He replied remorsefully, agreeing that the letter was ‘abysmal’, that he had ‘never’ done anything ‘so rotten as represented by the mailing of that letter’.55 Over the following days and weeks the correspondence between Sartre and Beauvoir included a lot of discussion of Bienenfeld: Beauvoir thought she found the break hard at first but bounced back; Beauvoir continued to go for meals with her, discussing philosophy with her, and Bienenfeld gave Beauvoir feedback on her novel. She said that there was ‘too much thought’ in She Came to Stay, comparing it with American novels (like Hemingway’s), which were pleasing because of their ‘absence of thought’.56 She wouldn’t be the only contingent lover to tell Beauvoir that her novels had ‘too much philosophy’. But few, if any, relationships in Beauvoir’s life rival Bianca’s for its absence of thoughtfulness. In the early months of 1940 Beauvoir admitted that they were responsible for causing her suffering – too much suffering. She wrote to Sartre on 3 March, ‘I blamed us – myself as much as you, actually – in the past, in the future, in the absolute: the way we treat people. I felt it was unacceptable that we’d managed to make her suffer so much.’57
From 23 March to 11 July there is a gap in Beauvoir’s correspondence.58 On 7 May 1940 her novel was accepted for publication by Gallimard.59 Three days later, on 10 May 1940, the Germans had invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, and Bost was transported to the Belgian border. On 12 May the Germans came around the Maginot line, surrounding the French divisions and attacking by air and on land. On 21 May Bost was hit in the abdomen by shrapnel. He was bleeding badly so he was taken to a Red Cross station on a stretcher, and from there to a military hospital for operation. He was lucky to have survived the hit, but even luckier to be off the line. Sartre wrote reassuringly to Beauvoir that ‘it’s the best possible news’ that he had been evacuated from the front.60 Bost’s regiment dwindled; on 23 May Paul Nizan was killed by enemy fire.
On the evening of 9 June, 1940, Beauvoir received a note from Bianca. She had been looking for her all day, it said: no matter the hour please would she come to the Flore? Beauvoir arrived to a room full of distressed faces. Bienenfeld’s father had connections and intelligence: the Germans were close to entering Paris. She was leaving with her father the next day. She knew it was less urgent for Beauvoir, not being Jewish, but she wondered if she would like to join them, even so.
Beauvoir wept, overcome by the bitter truth that France was on its knees, one of her lovers had been shot and another was about to become a prisoner of war. The next day Beauvoir joined the Bienenfelds and nearly 3 million others leaving Paris. On 14 June, Paris fell. In the days that followed surrender came quickly, and on 22 June Marshal Pétain signed an armistice with the Nazis. They would control the northern section of France, including Paris; Pétain would control the ‘Free Zone’ from the southern capital of Vichy.
Simone spent a month in the country at La Pouèze, a friend’s country house near Laval. But she was impatient to return to Paris, and to news from Sartre and Bost. For all she knew, they might even be in Paris. So she set off to return, taking a lift in a German military truck. When she returned, the Nazi flag hung over the Senate in the Luxembourg Gardens. She saw her parents and Sorokine, and moved in at her grandmother’s.61 At the Hôtel Danemark there was only one letter waiting – it was from Sartre, from the day before she left Paris.
She phoned Bost’s parents in Taverny to ask after him; he had been moved to a military hospital near Avignon.62 She phoned Olga, who was with her family in L’Aigle; she was safe. Hélène was still in Portugal with Lionel, safe but not close.
Back in the capital, Beauvoir signed the Vichy oath, a declaration stating that she was not a Jew.63 She later expressed embarrassment at having signed it, but at the time she saw no other option:
I signed it because I had to. My only income came from my teaching; my ration cards depended on it, my identity papers – everything. There simply was no other choice available to me. I hated it, but I did it for purely practical reasons. Who was I? A nobody, that’s who. What good would it have done if some unknown teacher refused to sign a statement that had no meaning, no value, and certainly no influence or impact on anything? Refusing to sign such a statement would have had only one significance: that I no longer had a profession or an income. Who, in wartime, in my circumstances, would have been so foolish as to risk such a thing?64
According to Marshal Pétain, France had suffered from decadence in the interwar years, and the re-establishment of order was required. French people must return to their forgotten values: ‘Work, Family, Fatherland’ was the regime’s slogan.65 In Occupied Paris, Beauvoir said, ‘the very fact of breathing implied a compromise’.66 The clocks were on German time, and when Beauvoir watched the world from her balcony after the curfew it was uncannily light.67
Nathalie Sorokine was still in Paris, and Olga returned in mid-July. When Beauvoir met her there was so much to catch up on they talked for hours. For one thing, Olga was pregnant. The baby wasn’t Bost’s (he had been away on the front) but paternity aside she didn’t want a child – she wanted an abortion. During the Occupation, it was difficult to find any way to have an abortion, let alone a safe one. But Beauvoir found her an address and nursed her for two weeks when she developed an infection afterwards.
In August Sartre was transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp near Trier, called Stalag XII D. The conditions there were good; he was allowed to write two postcards per week. He was reading Heidegger’s Being and Time, writing his first play, and working on Being and Nothingness. In Paris Beauvoir passed swastikas on her way to work on her novel at the Dôme or read Hegel and Jean Wahl in the Bibliothèque Nationale.68 In July she found an epigraph from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit for She Came to Stay.
Beauvoir had first encountered Hegel in her philosophy textbook in the mid-1920s, and he was the kind of philosopher she would later distance herself from: he treated history as the logical development of a system, thought ideas could explain all events, and devalued individual experience. He was the target of famous criticisms by Kierkegaard and Marx, for giving us nothing but a ‘palace of ideas’ (in Kierkegaard’s words) and being the kind of philosopher who was content to ‘interpret the world’ rather than change it (in Marx’s). But during the Second World War Beauvoir found reading Hegel ‘the most soothing activity I could find’. It reminded her of her agrégation year: ‘there’s the reality of books, of the ideas in the books and about human history of which this is only a moment – I felt more assured in the world than I had for a long time’.69
After work, she kept a carefully ordered timetable: two evenings a week with Olga, two evenings with Nathalie Sorokine. Sorokine was intensely jealous and resented Beauvoir’s inflexible itinerary, calling her a ‘clock in a refrigerator’ for the inflexible way she insisted on having time to work. Sometimes she resorted to waiting for Beauvoir to come out of her hotel in the morning or to leave school in the afternoon to see her. Sometimes they went to the theatre or the opera: wartime tickets came cheap.
In September Bost returned to Paris and took a teaching job. This meant that Beauvoir was able to eat lunch with him most weekdays; Thursdays she ate lunch with her parents. As for nights, Bost’s Saturday was hers. She kept writing, as signs went up barring Jews entry and denying them employment. Bost wanted to become a journalist, so she helped him with his writing. She was carefully reading Kierkegaard and Kant that winter. But now that Bost was back in Paris she wished that Sartre could be too.
After’s Bost’s return Beauvoir came clean with Bianca about her relationship with him, and said that she thought she and Bianca should see each other less often. It was a huge blow to Bianca to know that Beauvoir had lied to her; she felt like she was ‘suffocating, sinking’. Sartre’s about-face in February was bad, but this time she was ‘desperate beyond words’ because she was so much more strongly attached to Beauvoir.70 Beauvoir still didn’t fully realize how deeply they had hurt her; she wrote to Sartre tha
t she had ‘more or less broken with Bianca’, but since Bianca was having a relationship with Bernard Lamblin (one of Bianca’s classmates, a former student of Sartre’s) she thought it would work out.
Bianca’s father, however, wanted her to marry an American who would take her out of France: with a name like ‘David Bienenfeld’ he knew his family was not safe. Bianca didn’t want to marry some unknown man, but her father insisted. He found a willing American in Montparnasse, paid him, and Bianca gave in. But on the appointed day, the American didn’t show up for the wedding. So Bianca and Bernard married on 12 February 1941 – despite the danger of a mixed marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. Her parents were relieved that she, at least, would have a more French-sounding name.71
By November 1940 Beauvoir was having ‘days of dark depression’, thinking that if she knew she would never see Sartre again she would kill herself.72 By January reading philosophy and keeping history at arm’s length were no longer cutting it. In her diary she recognized that she had been a solipsist – thinking that her consciousness and freedom, her ‘view from within’, was real, but that the others around her were like ants going about their business. (Sartre had written a short story in the 1930s called ‘Erostratus’, in which the proud protagonist looked down from a seventh-floor balcony and saw all of the humans below as ‘ants’.) She and Sartre had been ‘antihumanists’, Beauvoir, wrote in her War Diaries, but she now judged that they were wrong to have been so.73
When she read She Came to Stay now she looked at it with the estrangement of something that belonged to her past. It wouldn’t be published until 1943, but in January of 1941 she had come to the conclusion that ‘it rests on a philosophical attitude that is already no longer mine’.74 She had become a different woman. She read Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kafka and Jaspers, and thought about old questions – her desire for salvation. She wanted her next novel to be about what she called the individual situation, and the moral tensions that arise from being both individual and social – by the middle of 1941 she started writing the book that would become The Blood of Others.
Beauvoir’s diaries once again show a different side to her from the version she presented in her memoirs. There, she described Sartre’s conversion to politics at the expense of her own thoughts and actions. She wrote that she hadn’t seen Sartre for eleven months when she received a note at the end of March 1941: he was in Paris. He had lied his way out of the camp, claiming to be a civilian and using his near-blind right eye as a ploy. Beauvoir was elated to see him but within days she wondered: was this the same man? He was moralizing and impatient, shocked that she had signed a declaration that she was not a Jew. It was all well and good to be free, he said: but now they must act. He was speaking about resistance; about expelling the Germans from France. She was, she claimed, still convinced that they, as individuals, were utterly powerless.
On 8 July 1941 Beauvoir’s father died, leaving nothing. His last words to her were: ‘You began to earn your living very young, Simone: your sister cost me a great deal of money.’75 She shed no tears for him,76 but afterwards she was struck by the courage with which her mother began a new chapter; for her, being widowed was a kind of deliverance. Françoise de Beauvoir had grown to loathe the family flat in the rue de Rennes, which Georges had ‘filled with the noise of his ill-temper’.77 So in 1942 she moved to a studio apartment in the rue Blomet. Françoise studied for exams and qualified to work as an assistant librarian in the Red Cross. She volunteered, learned languages, attended lectures, made new friends and travelled. But she did not give up what Beauvoir called her ‘prudent attitude’: she still considered her daughter to be living in sin.78
Less than six months later Françoise lost her mother, too.79 On the day of Madame Brasseur’s funeral Françoise had a nervous breakdown – she stayed in bed and Simone spent the night with her, watching over her 55-year-old mother as she slept. In the immediate aftermath of Georges’ death Françoise was financially dependent on her eldest daughter. Beauvoir was already supporting Hélène to an extent by paying for her studio, as well as helping support other members of ‘the family’. So she had to make economies: they would have to cut back on eating out.
The first meeting of their resistance group, ‘Socialism and Liberty’, met in Beauvoir’s room at the Mistral – she and Sartre had moved back in, again in separate rooms. They made leaflets and met with other groups in Paris, and snuck across the border to Vichy France to try to establish links between their group and other members of the resistance. But their attempts were unsuccessful; the communist group was larger and seemed more effective so in May 1942 some of their members transferred ranks and soon afterwards the group dispersed.
Meanwhile Sartre refused to sign the declaration that he was not a Jew or a Freemason. He managed to keep his job at the Lycée Pasteur even so: the inspector general of education was part of the resistance so overlooked his insubordination. And in October he transferred Sartre to a more prestigious post: the Lycée Condorcet.
So life fell into a familiar pattern: they taught and they wrote. Winter times during the occupation were cold, so they took refuge in the Flore, on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Sartre continued to see Wanda, and to enjoy her possessive, proprietary affection. Some members of ‘the family’ were less than pleased that Sartre had returned to Paris: Nathalie Sorokine saw him as another person vying for Simone’s attention. Before she met him Sorokine thought he was a ‘phony genius’. But when they met in 1941 she seduced him. Like Sartre, she made a sport of seduction, and she also played it successfully with Bost.
In December of 1941 Sorokine’s mother filed a complaint with the Vichy ministry of education. In it, she accused Beauvoir of corrupting her daughter: the official charge was ‘inciting debauchery in a minor’.80 The age of consent at the time was 13 years old; Nathalie Sorokine was 20 when the complaint was filed. And Mme Sorokine gave a lengthy report: Mlle de Beauvoir had seduced her daughter, and then introduced her to two men who also seduced her. Mme Sorokine drew attention to the irregular living arrangements of Mlle de Beauvoir, who was single, lived in a hotel, worked in cafés, making no secret that she was Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘concubine’. She also taught her pupils the morally corrupting works of two homosexual writers, Proust and Gide. In short, any patriot would see why France did not need a woman such as her in their secondary schools. Under Pétain, France was attempting to regain lost dignity by a strategy that promoted French family values. Such a woman as Mlle de Beauvoir should not be shaping the futures of its youth.
The Ministry was inclined to agree, and began an investigation that would only conclude a year and a half later.
The story Beauvoir told Bair was that Mme Sorokine had come to her in March, asking Beauvoir to intervene in Nathalie’s life. Nathalie was seeing a young man called Bourla, who was Jewish and poor – Mme Sorokine did not approve. Beauvoir said she would tell Nathalie about their meeting, but that she didn’t think she held the influence her mother hoped. She thought that was the end of it. But then the complaint was filed.
During the 1941–42 academic year the philosopher Jean Wahl was dismissed from his post at the Sorbonne because he was Jewish. In 1942 he was interned at Drancy. That June Jews in Occupied France were required by law to wear the Star of David. Their freedoms were restricted even further: they could no longer own property or open bank accounts. It was illegal for anyone to cross the border to the Free Zone without permission. But that summer Beauvoir and Sartre sneaked across it with Bost. They went cycling in the Pyrenees.
The debauchery charges against Beauvoir were never confirmed. Sorokine denied that her relationship with Beauvoir was sexual, and the two men denied any such relations with her. So the Ministry of Education had no proof confirming these allegations. But they could confirm Mlle de Beauvoir’s suspicious living arrangements and questionable inclusion of Proust and Gide on her syllabus. On 17 July 1940 a law had been created by Pétain’s government to make it easier to eliminate government f
unctionaries who did not contribute to its ‘national renovation’. And this law was cited in the Ministry’s decision of 17 June 1943, to sanction Simone de Beauvoir and to revoke her permission to teach.81 Her dismissal went down like a badge of honour among some parts of the resistance. Her permission was reinstated in 1945, and other students from the period remembered her as an inspiring philosopher who introduced them to Husserl and Heidegger even before they were popular in French universities.82 But Beauvoir didn’t return to teaching: from now on, writing was to be her life.
In the memoirs Beauvoir skimmed over the debauchery charges, presenting them as Mme Sorokine’s retaliation for Beauvoir’s failure to get Nathalie to leave Bourla. But in the immediate aftermath of her dismissal the future looked uncertain. She knew she wanted to write – but she needed money to live on. Françoise had been saving a large fraction of the monthly stipend her daughter gave her and she volunteered to give it back to Beauvoir. Beauvoir asked her to keep it, in case it was needed.
Later that summer, Beauvoir got her first writing job, working as a features producer for Radiodiffusion Nationale (known as Radio-Vichy).83 At the time, there were two national stations, Radio-Vichy and another, Radio-Paris, the latter of which shared the Nazi ideology. It was possible to work for Radio-Vichy without being seen as a collaborator – depending on the kind of work one did. Beauvoir worked on a programme about music in the Middle Ages, which was arguably neutral – although, unsurprisingly, her participation in this work raised questions about where to draw the lines between complicity and collaboration.
Becoming Beauvoir Page 18
