Parisian Lives Page 28
The minute the conference ended, I took the train to nearby Frankfurt and then flew back to Paris, not wanting to waste a moment of my last weeks to work. I already had a good fourteen hours of Simone de Beauvoir on tape, six of Hélène, and I had not yet counted how many hours I had of others. I would have several more sessions with Beauvoir and another round with Olga and Bost, which would give me more than enough to listen to on the flight home.
Over coffee on my first morning back in Paris, Ellen Wright surprised me by saying that publishers were suddenly eager to meet me to talk about book contracts. She thought the interest in a book about Beauvoir stemmed from Benny Lévy’s new book about Sartre: “Papers and magazines are filled with stories about Lévy breaking his ‘2-year silence.’ They are all on his side and against the ‘vielle clan’ [Beauvoir’s self-appointed ‘family’], but particularly against SdB. I don’t know why I am so surprised by this. I should know by now that people just don’t like her.” However, if this made French publishers want my book, I would not complain. And when I saw Beauvoir for our interviews, I thought it would be time to start asking the hard questions I had put off until now. It was going to be an interesting week, no doubt about it.
Simone was eager to hear about my visit with Hélène, so we began with my recounting Hélène’s recollections. Simone was animated and laughing as she remembered girlhood escapades, particularly the one about how Sartre made his way to Meyrignac one summer during their student years and how she hid him in the pigeon cote at the neighboring estate of La Grillère because of her father’s disapproval. Beauvoir became animated while she imitated her cousin Magdeleine smuggling him food hidden in her apron. She was in such a cheerful mood as she told how she sneaked out at night to be with him that I thought this would be an opportune moment to bring up some touchy subjects she had hitherto been reluctant to talk about.
To shift the conversation in that direction, I told her the good news that the publisher of the Beckett biography, Claude Durand at Éditions Fayard, had offered a contract. She was pleased that her biography would also appear under the imprint of this respected publisher. That provided the segue for me to tell her that I had just read the book then dominating the literary news, Benny Lévy’s book about Sartre. Could we discuss it? Her mood changed in an instant. Her face flushed and her voice thickened as she began to talk about Sartre’s last years. Whenever I had asked about Lévy before this, she had denounced him as a manipulative liar but had been reluctant to go into detail beyond saying that Sartre’s “Jewish conversion was all Benny’s invention.” Now she elaborated: “Yes, Sartre was part Jew, and of course that was one aspect of his being. But he was also French, and his French identity was paramount to him. He was a writer, a political figure, a good son to his mother, and a lover to many women. He was all of these, and they were all part of him. There was no Jewish conversion: Jewish identity did not become the defining part of him, it was only one of the many parts of him. It was a terrible lie to make Sartre renounce everything he stood for all his life.”
She was reluctant to go into the details of how Lévy became one of the two dominant figures in Sartre’s final years, someone who had managed to marginalize or exclude everyone else, particularly Beauvoir. Whenever I had pressed for more detail in previous interviews, I had sensed that her hesitation was linked to what she considered a personal failure: her shame that she had abandoned the man she loved when he was helpless. Now I asked if she had willingly given his care over to others because of that love, because she could not bear to witness his decrepitude. She verified this when she blurted out that much of Sartre’s daily life had become sordid and sad, and it was just easier to let the two young people who didn’t mind being around him perform the onerous duties that were needed to keep him going. Years of smoking and drinking had hardened Sartre’s arteries and enfeebled his brain. He was often incontinent and frequently soiled himself; he paid no attention to his personal hygiene; often his clothes were dirty, his breath foul, and he smelled bad. But he was still demanding that young and nubile bed partners be brought to him, and many, wanting to brag about being with the great philosopher, came. According to Beauvoir, one in particular, a foreigner with visa problems, was happy to comply repeatedly.
Once Arlette Elkaïm entered Sartre’s life, Beauvoir let her take center stage in it, only continuing to keep the task of placating his two longstanding mistresses, Michelle Vian (widow of Boris Vian) and Wanda Kosakiewicz (Olga Bost’s sister). Beauvoir had never been a nurturer, but when Arlette prohibited the two women from seeing Sartre (their main financial supporter) and they became unmoored, she felt she had little choice. Michelle was in the early stages of dementia, and Wanda’s lifelong mental instability worsened, alarming her friends, who feared she would cause serious harm to herself. It was Beauvoir who saw that the money Sartre paid every month for their upkeep continued to flow, and it was she who rushed to calm them when they acted out irrationally.
As her sister said, and as was evident in Beauvoir’s book about Sartre’s last years, La Cérémonie des adieux, Beauvoir did not hide from unpleasant truths, nor did she try to soften or prettify any of the ugliness that characterized Sartre’s final years. Neither did she try to sugarcoat how her abdication of responsibility for him contributed to it. By the time she spoke to me, she had nothing good to say about Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, the young Algerian Jewish woman who was first his lover and then his adopted daughter. She lashed out repeatedly about how Arlette had managed to dupe all Sartre’s “family” into accepting her presence as his “girlfriend.” Once they allowed her to take over the daily management of his meals and personal hygiene, it was just as easy to let her take care of his apartment and see to his literary affairs. Not until Sartre announced that he was adopting Arlette and making her his sole heir did they realize that they had all been “duped.”
But by then it was too late. Beauvoir saved face by presenting herself to the public as Arlette’s staunchest advocate, pretending to show such approval of Sartre’s decision that she consented to be Arlette’s sponsor during the legal process required by French law, for only a family member was entitled to inherit an estate (and Sartre’s was significant), and a non–blood relative could inherit only if legally adopted. Beauvoir was aghast in private but to the world at large said she had been in favor of the adoption from the beginning “of their [Sartre and Arlette’s] ‘friendship.’ ” Only to me and a small group of others, which included Sylvie, Hélène, and Lanzmann, did she rage at the betrayal that transpired behind her back.
* * *
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Having succeeded in getting Beauvoir to tell me why she so despised Benny and Arlette, I thought the time had come to press on the major topic that had long been a source of disagreement between us, her sexuality. I wanted to move beyond her affairs with men to those she had with women, but I knew I had to tread carefully.
Whenever I approached this subject in my mind, I thought of it in tennis metaphors. I always began with an easy lob, saving the hard slams down the line for later, and there was always the hope that I could sneak in a drop shot when she least expected it. The easiest practice volley was to ask her to talk about “the contract” she made with Sartre when they were students setting out on their life together. The agreement stipulated that they would always be primary, “essential,” in each other’s affections, but they would also be free to indulge in “contingent” relationships. As far as she was concerned (at least in the beginning of our talks), everything connected to Sartre throughout their relationship had been exactly as she wanted it, sheer perfection. And yet everyone else in their “family” told me of how they thought Beauvoir coped with Sartre’s rapacious sexual appetite, and their stories hardly depicted one partner who willingly accepted another’s ongoing infidelities. Instead they were of a woman so devastated and racked with emotional pain that she would often drink herself into a stupor as she sobbed to exhaustion.
I took her more relaxed attitude as a sign of growing trust, but she still needed to see me as a working professional, and my little file cards sometimes created touchy situations. At most sessions my single pile quickly split into two as we talked, one of questions asked and answered and the other of those still to be asked. Sometimes, when I could see that one question was leading into sensitive territory where she might not want to go, I’d try to push that card to the bottom of the unasked pile as something to come back to later, when the time was more propitious. She was incredibly sharp and observant. “What’s that?” she would ask. “Not important,” I would try to say with as much nonchalance as I could muster. “We can always come back to it later.” She was undeterred. “Ask it now,” she would insist as I tried all sorts of feints that would not incur her anger. Often whatever I dreamed up was something so insipid that I knew that she knew I was inventing as I went along!
But there was the occasional flash of real anger, as happened, for example, when I pressed her to talk about what she and Sartre did (or did not do) during the war. In one session she literally jumped up from her usual perch and stood straighter than I had ever seen her and shouted, “This interview is over! You must leave at once!” I was shocked by her outburst and didn’t know what to do, but as she was standing, I stood up, too. I must have been hesitating too long, as she was yelling “Leave! Leave!” I gathered up all my things as quickly as I could, and with coat half on and scarf dangling and tripping me up, I headed for the door. Apparently I was not moving fast enough, for she literally gave me a shove in the small of my back and slammed the door behind me.
“Now what do I do!?!” was what I thought constantly during the next few days, even as I did nothing to reach out to her, mainly because I could not think of anything that seemed appropriate. Instead I simply showed up at the appointed time for our next interview three days later. We resumed the conversation as if nothing had ever happened. That was when I learned I could press her only so far before what I called “the Lucite curtain” would come crashing down.
I could ask Question A, and she would answer it, knowing that most likely I would then go on to Question B. That was all right, too, even though she could sense that Question C was next on my list. She was not going to answer Question C, because that was the one that would get me to where I wanted to go, which was to Question D, and she was definitely not going to answer that one. Down would come the Lucite curtain. I could see through it clearly and so could she, but we could not hear each other, nor could we make any other sort of contact, and that was exactly how she wanted it.
Still, I was not to be deterred: sometimes I knew that if I wanted the answer to Question D, I would have to lead with it. There would be a smile on my face but dead seriousness in my voice as I told her that the time had come when I really needed the answer to Question D before I could write anything further on that particular subject. And that was when she sat there in her lumpy, dumpy, frumpy, and grumpy mode for a fairly long time before finally letting out a great sigh and telling me what I needed to know to ensure that what I wrote was an accurate account of the subject at hand. Beauvoir’s relationship with women was exactly one such subject, but in the case of Sylvie Le Bon, I didn’t even need to get to Question D. Beauvoir did it for me.
When I first met Sylvie, I asked Beauvoir a few general questions about why she had adopted her. Beauvoir insisted that it was “the only sensible thing to do because Poupette [Hélène’s childhood nickname] and I are old and Lionel is sick.” She said she “had faith” that Sylvie would carry out her wishes toward the two of them should she die first. I was perfectly willing to accept her explanation, even though I knew from Hélène how deeply hurt she had been by her sister’s action. Sadly, she was right to be fearful of Sylvie’s behavior, for after Beauvoir’s death, Sylvie committed despicable actions. But all that happened after my biography was published.
The adoption gave me the answer I always gave when people asked me just what was going on between Simone and Sylvie: “Madame de Beauvoir’s trusted friend will ensure that her family and friends are protected and her estate is administered properly.” But the suggestion that they were lovers cropped up again and again.
Paris is a very small town, and the little fiefdom of the literary world was often particularly nasty. The usual rumors about me that were sometimes carried to Beauvoir usually concerned something connected to what I would write about her, and even though they were very different from those about Beckett and me (that I had used sex to get his permission to write the book), I found the Beauvoir rumors far more upsetting. Often what they told her was more than a simple misinterpretation; it was an outright falsehood. A number of times I had to explain that the stories she heard about me were lies, and in every instance she believed me and her trust deepened. I trod so carefully in all those years, but even so, it was often not good enough to keep the gossip at bay, and that gossip created temporary upsets between us.
I thought I was succeeding in keeping things on an even keel until two Frenchwomen who lived and worked in the United States decided that they, too, were writing Beauvoir’s biography and set out to sabotage mine. Professors Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier came to Paris on sabbatical to meet Beauvoir and interview her. She asked me what she should do, and I said the decision to cooperate or not was hers to make, as was how much she wanted to confide in them. At our next meeting she told me she had seen them and said dismissively that they were not going to be competition because all they had asked about was her feminism. She said she would see them a few times more but that I was not to worry. However, they did want to meet me and she had given them my telephone number.
They phoned and invited me to dinner, so as a courtesy I went. From the moment I met them, I didn’t trust them. The only thing they talked about over a dismal meal in a grim café was “Beauvoir’s new-found lesbianism with Sylvie.” I beat as hasty an exit as I could and decided that from then on I would not have any further contact with these two women.
When I arrived for our next session, I could see that Beauvoir was in a nasty mood. I found a festering, smoldering woman sitting in her little hollow on the sofa, her face a molten red and her conversation curt, abrupt, even rude. There had been times when she was short-tempered as I began my questioning, but usually she would recognize that whatever was bothering her had nothing to do with me—her feminist friends were making too many demands, she did not want to see an old bourgeois school friend who had suddenly materialized after many years, Sylvie wanted her to do something she did not want to do—and she would resume cooperative behavior. This time the mood not only persisted, it deepened. Beauvoir seldom blushed the pink of pleasure, but her face always darkened when she was angry or upset. I was thinking I had never seen it so mottled when she suddenly burst out, “You are going to write that Sylvie and I are lesbians! You are going to tell the world!” When she said the word “lesbian,” she all but screamed it.
I had not yet gotten around to asking about the exact nature of their relationship, because I thought it was a subject best left until the end of my
research and interviews. Why stir up trouble before need be, was how I reasoned; why not lob until the perfect moment to slam one down the line? This barrage of anger was obviously instigated by someone else, and my logical conclusion was that it came from Francis and Gontier. When I asked, Beauvoir confirmed it, saying that the two women had “warned” her that all I talked about was her “lesbian sex,” and that was how I intended to write the book. I told her I thought she knew me well enough by now to know that it was not true, and I do believe she blushed pink when she said yes, of course, she had never believed it for a minute. I think she expected me to drop the subject, but instead I continued. I spoke quietly as I told her I was glad the topic had come up, and now was the time for her to talk about the relationship so that I would know how to write about it.
“We are not lesbian!” Again she practically spat out the word. “We do not do—” and here she did not use words but rather held out her hand, palm up, and flicked it downward toward her vagina with a hard, sure movement.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but you have to tell me what”—and here I flicked my own hand downward—“means.”
“Oh sure, we kiss on the lips, we hug, we touch each other’s breasts, but we don’t do anything”—and here another downward flick—“down there! So you can’t call us lesbians!”
Well then, I thought, what am I to call them? She was flat-out determined to deny her encounters with women despite so much evidence to the contrary, and as her biographer, I could not ignore this part of her life. I solved the problem some months later when I was back in New York by convening a group of feminist scholars in various fields and of various sexual persuasions to help me find the best way to write about her sexual identity. I adopted the consensus view that Blanche Wiesen Cook, then writing about Eleanor Roosevelt, expressed best: “If she does not identify as a lesbian, you cannot call her one.” And so I wrote a carefully worded endnote, scholarly in the extreme, that came as close as I could make it to a definition of what I concluded was a complex sexual identity, and I left it at that.