often been invoked to claim that Sartre set the expectations of their relationship, inflicting his infidelity on Simone. But the diaries show that her heart had many objects of affection, each of whom she found loveable for his own reasons. In Meyrignac that August, Sartre shared his notebooks with her and described his thinking on psychology and the imagination, as well as his theory of contingency. He had been reading many of the same things she had, so their conversations were buttressed by interests that stretched back into both of their pasts. Alongside the philosophy they had both read for the agrégation, their mutual love of literature gave them an uncommonly deep shared world. She found his ideas interesting, inspiring – hopeful, even – and began to realize that she was becoming more and more attracted to his ‘beautiful serious head’.9
Simone had told her parents that she and Sartre were collaborating on a critical study of Marxism, hoping that their hatred of communism might overpower their concern for propriety. Would it work? Not for long. Four days after Sartre arrived they were together in a meadow when Georges and Françoise approached. The sprawling philosophers jumped to their feet and her father looked embarrassed. He addressed his words to Sartre: people were starting to talk; could he please leave the district? Simone was indignant, and asked her father why he spoke to her friend in this tone; her mother began to shout at her. Sartre assured them that he would leave soon, but said that they were working on a philosophical inquiry they needed to finish first. Whether or not her parents believed them, they returned to the house, and Sartre departed several days later on 1 September.
After Sartre left, Beauvoir wrote in her diary that she demanded ‘nothing more from Sartre than the moments he wants to give her’. She had begun to imagine a future that enabled her to reconcile her hopes of independence and love, and it made her feel elated. In her diary she wrote: ‘The Valkyrie hidden in the depths of this tender little girl, poured joy into her in great waves, and she knew herself to be strong, as strong as him.’10
After Sartre departed, she expressed delight at ‘being alone, uniquely her own, free and strong’. In her solitude she had space to reflect on incertitude: for her heart was certain that she loved Sartre, she loved the Lama, and she could love Jacques, ‘each in a different manner’. But she did not know how to reconcile all of her loves.11
So after Sartre left, on the 2–4 September, the Valkyrie continued her project of taking stock. She was happy, overflowing with possibility and feeling as though the life she had l
onged for had finally begun. Sartre was very much an ingredient in her happiness, but contrary to what has been widely written and assumed, he was not the only ingredient. Sartre’s role was to be ‘in my heart, in my body and above all (for in my heart and my body many others could be) the incomparable friend of my thought’.12
Beauvoir settled on a resolution: ‘I will love each one as if he were the only one, I will take from each one all that he has for me; and I will give him everything I can give him. Who can reproach me?’ There were days when she wasn’t sure what her feelings for Sartre were, precisely, but felt certain that they were not yet love.13
Before their legendary pact, therefore, Beauvoir came to the conclusion that she would love multiple men in the ways she thought them loveable. As early as 1926 she wrote in her diary that she did not think she had the right to give a lover ‘an image he likes in place of me, or to be really unfaithful to what I am’: one should ‘give only what one can give’.14
Two days later the Lama arrived and they stayed together in a hotel. They had hired separate rooms but she enjoyed the two mornings they spent together, tenderly remembering his blue pyjamas and the voice in which he said ‘Bonjour Castor.’15 Beauvoir’s diary descriptions of Maheu are often imbued with physical attraction, drawing attention to his body, his face, his voice, his posture, what he wore and how it fitted him. But she began to see his attractiveness as ‘partial’ in comparison with Sartre’s. She did not hold him in high esteem morally, and intellectually he didn’t satisfy her.16
Becoming Beauvoir Page 10
