Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  Both of them had to confront the disappointing dissonance between their expectations of adult life and its reality. Sartre was starting to lose his hair, and he didn’t know what to do with his manuscript on contingency – it was still too dry. Beauvoir had an idea: why not make it a novel? It needed fictional depth and suspense. Sartre loved detective stories, so could he write his philosophical question as a fictional quest? In his third draft, he would set the novel in Le Havre and base the main character, Antoine Roquentin, on himself. Her criticism was detailed and exacting, but that was why he took her advice – ‘invariably’.94

  In the meantime he set it aside to work on his philosophical essay on the Imagination. It had been commissioned by Henri Delacroix for an academic publisher, Alcan, and researching the subject had made Sartre wonder about dreams and hallucination. A friend from the École Normale, Daniel Lagache, had specialized in psychiatry and told Sartre that he would arrange for him to try mescaline if he wanted to have hallucinations for himself.

  So in February of 1935 Sartre went into Sainte-Anne’s hospital in Paris for a supervised mescaline injection. He was observed for several hours, and unfortunately did not experience the kind of trip he had hoped for: instead of happy hallucinations he was chased by the deformed shapes of the objects in his room, seeing crabs and other crustaceans, which haunted him for weeks to come. When he saw Beauvoir that evening he was not at all his usual self.95

  Eventually he admitted that he was fighting depression and worried – he was a little prone to catastrophize – that he was on the edge of chronic hallucinatory psychosis. Beauvoir wryly reminded him that according to his own philosophy the mind controlled the body, that his only madness was believing that he was mad.96

  In March 1935, Hitler enacted a conscription law reintroducing mandatory military service, increasing the army from 100,000 to 555,000 soldiers. France began to panic, Left and Right. They signed a pact with the USSR in which Stalin approved the French national defence policy. With Russia on one side and France on the other, peace seemed secure: Germany had no chance of winning a war, so surely they wouldn’t be foolish enough to wage one. In retrospect Beauvoir would write that her ‘way of reading the paper remained decidedly frivolous’; at this stage she took avoidance to be the best approach to the problems Hitler posed.97 Only one of Beauvoir’s letters from 1935 was published in Letters to Sartre, dated 28 July. She makes no mention of politics, save to say that the only newspaper she can get in the Ardèche is Le Petit Marseillais.98

  That Easter they visited the Italian lakes, and Sartre seemed in good spirits. But when they returned he couldn’t find it in himself to pretend that he was normal. He was listless and felt low – low enough that a doctor advised him to avoid being alone. So Beauvoir made every effort to be with him when she could, and to arrange others to be with him when she couldn’t.

  Writing in 1960 Beauvoir said that she couldn’t really understand Sartre’s crisis; she began to realize that although their situations looked very similar, they were not as alike as they seemed at first sight:

  To pass the agrégation and have a profession was something he took for granted. But when I stood at the top of that flight of steps in Marseille [in 1931, when she began teaching] I had turned dizzy with sheer delight: it seemed to me that, far from enduring my destiny, I had deliberately chosen it. The career in which Sartre saw his freedom foundering still meant liberation to me.99

  Beauvoir continued to take deep satisfaction in reading philosophy, which she described as being a ‘living reality’ for her, and she continued to write. She worked on a collection of short stories, When Things of the Spirit Come First. One of them told the story of how Zaza was ‘driven to madness and death by the puritan moral code of her environment’.100 Another is now thought to have inspired Sartre’s short story, ‘The Childhood of a Leader’.101 In the period between 1926 and 1934 Beauvoir made seven attempts at writing novels.102 But she would have to wait over forty years to see any of this material published. And in the meantime, Sartre would at last meet with philosophical and literary success and their relationship would become (or at any rate, appear to become) a trio.

  7

  The Trio that Was a Quartet

  In 1934, Beauvoir met the pupil whose role in her life and Sartre’s became the subject of much conjecture and condemnation: Olga Kosakiewicz. Her part in their story was memorialized in The Prime of Life and fictionalized by both writers in their novels, as Xavière in She Came to Stay (by Beauvoir) and as Ivitch The Road to Freedom (Sartre). According to Hélène de Beauvoir, Olga resented their fictionalized depictions of her, but Olga and Castor remained friends until late in both their lives.1

  From the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, Beauvoir had three intimate relationships with much younger women who were formerly her students, and in each case Sartre pursued these women, sometimes at the same time, and sometimes successfully. The French feminist Julia Kristeva called Beauvoir and Sartre ‘libertarian terrorists’ on the basis of the way they treated their contingent lovers, and it is this period especially that has given Beauvoir a reputation as a sexual libertine, and which features in many ad feminam rejections of her work.2 Given the philosophy she would later go on to write, and the lasting legacies of these liaisons for her personal life and public reputation, it is very difficult not to wonder: what was she thinking?

  Collette Audry first told Beauvoir about Olga, who was known at the lycée in Rouen as ‘the little Russian’. She was the daughter of a noble Russian father and a French mother. She was strikingly pale and blonde, and wrote less positively striking essays: they were so short that Beauvoir struggled to mark them. So she was surprised when she handed back marks for the end of term exams: Olga had the highest results.

  Soon afterwards there was another exam, a preparatory one for the baccalauréat. At the end Olga (having written nothing) burst into tears. Simone asked her whether she would like to meet about whatever was troubling her, so they met on a Sunday afternoon and walked by the river, talking about God and Baudelaire. They found each other fascinating: Simone thought the 19-year-old Olga was brilliant and wanted to build up her confidence; Olga found the 27-year-old Simone intriguing: unlike the other teachers at the school, Mlle de Beauvoir was elegant, sophisticated and unconventional.

  Olga Kosakiewicz’s parents had met in Russia: her mother had travelled there to be a governess for an aristocratic family in Kiev. She ended up marrying one of the sons, who was an engineer and became an officer of the Csar. Olga was born in Kiev on 6 November 1915,3 and her sister Wanda was born there in 1917. But soon after the Russian Revolution the family joined the hegira of the high-born. They moved around a little, in Greece and elsewhere, before settling in France. So the Kosakiewicz sisters were raised on a parental cocktail of exiled nostalgia and noble superiority.

  Olga did very well on her baccalauréat, especially in philosophy, and while she was home for the summer she and Beauvoir corresponded briefly before Olga’s parents sent her back to Rouen to study medicine. She had no desire to be a doctor, and detested the right-wing nationalism of many of her classmates as much as others’ communism. In the autumn and winter of 1934–5 the political situation shifted: the economy was getting worse, with large companies like Salmson laying people off and Citroën going bankrupt. Unemployment was rising, and so was xenophobia.

  So Olga became friendly with other immigrants, many of whom were Jewish, and remained friends with Simone, with whom she discussed her day-to-day life and the questions arising from her new friendships. One day she asked what it meant to be a Jew. Simone replied: ‘Nothing at all: There are no such things as “Jews”; only human beings.’ Beauvoir later realized how deplorably abstract she was about questions like this – claiming that she knew that social categories were powerfully real but she utterly rejected her father’s hierarchical ideology, in which Frenchmen and Jews, Men and Women occupied fixed orders.4

  In the autumn of 1934, Olga and Beauvoir spent mo
re and more time together: each found in the other relief from Rouen’s penitentiary provinciality. They met about once a week for lunch, and occasionally for an evening at the opera or a political gathering: as far as Simone was concerned Olga was ‘still a child’, although she enjoyed her way of seeing the world.5 She wrote to Sartre that it was ‘a world rethought in an absolutely unexpected way by an original little consciousness.’6

  By the time Olga met Sartre his legend had preceded him, and it had a layer of eccentric allure: the lobsters induced by his mescaline trip gave him a tragic air. ‘Sartre had something of the medieval knight about him,’ as Olga saw him: ‘He was very romantic.’7 During this period Sartre and Beauvoir usually met in Le Havre – which they preferred to Rouen – but by early 1935 Sartre had begun to visit Rouen, and spend time with Olga, more frequently. At first everyone seemed to benefit from their mutual friendship: Olga enjoyed their attention, Sartre was cheerfully fascinated by her, and Beauvoir was relieved to see Sartre emerge from his anhedonia. But then – from the spring of 1935 to the spring of 1937 – the black mood was supplanted by madness of a different colour: Sartre was obsessed with Olga.

  The period that followed was intensely difficult for Beauvoir: she was very fond of Olga, and wanted her to see, and realize, the potential within herself. But through a series of events the relationship became complicated in ways that she had not anticipated. Beauvoir had moved into another hotel, recommended by Olga: Le Petit Mouton. Beauvoir tried to encourage Olga in her studies, and Olga also tried diligently – for a term. But then freedom went to her head and she spent her days and her nights drinking and dancing, reading and talking – but not working. She would go on to fail her medical exams twice in 1935, first in July and again in October.

  With the situation with Olga increasingly complex, in the summer of 1935 Simone again set out on her own to walk her way through France, again with nothing better than canvas espadrilles on her feet. She walked on her own while Sartre was on a Norwegian cruise with his parents; then he joined her at Sainte-Cécile-d’Andorge. He could be a good walker too, when he felt like it, but he worried that Beauvoir pushed herself to unhealthy excesses.8 He may have been overstating the case when he told her that he was allergic to chlorophyll in 1929, but he still preferred old stone to trees. So Beauvoir designed their route to take in towns, villages, abbeys and châteaux. After his mescaline trip Sartre was still suffering unwelcome visits from crustaceans. One day, they were sitting on a bus when he declared that he’d had enough of the lobsters: they had been following him throughout their trip, and he was going to will them away, once and for all. Walking had always been a good way for Beauvoir to exorcise her demons; now Sartre, too, was trying to rid his mind of its unwanted inhabitants.9

  While Sartre struggled to will away his crustaceans, Beauvoir was thinking about why she hadn’t had much success in writing lately. She was determined to get back to it. The only question was: what should ‘it’ be? It hadn’t escaped her notice that Sartre was having more success with philosophical writing than novels at this point. So why didn’t she try that? Sartre told her that she grasped philosophy more quickly and precisely than he did, and she acknowledged that his way of reading others tended to involve interpreting them in line with his own hypotheses.10 In 1946 she would write that Sartre wanted to be dependent on no one for his creativity, that ‘no idea ever comes to him from the outside’ (apart from through her, of course): ‘He reads little, and if by chance he feels like reading, any book can delight him – he asks only that the printed pages act as a support for his imagination and his thoughts, a bit like fortunetellers who look in coffee grounds for a support for their visions.’11

  As she saw it, Sartre either couldn’t get outside his own point of view or didn’t see the value in doing so. But in Beauvoir’s case the opposite was true: she felt little resistance when she attempted to understand other ways of thinking. She could see weaknesses in different opinions, and spot their potential for development. But when she met a convincing theory it did not leave her unaffected: it ‘altered [her] relationship with the world, and coloured all [her] experience’.12

  Although she hadn’t been writing much, she hadn’t been idle; she was working on her German – Sartre’s, despite his year in Berlin, was terrible – and continued to read philosophy avidly. But she did not yet want to write it. In hindsight she did not remember feeling particularly anxious about not having published anything yet – Stendahl, the French novelist after whom she modelled When Things of the Spirit Come First, didn’t even start writing until he was 40.13

  Back in Rouen, it was clear that Olga was not going to make a success of medicine. Her parents wanted to send her to a boarding school in Caen: but all three of the ‘trio’ wanted to avoid that. The question was: what could she do well? She had done well in philosophy, so Sartre made a suggestion to Beauvoir which she found absolutely brilliant. They had enough money, between their two salaries, to pay for a room for Olga, and Sartre was running an honours course to prepare students for teaching diplomas. Beauvoir wrote to Olga’s parents and arranged a meeting. They agreed to her proposal: Olga would study under her supervision. So Sartre and Beauvoir made a timetable of lessons, set her reading lists and essays, and rented her a room in the Petit Mouton, near Beauvoir’s.

  They also made a timetable of who would see whom when: they each wanted some time tête-à-tête, but they also wanted what they called ‘plenary sessions’ when the three of them were all together. In hindsight Beauvoir wrote that she never felt at ease in the trio with Olga. She frequently found herself in the middle of a relationship that was built on unstable foundations. Their efforts to teach her came to little fruition, academically: Olga did read when she felt so inclined, but she did not work unless she wanted to, and she rarely wanted to. Initially Sartre and Beauvoir thought they were consulting, and acting in, her interest, but Beauvoir later acknowledged that their relationship was not built on mutual equality: Sartre and Beauvoir ‘annexed her’ to themselves.14 Both of them were starting to feel old and uninteresting: they lived vicariously through her youth and carelessness.

  But Beauvoir did care about Olga very deeply: ‘There are at the present time only two people in the world who count in my life,’ she wrote to her, ‘and you are one of them.’15 Soon Olga’s feelings towards Beauvoir ‘reached a burning intensity’.16 Olga’s physical relationship with Beauvoir provoked several kinds of frustration for Sartre: throughout the two years of his obsession Olga wouldn’t sleep with him.

  Olga was the first of their ‘contingent’ loves that she and Sartre ‘shared’, but they did not share her sexually. Even so – and despite his disdain for, and freedom to overcome, emotion – Sartre grew very jealous.17 His behaviour became increasingly erratic and strange. More unsettling, from Beauvoir’s point of view, was the undeniable fact that he experienced feelings for Olga that he had never had with her. Towards the end of Sartre’s two-year obsession, Beauvoir was in an agony that went ‘beyond jealousy’, in her words, making her question whether her happiness was built on ‘a gigantic lie’.18

  But Olga was only part of the story. In Le Havre, one of Sartre’s favourite students was a charming man called Jacques-Laurent Bost. He was the youngest of ten children, exactly six months younger than Olga. He came from a Protestant family and had an elder brother who worked as a reader for the prestigious Paris publisher, Gallimard. He was tall, with full lips and jet-black hair that fell into green eyes: and although she did write that she ‘felt drawn towards him’ Beauvoir said little about their relationship in her memoirs.19 In fact, he was one of her most significant omissions – hidden for her whole life. It was only when their correspondence was published in French in 2004 (it is still unpublished in English) that their passionate, ten-year-long affair became public. When Olga betrayed Sartre (so it seemed to him) by sleeping with Bost, Sartre salved his wounded ego by seducing her sister, Wanda. Beauvoir thought Olga’s decision to end the trio was the epi
tome of sanity, but Sartre was floored. To make matters worse, Gallimard rejected his novel.

  For Beauvoir, the trio wreaked havoc with her daily life, but it also writ large the questions she had been pondering since the late 1920s. The 19-year-old Simone had written in her diary that she wanted to spell out her philosophical ideas on ‘the opposition of self and other’. Ten years on, her relationships with Olga and Sartre made her face this problem in life in a new way. Although Olga enjoyed the attentions of both Sartre and Beauvoir, and stayed friendly with them until the 1970s, she knew she was playing a precarious part. She was moody and taciturn during this period, prompting Beauvoir to reflect that, ‘When she stood apart from me she looked at me with alien eyes, and I was transformed into an object that might be either an idol or an enemy.’20

  Beauvoir’s feelings about the relationship oscillated. In the public account of the trio in Beauvoir’s autobiography, she wrote that the trio made her realize – yet again – that a harmonious relationship between two people should never be taken as given; it requires continuous work.21 As early as 1927 she had reached the conclusion that love was not something that was established once and for all, but rather had to be ‘unceasingly created in a perpetually renewed youth’.22 But though she was honing her views about freedom, action and love, she had not fully realized the harm the ‘essential’ pair could inflict on their ‘contingent’ others.

  Olga rarely gave interviews, but retrospectively she likened her young self – and Bost and Wanda – to mesmerized snakes: ‘we did what they wanted because no matter what, we were so thrilled by their attention, so privileged to have it’.23 Even before fame amplified their allure, Beauvoir and Sartre were a charismatic and captivating duo. But we do not have any evidence from this period that Beauvoir considered the unequal power relations between them a source of concern. Young or old, rich or penniless, their contingent lovers were free to choose their actions for themselves – weren’t they?