Becoming Beauvoir
Page 23
Beauvoir was curious but wary about American ways. She went walking in Harlem by herself – defying the white locals’ advice that it could be dangerous just as she defied her friends’ warnings about hitchhiking in Marseille. She tried scotch because it seemed to her to be one of the ‘keys to America’; at first she didn’t like it but she quickly acquired the taste.3 Gradually she overcame the knot in her stomach when she had to phone hotel reception or make an appointment in English, gaining confidence.
She set up a date with Dolores Vanetti, who hadn’t left New York for Paris yet, because she wanted to meet her in the flesh and Vanetti had promised to put her in touch with some editors. So Beauvoir invited her for a drink at the Fifth-Avenue Sherry Netherland. They drank whiskey, a little nervously at first, and talked until 3 a.m.
After imagining this woman for months Beauvoir was happy to feel real pleasure to meet her.4 She felt happy because she ‘understood’ Sartre’s feelings, writing ‘I could appreciate them, and honoured you for having them.’ Soon after, Vanetti invited Beauvoir to a cocktail party, and even put her in touch with some American newspapers and magazines. Beauvoir wrote articles for extra income, on the topic of women writers and femininity. These show that two years before The Second Sex was published she was already tracing the contemporary situation of women to its roots in the First World War, which gave them greater access to paid work but not yet independence.5
While in New York Beauvoir became good friends with Ellen and Richard Wright, a mixed-race couple who would remain friends for decades. Richard was the author of the novels Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945); Ellen would go on to found a literary agency and Beauvoir would be her client for life.6 Beauvoir had first read Wright in 1940, and Les Temps Modernes published one of his stories, ‘Fire and Cloud’, in its inaugural issue. Wright thought she and Sartre felt the human plight keenly, and that there was nothing quite like their writing. Before long Beauvoir was calling their Greenwich Village apartment – on Charles Street – her home. Their 5-year-old daughter liked her, which took Beauvoir a bit by surprise. And so did their friends: the Wrights introduced her to intellectuals like Bernard Wolfe, who had been Trotksy’s secretary in Mexico and wrote books about the blues. She told him she wanted to hear real jazz, so he set her up with tickets to see Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall.7
Richard Wright also introduced Beauvoir to a book that would alter her intellectual course: American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Published in 1944 by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, at the time it was the most prominent study of race and racism in America. (It would go on to be cited in the landmark desegregation trial Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and to sell 100,000 copies by 1965.) Myrdal thought that race relations in America were caught in not a vicious circle but resulted from something he called ‘the principle of cumulation’. As he saw it, white people oppressed people of colour and then blamed them for performing poorly. Unless whites were cured of their prejudice, or the circumstances of black Americans were improved, the cycle would continue to take its toll on society. American political ideals – such as equality, meritocracy and opportunity – failed to take into account the ways in which black lives were, in the past and present, conditioned by oppression, prejudice and exclusion. Writing before the Civil Rights Movement, Myrdal believed that many white Americans did not know about the situations faced by their black compatriots. So he thought that getting ‘publicity’ – consciousness raising – was crucial to improving the situation, because unlike a ‘vicious circle’ the principle of cumulation could work both ways: ‘in an “upward” desirable direction as well as a “downward” undesirable direction’.8
America prided itself on being a country that welcomed new ideas, and Beauvoir was warmly received: The New Yorker interviewed Beauvoir and covered her visit. The write-up called her ‘Sartre’s female intellectual counterpart’ and ‘the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw’.9
In mid-February Beauvoir left New York for a 24-lecture cross-country tour on ‘the ethical problems of the post-war writer’. Two articles on French women writers were published announcing the tour: ‘Problems for women’s literature’ and ‘Women of letters’. France-Amérique introduced their author as a ‘philosopher, reporter, novelist’. What were the ‘problems’ of women’s literature? Why had women achieved less literary success than men? Beauvoir argued that women’s limitations were to be found in their situation rather than an inherent lack of ability:
For centuries it has been men and men alone who have fashioned the world in which we live. That is to say that this world belongs to them. Women have their place in it, but are not at home there. It is natural that man seeks to explore the domain of which he feels himself the master; that he searches with curiosity to know it, strives to dominate it with his thought, and even claims, through the medium of art, to create it anew. Nothing stops him, nothing limits him. But, up until these last few years, women’s situation was completely different.10
The situation of women had changed dramatically in recent years – not just in terms of winning the right to vote (which was a very fresh victory in France), but in terms of access to education and opportunity. And, as a consequence of this, women increasingly sought ‘a deepening of their internal knowledge of themselves’, leading them to ‘turn toward philosophy’.11 But Beauvoir thought that there was still much to overcome: because femininity was so often identified with modesty, women lacked audacity and they were afraid of the consequences of having it. In childhood, Beauvoir wrote, girls had some autonomy – but they were encouraged to forsake it as women in the name of happiness and love.12
One of her lectures was in Chicago, where she stopped for a day and a half. The streets were snowy and the Windy City lived up to its name. The cold felt inhospitable; she didn’t want to explore this place alone. Her New York friends had given her a name to look up: Nelson Algren, a novelist with a tough guy veneer who wrote about the underbelly of American life – addicts and prostitutes.
She tried phoning him three times, but she couldn’t pronounce his name and he kept hanging up on her. After the third time, she asked an American to try, and that evening they met at her hotel bar.13 At 38, he was a year her junior, tall and trim. Beauvoir told him she was tired of seeing the shiny surface of America: her tour so far had taken her from one high-end hotel to the next. After so many luncheons, lectures and lobsters, could he please show her what Chicago really looked like?
He could and he did: he took her to the Bowery, which was well known for ‘red lights, cheap liquor, wiggling dancers, and a variety of associated evils’.14 They visited a burlesque club and listened to jazz in a black club. He spoke no French, and she was still struggling with English. But before the night was over he was telling her about his life. He was born in Detroit and raised in a poor part of Chicago’s South Side. His father was Swedish and his mother was Jewish: he felt neither. He studied journalism at the University of Illinois and then travelled around the American South by train. Once, he stole a typewriter in Texas and ended up in prison for four months. He’d served in the army in France, and stopped in New York on his way there and back. Other than that he hadn’t left Chicago much. But he loved writing, and thought she should really see America.
At the end of the night they arranged to meet again the next day. Beauvoir had lunch at the Alliance Française, but after that she asked her hosts to drop her at Algren’s. Her respectable escort was more than a little surprised that she wanted to visit this neighbourhood. They drove past vacant lots and abandoned warehouses. And then they reached 1523 West Wabansia Avenue. Algren’s house was a wreck, strewn with newspapers and clutter. But there was a fire warming the kitchen, and on his bed there was a colourful Mexican blanket. Beauvoir didn’t get too close to it on this visit: Algren wanted to show her around. They wandered through the freezing cold, warmed up with drinks, and then she had to leave for a dinner with the starchy gentlemen of the French consul.
When they got back to LA, Beauvoir and Sorokine got on a Greyhound bus to Santa Fe, New Mexico. They spent three weeks travelling together: Santa Fe, Houston, New Orleans, Florida and finally New York, with Beauvoir giving lectures all along the way. It was a tiring itinerary, but Beauvoir loved seeing, and learning, so much. While she went from city to city, she asked questions at drinks receptions and dinners, talking to her audiences, to university faculty and students. She read American books and made notes about American life. After her visit she published a travelogue, America Day by Day (1948). Parts of it were glowing: before New York, she said ‘I didn’t think I could love another city as much as Paris.’17
When she got back to New York on 12 March she sent Algren a letter – he had sent some books to her Chicago hotel but she hadn’t received them when she checked out. He had also sent a note asking: Could she come back to Chicago? She replied that she didn’t know – she had many lectures to give around New York – but it might be possible to visit in April.
Her tour was well-publicized, in fashion magazines and university papers. In mid-March Vogue published ‘Femininity: The Trap’, introducing Beauvoir as ‘the leading disciple of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialist philosophy’. The irony of this is unlikely to have been lost on her, but did she find it irritating to be described this way? Or as ‘a woman who thinks like a man’; ‘a slender, handsome, thirty-eight-year-old Frenchwoman’? The same issue contained a profile describing André Malraux as a ‘literary strong man’, ‘faithful DeGaullist and enemy of the communists’. (The reader is left to wonder whether he was slender or handsome.)
Beauvoir’s article was advertised as a piece on ‘the new role of women in France’. Some sections of it appear – almost verbatim – in The Second Sex, although it is unknown whether they had already been written for the book or whether, in fact, Beauvoir later plundered her Vogue article.18 All we know from her memoirs is that Vogue’s editor, Jean Condit, threw a party in her honour soon after her arrival in New York, by 6 February she agreed to write for them, and on 12 February she dictated her work to a typist.19
In this article she clearly states one of the central claims of her mature feminism: ‘there is no myth more irritating and more false’ than ‘the eternal feminine, which was invented, with the help of women, by men, who describe her as intuitive, charming, sensitive’.20 The ‘trap’ of this femininity is that it often casts women as inferior to men and results in women feeling divided. Beauvoir thought that femininity gave women value in men’s eyes, and that women therefore fear that if they lose it they will lose their value. She was beginning to think that when women gain value in their own eyes, through education or accomplishments, professional women often feel inferior to other women, on account of being less charming and sensitive – that is to say, less feminine. Men, by contrast, did not have to sacrifice success for masculinity, or accomplishment for feeling at ease: their professional gains were not personal losses. Only women were afflicted by this contradiction: ‘Either they renounce in part the integration of their personalities, or they abandon in part their power of seduction over men.’21 But why should success – or seduction – come at such a high cost?
While Beauvoir was in America she noticed things she wanted to remember for her book on women. Being in a different culture – and seeing it with foreign eyes – made her look at the way men and women related to each other from a different standpoint. She wrote in America Day by Day that she was surprised to find herself thinking that women were less free in the United States than they were in France. Before her visit, she took the words ‘American woman’ to be synonymous with ‘free woman’. But to her shock she found that here unmarried women were less respected. At first, she wrote, American women’s dress ‘astonished me with its flagrantly feminine, almost sexual character. In the women’s magazines here, more than in the French variety, I’ve read long articles on the art of husband hunting’. In the United States Beauvoir saw an antagonism between men and women; she felt they didn’t like each other, which made their relationships struggles against each other. ‘This is partly because American men tend to be laconic, and in spite of everything, a minimum of conversation is necessary for friendship. But it’s also because there is a mutual distrust.’22
When Beauvoir got back to New York in the middle of April she stayed near Washington Square, in the Brevoort. She saw the Wrights again, and Bernard Wolfe. She was due to leave on 10 May and wrote to Sartre in Paris asking him to make arrangements for a ‘nice return’ for her: she didn’t want to see anyone but him and Bost. Could they go away together just the two of them to catch up?
She had so much to tell him about: there were so many lectures around New York – Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Macon College, Oberlin, Mills College, Vassar, Wellesley and Smith. But even in the university papers she was described in ways that emphasized her appearance and relationship to Sartre: The Daily Princetonian reported that the ‘elegant and attractive Simone de Beauvoir, the female ambassador for Existentialism in the United States’ had told her audience that ‘it is no longer permissible for the writer to stand apart and isolate himself in his ivory tower’.23
Outside the ivory tower, what she saw of America with Ellen and Richard Wright was eye-opening. When she was with them – that is, when two white women and a black man went out together – New York taxis passed them by. Wright took her to the Abyssinian Baptist Church to hear the political sermons of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell,24 to see a poor church in Harlem.25 Wright’s novel Native Son had told the story of 20-year-old black man Bigger Thomas, which drew discussion about what it meant to be black – from the likes of James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon. The Wrights helped Beauvoir see segregation: ‘From the cradle to the grave, working, eating, loving, walking, dancing, praying, he can never forget that he is black, and that makes him conscious every minute of the whole white world from which the word “black” takes its meaning.’26
It must have been strikingly dissonant to be snubbed on sidewalks by day and fêted by the famous by night. Once, after speaking at the New School (a new university and progressive hub), Beauvoir went to dinner with the Dadaist painter Marcel Duchamp before turning up at Erwin Piscator’s for a huge party in her honour: the architect Le Corbusier was there, the composer Kurt Weill – even Charlie Chaplin. She had fun talking to Chaplin, but things got a little embarrassing – ‘grotesque’! she wrote – when another guest suggested that she should acknowledge that Chaplin was an existentialist.27
America Day by Day was translated into English quite soon after, appearing in Britain in 1952. There, ‘Mlle Gulliver en Amérique’ met with dismissive reviews. A separate American edition appeared in 1953 – but Beauvoir’s discussions of racial segregation were omitted. It wasn’t the only time this would happen to Beauvoir’s work: the English edition of The Second Sex, too, would cut swathes of her analysis of oppression. In 1953, the American public was deemed unready to hear what she had to say about race. More recent appraisals, however, ha
ve described it as ‘one of the two best twentieth-century analyses of America’.28
On 24 April she wrote to Sartre saying she’d like to see Bost when she got back, before they went away together, and she put in a phone call to Nelson Algren: She had some time after all; could she visit? She flew back to Chicago and spent three – this time intimate – days with him. Four days later she got back to New York and a letter from Sartre; he had booked her ‘her pink room’ at the Hôtel Louisiane and would meet her from the airport bus.
On May Day Bernie Wolfe took her to a party where people were smoking joints. Did she want to try? The New Yorkers told her one would make her high, but even after six nothing happened. By then she was annoyed that she wasn’t high, so she drank half a bottle of whiskey out of sheer irritation. The Americans were shocked: after all that, she was barely even tipsy.29
On 3 May she received a letter from Sartre at the hotel. Vanetti was making things difficult; please could she stay in New York for another week? It was a grey and rainy Saturday when she got it, and when she read it she had a ‘breakdown’, a return of the old anguish and tears. Beauvoir didn’t reply for five days. When she did she said that she found the news ‘devastating’ but that the idea of returning earlier than Sartre wanted was ‘unbearable’. She had some difficulties but managed to change her seat so that by Tuesday 6 May it was all arranged: she’d arrive at the Gare des Invalides on Sunday 18 May at 10.30. She didn’t want to share Sartre during their first days back together so she asked him again to ‘fix everything nicely so that we can be on our own for a long time’. She signed off with a postscript to Bost, saying that she was ‘stupidly looking forward to seeing him’ and thought of him much more than he deserved.30