In Force of Circumstance she wrote that The Second Sex was ‘possibly the book that has brought me the greatest satisfaction of all those I have written’.60 In hindsight, of course, there were things she would have changed. But the letters she received showed her that she had helped women ‘become aware of themselves and of their situation’.61 She was now 55 years old, and aware that (despite not claiming to be a model) her life had become an idealized example that others turned to for inspiration. Even after twelve years she was still receiving letters thanking her for The Second Sex, telling her that she had helped women overcome the myths they felt crushed by. In the decade after The Second Sex was published, other feminists published works she described as more daring than her own. Too many of them focused too much on sexuality; but, she said, at least now women could ‘present themselves as the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom’.62
And yet, it is also in this book that Beauvoir wrote the famously perplexing statement that she had ‘avoided falling into the trap of “feminism”’ in The Second Sex.63 Three years earlier, in a 1960 interview, she explained that she wanted readers to know that she was not partisan or anti-men because, if viewed through that lens, her point of view would be undermined: ‘I would like it to be known that the woman who wrote The Second Sex did not do it […] in order to avenge a life that had […] embittered her. If one interprets the book in that way, one […] repudiates it.’64
It was at this point, in the epilogue of Force of Circumstance, that Beauvoir wrote that her relationship with Sartre was the ‘one undoubted success’ of her life. The epilogue confused readers: it opened by claiming her success with Sartre, celebrating their unending interest in each other’s conversation. But it ended with an intriguing line: ‘The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.’65
What did this mean? Reviewers speculated: Did ‘la grande Sartreuse’ regret her ‘romance of the century’ with Sartre? Did the ‘dutiful daughter’ regret becoming an atheist? Was she disappointed by the doublespeak of a France that claimed to stand for liberté, egalité, fraternité – but not if it was liberty, equality and fraternity for Algerians?
Readers, too, wrote to her in shock: she had been a beacon of hope in their lives; how could she, with such accomplishments, such lovers, such a life, feel cheated? Françoise d’Eaubonne wrote that there was no more-discussed phrase at the time than Beauvoir’s ‘I was gypped’; even de Gaulle’s most famous words hardly rivalled this sentence: she remembered people going ‘back to the dictionary to know the exact sense of the term, to try to discern whether it was authorial teasing or the drama of an authentic disillusionment’.66
Beauvoir knew it was a provocative way to end the book. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir has said that the ‘misunderstanding’ provoked by these words was ‘in part, deliberate’ and ‘is about the very nature of literature’.67 In a 1964 interview with Madeleine Gobeil (published in in The Paris Review in 1965) Beauvoir was asked about her autobiographical project and what it was that led her to pursue a vocation as a writer. Her answer was that she wanted her books to ‘move readers’. She wanted to write characters that spoke into her readers, charting paths in their imaginations that transformed their possibilities in life – like Jo March in Little Women and Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss had for her.68
She had moved her readers, but many did not like it. After reading Beauvoir’s claim that she had been ‘gypped’ some even wrote to reassure her, saying ‘you are unjust to yourself, because it is false that your experience has produced nothing’: how could she think that when she had lit a ‘luminous hope in the heart of millions of women’?69 Had she fought myths of woman only to become one herself?
Beauvoir had downplayed the roles of Bost and Lanzmann in her life. She had excluded what looked like a serious love affair in Sartre’s life from the unfolding of her story because his lover was Soviet. Clearly, concerns of privacy affected them both. But in Beauvoir’s case it was starting to look like age seemed to condemn her to celibacy; in Sartre’s case, it did not.
She knew people were fascinated by her relationship with Sartre: it was an interesting story. But why not show, in multiple volumes, that becoming a woman can involve valuing different things at different times in life? Or that you may understand your own situation differently in hindsight? Or, indeed, that having the audacity to voice what many leave silent might make you subject to attack by those who don’t want you to be heard?
There is a passage in Force of Circumstance in which Beauvoir returned to Nelson Algren and the challenges of ‘the pact’ because she recognized a problem that her younger self had taken to be too easily resolved: ‘Is there any possible reconciliation between fidelity and freedom? And if so, at what price?’70
Often preached, rarely practiced, complete fidelity is usually experienced by those who impose it on themselves as a mutilation […]. Traditionally, marriage used to allow the man a few ‘adventures on the side’ without reciprocity; nowadays, many women have become aware of their rights and of the conditions necessary for their happiness: if there is nothing in their own lives to compensate for masculine inconstancy, they will fall a prey to jealousy and boredom.
In hindsight, Beauvoir told her readers, their approach had many risks. One partner may begin to prefer a new attachment to the old one, leading the other to feel betrayed; ‘in the place of two free persons, a victim and a torturer confront each other’. Some couples, on Beauvoir’s view, were impregnable. But there was one question she and Sartre ‘deliberately avoided: How would the third person feel about our arrangement?’ On this point, she wrote,
an unavoidable discretion compromised the exact truthfulness of the picture painted in The Prime of Life, for although my understanding with Sartre has lasted for more than thirty years, it has not done so without some losses and upsets in which the ‘others’ have suffered. This defect in our system manifested itself with particular acuity during the period I am now relating.71
When this volume appeared it got bad reviews and some quite spiteful ones. It sold well. But once again Beauvoir objected to the way the media treated her. They called her ‘complacent’, ‘desperate’;72 the embodiment of the ‘mutation’ of the feminine world. She was accused of attention-seeking, of doing ‘everything to shock gratuitously, uselessly’, of breaking ‘more appearances than was necessary to her message’.73
Esprit’s review, by Francine Dumas, was entitled ‘A tragic response’. For women who had chosen to live traditional lives of faith, motherhood and marriage, it was ungenerous and unjust to find the absence of these things responsible for Beauvoir’s ‘internal trembling’:
For the greatness of her destiny is precisely that deliberate abandonment of a traditional background (which was not without price in her eyes) and the will to replace it with the perilous way of ever-changing choices. The rope is so stiff that it may break, and Simone de Beauvoir refuses any safety net.74
In the press, one paper had selectively translated parts of Nelson Algren’s Who Lost an American to make it look like Algren resented Sartre and Beauvoir: she objected that they had taken away all the humour, the ‘little friendly words’. At this point she and Algren were still corresponding, so she wrote to him expressing her frustration: ‘these dirty people know nothing about nothing, chiefly when it comes to friendship and love’.75
By the mid-1960s, the second and third volumes of Beauvoir’s autobiography had cemented the Sartre–Beauvoir legend. Some of those close to them thought she had a personal agenda: putting herself in control of their public image. Sartre was happy with how Beauvoir portrayed him, but Sartre’s other women were unsettled – or worse. Wanda hated Beauvoir’s memoirs; she thought the Sartre–Beauvoir they portrayed was an imaginary ideal that bore little resemblance to reality. But they also made her worry about Sartre: after all these years, to Wanda he still denied that he
was romantically close to Beauvoir.
In later life Sartre continued to conduct multiple relationships simultaneously, and he did not convert to the point of view that saw truth-telling as something everyone deserved. Beauvoir, by contrast, was open about her relationship with Sartre and the terms in which she was available to others – which was more honest, but not necessarily less hurtful.
Force of Circumstance was published in America in the spring of 1965, which brought Beauvoir’s friendship with Algren to an abrupt halt. She had already given a fictionalized account of their romance in The Mandarins, but what she wrote in Force of Circumstance provoked his fury. When asked about the accuracy of the account in the memoir for Newsweek, he said that ‘Madame Yackety-Yack’ had written a middle-aged spinster’s fantasy.76 He reviewed the book in two magazines – Ramparts and Harper’s – with sarcasm and spite. And the next summer he published a poem dedicated to her in Zeitgeist: its subject was a blabbermouth he wanted to banish to a dank basement. Beauvoir had published two excerpts from Force of Circumstance in Harper’s in November and December 1964, entitled ‘A Question of Fidelity’ and ‘An American Rendezvous’. In Algren’s May riposte, he wrote:
Anybody who can experience love contingently has a mind that has recently snapped. How can love be contingent? Contingent upon what? The woman is speaking as if the capacity to sustain Man’s basic relationship – the physical love of man and woman – were a mutilation; while freedom consists of ‘maintaining through all deviations a certain fidelity!’ What she means, of course, when stripped of its philosophical jargon, is that she and Sartre created a façade of petit-bourgeois respectability behind which she could continue to search for her own femininity. What Sartre had in mind when he left town I’m sure I don’t know.77
Beauvoir wrote her last surviving letter to Algren in November of 1964. She hoped to visit him in 1965, but her trip to the United States was cancelled because of the Vietnam War. However, it is unclear if anything of their intimacy was salvageable after Algren’s reaction to the publication of Force of Circumstance.78 Algren would go on to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1981. In an interview about the award, a journalist asked him about Beauvoir; and described Algren responding with emotion that was still raw. He’d been having heart trouble so the interviewer redirected the conversation. The next day Algren was having a party at his cottage to celebrate, but when the first guest arrived he found Algren dead.
When Beauvoir’s letters to Algren were published in 1997 it provoked an uproar about the truth of her memoirs. Her long correspondence revealed that her passion for him, though hidden, was profound. The memoirs succeeded in forging the Sartre–Beauvoir myth; but they had misinformed the public spectacularly. Now it seemed that Algren was the most ardent love of her life; some even charged her with bad faith concerning her relationship with Sartre.79 Their relationship too would have a fantastical literary afterlife: Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lengthy section on Algren in Fates Worse than Death, where ‘Miss de Beauvoir’ appears as ‘Madame Yak Yak’, whom Algren ‘helped achieve a first orgasm’.80
A year before Force of Circumstance was published in America, Beauvoir wrote a very short preface to The Sexually Responsive Woman, a study of another misunderstood phenomenon: female sexuality. ‘In this realm as in so many others,’ Beauvoir wrote, ‘male prejudice insists on keeping women in a state of dependency. In contrast to this, the authors grant women autonomy – both physiological and psychological – equal to that of men.’ The review is comical and touching at the same time: she says she is ‘not qualified to pass definite judgment’ on all of the claims of Drs Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, but it was ‘absorbing and fascinating reading’.81
It is interesting that in the reception of Force of Circumstance as in other domains Beauvoir was accused of not having a sense of humour.82 Feminists are often accused of being killjoys, and many episodes in Beauvoir’s life illustrate what is now a well-documented dynamic: when Beauvoir expressed unhappiness her unhappiness was discussed as though the issue at stake was her unhappiness rather than what her unhappiness was about.83 For decades Beauvoir had been unhappy about the ways in which society mistreated women, Jews, Algerians – why couldn’t she just lighten up? And now she was becoming increasingly unhappy about the way society mistreated the old. It wasn’t good enough to make light of dark situations – the point was to make the situations themselves less dark.
In May of 1964, after finishing A Very Easy Death, she decided that she wanted to distance herself from autobiography and write a novel again. This time she would write about protagonists who were unlike her in almost all respects, save that they were women – ageing women.84 Throughout the 1960s Beauvoir continued to use her writing to support projects that she thought would improve women’s situations – whether academic studies or magazine articles like ‘What Love Is – And Isn’t’. She wrote that love only appears to ‘those who openly or secretly wish to change. For it is then that you anticipate love and what love brings: through another person, a new world is revealed and given to you’.85
As 1965 drew near Sartre was approaching his 60th birthday so he decided that, as a childless man whose future was growing shorter, he needed an heir and literary executor. There was no point, he thought, in giving that task to Beauvoir since she was almost as old as he was. So Sartre legally adopted Arlette Elkaïm the year she turned 30, on 18 March 1965. The witnesses were Simone de Beauvoir and Sylvie Le Bon. It was covered in France Soir but most of his friends had no forewarning – Wanda, Evelyne and Michelle were beside themselves.
After the bombing of North Vietnam by the United States in February 1965 Beauvoir refused an invitation to speak at Cornell University. She gave interviews on ageing, on writing, on literature, on autobiography. Sartre, too, was interviewed about her: in July 1965 American Vogue published an interview with him, entitled ‘Sartre Talks of Beauvoir’. Sartre thought she was ‘a very good writer’:
She has achieved something which has manifested itself particularly since The Mandarins. It’s apparent in the memoirs and in her book A Very Easy Death, which I consider the best thing she’s written. What she has achieved is immediate communication with the public. Let’s put it this way: there’s a difference between her and me. I don’t communicate emotionally, I communicate with people who think, who reflect, who are free in relation to me. That may or may not be a good thing. But Simone de Beauvoir communicates emotionally at once. People are always involved with her by virtue of what she says.86
In Beauvoir’s notes for All Said and Done, written in 1965–1966, Beauvoir wrote that the published ‘story’ of her life had only conveyed a ‘mutilated truth’ because it was not exhaustive; a ‘deformed truth, since time is not exactly restored’. But it had delivered a ‘literary truth’.87 She thought that her life was an example of what it meant to live an existential choice: there was no ‘decree’ from on high about who she should be, no predetermined path or Epicurean clinamen by which she swerved away from it. Instead, there was a blueprintless becoming – a project that she pursued throughout her life, which sometimes branched off into secondary projects along the way.88
Sometimes, the weight of past choices weighed heavily on her. She still regretted the way she treated ‘Lise’ (Nathalie Sorokine), and felt ‘imprisoned’ by the way her projects had ‘petrified’, accumulating behind her an ‘ineluctable past’.89 But, on the other hand, her ineluctable past was part of the way she became who she was, and being a public figure opened up new possibilities – and responsibilities. She could not in good conscience have written what she wrote about the world and not act to make it better. So how could she refuse to respond to letters and sign petitions? Her situation had the power to transform the lives of others: she had to make the most of it.
In August 1965, Sylvie and Simone went to Corsica. After that Beauvoir and Sartre went for their annual dose of Rome. Sartre left Italy for Paris on 12 October by train; Beauvoir was drivin
g the car back. They planned to meet on the evening of the 14th, at 7 p.m., at hers. But at lunchtime that day the phone rang; it was in the news that Beauvoir had had a car accident in the Yonne and had been hospitalized in Joigny. Lanzmann and Sartre set out at once, driving at breakneck speed to be with her. She had four broken ribs. Her face was swollen, with stitches and a bruised eye. She had taken a bend too fast.
Sartre stayed the night in a hotel nearby and then escorted her back to rue Victor Schoelcher in an ambulance. He helped her to her apartment and said he would stay with her until she was able to walk; she was in so much pain even undressing was a challenge. She was bedridden for three weeks, during which Sartre, Lanzmann and Sylvie Le Bon cared for her, supplemented by daily visits from a nurse.
She made a good recovery; in June of 1966 Sartre and Beauvoir went back to the USSR, and in September they took off for Tokyo. They had never been to Japan. They knew that their works were read there – it was one of the best markets for Sartre’s work and The Second Sex had just been translated into Japanese. But when they got off the plane they were not expecting to be blinded by the flash of journalists’ cameras. Their interpreter took them to a room to take questions from the press; young people tried to touch them as they passed. In her memoirs Beauvoir wrote about Sartre’s engagements and her voracious reading about Japanese history and culture without elaborating on the contents of her own lectures.90 But she was not there as Sartre’s plus one: she gave three lectures on ‘The Situation of Women Today’. Once again, it is unclear whether she omitted this out of self-deprecation, some convention of modesty, or in order not to write her life in a way that would render it too distant to her readers.
Becoming Beauvoir Page 33
