Once a friend of mine was married to a Russian musician, a lead-singer in a band, which subsequently became widely-known in Russia, you may even say famous. Till this day the band’s songs are listened to by millions in Russia. The stadiums get filled. The critics, even the ones who usually excel at mockery and contempt, offer blessings or gentle, insightful critiques. My friend, unsurprisingly, remembers the long climb to the top - the bullshit, the corruption, the astounding self-absorption. The marriage, of course, is long since over. No one, I discovered, much laments its dissolution.
 
Actually this friend is me. I am the one, who, once or twice a year, usually in the middle of the night, goes on Google to find out what happened to the man who had made it, the man who I had once loved and who (because I haven’t learned how to stop) I will keep on loving as a ghost or a stray half-brother. The truth is that I am no longer bothered by my ex-husband’s abundant success. The man has been doing so well for so long that I had to give up all my fantasies of his inevitable fall from grace years ago. But I am bothered by the inability to reconcile my knowledge of how his songs affect people with my knowledge of him.
 
Does it really matter that millions of people are inspired by bullshit artists, that so often we weep, make life-changing decisions, see truth and beauty to the words of someone rotten at their core?
 
Which brings me to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He – the birthfather of existentialism. She – the woman behind the second wave of feminism in the West. Their much-celebrated relationship across the five pivotal decades of the twentieth century - the subject of Hazel Rowley’s Tete-a-Tete. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre (HarperCollins, 2005).
 
Not that Sartre and de Beauvoir were the con-artists, the hollow and self-serving ideologues. On the contrary, I have always thought of the pair of them as the compulsive intellectuals and writers. That is to say, that they were much more than cafe-hopping, salmon-chewing, Rome-vacationing advocates of the underprivileged and downtrodden. Because for all the salmon, Roman holidays and a smorgasbord of Parisian cafes, both Sartre and de Beauvoir worked all their lives like horses or beavers (Sartre’s nickname for de Beauvoir), unconditionally dedicated to the pursuit of ideas. In the world of sprinters of a varying degree of resilience and talent, they were the genuine long-distance runners. Putting themselves on the line, sticking their nose everywhere they could, uncompromising, burning themselves up with big ideas, they spent their lives pushing their thinking to the limit, what Sartre called ‘breaking bones in the head’.
 
And now I am breaking bones in my head because in front of me is Hazel Rowley’s book, an exhaustive dual narrative of a celebrated relationship, an even-handed and systematic account of the potent glue that bound Sartre and de Beauvoir to each other. ‘Whether or not we think it is one of the great love stories of all time, it is certainly a great story’, Rowley writes in the preface. ‘Exactly what Sartre and de Beauvoir wanted their lives to be.’
 
In Russian, there is an expression ‘to separate flies from cutlets’ Even the plain-talking President Putin, a man not usually taken by flowery idioms, uses it from time to time to refer to the importance of distinguishing between things that matter and things that do not, regardless of how loudly they buzz around in the foreground. As I kept reading Tete-a-Tete, I could not quite work where I had glimpsed the cutlets and where I got swamped by the flies. Or perhaps in the end I could not see the cutlets for the flies. Or maybe I was no longer convinced that the two were separate from each other.
 
The relationship between Sartre and de Beauvoir, all fifty-one years of it was never simply a private matter. It was, explicitly, a life-long experiment in existentialist living, a model of an open marriage based on trust, transparency and intellectual camaraderie to which countless mere mortals, including Hazel Rowley and myself, had aspired in thought if not necessarily in action. Rowley’s book is not, in other words, a look behind the legend, but an exploration of the integral part of that legend. Not the flies, but one big juicy cutlet.
 
In an existentialist universe, which Sartre and de Beauvoir inhabited, there was no God. Existence came before essence. People needed to assume complete responsibility over their lives, to accept their radical freedom as the daily hard work. Human beings, Sartre famously proclaimed, were ’condemned to be free’. Relationships then were about loving a free and radically autonomous human being, not about possessing them and not about turning to them for salvation. So Sartre and de Beauvoir made a pact. Their loyalty and love will remain forever with each other, but they will have secondary, contingent affairs. Their relationship will be based on absolute transparency. They would tell each other everything. They will respect each other’s freedom first and foremost.
 
To a large degree, Rowley tells us, they had succeeded. They consistently and, it would seem, joyfully upheld the ‘transparency principle’. Till the end they vigorously respected and protected each other’s freedom. And, of course, they involved themselves in the contingent affairs, oodles of them in fact. Sartre, in particular, could not help himself. A year before his death in 1980, virtually blind, uglier than ever before, dropping food everywhere, fully dependent on others, he boasted of having nine women in his life, not counting the Beaver. De Beauvoir, the more sexually passionate of the two, had affairs both with men and women, matching Sartre if not in quantity than in the intensity of her contingent relationships. Yet all the affairs, Rowley tells, only solidified the couple’s primary bond with each other. De Beauvoir, for one, considered precisely the relationship with Sartre to be the greatest achievement of her life.
 
In his brilliant review of Edwin Williamson’s biography of Borges, David Foster Wallace noted that ‘it often seems that the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire.’ And, he continues, ‘the more intimate and thorough the bio, the stronger this feeling is.’ Hazel Rowley’s book is both intimate and thorough and the resulting portrayal is at times nauseating and at times nothing short of remarkable. Yet the more I read Tete-a-Tete, the less I was able to imagine that Sartre, who penned countless mushy, wet love letters sometimes to several women simultaneously, in which the world ‘love’ was thrown around like the dirtiest of sluts, was the same person who wrote some of the most important philosophical works of the 20th-Century. I found it hard to imagine that the same De Beauvoir, who showed a startling disavowal of moral responsibility for those she herself had tamed, was considered an uncompromising moral arbiter of a feminist movement. For David Foster Wallace, the point is precisely that important works of art transcend their creators and the circumstances of their lives – an all-important fact that most literary biographies fail to capture. This sense of transcendence is missing from Rowley’s book as well. As one reviewer put it rather admiringly, at times Tete-a-Tete reads as ‘a highbrow Francophile edition of US Weekly’.
 
For her part, Hazel Rowley is neither judgemental nor contemptuous. She is deeply sympathetic to Sartre and even more so to de Beauvoir, even when she talks of the couple’s moral callousness, of their lies, of their disregard for others, especially the ones they have wooed and insisted on taking under their wings. She is careful not to speak from the moral high ground, not to expose and not to condemn. It is clear that Sartre and de Beauvoir may have fallen short of their own ideals, but their legacy, the sum total of their writing and advocating and thinking cannot be diminished by the stories of their private transgressions.
 
I wish I had Rowley’s disposition. Or maybe I do not wish for that. As I read Tete-a-Tete, I thought that Sartre and de Beauvoir were a pair of assholes, admittedly, a pair of assholes with a gift from God. I am not talking about affairs and lies, of people thinking with their genitals (if only Sartre did), of vanity and self-indulgence, of intellectuals growing fat with fame (they worked like mad till the very end). I am talking of a general stance vis-a-vis other people. It is called humility or a regard for the absolute autonomy and absolute worth of another human being. Existentialists should have known that. Radical freedom calls for radical responsibility. But it also requires radical respect.
 
The early part of Tete-a-Tete, dedicated to the genesis of the relationship, struck me as the most enjoyable, maybe because in it Sartre is still discovering that his ugliness is nothing compared to the power he can wield with words. It is in the early part that we learn that the relationship of the compulsive re-telling and sharing that Sartre had created with de Beauvoir goes can be traced back to Sartre’s mother Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie, Rowley tells us, was twenty-four at the time her husband died leaving her with a fifteen-months old Sartre. Until her remarriage, the mother and son were incredibly close. ‘I gave myself feelings for the pleasure of sharing them with her’, Sartre would write in his autobiography Words. The most undiluted of truths and the deepest of joys was in this type of all-consuming, unconditional sharing. This was the real intimacy, the only true love. All through their lives, de Beauvoir and Sartre stayed just a breath from each other by telling each other everything - all the time, in minute details, with enormous, palpable pleasure.
 
Olga Kosakiewicz was a student of de Beauvoir in the early 1930s. They became friends and then occasional lovers. Eventually she was introduced to Sartre who pursued her (with little success) and then became Olga’s teacher. Kosakiewicz was soon financially dependent on both Sartre and de Beauvoir. As Sartre could not get Olga, he decided to go for her younger sister Wanda. Two years of relentless pursuit, hundreds of desperate love letters and Wanda finally succumbed. ‘The result was that I left her on her bed, all pure and tragic’, wrote Sartre in a letter to de Beauvoir, ‘declaring herself tired and having hated me for a good 45 minutes.’ He had sneaked out to a cafe minutes later to write to de Beauvoir. The pleasure of the long-overdue conquest paled next to the bliss of transforming this moment into a story to share with Simone. This pattern was to be repeated throughout his life, aided by the fact that Sartre, one of the most celebrated seducers of his generation, did not seem that much interested in sex. Of Dolores Vanetti, one of the big contingent relationships in his life, a woman for whose divorce he paid and who for years was determined to marry him, Sartre wrote (to de Beauvoir of course) ‘her passion literally scares me, since that’s not my strong suit, and she uses it solely to her disadvantage’.
 
De Beauvoir too derived enormous pleasure from telling Sartre of her other relationships. ‘ When she wrote to Sartre about her love affairs with women’, notes Rowley, ‘her tone – ambivalent and condescending – was just like his. Part of her pleasure was that she felt almost as if she were Sartre.’ Bianca Bienenfeld was another young student of de Beauvoir’s, seventeen when she became her lover. Unlike Olga, she could not withstand the charm and the persistence of the all-conquering Sartre, falling head over heels with both of her imminent suitors. For de Beauvoir, however, the relationship soon proved tiring. We woke up at 8.30 after a night of passion, she wrote to Sartre, ‘and like a sated man I discreetly avoided her caresses. I wanted to have breakfast and work (I feel I can get right into your skin at such moments).’ The whole thing was much more about getting into Sartre’s skin than about getting under the sheets with Bienenfeld.
 
For all his talk of radical freedom and autonomy, Sartre was attracted to what he himself called ‘drowning women’ (as long as they were beautiful, of course). He himself actively encouraged and sustained their dependency on him - paying their bills, writing plays for them, psychoanalysing them, declaring his undying love and loyalty – an act of remarkable and life-long multi-tasking he called ‘the temporary morality’. There was Wanda, ‘all pure and tragic’, for whom Sartre would write six plays – giving her the only theatrical roles she would ever have. And then there was Michelle Vian, who left her husband famous jazz composer Boris Vian to be with Sartre. And then there was Evelyn, the sister of Claude Lanzmann, who committed suicide, unhappy in her personal life and, like Wanda, unable to make it as an actress. Accidentally, Claude Lanzmann was de Beauvoir’s lover for many years – one of the only people in her life who de Beauvoir addressed in the informal ‘tu’ (Her and Sartre always used the polite ‘vous’ in their conversations and correspondence). And then there was, of course, Arlette Elka_m – a French Algerian girl, who was to become Sartre’s adopted daughter and after his death, the heir and the manager of his literary estate. It was Arlette Elka_m Sartre who wrecked havoc with Tete-a-Tete, banning Rowley from the use of Sartre’s most revealing correspondence. As a result, there are two versions of the book – the European (with the banned passages omitted or paraphrased) and the American (with the quotes in question intact because of the much laxer copyright laws.)
 
As to Bianca Bienenfeld, she was eventually dumped by the couple in 1940 before Germans came to Paris and the young woman’s life as a Jew was literally put on the line. Neither Sartre nor de Beauvoir enquired about her whereabouts or well-being during the Occupation. As a result, Bienenfeld suffered a major breakdown. Later on, her psychoanalyst, none other than Jacques Lacan, would declare that the breakdown was brought about by a sense of deep betrayal – a quasi-parental relationship established first by de Beauvoir and then by Sartre, broken initially by sex and then by abandonment. After the war Bienenfeld did resume her friendship, of not sexual relationship, with de Beauvoir. The two women saw each other till de Beauvoir’s death. Then Bianca was to suffer another breakdown as de Beauvoir’s letters were published posthumously, revealing little more than contempt for Bienenfeld. In an attempt to redress the humiliation and hurt caused by the publication of the letters, Bienenfeld, now Lamblin, wrote a book entitled A Disgraceful Affair. The book is heart-breaking both by being so full of fragility and pain, and by being so poisonous and badly-written. ‘I could no longer stand to be a passive object described with relish by biographers and lampoonists’, Lamblin wrote in the preface.
 
This is another thing about Tete-a-Tete. For Sartre and de Beauvoir, as Louis Menand writes in her review of the book in New Yorker, other people ‘were, in effect, prostheses, marital aids’. This was how Sartre and de Beauvoir ‘slept with each other after they stopped sleeping with each other’. Rowley’s book in a sense re-creates this structure. Other people are backdrops to Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s remarkable relationship, their enthralling lives, their brilliant and brilliantly intertwined careers. They, and ultimately us as the readers, are but the eavesdroppers on the couple’s life-long tete-a-tete.
 
There is, of course, much more than just the affairs in Hazel Rowley’s book. There is the infamous row with Albert Camus over Sartre’s ambivalence towards the use of violence, the rejection of the Nobel Prize in 1964, the tumultuous relationship with Communism and the Soviet Union. Then there is the story of the ‘Manifesto the 121’ signed in 1960 by 121 French intellectuals, including Sartre and de Beauvoir, demanding independence for Algeria and amnesty for all French soldiers refusing to take up arms against Algerian people. The couple’s stance, as well as many other of their public actions resulted in death threats made against Sartre. While the two of them were away in Brasil, de Beauvoir sick as a dog with a suspected typhoid fever, Sartre busy trying to seduce a twenty-five-year-old virginal Brazilian journalist Christina, five thousand war veterans had paraded down the Champs-Elysees shouting ‘Shoot Sartre’. Thirty of 121 signatories were charged with treason. Some lost their jobs and all were threatened with a five-year jail sentence. When Sartre and de Beauvoir came back to Paris driving via the back roads from Barcelona, Sartre called a press conference protesting the charges against thirty of the signatories of the manifesto. ‘If those individuals are found guilty’, he proclaimed, ‘then we all are. If not, let them withdraw the case.’ Eventually the charges were withdrawn. The government was not prepared to put Sartre in jail. ‘You do not imprison Voltaire’, famously uttered De Gaulle himself. After much of the information gleaned from Tete-a-Tete, I desperately needed stories like these to be able to read Sartre and de Beauvoir’s books once again.
 
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