Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  The Second Sex didn’t gain momentum immediately – it was ahead of its time and, quite frankly, for many it was also too intimidating. Beauvoir’s extensive classical, philosophical and literary education is reflected in this work: she cites ancient Greek playwrights, Roman philosophers, the Bible and the Qur’an, centuries’ worth of philosophical and theological writing on women, swathes of literature, letters and diaries, psychoanalytic accounts, and more, as well as employing a phenomenological method and existentialist perspective in her analysis. As Marine Rouch’s research has shown, many of Beauvoir’s readers wrote to reproach her for making The Second Sex so difficult. One reader asked outright:

  Why did you write such a book? For a little literary club of a few hundred (or thousand) people initiated into esoteric jargon of metaphysics and its existentialist category? Or for any public that has the common sense and understanding to usefully address such problems? Couldn’t it be expressed in familiar language, without this pedantic algebra used by professional ‘philosophers’?49

  Encouraged by her work, feminists in the 1960s and 1970s would continue to confront some of the ‘real idiocies uttered against women by the most eminent minds’.50 But in 1949 Beauvoir didn’t know that The Second Sex would be recognized as a classic and inspire political movements. When the time came, feminists would criticize Beauvoir for her ‘unconscious misogyny’, claiming that she separated herself from women while writing about them.51 Some thought that she was blind to the privileges of her class, race and education; others thought that she had been conscientious about these privileges but nevertheless made the misstep of universalizing about the experiences of women. She was accused of writing from ‘the personal to the general’; and also praised for using her personal experience as an ‘energetic anger’ that propelled the book forward.52 Some feminists objected that Beauvoir excluded women of colour and appropriated their suffering as a rhetorical strategy in the interests of white feminism.53 After decades of hearing from her readers, Beauvoir would admit that aspects of her attitude towards men and her own experience was naïve. She was a ‘token’ woman, protected from the daily realities of many kinds of oppression.54 But in the immediate aftermath of the book’s publication she paid a high price for being such an outspoken token. She had emerged from Sartre’s shadow, only to find herself in the scorching light of scandal – the ad feminam target of ridicule, spite and shame.

  Toril Moi, in Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, writes that by the end of 1949, ‘Simone de Beauvoir had truly become Simone de Beauvoir: personally and professionally, she was “made”.’55 She declares that Beauvoir’s work after 1949 was ‘retrospective’, that she produced ‘almost nothing but autobiography’. But, professionally, Beauvoir still had not written her prize-winning novel The Mandarins, two further volumes of fiction, any of her life writing, her book on old age, or supporting materials for massive changes to French legislation; The Second Sex had not yet played its role in the genesis of second-wave feminism; and Beauvoir’s career as a feminist activist had not even begun. Personally, life still held the promise of reciprocal relationships. There was much more for Beauvoir to become.

  13

  Putting a New Face on Love

  In early 1950, Beauvoir’s days had once again settled into a reassuring routine: writing, working on Les Temps Modernes, doing interviews on The Second Sex. But one day that February, entirely by chance, Beauvoir ran into someone she hadn’t seen for a long time: her cousin Jacques. He was a shadow of his former self: ruined, alcoholic, penniless – he had been rejected even by his own wife and five children. Whether out of timeworn tenderness or sheer generosity, she arranged to see him again and gave him financial support.1

  Beauvoir wanted to see the Sahara, so in March she left Paris again with Sartre. They crossed the desert for four days in a truck, saw Tamanrasset, and passed caravans on their way to El Goléa before flying across the Sahara to Mali.

  Alongside her larger projects Beauvoir continued to write short articles and in 1950 she published a magazine piece in Flair, an American style magazine. Flair was short-lived – only publishing a year’s worth of issues – but in that time it included works by Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Salvador Dali and Margaret Mead. Beauvoir’s article – entitled ‘It’s About Time Women Put a New Face on Love’2 – discussed sexual desire in light of her view that human beings are both free and conscious, and incarnate in different bodies. Sexual attraction, she wrote, thrives on difference: ‘the other sex has the fascination of an exotic country’.

  The problem, as Beauvoir saw it, was that men thought of love in terms of inequality and submission and many women were resisting love because ‘it evoked ancient slaveries’. The difference between the sexes, as Beauvoir saw it, was too often that of superior and inferior, subject and object, giver and exploitative taker: but domination was not love, and neither was devotion. Women were becoming increasingly active in the world, independent and responsible. Now that women had entered public life some were dismayed, wondering: would love be ruined? Would it lose its poetry and happiness? Beauvoir didn’t think so: ‘Is it not possible to conceive a new kind of love in which both partners are equals – one not seeking submission to the other?’3

  She had caught partial glimpses of this new love in famous writers; Nietzsche, Tolstoy and D. H. Lawrence recognized that ‘true and fruitful love’ included both the physical presence of the beloved and the beloved’s aims in life. But they proposed this ideal to woman, since love was her purpose and she had no other. In ‘equalitarian’ love, by contrast, Beauvoir thought that women would still aspire to be their lover’s ally in this way – that they would aim for reciprocity and friendship – but that the same ideal would be shared by men:

  The man, instead of seeking a kind of narcissistic exaltation in his mate, would discover in love a way of getting outside himself, of tackling problems other than his own. With all the twaddle that has been written about the splendour of such generosity, why not give the man his chance to participate in such devotion, in the self-negation that is considered the enviable lot of women?4

  If each partner thought ‘simultaneously of the other and the self’, both would benefit.

  It is interesting, given the non-sexual nature of her relationship with Sartre, that she is explicit in this piece that such love can be platonic (although she acknowledges that sexual attraction is ‘the more usual instrument’). Returning to the theme of ‘Femininity: The Trap’ and to ground she covered in The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote about widespread fear she saw in women, that losses of ‘femininity’ would cost them their desirability in men’s eyes. She knew that women want to be desired – but she did not think their desirability could be so easily eradicated: ‘the physical need that each [sex] has for the other will maintain their mutual magic’.5

  In June Beauvoir went to Chicago to see Algren. She had asked to come in June because Sartre was going to see Vanetti a final time – he was trying to let her down gently – and both she and Sartre liked it if she was away at the same time he was, so they could be together more. She made no secret of the fact that she was scheduling her trip around Sartre when she wrote to arrange it.

  Nelson agreed. But his letters became fewer and fewer. She started to wonder: should she even go? Sartre encouraged her to give it a try.

  On the plane it was surreal to see the person next to her reading The Second Sex. After visiting Stépha and Fernando Gerassi in New York, in September 1951, she flew to Chicago. It took less than twenty-four hours to recognize that things had changed. She asked Algren what was the matter. He was happy to see her, he said, but he didn’t like it that she came only to leave again. She wrote to Sartre that his detachment now bordered on indifference.6 Algren’s ex-wife wanted to re-marry him, but after Beauvoir, Algren said, wasn’t sure he’d ever love another woman.

  Even so, he told her, something had died. The next night they tried to make love but neith
er of their bodies would cooperate. When she and Algren moved to a cottage on Lake Michigan at the beginning of August they slept in separate rooms. Beauvoir started to worry that she would never experience passion again. She took corydrane, an amphetamine Sartre took in high doses to sustain his huge output, and worked on her novel – the one she would dedicate to Nelson. Their days settled into a peaceful rhythm, passionless but productive: writing in the morning, swimming, reading in the afternoon. Once, she nearly drowned in the lake – she never was a very good swimmer. And then Nathalie Sorokine came to visit, and things went south. Algren disliked her intensely, and told Beauvoir that Sorokine had shocked his friends with her ‘lesbian side’.7 Beauvoir felt torn between the two of them – Sorokine wasn’t easy to live with, but Algren hadn’t exactly handled himself well. She was looking forward to being back with Sartre, her ‘dear little absolute’.8

  In Force of Circumstance Beauvoir described that visit as one in which despair drained her of all feeling. She glosses over its end, moving on to the insults Sartre was receiving in abundance in Paris at the time.9 But her letters show that at the end of October, just before she left Chicago for New York, her hope for the relationship with Algren was rekindled. At the visit’s end, Beauvoir told Nelson that she was glad to have his friendship. To which Algren replied, ‘It’s not friendship. I could never give you less than love.’10

  She wrote to Nelson the same night, saying that she cried all the way to and from the airport, and on the plane too: ‘In this “introduction” you made me read yesterday, Thomas Mann says that before each fit Dostoevsky had a few seconds of bliss which were worth ten years of life. Certainly you have the power to give me in a few minutes, at times, a kind of fever that is worth ten years of health.’

  It was fair, she said, that he wanted to evict her from his heart. But, as her not-quite-fluent English put it: ‘thinking it is fair did not prevent it to be hard’.11 She loved him, she said, ‘for the love you gave me’, ‘for the great new sexual longing and happiness you had aroused in me’. But even in the absence of those things, she loved him ‘because of who you are’.12

  When she got back to Paris Sartre was writing plays and reading about Marxism; he seemed distant and far away but she attributed this to his having become a public figure: he no longer wanted to sit in cafés and stroll through Paris, or join her skiing trips. He invited her to read the things he was reading, to follow his intellectual path, but she had her novel to finish and – although she was interested in politics – she did not want to spend her time following his. He wanted to create a new ideology that would solve humanity’s problems; she didn’t share these ambitions. Some days their growing distance loomed like a thin veil of sadness; on other days despair gnawed away at her like a corrosive.13

  The Second Sex had made Beauvoir money as well as earning her a largely unwanted reputation, so she bought a record player and some records; Sartre came to the rue de la Bûcherie a couple of nights a week to listen to jazz or classical music. And in November 1951 Beauvoir wrote to Algren with excitement: she’d found a new passion: ‘As love is forbidden, I decided to give my dirty heart to something not so piggish as a man: and I gave to myself a nice beautiful black car.’14 She was taking driving lessons three times a week.

  Since the war Paris had blossomed into one of Europe’s leading cultural centres. Miles Davis played in Left Bank clubs, and intellectuals, artists and writers – including anticolonial activists – gathered for meetings and events. In 1950 the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire published Discourse on Colonialism, in which he likened European Nazism to colonialism on account of their shared pursuits of domination and control. India had won its independence from the British in 1947 and anticolonialism was gaining ground. In 1952 Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks was published, passionately describing the effects of racism on the oppressed. But many in France were reluctant to relinquish their empire, despite the growth of anticolonial and Algerian nationalist movements since the 1930s.

  During this period, Beauvoir’s work was becoming one of France’s leading cultural exports. The first translation of The Second Sex appeared in West Germany in 1951 under the title Das andere Geschlecht – ‘The Other Sex’. It sold so quickly it had to be reprinted three times: 14,000 copies in five years.15

  Meanwhile, Beauvoir’s correspondence with Algren played more variations on the same melancholy theme. She started to call him her ‘pang collector’. He wanted to be with her, but he wanted her to stay with him in Chicago, which meant that they might be together a month a year instead of the three or four they might manage if he would come to Paris. And he was angry about her New York letter. But what was she supposed to do? He charged her with wanting to keep his life without giving her own, but she felt this was unfair. ‘You could not expect me to react like an obedient machine,’ she wrote.16 Her claim in The Second Sex that women were expected to see love as life – and to sacrifice everything for it – became painfully personal. For her, it could only ever be part of life. In Force of Circumstance she would write that ‘Even if Sartre hadn’t existed, I would never have gone to live permanently in Chicago.’17

  Over 1952 the letters between Beauvoir and Algren became fewer; the intervals between them stretched from near daily, to weekly, to monthly. Beauvoir was 44 now, and worried that she had been ‘relegated to the land of shadows’.18 In The Second Sex she had described it as a tragedy of women’s sexuality that they lose their desirability long before they lose their desire, becoming ‘objects without assets’. She thought women reached their sexual peak in their mid-thirties. But soon afterwards, she said, they were haunted by ageing. Beauvoir’s fictional women – especially in her later novels – frequently embody the lonely dissatisfaction of listless desire.

  Early in 1952 Beauvoir felt that she and Sartre had grown apart on account of his public prominence and political engagement; there was now a third person in their relationship: Beauvoir, Sartre and ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’. She told him that she wished he were an obscure poet. Although he had adopted some of her views about ethics and the importance of cultural values by this point, pressures on their time and diversions of their interests exacerbated her feelings of loss and isolation, which made her feel very low. In Force of Circumstance she described her sadness becoming ‘a universal despair’ that ‘crept into my heart until I began to long for the world to end’.19

  Beauvoir’s typist Lucienne had died of breast cancer in January and not long afterwards Beauvoir discovered a lump in one of her own breasts. She told Sartre, who encouraged her to go to a doctor if she was worried about it. By March of 1952 it had grown painful, so she made an appointment and in April she went to the specialist. The surgeon reassured her: she was young, it was unlikely to be too bad, but even so they should operate and do a biopsy. The worst case scenario was that the breast would have to be removed: would she agree to this?

  She did. But she emerged from the consultation feeling shaken; she had seen these waiting rooms with Lucienne, and she had also seen women who’d lost one breast come back ten years later to lose the other, or dying from infection. When she told Sartre what the doctor had said he replied with Cold War sardonicism: in the worst case scenario she had twelve years to live, and by then the atomic bomb would have killed everyone.20 She spent the day before her operation visiting a beautiful abbey with Bost.

  In Rome in May 1952 Sartre heard that the French government had violently suppressed a demonstration of the French Communist Party. He did not join the party but he became an outspoken public sympathizer just at the time when most Western intellectuals were beginning to distance themselves from Stalin. Whatever its political savvy, Sartre’s conversion to communism brought Beauvoir one unexpected benefit. The Les Temps Modernes people had a regular meeting on Sunday afternoons at the rue Bonaparte. Sartre wanted the journal to reflect his new political zeal, so he invited some young Marxists onto the editorial board. One of them was a quick-witted friend of Sartre’s secretary
. Claude Lanzmann was 27, funny and had magnificent blue eyes.

  One day Sartre’s secretary, Jean Cau, told Beauvoir that Lanzmann found her attractive. She shrugged it off: she had started to have anxiety attacks about ageing and believed dusk had fallen on her sexual life.21 But sometimes she noticed that his gaze lingered on her during meetings. After a party one evening in July her telephone rang: Lanzmann invited her to see a movie. Which one? She asked. ‘Anything you like,’ he said. They fixed it for the next day, and when she put the phone down she burst into tears.22

  Although it would be clearer in her later work on Old Age (published when she was 62) than in the autobiographical account given in Force of Circumstance (published when she was 55), the young Beauvoir was disgusted by mature female sexuality. As a young woman she ‘loathed’ what she called ‘harridans’ who had the gall to dye their hair, wear bikinis and flirt when their place was, to use Beauvoir’s image, ‘on the shelf’. Beauvoir promised that she would ‘dutifully retire to the shelf’ when her time came. At 44, she thought her time had come. But it had come too soon.23

  At their first meeting Lanzmann and Beauvoir talked their way through the afternoon into the evening, and at the end of that they agreed to have dinner the next day. When he flirted she protested: she was 17 years older than he was. It didn’t matter to him, he said: in his eyes she was not old. That night he didn’t leave her apartment on the rue de la Bûcherie, nor the next.