A few days later she left for Milan – she drove her Simca Aronde, Sartre went by train – where they met on the Piazza della Scala. She wanted to see museums, churches, art; he just wanted to work. So they compromised: sightseeing for the morning, and working in the afternoon. For him, it was The Communists and Peace, and for her, more work on the novel that never seemed to end. Sartre read it in autumn 1952 and found much to praise, but he was still not satisfied that it was finished. She was fed up, and wondered about ditching it. But then Bost and Lanzmann read it and encouraged her to keep going. When it was finished, Sartre would cite it as the reason he stopped writing novels – even leaving his ‘Roads to Freedom’ series unfinished. There wasn’t any point finishing it, he said, The Mandarins had already ‘explored the problems of the time much better than I could have ever done’, ‘maintaining freedom, uncertainty, and ambiguity throughout’.24
From Italy Beauvoir wrote letters to Lanzmann. Five letters, in fact, before he replied. She had promised that she would still love him when she returned to Paris. Only until then, he asked? He had more confidence than that.25
Beauvoir visited her sister en route to Paris, but she had to wait two weeks for Lanzmann to come back from his own travels in Israel before ‘their bodies met each other again with joy’.26 They began to share stories of their pasts: he was Jewish, and his reflections on Jewishness helped her understand it in ways she hadn’t imagined. (In later life many would say the same of him; he went on to – with sustained support from Beauvoir – direct the acclaimed Holocaust documentary Shoah.)
Conversations about the past segued into conversations about the future. He had little money after his travels so Beauvoir invited him to move in with her. It was the first time she had ever lived with her lover, and she was nervous about giving up her solitude, but they would live like this for seven years. He was also the only lover Beauvoir ever addressed in the familiar second person, tu. Sartre commented on this in later interviews, claiming that he had never been closer to any woman than he was to the Beaver. But even so, they had never said ‘tu’.27 In 2018, Beauvoir’s letters to Lanzmann became available to researchers. Interspersed throughout discussion of what Beauvoir was writing, reading and seeing when she was away from Lanzmann, there are tender professions of love and practical details of daily life. For someone who wanted to be alone as much as Beauvoir did, it is significant that she was willing to share her life with him in this way.
In Josée Dayan’s film portrait of Simone de Beauvoir, Simone asked Lanzmann about his first impression of her:
Lanzmann I found you very beautiful, you had a smooth face and I wanted to see what lay behind your impassivity.
Beauvoir And then you found that I was less impassive then I looked.
Lanzmann Oh absolutely. […] I don’t know if I ought to talk about that.… What was striking about you right from the beginning, was your taste for life, your constant projects. You always wanted to do something, to travel, to see things in detail […]. It was most surprising to discover the world with you, which is in effect what I did.28
The past two years, for Beauvoir, had brought her a bitter end to a love affair and seemed to signal the end of her sexual era. But with Lanzmann, Beauvoir said, ‘I leapt back enthralled into happiness.’29
Beauvoir continued to see Sartre, but their habits changed.30 She did not want to leave Lanzmann for two months, as their usual annual vacations would have required. So they agreed that Lanzmann would come too, for ten days at least. Lanzmann was writing about the recently established State of Israel; he was deeply impressed by the fact that there, Jews were not outsiders. So he and Beauvoir wrote together in the mornings, and then in the afternoon she kept her custom of going to work with Sartre.
But although she and Lanzmann shared an apartment as well as a bed their relationship was conducted on the same, non-exclusive terms as Beauvoir’s others. She expected him to see other women and to tell her everything; she expected to see Sartre and tell him everything. Lanzmann became part of ‘the family’: they spent New Year’s Eve with Olga, Bost, Wanda and Michelle. With time she came to appreciate the long, shared history of these people more and more: ‘there was so much understood between us that a smile conveyed as much as a whole oration’.31
Lanzmann was a passionate man, spontaneously expressing his emotions and reactions for others to see; early in their affair he expressed gratitude that Beauvoir could love him despite his ‘madness’. He had a tempestuous past, but that was not the only thing that shaped his temperament. He was griefstruck by the postwar discovery of France’s complicity with the Jewish genocide. And his childhood – in addition to academic excellence at the Lycée Louis le Grand and friendships with Jean Cau and Gilles Deleuze – had included violence between his parents so severe that his mother left his father, and their three children, with no indication of where she could be found.
But he wasn’t the only one with darkness to reckon with, and Lanzmann – as the only lover she ever lived with – saw Beauvoir’s own storms at close quarters. Lanzmann thought that that one of the important things that Beauvoir shared with Sartre was an existential angst on the verge of depression or despair. In Sartre, they manifested as ‘gloom and inactivity’, and he fought them off with corydrane, writing and seduction. In Beauvoir, they manifested as what Lanzmann called ‘explosion’:
Sitting, standing, or lying down, in the car or on foot, in public or in private, she would burst into violent, convulsive sobs, her whole body racked with gasps, with heartrending cries punctuated by long howls of incommunicable despair. I don’t remember the first time, it happened many times during the seven years we spent together, but thinking about it now as I write, it was never associated with some wrong done to her nor some misfortune. On the contrary, she seemed to break on the rocks of happiness, to be crushed by it.
Lanzmann tried to reassure Beauvoir but he was ‘utterly helpless’ in the face of her ‘excruciating awareness of the fragility of human happiness’.32 But just like the ‘Mlle de Beauvoir’ of her student days, the explosions would pass; Beauvoir and Lanzmann passed peaceful hours living and working together in the rue Schoelcher, sometimes writing for as long as five hours without speaking to each other.33
In 2018 Claude Lanzmann sold a selection of his letters from Beauvoir to Yale University.34 On announcing the sale Le Monde published one letter from 1953, in which Beauvoir wrote that while she ‘certainly’ had loved Sartre, it was: ‘without true reciprocity; and without our bodies ever amounting to anything’.35 This revealing claim shows that by 1953, Beauvoir clearly did not take Sartre to be central to her life in a romantic sense, and moreover, that her criticism of their relationship was not just sexual, but ethical. If history were to repeat itself, readers of these letters would focus only on the sex. They would rehearse their surprise that ‘the greatest love story’ of the twentieth century was not what they were led to believe. But the sex was not the only thing Beauvoir found wanting. She objected to its lack of reciprocity – something she believed to be necessary for romantic love to be authentic. Since generations of Beauvoir’s readers have wondered whether she was in bad faith about her relationship with Sartre, it is very significant that she admitted outright (to those closest to her) that it had serious imperfections. Yes, she loved Sartre. But in important respects, from her point of view, their relationship did not succeed.
What she told the public was a different story, but it was also complicated by what the public said about her. In spring 1953 the first English translation of The Second Sex was published. Blanche Knopf, the wife of the publisher Alfred Knopf, had heard people talking about it when she was in Paris. Her French wasn’t good enough to assess the work herself; she thought it was some kind of intellectual sex manual so she asked a professor of zoology to write a reader’s report. H. M. Parshley wrote back praising it as ‘intelligent, learned, and well-balanced’; it was ‘not feminist in any doctrinaire sense’.
The Knopfs w
rote back: would he like to translate it? And please could he cut it down a bit? (Its author, Knopf said, suffered from ‘verbal diarrhea’.36) In French, The Second Sex was 972 pages long. In correspondence with Knopf, Parshley said he was cutting or condensing 145 of them – deleting nearly 15 per cent of what Beauvoir said. Parshley had no background in philosophy or French literature, and he missed many of the rich philosophical connotations and literary allusions of Beauvoir’s original French, making her look much less rigorously philosophical than she was. He also cut sections and translated material in less-than-innocent ways. The hardest hit section was the one on women’s history, where he deleted seventy-eight women’s names and almost every reference to socialist forms of feminism. He cut references to women’s anger and oppression but kept references to men’s feelings. He cut Beauvoir’s analysis of housework.37
When she saw what Parshley had cut, Beauvoir wrote back that ‘so much of what seems important to me will have been omitted’. He wrote back saying that the book would be ‘too long’ if he didn’t cut it, so Beauvoir asked him to state outright in the preface that he had made omissions and condensed her work. But he was not as forthright as she hoped.
In America the book was not billed as an ‘existentialist’ work because Blanche Knopf thought existentialism was a ‘dead duck’; she had, in fact, asked Parshley to play it down in his preface.38 When Parshley’s preface appeared he said that since ‘Mlle de Beauvoir’s book is, after all on woman, not on philosophy’39 he had ‘done some cutting and condensation here and there with a view to brevity’. ‘Practically all such modifications,’ he writes, ‘have been made with the author’s express permission.’40 In a 1985 interview Beauvoir said that she begrudged Parshley ‘a great deal’.41 (A new English translation, with the missing pieces restored, would not be published until 2009 in Britain, 2010 in America.)
When The Second Sex went on sale in the United States, it leapt onto the bestseller lists. Some of the early evaluations were very positive about Beauvoir’s style and originality, simultaneously pointing out that she falsely universalized challenges that really only pertained to artistic or intellectual women.42 Others concluded that this author (as a reviewer in The Atlantic put it) clearly had ‘the extreme feminist personality type’.43 A reviewer in the New Yorker and the anthropologist Margaret Mead called it ‘a work of art’ and ‘a work of fiction’, respectively.44 It has sold well since publication, reputedly passing the million-copy mark in the 1980s. In the 1950s, it was one of the few books women who wanted to think about their status in the world could turn to.45
Because of The Second Sex Beauvoir would be referred to as the ‘mother’ of second-wave feminism. Curiously, however, some of the best-known feminist pioneers of the 1960s failed to acknowledge her influence until later. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics owed a great deal to The Second Sex, prompting Beauvoir to comment that Millet’s book, while ‘very good’, had taken ‘it all, the form, the idea, everything’, from her.46
In America, it was Beauvoir’s ideas about sexuality, the ‘independent woman’, and maternity that would draw the most sustained attention.47 And although reactions weren’t as vitriolic as the ones she’d had in France, it still managed to ruffle feathers in some quarters and provoke fury in others. After a trip to Saint-Tropez with Sartre and Lanzmann, in April of 1953 a parcel arrived for her at Les Deux Magots, in Paris. It was postmarked Chicago so she thought it was from Nelson and opened it excitedly. But in fact it was an anonymous gift: ‘laxative pills to help evacuation of bile’.48
She was still writing to Algren monthly, regularly updating him on The Mandarins. When Beauvoir wrote to him she called it ‘his’ book – although it was Lanzmann who found her the title (from the beginning, Lanzmann said, their rapport was both ‘intellectual and carnal’49). The Mandarins was taking shape slowly, more slowly than she wished, so by August 1953 her letters to Algren were calling it ‘his damned book’. By December it was her ‘damned dirty novel’.
In June 1953 Beauvoir and Lanzmann travelled to Switzerland and Yugoslavia before going to Venice for a ‘joint session’ vacation with Sartre and Michelle. Lanzmann drove the Simca Aronde, while Beauvoir planned eight-hour hikes with gruelling itineraries. At Trieste they discovered that they could get visas to enter Yugoslavia. Beauvoir had never been behind the iron curtain: they packed the car with supplies and into communist territory they went.
In Amsterdam that August Beauvoir kept working on The Mandarins. She was enjoying the rhythm of working there, alongside Sartre, when she received distressing news from Lanzmann: she had planned to meet him in Basel, but he had been hospitalized in Cahors after a car accident. She got in the car immediately, and drove to his side.50
Meanwhile, Sartre went back to Paris. He was going to meet Beauvoir and Lanzmann in Cahors but he had a few matters to attend to for the Beaver – errands, mainly – and a new lover to woo for himself. He had fallen for Lanzmann’s sister, Evelyne. And although Michelle knew nothing about it, Evelyne had fallen for Sartre, too. So Sartre now had three ‘mistresses’: Wanda, Michelle and Evelyne, some of whom were more in the know than others, and all of whom he supported financially and lavished with literary gifts.
In February of 1954 Beauvoir got a letter from Algren asking if she still had ‘magic’ in her life. Despite the presence of Lanzmann she replied that she would never love a man like she had loved Nelson. She had become disenchanted with the world and blamed her age; now she lived ‘a magicless life’.51 But at the end of April she wrote to him again, jubilant – she’d finished the book. It was 1,200 pages of typescript, and Sartre, Bost and Olga thought it was her best novel ever. It was an American story, about a man and a woman, and although she hadn’t yet given ‘the monster’ to Gallimard she was already feeling the relief of completion.
Beauvoir was worried about Sartre’s health: he’d been pushing himself too hard for years, taking corydrane at several times the recommended dose. He had high blood pressure so the doctors had recommended rest. He made no changes, except to increase his stimulant intake when he started to feel slow. Beauvoir and Lanzmann both told him he was killing himself, but he didn’t want to stop.
In May 1954 Sartre left on a trip for the USSR. His visit was covered in the French papers, and Beauvoir followed it in the press, but he hadn’t sent letters. The same month Hélène came to Paris to show her paintings, and in June Simone and Lanzmann travelled to England, (where she was decidedly unimpressed by the English ‘summer’). They got back to find a note from Bost under her apartment door, asking her to come and see him immediately. They went downstairs (Bost and Olga were still living on the floor below) to see what the matter was: he told them that Sartre had been hospitalized in Moscow. It was his high blood pressure, Jean Cau said, nothing serious.
Beauvoir phoned Moscow and was reassured to hear Sartre’s voice. He spent ten days recovering before flying back to France. But in addition to his health Beauvoir began to find his principles disquieting. On this trip he’d written an article for Liberation claiming that in the USSR there was complete freedom of expression. Everyone knew that that wasn’t true; what was he thinking? Sartre was stubborn, and wouldn’t publicly criticize the USSR until the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
When he got back from Russia he went to Rome to convalesce. Michelle went with him, but all he felt like doing was sleeping. In August, he joined Beauvoir for a trip to Germany and Austria, and Beauvoir was surprised by his low mood and physical state: she thought his fatigue had brought on mental disgust. He was irritable and dismissive, even calling literature – the vocation to which both of them wanted to dedicate their lives – ‘horseshit’.52 He was dysphoric and questioning his life’s purpose. No number of women could deliver him from this despair.
October 1954 saw the publication of The Mandarins. Beauvoir was apprehensive after the reception of The Second Sex: ‘I could almost hear the unpleasant gossip in advance.’ It was extremely well received, and what astonished
her most is that it was well received everywhere: the right wing and the left found things to like about it. The first print run of 11,000 copies was not enough; by the end of the first month it had sold 40,000.53 She wrote to Nelson that his book was the biggest success she’d ever had. It was even a contender for the Prix Goncourt, a prestigious French prize awarded annually in November. Lots of people said the novel deserved it but she wondered if her reputation as the author of The Second Sex would work against her.
The convention was for the nominees to go to a special Goncourt lunch to hear the winners announced and then – if you were the lucky one – thank the jury. After that the publisher had a cocktail party where the press could ask questions and take pictures. Many writers enjoyed the fanfare and public attention, and wanted to do this. Simone de Beauvoir did not.
She didn’t like the way the newspapers wrote ‘dirt’ about her and Sartre, or, more recently, about her as the author of The Second Sex. Nor did she relish public appearances since, in her view, ‘publicity disfigures those who fall into its hands’.54 So she decided to play the game her own way, and stay out of its hands – she hid.
Two days before the prize was announced reporters started to watch the door of her apartment building from a bar across the street. But she slipped out the back door and went to stay elsewhere. So on the day itself she had a small party with Sartre, Olga and Bost, listening on the radio to hear who won while the journalists sat waiting all day at the rue de la Bûcherie. They got impatient and tried several ruses, including phoning her flat and impersonating Sartre.
But the joke – and the Goncourt – was hers.
The literary power brokers were angry; she had successfully conveyed her message that she could do without them. One newspaper spitefully published an artificially aged photo, making dark shadows under her eyes. A TV feature showed video clips of her empty place at the white-linen table, before showing the ‘less shy’ winner of the Renaudot prize, Jean Reverzy, signing books (fulfilling ‘the little obligations of glory’, as the announcer put it).55 But despite Beauvoir’s refusal to play by the rules, The Mandarins sold well – better than usual even for a Goncourt winner – and she received more letters. Their tone was softer than the disdainful deluge that followed The Second Sex. She heard from old friends, old pupils. But she wanted to know what Algren thought. This American love story was not exactly theirs, she told him; but she tried to put something of them in it.56
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