She was hospitalized in the Hôpital Cochin for a month; at first the doctors didn’t think she would ever recover, after the binge on pills and whiskey she had cirrhosis of the liver and some motor-neuron damage. When she returned to the rue Victor Schoelcher the pneumonia was gone but the depression wasn’t. Throughout June and July Sylvie stayed with Beauvoir as much as she could during the week and, when Sylvie was teaching, Lanzmann and Bost came to be with her. She had always said that her life would end when Sartre’s did; they were worried that she would enforce this literally. At weekends Sylvie took her away from Paris in the car. In August, when it was time for her annual trip to Rome, she said to Sylvie that they needed to leave Paris: ‘I want to live and I need to go somewhere far away to do it.’3
They went to Norway, on a fjord cruise. Slowly she began to resurface, to remember that there were other meaningful relationships in her life that were still worth living for. But she also began to see that some relationships would never be the same. Three days after Sartre’s cremation, Arlette had emptied his apartment. This was surprising from a legal point of view, because the law required that his property be untouched until an evaluation was made for tax purposes. Arlette told different stories about why she had done it: she couldn’t pay the rent until the end of the probate period; she feared a break-in. But Beauvoir felt certain that she had done it to prevent Beauvoir taking things that were rightfully hers. It was an unpleasant dispute: other friends wanted mementos of Sartre, and when Lanzmann asked Arlette to give something to Bost, given their 40-year-long friendship, she gave him Sartre’s old slippers.
Sylvie, who had never particularly liked Arlette, was furious. Sartre had Beauvoir’s father’s books in his apartment: these were not his for her to inherit. He also had a drawing Picasso had given to them both, and a painting by Riberolle with the same provenance. Both Sylvie and Lanzmann asked Arlette for them on Beauvoir’s behalf but Arlette said she could ask for them herself if she wanted them so much.
Sylvie got Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir’s books back. But there was only one thing Beauvoir herself asked for: the manuscript to Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics. When Sartre had finished Being and Nothingness he gave Beauvoir the manuscript as soon as it was published; it was her most treasured possession. And at the end of Being and Nothingness Sartre had promised to publish an ethics, which he started in the late 1940s, around the same time Beauvoir wrote her own Ethics of Ambiguity. Arlette knew that Beauvoir wanted this manuscript, since one of the first things she did when released from the hospital was to ‘humble’ herself to ask Arlette for it. But Arlette said no. And in 1983, she published it.
When Beauvoir was released from the hospital in May 1980 the doctors told her to stop taking Valium and drinking, and to have massage and therapy to help her body recover. She followed most of their advice – apart from giving up whiskey and vodka. During these weeks she realized that she wanted her doctors to be able to discuss her condition with Sylvie. According to French law her nearest blood relative, Hélène, was her legal guardian and heir. Sylvie could not even drive Beauvoir to her treatments without her sister’s permission.
Beauvoir did not want to move to Alsace to live with Hélène and Lionel, and it would not have been practical for them to uproot themselves to Paris to care for her. So Beauvoir decided to ask Sylvie if she could legally adopt her. She told Lanzmann and Bost first, and they were both in favour. They had learned from the Arlette case what problems could arise when all parties were not equally in favour of new arrangements, so she raised the issue carefully with Sylvie first and then Hélène. Initially Hélène felt the discomfort of displacement, but she realized that her life would not last much longer than her sister’s, and it was already full enough.
Sylvie, on the other hand, was a little reluctant. She had always detested Arlette’s willingness to live as Sartre’s kept woman. Sylvie Le Bon was an independent woman who had her own professional life – she was an agrégée and taught philosophy – and she did not want her relationship with Beauvoir to be considered alike to Arlette’s with Sartre. She also knew that scholarly research had begun to concentrate on the role of mothers and daughters in Beauvoir’s writing, and she thought adoption would provide a ‘feast’ of speculation.
But by this stage Beauvoir had had decades to get used to people making imaginary characters out of her life. She encouraged Sylvie to see their friendship from within, where it wasn’t defined by their ages or traditional roles. Beauvoir confided to Sylvie that over the course of her life she made several attempts to find another friendship like the one she had with Zaza. But until Sylvie, none of them succeeded. In Sylvie, Beauvoir said, it was as if she had found Zaza’s reincarnation. Sylvie accepted, later writing that her relationship with Beauvoir was one of ‘unique and incomparable intimacy’.4 Beauvoir told Deirdre Bair during an interview that she was fortunate ‘to enjoy a perfect relationship with both a man and a woman’.5
The year of Sartre’s death bore all the wounds of grief: tears, depression, wondering what she could have done otherwise. Again Beauvoir turned to literature as catharsis: she decided to write an account of Sartre’s death. Adieux was published in 1981: it chronicled Sartre’s decline and death, focusing on the changing situation of his life as age and illness restricted his possibilities. It also included the interviews she had done with Sartre in Rome in the mid-1970s as a testament to their friendship of thought, their constant conversation. Friends worried about her working on the project, but this was the only way she could come to terms with his death. Writing had been catharsis with Zaza, and with her mother, so she persisted. Her opening words read:
This is the first of my books – the only one no doubt – that you will not have read before it is printed. It is wholly and entirely devoted to you; and you are not affected by it. […] When I say you, it is only a pretense, a rhetorical device. I am speaking to no one.6
Some readers have called Adieux her fifth volume of memoirs. But it is more elliptical than the others, describing Sartre’s decline with little focus on her own life beyond it. And it is a mixture of two forms: memoir and dialogue. Beauvoir believed that Adieux was a tribute to Sartre and an extension of Old Age. In 1970 Old Age had described the way old people are marginalized and treated by some as subhuman. In Adieux readers saw that this fate awaited even Jean-Paul Sartre.7
She thought it would be harshly received, and she was right: once again she was accused of indiscretion, or of speaking for Sartre when he could not speak for himself. Pascal Bruckner described the book as a mix of ‘homage and vengeance’ in Le Point.8 (Among other things, she had asked him why he thought men had ‘a certain pride’, whether he had always felt free, since childhood.9) Her defenders were primarily English-speaking women. The translator of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Hazel Barnes, condemned the gossip that painted Adieux as Beauvoir getting her own back ‘in return for having to put up with Sartre’s infidelities. This is slander. The narrative is both factual reporting and a tribute’.10 Sartre’s biographer Annie Cohen-Solal thought it elicited the usual reactions to this mythical couple: ‘utter respect or radical rejection’.11
One of her harshest critics was, of course, Arlette Elkaïm Sartre. She published an open letter in Libération attacking Beauvoir, disparaging her relationship with Sartre, her claims to centrality in his life, and her conduct in the Benny Lévy affair. Both women thought the other had reduced Sartre to an inferior being, and claimed to be the pre-eminent witness to Sartre’s life. Beauvoir refused to reply in print because she did not want to dignify Arlette’s claims with a response, or to be a public spectacle. Privately she was full of disdain.
In 1981 Beauvoir began her conversations with Deirdre Bair, her first biographer: she liked American women, and Beauvoir and Bair developed a habit of 4.00 p.m. interviews over neat scotch. She had been thinking about the image she would leave to posterity for over twenty years now, with the benefit of decades of experience of how ‘publicity disf
igures those who fall into its hands’.12 She did not want Arlette to have the last word concerning her relationship with Sartre. So she decided to publish Sartre’s letters to her, and made a public announcement of this intention, so the world could see for themselves what Jean-Paul Sartre thought of Simone de Beauvoir. She did not have the legal right to do so, since in France the literary executor has rights to any word Sartre penned, regardless of to whom he wrote them or who held the texts in question. So Beauvoir consulted her publisher, Robert Gallimard, who told her to leave the talking to Arlette to him.
There was much more at stake here than two of Sartre’s women arguing over whom he loved more. It was not a question of romance, for Beauvoir: she had been dogged all her life by people who denied her independence as a thinker, even claiming that Sartre wrote her books. And she thought the letters would show ‘my critical influence on him, as well as his critical influence on me’.13
When Sartre died, some Paris obituaries did not mention Beauvoir once. Le Monde mentioned the thousands of people at his funeral. But it did not mention her.14 A long article in L’Express includes a timeline which mentions the date when they met, and Beauvoir taking second place in the agrégation; but the rest of their relationship does not receive a single comment.15
In English The Times of London made no mention of Beauvoir in their initial article announcing Sartre’s death;16 the full obituary introduced her as one of his ‘closest friends’ who ‘became his mistress and life-long political, philosophical, and literary ally’.17 The Guardian’s death announcement didn’t mention her either, declaring that he had ‘lived his last years alone in Paris, visited and helped by friends and disciples’.18 In their full obituary she is not included in the ‘group of gifted intellectuals’ with whom he studied; rather she is mentioned for their ‘life-long union’ in which she ‘helped him in his various intellectual enterprises’.19
The New York Times was slightly more inclusive: ‘Mr. Sartre was scarcely less well known as a writer and thinker than Simone de Beauvoir, his stanch and close companion of many years. Their relationship persisted through numerous phases, but their basic attachment to each other, their fortification of each other, was never seriously doubted.’20 But the Washington Post introduced her as a ‘liaison’21 – could no one see her as an intellectual interlocutor, an active participant or even inspiration in the development of his thought?
This woman-as-man’s-disciple trope did not only affect her in relation to Sartre, either. During the early 1980s, Beauvoir continued to see Bianca Lamblin (née Bienenfeld) for lunch regularly. When the subject of Israel came up their discussion became heated. Lamblin criticized Beauvoir for being ‘unconditionally pro-Israel’, not even trying to see the Palestinian point of view. Lamblin was unsettled enough by their conversation to write to Beauvoir after it, further explaining her position. Like her review of Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic, Beauvoir’s reply to Lamblin shows both her temperament in conflict and her frustration with the assumption that her views are derivative of Sartre’s or any other man’s:
I’m answering your letter so that you don’t think I read it indifferently, but it’s stupid. Since the situation is ‘ambiguous’, as you say, why would I bear any sort of grudge or scorn towards someone who doesn’t share my opinions? […] As for Lanzmann […], I’m sorry you subscribe to the chauvinist prejudice that a woman is able to form her ideas only from a man’s.22
When Beauvoir published her correspondence with Sartre it cost her some friendships – for the first time, Olga and Wanda would see the reality of her role in Sartre’s life. The Bosts had separated several times in recent years and Beauvoir saw less of Olga because she was closer to Bost; they still worked together on Les Temps Modernes. According to Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir warned Olga that she was going to publish the letters, and ignored Olga’s requests to exclude anything about her and her sister, causing a permanent rift in their relationship.23 But if it cost them their illusions it was worth the price, in Beauvoir’s view, to show the rest of the world the truth. By now she was back to giving lectures and broadcasts on feminism, more cognizant than ever of the way even her prizes were attributed to Sartre’s genius. It took a lot of time to organize their voluminous correspondence. But in November 1982 she gave the manuscript to Gallimard. It was dedicated ‘To Claude Lanzmann, with all my love.’24
The path to publication was not easy: before it could be published Arlette wanted to establish herself as the legitimate heir of Sartre’s philosophical legacy, and she published not only the Notebooks for an Ethics (the manuscript she had refused Beauvoir) but also Sartre’s War Diaries.
When the letters finally appeared readers could see what Sartre had said, yes. But then they asked: why did she not publish her own part of the story? In their 1974 interviews Sartre said he wanted his letters to be published after his death, so she said that she was following his wishes. As for her own letters, she told Bair that they were nobody’s business but her own.25 In an interview in 1985 Margaret Simons asked Beauvoir if she had read Michèle Le Doeuff’s review of Sartre’s letters; did she know that Le Doeuff claimed that Sartre was ‘the only speaking subject’ in their relationship?26 Beauvoir replied that these letters were Sartre’s letters: naturally it was Sartre speaking in them. ‘If I published my own, I would be the one speaking. But in my lifetime, I won’t publish my letters.’27
After the publication of Sartre’s letters Beauvoir dedicated her time to the two things that gave her pleasure: working for women’s liberation and spending time with Sylvie and other friends. In one of her interviews with Beauvoir Alice Schwarzer said that ‘such great friendships’ between women were uncommon. But Beauvoir replied that she was ‘not so sure’: ‘Many friendships between women endure, whereas love fades. Real friendships between men and women are very, very uncommon, I think.’28
The year 1980 also heralded the end of ‘1970s’ feminism in France, not just in the sense that a new decade was marked on the calendar, but in that a new association was formed, calling itself Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF; The Movement for the Liberation of Women) – it claimed this name as a commercial trademark, and was officially registered with the National Institute of Industrial Property. Anyone who used the name without consent could be sued. Whereas the MLF of the 1970s was an organic movement with three simple criteria of belonging – that one was a woman, aware of the oppression of women, and committed to fighting it – this new MLF claimed to speak for women rather than letting them speak for themselves. This was no longer feminism, in Beauvoir’s view; it was ‘tyranny’.29
But there was good news, too: in 1980, the first Cabinet-level ministry for women in France came into existence. Its first Minister for Women, Yvette Roudy, asked Beauvoir for support in campaigning for François Mitterrand.
In 1981, Beauvoir gave an interview to publicize the relaunch of Nouvelles questions féministes in which she discussed how much a new anti-sexist law meant to her. Yvette Roudy, then Secretary of Women’s Rights, was working on legislation concerning professional equality, and she wanted to complement this with a bill against sex-based discrimination. This would extend the anti-racist legislation to sexism and make it possible to fight against public advertisements that attacked women’s dignity.
Beauvoir wanted it to be against the law to insult women, although she realized that legislation ‘would not prevent women from leading struggles of their own against sexism’. She had seen, through her life, letters and editorial work, that women suffered a great deal of violence at the hands of men. But though this was the fact of the matter she was convinced that there was no ‘unchangeable given’ that made men violent. Rather, she claimed that, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a man’ – violence takes root in individual men in societies that tolerate sexism and discrimination.
Beauvoir did not like it that ‘[p]arts of our bodies are displayed on the city streets for the glory of this profit-driven society’. The manifesto
of the League of Women’s Rights claimed that women’s bodies should not be used as merchandise; physical pleasure and sexual initiative should not be the preserve of men; that they would fight for the application of rights already won for women and pursue new ones. Advertisers, claiming to be heralds of freedom, denounced Beauvoir’s proposal dismissively: she was at once a Puritan and a hypocrite. Didn’t she realize that if her rules were implemented literature itself would have to be banned? – including her own?
Beauvoir’s reasoned response was ignored: she was not attacking literature. She thought there were good grounds for attacking advertisements because ‘instead of being offered to [individual] freedoms’, they ‘are imposed upon all eyes that are subjected to them, willingly or not’.30 Some claimed that the anti-sexist law was revenge on men. But Beauvoir argued that its motivation was rather to change the cultural environment in which men became men so that there was less legitimation of their violence against women. She wanted to achieve this by prohibiting degrading images of women in: ‘advertisements, pornography, literature. An anti-sexist law would allow us to publicly denounce each case of sexist discrimination’.31 It would also, Beauvoir thought, help women develop reflexes against sexism, helping them to stand up against injustice and ill-treatment instead of taking it as ‘just how it is’, as just how men are – as women’s lot.
Beauvoir and her fellow feminists were accused of being ‘intellectuals with no contact with reality’. But they were doctors, lawyers, engineers, mothers – was this not reality? Underlying the public outcry Beauvoir saw two motivations: money and manipulation. The money argument is familiar enough in late capitalism not to require rehearsal. As for the manipulation, in Beauvoir’s view, many men remained ‘deeply convinced that woman is an object to manipulate and that they are the masters of this manipulation’.32 She wanted women to be ‘the eye that sees’, for their perspective on the world to be articulated, heard and respected.
Becoming Beauvoir Page 38
