Parisian Lives Read online

  One of those close to Beauvoir to whom I reached out was Ellen Wright, the widow of the novelist Richard Wright, who sometimes acted as Beauvoir’s agent and liaison with English-language publishers. She told me the alarming news of rumors that Beauvoir was ill with a possible cancer. Ellen, who often expressed unorthodox opinions, said she herself was worried because she believed people could wish cancer on themselves, and in her view Beauvoir had that kind of mind-set: “Who knows what losing Sartre and now Algren might have done to her.” I learned fairly soon after this conversation that Ellen, like Maria Jolas before her, could be an unreliable source.

  As Maria had done with Beckett, Ellen Wright maintained her own version of Simone de Beauvoir’s reality, which was not rooted firmly in fact. Beauvoir did not have such a mind-set: in all the years I knew her, and despite obvious signs of failing health, she considered herself wholly healthy—invincible, really. She did pay attention to matters of her physical well-being, but only to those that could be addressed with holistic methods of healing, particularly kinesthesia. She ignored anything that would have required medication or other conventional medical treatments.

  At the end of May, I finally connected with Beauvoir on the telephone. She told me that it was “probably Sartre’s daughter who is spreading the rumors” that she was ill. In fact, she told me, she was so healthy that she was planning a trip to New York, “probably around July tenth with her girlfriend Sylvie.”*2 She hoped to spend time with me then. However, it took two years to finalize her on-again, off-again travel plans before she went to New York, and throughout that time I learned something else about her, best expressed by her American friend John Gerassi: “She could turn on a dime.”

  When I asked him to explain, he told me of the curious contrast between the woman who could form instant opinions but then become utterly inflexible in her judgments, stubbornly holding to views that she knew were inaccurate or incorrect, and the woman who could be instantly spontaneous when she decided to do something or go somewhere; she was famous for going away without telling anyone, which created enormous worry for her close friends. And, Gerassi added, “She is also a terrible procrastinator, and you have to be careful when she makes delay after delay, or tells you why she can or can’t do something. It isn’t that she’s lying, but she does make an awful lot of excuses, and when she finally gets around to going somewhere or doing something, she hates to be called out for the lies and excuses. You better be careful with how you approach her when you ask about these things.”

  This was hardly what I wanted to hear as I set off on my worldwide travels. On top of no tenure (and the possibility of no future job), no book contract, and a household in disarray, this insight into Simone de Beauvoir was not the most encouraging information. Nevertheless, I could not dwell on it, so I fell back on one of my favorite expressions: I would worry about it when the time came.

  * * *

  —

  I flew to Brisbane and spent three highly rewarding months meeting Australian scholars and writers who became lifelong friends. There was a strong feminist presence throughout the country and a burgeoning interest in studies relating to women’s issues, so I talked as much about Beauvoir as I did about Beckett and his biography. When I left Australia and arrived in Boston at the end of September, I was still reeling from the exhilaration of the engagement, only to find the same sort of excitement among the women who were my colleagues for the upcoming academic year. Early on, several of us who gathered for brown-bag lunches at the big table in the conference room discovered that even though we were in very different disciplines—historians, literary scholars, political scientists, economists, and folklorists—we approached our research topics with a surprisingly similar technique and methodology. Our research centered on issues pertaining to women, and the only thing that differed among us was the professional vocabulary unique to each of our disciplines.

  By the time the semester ended in December, after three months of intensive reading and conversations, I had gained many insights into Simone de Beauvoir’s writings, her place in French cultural life, her intellectual contributions to her society, her friendships, her travels, even her love affairs. I had accumulated a huge pile of file cards with questions I wanted to ask her, and all I needed now was to go to Paris and get her answers. I could hardly contain my enthusiasm as I set off for two months of her company.

  *1 Le Bon became known as Le Bon de Beauvoir after Beauvoir adopted her.

  *2 Beauvoir was referring to Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, whom Sartre adopted in the last years of his life. And “girlfriend” was her word for Sylvie.

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  I arrived in Paris in January 1982 to find the exact same circumstances as the previous year. Once again Simone de Beauvoir was all business, her brusque voice telling me to come again on her birthday, January 9, but this time at 4 p.m. (which became our usual time for every meeting thereafter). She said she looked forward to seeing me and ended the call. Even though her blunt directness was always slightly unsettling, I actually found it comforting after the mind games I had played with Samuel Beckett every time I tried to arrange meetings.

  I had flown over with my daughter and her classmates, who were returning to finish their junior year at the University of Bologna in Italy. Katney and I were to spend a week together in Paris, but we arrived with such severe colds that neither of us could venture further out of bed than to the nearest shop that sold chicken soup and orange juice. I was renting a new apartment on this trip, which the owner had not told me was at the bottom of an air shaft in an interior courtyard where no daylight penetrated. The heat seldom worked, and the weather refused to cooperate. I desperately needed to replace my elegant dress boots with a sturdy outdoor pair that would let me navigate the frozen ice and snow on dangerous Paris streets that were neither cleared nor sanded.

  Such topics did not come up in my conversations with Simone de Beauvoir, because small talk was not her strong suit. Several years would pass before I told her anything about myself, simply because she did not ask me until then. All she was interested in during the initial interviewing sessions was the book I was about to write, and despite our earlier agreement that she would not impose herself on it, I retained the distinct impression that she expected me to write it under her direction.

  I could not help but flash back to my earliest meetings with Samuel Beckett and contrast them with what I faced in early meetings with Simone de Beauvoir. He did not take me seriously at the beginning, but once he realized what kind of book he had agreed to cooperate with, having given his word, he let it happen. Perhaps it is too strong to say that Beauvoir tried to control what I wrote, but I do think she tried to influence me. Considering the kaleidoscopic range of topics she would discuss in a single session and the intensity with which she discussed them, it took me awhile to sort out her strategy.

  * * *

  —

  On her birthday, snow fell steadily, and it was bitterly cold. The weather system that was making my trip miserable had been battering the entire country—there were floods all over France, and the Seine was about to overflow onto the quays. Part of the extensive preparation I had done beforehand was to confide everything from thoughts to fears in the DD. This time I wrote: “I am very nervous and filled with anxiety. She is 74 today and I am not sure what I will find when I get there.” What I found was “an absolutely charming woman, warm and friendly, telling me if it would be easier to speak English with my terrible head cold and laryngitis, I should go ahead and she would reply in French.”

  Beauvoir plunked herself down in her usual spot in the corner of one of the daybed-sofas while I stood there, still in my coat, uncertain of what I should do. I took off the coat and decided to sit in one of the three slipper chairs facing her while putting it on the one next to me, as she had not offered to take it or hang it up. In every subsequent meeting I would perform the same little routine of making mysel
f comfortable. Her only concern was for the work ahead.

  I noticed that on the coffee table between us she had already set up her own tape recorder next to three or four carefully arranged fountain pens and a small writing pad. I chattered away nervously as I dug into my bag for similar equipment, which I then placed opposite hers. I made a spontaneous gesture of pulling out the pile of notecards with questions I intended to ask, my “intellectual solitaire” cards, probably to show her that I, too, had the materials of “work.” Beckett had never seen the cards I made during the time we worked together, and he had no idea how I slaved before each meeting to memorize and mentally arrange the order in which I wanted to ask them. But Beauvoir was different, and her eyes actually lit up when she saw the first pile I presented. It proved to her that I took the forthcoming book seriously and that I had indeed spent the previous year doing research, reading intensively, coming up with various theories. This initial pile, a good two to three inches thick, contained only the easy questions I thought we might cover at the first meeting. I had several more such piles back in the apartment, ready and waiting for future sessions.

  And so we began. I thought I would ease into my questioning by asking about her earliest childhood memories, but she went first because she wanted to thank me. “Women come from all over the world to write about me, but all they want to write about is The Second Sex.” Here she pounded one fist into the other open hand as she said, “I wrote so much else. I wrote philosophy, politics, fiction, autobiography…” She seemed to be pausing to catch her breath after every genre, and then she said, “You are the only one who wants to write about everything. Everyone else only wants to write about feminism.” It threw me off-balance, but I did not have the luxury of reflecting on her generous appraisal until after I left, when I grasped the truth in it. During the 1970s and 1980s she had been slotted into the niche of feminist icon—all well and good, but she did not want to be there in perpetuity. Aware of her many different contributions to culture and society and extremely proud of them, she wanted posterity to acknowledge all her accomplishments.

  After I thanked her for her comment, I launched into my first questions about her childhood. Her answers to the first one or two were perfunctory, and I could tell she had something else on her mind. She interrupted me as I began to ask another and said, “Look here, I understand you have made arrangements to talk to many people here in Paris. Who will you see?” I stopped the questioning and pulled out the date book with the list of all my appointments. She seemed impressed, nodding her head repeatedly and making a little noise that sounded like clucking. I was to be in Paris for two solid months, until the end of February, and I had booked interviews and appointments for every day that I did not see her. She and I were to meet at least twice each week, reserving the possibility of a third or even a fourth session if need be.

  I told her I would begin my interviews with the persons to whom she was closest, those she and Sartre had chosen to call their “family.” Among them were Jacques-Laurent Bost and his wife, Olga; her ex-lover and good friend Claude Lanzmann; her Sartrean friends Jean Pouillon and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis; her childhood friend Geraldine “GéGé” Pardo; and her friend who had just become her newly adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. Equally important was her sister, Hélène de Beauvoir de Roulet.

  She was inordinately pleased that I had arranged interviews with Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras, for she was extremely proud of being ranked in their company. She had the same reaction when I told her I had talked to Mary McCarthy, for she was always eager to hear what American writers thought of her work. I showed her the list I had made of writers, publishers, professors, and feminist activists and asked her to contribute the names of anyone I might have omitted. She was quite excited about all those names but was thrilled most of all that I would meet Yvette Roudy, the minister for the rights of women, a cabinet position in the French government.

  I also showed her the list of people I had interviewed during the previous year, mostly Americans but also French scholars and writers who had attended conferences in the United States or Canada. She liked it that the list contained the names of scholars whose specialty was Sartre, for she felt that many of them did not take her seriously: “They ignore me; they don’t want to admit how important Sartre and I were to each other.”

  Once Beauvoir saw how intensely I had studied her life and work and how much preparation I had done to write about both, she relaxed and said that because we had done enough for one day, we should stop now and have a relaxing drink before I left. This first encounter set down a pattern that would repeat, with little variation, for the next five years. “Do you drink scotch?” she asked, and before I could answer she was up and shuffling toward her refrigerator, which was not hidden in her kitchen but in clear sight on the back wall of the living area. When she opened it, I could see that it was spotless, pristine, and empty save for a large bottle of Johnnie Walker Red—and sometimes in subsequent meetings a bottle of vodka as well. At one point there was also a plastic-covered arrangement of petits fours on a shelf, but it remained untouched and unmoved for the better part of a year. I thought perhaps it was not real food but an art object of some kind. Occasionally there would be a dried-out slice of something she had forgotten to eat or some fruit long past its prime, but most of the time all the refrigerator contained was the liquor. She told me she did not keep food because either Sylvie brought her dinner or she went out with friends. In her later years, when she did not go out to lunch routinely, Sylvie also brought her something for the next day.

  While she was fussing to collect the bottle and glasses, I had the opportunity to look around the seating area. I saw the thick gold satin spreads on the daybed-sofas and the pillows that topped them in gemlike colors of amethyst, emerald, and sapphire, the same colors that graced each of the little chairs that faced them. The sofas were clear on that first occasion, but by the time she grew used to my visits, she did not bother to hide the clutter that accumulated where she usually sat and which gave the setting a slightly comical aspect. Beauvoir, like her mother before her, exhibited the practical behavior of a frugal bourgeois housewife: to protect the gold coverlet of the sofa where she liked best to curl up and read, she covered it with a flamboyant American Indian blanket. It was especially jarring in the midst of her one attempt at decorative elegance, since the blanket was where she kept her telephone and piled books, manuscripts, stacks of unanswered mail, wadded paper handkerchiefs, a comfortable old sweater, and the other detritus of a writer’s workplace.

  It was dark outside when we finished the work session, and she had reached up from her perch on the sofa to turn on the floor lamp made for her by Diego Giacometti. It was next to the shelf where she had a collection of his brother Alberto’s tiny metal figures, and it threw enough light to make them cast magical shadows. She shuffled back to the coffee table, carrying the bottle, two glasses, and a battered pewter jigger. There was a large Mexican glass tumbler for her and a small plain glass for me. Into mine she carefully poured one jiggerful of scotch, putting it aside before filling her own glass to the brim. She told me that “Sylvie waters the scotch because she thinks I drink too much. She thinks I don’t notice, but I do.” It had not been diluted too much on that first visit, but in later years I had trouble swallowing what was little more than faintly colored water. Beauvoir, on the other hand, hastily downed several glasses to my one, as if that would be the only way she could get enough.

  She was an old woman when I met her, and as she was comfortable in my presence, she was often dressed in the dowdy red robe she had worn on our very first meeting. There were times when I took someone to meet her, or when I was escorting her to an event or a dinner, and on those occasions she made an effort to impress. Her usual outfit then consisted of neat brown trousers, a beige shirt, a patterned sweater-vest, and of course the ubiquitous turban. When she was in the red robe, I tried not to dwell on h
ow I described her in the DD, as “lumpy, grumpy, frumpy, and dumpy,” but instead to envision the beautiful, vital, and dynamic young woman she had been. That was the woman I wanted to write about and the one I wanted to describe most strongly, an accomplished woman in the fullness of her life.

  The whiskey at the end of each session—usually running two hours, if not longer—became our ritual. Those post-interview conversations were never tape-recorded, nor did I take notes, for this was our social hour, when we were to enjoy random conversation as we decompressed after what were sometimes fractious and argumentative sessions. That did not stop me from taking extensive notes immediately after they ended, when I rushed down to my favorite café, the Dôme on the boulevard du Montparnasse, to sit at a little table overlooking the street where I could people-watch, drink a glass of white wine, and write or record my impressions.

  Very often Beauvoir volunteered information in these post-interview conversations that surprised me, as she did on the first meeting. I had the feeling she was trying to woo me when she launched into a diatribe about how my book would differ from some of the recent ones about her. It was clear that she read everything, and unlike Samuel Beckett, who professed ignorance but revealed significant familiarity with those about him, Beauvoir did not hesitate to express her opinions. She liked Carol Ascher’s 1981 book but was disappointed because Ascher wrote “too much about herself and forgot to write about me.” Of Axel Madsen, “I thought I should sue him for all the lies he wrote, but Sylvie told me not to bother. It would give him too much attention.” Benny Lévy (also known as Pierre Victor), who wrote about Sartre in the last distressing years of his life, drew her most furious ire: “I hate him! I hate him!”