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Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
Hazel Rowley will be in Paris on Jan. 12, 7pm, at the Village Voice bookshop, 6, rue Princesse, in the 6eme to discuss Tête-à-Tête. Rowley has previously written two enthralling biographies of Christina Stead and Richard Wright. In her dual biography about these two famed French existentialists, she has successfully put together a dynamic saga of French culture, philosophy and literature as well a touching portrait of angst of the human condition, and, above all, the unconventional love story of a man and a woman who were devoted intellectual companions for life. I got the chance to talk with Hazel Rowley earlier this week and asked her some questions about this famous couple, her book, and life in France.
What did it feel like for you, coming to Paris to write this book? Did you feel that spark, a kind of spiritual force that people seem to feel in Paris?
I loved being in Paris to write this book. I have never enjoyed writing a book more, and it certainly had a lot to do with Paris. Through FUSAC, on the internet, I had found myself a very pretty rooftop apartment in the 14th arrondissement – close to where Sartre and Beauvoir used to live. I breathed in their world when I went on my afternoon walks, after a day’s writing. Many of their friends, the people I interviewed, still live in the 14th. I spent time doing research at the Bibliothèque Nationale, but mostly I spent very happy days, with my phone turned down, writing at home, looking out onto slate roofs and terra cotta chimney pots. I intended to stay a year, but I ended up staying almost two. Two of the happiest years of my life.
Do you think Sartre and Beauvoir are part of the romanticism that we associate with Paris?
Absolutely. If those cafés in St-Germain-des-Prés – the Dôme, the Flore, the Deux Magots – are so popular with tourists today, it’s largely because of the mystique of Sartre and Beauvoir, who used to work there before and during WWII. They were not expensive in those days, like they are now. Beauvoir and Sartre went there to keep warm. They lived in cheap, unheated hotels, and the winters during the German Occupation were particularly savage. The two of them would go to the Flore and huddle near the stove, which the owner stoked up with black-market coal. Sartre and Beauvoir enjoyed working in the midst of bustle, human voices. They worked for hours with one cup of tea. Everyone talks about their 
incredible concentration. And of course they smoked like chimneys.
For eight years, they taught in the provinces – Le Havre, Rouen and Marseille. They used to flee back to Paris as often as they could. They could not wait to get themselves teaching jobs in Paris. Paris was their love, their passion, their backdrop. They always lived in the Saint Germain or Montparnasse area, close to the cafés they loved. They never lived together, but were within easy walking distance of each other. Most of their conversations took place in cafés and restaurants, over a meal, wine, or whiskey. They drank heavily, Sartre in particular.
Do you think there is something peculiarly French about their unusual view of love and sex?
Maybe. I do know from the reaction my book is getting that the French are much more tolerant of free, non-monogamous relationships than the Americans are. Some American reviewers are doing quite a puritanical jig about their lifestyle. I think the French are more open to the idea of passion, in every respect. Beauvoir and Sartre did not want a relationship based on fidelity and obligation. They didn’t want to close each other in, to restrict each other. They knew that sexual passion eventually comes to an end, and never wanted their relationship to become mere habit. It was to be a free choice, perpetually renewed. And I think they managed that, in fact. They managed to invent a relationship.
Other people have had open relationships, of course.
Yes, but theirs was so much more than that. They had a pact to tell each other everything. They advocated what they called “transparency.” For writers, this was fantastic. They were always there for each other, waiting when they came home from their adventures, to mull everything over together, just the two of them, in a kind of warm verbal cocoon. Some relationships distract writers from their writing. (I’ve had a few of them!) The Sartre-Beauvoir relationship was an edifice constructed around writing. They gave each other ideas. They were the first reader of each other’s writing, the reader who really counted. Scrupulously honest, they never minced their words. As Sartre said once in an interview: “There is no point in not criticizing very severely when you have the good fortune to love the person you are criticizing.” In every way, they helped each other to write better, to think more radically, to live more fully.
For most of their lives, they worked together, in the same room, for several hours a day – in cafés during the war and at Sartre’s place after the war. In the evenings, at innumerable café and restaurant tables around the world, they talked, about life, about their writing, about things that would go into their writing.
Do you think that Sartre benefited most from their relationship?
No, I really don’t. In my first chapter I remind readers just how sheltered women’s lives still were in 1929, when Beauvoir and Sartre met. Women couldn’t vote, they couldn’t go to the Ecole Normale, and as far as sex was concerned, the double standard was absolute. Beauvoir understood from the beginning that whereas marriage with most men would rein her in, Sartre would open up her horizons as no one else ever would. He wanted her to live her life as fully as he did, as a man. And not only was he admonishing her to get out and experience the world, just as he intended to do, but he also assured her that ultimately she would never be alone. She wanted to be a writer. She needed to experience the world. She needed to get to know other men and other women, intimately. And remember, as I point out in the book, that Sartre was exciting in almost every domain except in bed. In my opinion, it was just as well for Beauvoir that she had some more exciting lovers.
It’s true that Sartre had numerous other girlfriends, and Beauvoir was often jealous. And it’s true that Beauvoir was far less keen than Sartre on the idea of freedom within their relationship. But I would argue, in some ways, she was the one who benefited most from it. It provided the subject matter for her writing. If she had not experienced love affairs, solitude, anguish, loneliness, longing and jealousy, she would never have written novels like She Came to Stay and The Mandarins. Without experiencing the conflicts involved in being an independent woman, how could she have written The Second Sex? And finally, she realized that her very best and most stirring story was the story of her own life.
Your book is filled with stories of their travels. It gives us a strong sense of French history, first hand. I felt as if I was with Sartre and Beauvoir in Moscow drinking shots of vodka and I was with them in Cuba, smoking cigars with the young Castro. You make us hear the sirens and the heavy boot steps of the Germans in Occupied France. We also see something of the political blunders of the Algerian war, which, of course, France is dealing with the repercussions of at this very moment.
Thank you, I like to hear that!
I was also very interested in their relationship to Russia in the 1950s and 60s. People talk about Sartre being a “Stalinist” and yet he condemned the USSR when they invaded Hungary in 1956, and Prague in 1968. They spoke out and made a difference that is still remembered today. I bet the French public is very impatient for your book to come out in French?
Well, I can only hope. I think Sartre and Beauvoir still generate a lot of interest around the world. There has already been a nice, laudatory review in Le Monde, which I appreciated. Grasset is going to bring out the French translation in October 2006. And there will be at least ten other translations. Meanwhile, the English edition is selling quite well in the English bookstores in Paris.
It seems the perfect moment to revisit their lives. You show us Sartre and Beauvoir as outspoken public intellectuals. They were pioneers in many domains. You show how much Beauvoir meant to feminists. And that Sartre, who took a strong position against war, colonialism, and racism, was something of a hero in the Third World. The current world is certainly in crisis. This book encourages people to think, to be free, to blaze new trails, like Sartre and Beauvoir did in their time. I am very inspired after reading it. I feel they have given me a new foundation. Thank you for giving us this intimate peek into their lives at this highly appropriate time!
For more information on Hazel Rowley you can listen to her interview on NPR in Boston and you can Buy the book on Amazon.co.uk, as well as at other English language bookstores and especially at The Village Voice in Paris where she will be discussing Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre at 7pm, on January 12th, 2006.
