From 1981 to 1986 I met regularly with Simone de Beauvoir at her Paris apartment, where I interviewed her for a forthcoming biography. A frail, tiny woman, she was always dressed in a trademark turban, color-coordinated with sweater and trousers.
At the beginning of our sessions she would offer me a drink, often remarking how pleased she was that we both took our Scotch neat. But de Beauvoir was not much given to small talk; after the drink she would make it clear that it was time to get to work.
For the author of such ground-breaking studies as ”The Second Sex” (on the status of women) and ”The Coming of Age” (on the process of aging), the author, too, of one of the most powerful autobiographies of our time,
”Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,” there were stories to tell, records to set straight.
Many women, she said, wanted to write her biography, but they were primarily interested in her feminism.
”I want to be remembered as a writer who wrote many different things,”
she told me, ”and not just as a feminist.”
It`s always risky to predict how history will remember anyone, but there was something poignant about de Beauvoir`s wish. Today, at any rate, nearly three years after her death, she is best known for her feminist writing and for her complex, unorthodox relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she shared her life until his death in 1980.
De Beauvoir and Sartre met in July, 1929, as philosophy students at the Ecole Normale Superieure, he graduating first in their class, she second. They remained linked for 50 years. They never married and never lived together, commitments of that sort being, to them, a bourgeois form of bondage.
At the same time, they agreed to recognize the extraordinary significance that each had for the other by entering into a contingency pact: Each would be the most important person in the other`s life-the ”essential person”-though each would be free to take ”contingent” lovers that chance and the vagaries of desire might put in their way. And each would be bound to give the other truthful accounts of these secondary relationships.
This was to become the lifelong framework of their relationship, based in large part on Sartre`s philosophical concept of existentialism.
In her memoirs, de Beauvoir recalls that they forged their contingency pact while sitting on a bench near the Louvre on a beautiful October afternoon in 1929. She noticed that in a cagelike space nearby a cat was meowing piteously. The poor thing was too big to get out; how had it ever gotten in?
She was spellbound by its plight.
It was at this moment that Sartre asked de Beauvoir to agree to the affaire, to abandon herself to the hazards of total emotional freedom, to commit herself to total responsibility for what she did with that freedom.
The recollection of Sartre`s proposition coming as she sat mesmerized by a sleek, well-fed cat that was nevertheless trapped and imprisoned seemed to beg a stunning connection. De Beauvoir drew none.
When I probed, she insisted that she had ”only described the scene literally. It was not metaphor; it just happened, that`s all.”
Intellectually, their contingency pact seemed straightforward;
emotionally, it proved unsettling for all concerned. Jealousies inevitably surfaced when contingent parties intruded on the essential relationship, and the ”contingencies” themselves frequently became envious of the ”essential other” who kept them in their strictly inferior place.
The one who refused to stay there was the American writer Nelson Algren, best known for his novel, ”The Man with the Golden Arm.” Algren`s affair with de Beauvoir, which began after de Beauvoir and Sartre were no longer lovers, was passionate and tempestuous, lasting 15 years. Yet despite the intensity of her feeling for Algren, de Beauvoir continued to put Sartre and his needs first, deferring to him intellectually and doting on him personally. Periodically, in private and in public, de Beauvoir went to great lengths to explain why she had agreed to the arrangement she had with Sartre. Sartre, for his part, seemed to take the arrangement for granted. On a gray February afternoon in 1982, when Sartre had been dead two years and de Beauvoir was still grieving for him, I asked if she had constructed a myth of the professional couple about herself and Sartre, that having kicked off the restraints of her conservative upper-class background, she nonetheless remained the ”dutiful daughter” in her relationship with him.
De Beauvoir put down her glass of whiskey, shivered as she rubbed her forearms briskly for warmth, and shrugged her shoulders, seemingly unable to find the words she wanted. She hunched over, staring intently at the large ring on the middle finger of the left hand, turned it around for a while, then said simply, ”How was I to know that I would meet Nelson Algren?”
De Beauvoir was 39 when the French government sent her on a lecture tour of the United States in early 1947. She had learned English as schoolgirl, steeping herself in American literature, and the trip represented the fulfillment of a dream.
De Beauvoir first heard of Nelson Algren at a New York dinner party. Mary Guggenheim, one of Algren`s former lovers, suggested that de Beauvoir meet him on her upcoming trip to Chicago. The only thing de Beauvoir knew about Algren was that he wrote about life on the seamy side of Chicago.
Algren wasn`t exactly eager to meet the ”bluestocking” who, Guggenheim wrote to him, he would recognize by the copy of the Partisan Review that she would be carrying. He wondered how they would communicate, as he spoke no French and her English was heavily accented.
Nelson Algren Abraham grew up in an ethnic, blue-collar Chicago neighborhood rich with the dramas and atmosphere that would find their way into his fiction. After graduating from the University of Illinois, he supported himself as a pool hustler, carnival worker and service station attendant.
When he decided to become a writer, he was too poor to buy a typewriter, so he stole one and consequently spent several months in an Alpine, Tex., jail. He was in the midst of getting a divorce when he met Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir had only 36 hours to spend in Chicago, but she was eager to see as much of the ”real” city as she could. Algren was dazzled by this exotic woman and determined to dispel her many preconceived notions about American wealth.
”I wanted to show her that the U.S.A. was not a nation of prosperous bourgeois,” he later wrote. ”I introduced her to stickup men, pimps, baggage thieves and heroin addicts.”
A PASSIONATE LOVE
De Beauvoir was deeply disturbed and emotionally exhausted by what she saw. Algren took her to rest at his apartment-two rooms in the poorest part of town-and there they made love for the first time.
”I think initially he wanted to comfort me,” de Beauvoir recalled,
”but then it became passion. Algren totally bowled me over, turned my life upside down.”
She said he taught her ”how truly passionate love could be.” Later, as she traveled throughout the country, she would send him tear-stained letters filled with gushing prose and sealed with lipstick imprints, like a schoolgirl in the throes of her first crush.
He called her his ”Frog Wife” and she called him her ”Crocodile”
because of his toothy grin.
Algren was also her teacher and guide. He took her ideas seriously and introduced her to books he thought would be useful in developing them. She had hardly begun to consider an essay on women when Algren helped crystallize her thoughts by suggesting that she conduct her study in light of Gunnar Myrdal`s book on the experience of black Americans.
He also acquainted her with the socially conscious American literature of the 1920s and `30s, suggesting that she might find a link between women and the impoverished, disenfranchised male characters in novels like James T. Farrell`s ”Studs Lonigan” and John Steinbeck`s ”The Grapes of Wrath.”
If there is a peculiarly American slant to much of her writing in this period, Algren was directly responsible for it.
After Chicago, de Beauvoir crisscrossed the country on her lecture tour, eventually returning to New York. Algren joined her at the Breevort Hotel in Greenwich Village, where they discovered that their passion for each other was stronger than ever.
The day after Algren moved in, de Beauvoir postponed her return flight to Paris, sending a telegram to Sartre, saying she had to stay on. She did not tell him she was delaying her return because of Algren, the lover she was now calling ”my husband,” a term she never used for Sartre.
For the better part of their time in New York, de Beauvoir and Algren stayed in bed, and she began to fuss over him, she recalled, ”just like all the American women I had ridiculed for the way they catered to men`s needs. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.” Surprised because her pleasure seemed at odds with her sharpening perspective on women`s status, even here in the New World.
WOMEN`S SEGREGATION
At New York parties de Beauvoir was meeting well-educated women who segregated themselves, happily chattering about recipes and babies while their men argued about books, politics and ideas. De Beauvoir realized that when she joined the men, she was looked upon as ”aggressive and pushy,” but she was proud to be the only woman-so she thought-whom American men listened to with respect.
”Because I had never felt discrimination among men in my life, I refused to believe that discrimination existed for other women,” she recalled. ”That view began to change, to crumble, when I was in New York and I saw how intelligent women were embarrassed or ignored when they tried to contribute to a conversation men were having. Really, American women had a very low status then. Men wanted them for sex and babies and to clean house, and that`s very much what they wanted for themselves, too.”
De Beauvoir admitted that at the time she had no sympathy for those women, or others. ”I am sorry to say that I ascribed (the way they were treated) to the shortcoming of women rather than the churlishness of men.”
Her views changed partly because of Algren, when she finally returned to Paris to ponder the essay that became ”The Second Sex.”
De Beauvoir wrote to Algren every day at first, then several times a week, imagining that they had one heart ”painfully split between two bodies.” Algren wrote that he coped with missing her by gambling; she replied that she coped by drinking excessively. Was she fair, she asked, to allow their relationship to continue, since she knew she could never commit her whole life to him?
De Beauvoir visited Algren again that year, but after de Beauvoir returned once more to Paris, Algren wrote a letter pouring out his frustration at their renewed separation and her refusal to stay in Chicago permanently.
In her reply, de Beauvoir told him that no one would ever love him more than she, but added, ”I cannot leave Sartre. I am his only true friend, and I would rather die than leave (him).”
Especially galling to Algren, with his self-conscious virility, was Sartre`s lack of concern about Algren`s presence in de Beauvoir`s life.
Meeting Sartre did nothing to ease the frustration. In December, 1948, Algren announced that he was coming to Paris as soon as he could make arrangements.
The meeting with Sartre took place hours later outside the Cafe de Flore in St. Germain-des-Pres. Algren assumed that he and Sartre would circle each other warily, ”like two gladiators, jousting for position,” but instead the tiny Sartre reached out to the much larger Algren, shook his hand warmly, then put his arms as far around Algren as they would reach, guided him into the cafe and chattered away as if he had known the man for years.
Soon after Algren had arrived in Paris, de Beauvoir found herself in the midst of a firestorm created by the serialization of ”The Second Sex” in Les Temps Modernes, Sartre`s journal, of which she was an editor.
Suddenly she was a celebrity, if a castigated one. She received letters calling her ”unsatisfied and frigid, a nymphomaniac and a lesbian,” and when she sat in cafes with Algren, people pointed openly at her, snickering with derision.
Later, ”I dedicated the first page of my new novel `To Nelson`, ” she told him in a letter. ”Now it is so brightly begun, it will be easy to go on.”
It was ”The Mandarins,” one of her favorite works and a winner of the Prix Goncourt, France`s most prestigious literary prize.
The affair lasted for more than 15 years, but they were never able to work out their differences.
When their liaison finally ended, Algren was determined to save face by reviling de Beauvoir.
She retaliated by telling people that she did not grieve when it was over, that ”It had not been that important anyway, and only Sartre mattered.”
Both lied.
In 1963, in her last letter to Algren, de Beauvoir wrote, ”Nelson, I will love you forever. I will wear your ring until I die and then be buried with it.”
At her death six years after Sartre`s she was cremated and buried beside him. But buried with her ashes was the ornate silver band given to her by Algren.
