At the Existentialist Café (18 page)

For Simone de Beauvoir, independence had come only after a battle. Born in Paris on 9 January 1908, she grew up mostly in the city, but in a social environment that felt provincial, since it hedged her around with standard notions of femininity and gentility. Her mother, Françoise de Beauvoir, enforced these principles; her father was more relaxed. Simone’s rebellion started in childhood, became more intense in her teens, and still seemed to be going in adulthood. Her lifelong dedication to work, her love of travelling, her decision not to have children, and her unconventional choice of partner all spoke of total dedication to freedom. She presented her life in those terms in the first volume of her autobiography,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, and reflected further on her bourgeois background later in her memoir of her mother’s last illness,
A Very Easy Death
.

(Illustrations Credit 5.3)

It was while she was first beginning to strike out alone as a student that she met
Merleau-Ponty through a friend. She noted her impressions in her journal, calling him ‘Merloponti’. He was attractive both in personality and in looks, she said, though she feared he was a little too vain about the latter. In her autobiography (where she gives him the pseudonym ‘Pradelle’), she described his ‘
limpid, rather beautiful face, with thick, dark lashes, and the gay, frank laugh of a schoolboy’. She liked him at once, but that was not surprising, she added.
Everyone
always liked Merleau-Ponty as soon as they met him. Even her mother liked him.

Merleau-Ponty was just over two months older than Beauvoir, born on 14 March 1908, and much more at ease with himself. He sailed through social situations with a relaxed self-possession which (as he himself thought) was probably the result of having had a very
happy childhood. He had felt so loved and encouraged as a child, he said, never having to work hard for approval, that his disposition remained cheerful for life. He could be irritable sometimes, but he was, as he said in a radio interview in 1959, almost always at peace
with himself. This makes him about the only person in this entire story who felt that way; a valuable gift. Sartre would later write, apropos Flaubert’s lack of love in childhood, that when love ‘
is present, the dough of the spirits rises, when absent, it sinks’. Merleau-Ponty’s childhood was always well buoyed up. Yet it cannot have all been as easy as he liked to imply, since he lost his father in 1913 to liver disease, so that he, his brother and his sister grew up with their mother alone. Where Beauvoir had a strained relationship with her mother, Merleau-Ponty remained utterly devoted to his for as long as she lived.

Everyone who knew Merleau-Ponty felt the glow of well-being emanating from him. Simone de Beauvoir was warmed by it at first. She had been waiting for someone to admire, and it seemed he would do. She briefly considered him as boyfriend material. But his relaxed attitude was disturbing to someone of her more combative disposition. She wrote in her notebook that his big fault was that ‘
he is not violent, and the kingdom of God is for violent people’. He insisted on being nice to everyone. ‘I feel myself to be so different!’ she cried. She was a creature of strong judgements, while he looked for multiple sides to any situation. He considered people a mixture of qualities, and liked to give them the benefit of the doubt, whereas in youth she saw humanity as consisting of ‘
a small band of the chosen in a great mass of people unworthy of consideration’.

What really irked Beauvoir was that Merleau-Ponty seemed ‘perfectly adapted to his class and its way of life, and accepted bourgeois society with an open heart’. She would sometimes rant to him about the stupidities and cruelties of bourgeois morality, but he would calmly disagree. He ‘got on perfectly well with his mother and sister and did not share my horror of family life’, she wrote. ‘He was not averse to parties and sometimes went dancing: why not? he asked me with an innocent air which disarmed me.’

In their first summer after becoming friends, they were much thrown on each other’s company, as other students were away from Paris for the holidays. They went for walks, first in the gardens of the
École normale supérieure — an ‘awe-inspiring place’ for Beauvoir — and later in the Luxembourg Gardens, where they would sit ‘beside the statue of some queen or other’ and talk philosophy. Notwithstanding the fact that she had overtaken him in the exams, she found it natural to take on the role of philosophical novice beside him. In fact, she sometimes won their debates, almost by accident, but more often she was left happily exclaiming, ‘I know nothing, nothing. I not only have no answer to give, but I haven’t even found a satisfactory way of propounding the questions.’

She appreciated his virtues: ‘I knew no one else from whom I could have learnt the art of gaiety. He bore so lightly the weight of the whole world that it ceased to weigh upon me too; in the Luxembourg Gardens, the blue of the morning sky, the green lawns and the sun all shone as they used to in my happiest days, when it was always fine weather.’ But one day, after walking around the lake in the Bois de Boulogne with him, watching swans and boats, she exclaimed to herself, ‘
Oh, how untormented he was! His tranquillity offended me.’ It was clear by now that he would never make a suitable lover. He was better as a
brother figure; she only had a sister, so the role was vacant and perfectly suited to him.

He had a different effect on her best friend, Elisabeth Le Coin or Lacoin (called ‘ZaZa’ in Beauvoir’s memoirs). Elisabeth too was unnerved by Merleau-Ponty’s
‘invulnerable’ quality and his lack of anguish, but she fell for him passionately. Far from being invulnerable, she was prone to emotional extremes and wild enthusiasms, which Beauvoir had found intoxicating during their girlhood friendship. Elisabeth now hoped to marry Merleau-Ponty, and he seemed keen too — until he suddenly broke off the relationship. Only later did Beauvoir learn why. Elisabeth’s mother, thinking Merleau-Ponty unsuitable for her daughter, had warned him to back off or else she would reveal an alleged secret about
his
mother: that she had been unfaithful, and that at least one of her children was not her husband’s. To prevent a scandal engulfing both his mother and his sister, who was about to get married, Merleau-Ponty bowed out.

Beauvoir was even more disgusted after she learned the truth. How
typical of the filthy bourgeoisie! Elisabeth’s mother had shown a classic middle-class combination of moralism, cruelty and cowardice. Moreover, Beauvoir considered that the result literally proved lethal. Elisabeth had been very upset, and in the middle of the emotional crisis she caught a serious illness, probably encephalitis. She died of it, aged just twenty-one.

There was no causal connection between the two disasters, but Beauvoir always thought
bourgeois hypocrisy had killed her friend. She forgave Merleau-Ponty his role in what had happened. Yet she never ceased to feel that he was too cosy and respected traditional values too much, and that this was a fault in him — a fault she swore never to allow into her own life.

A little after this, Beauvoir’s ‘violent’ and opinionated side got all the satisfaction it craved when she met Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre too had a bourgeois childhood, born an adored only child two and a half years before Beauvoir, on 21 June 1905. Like Merleau-Ponty, he grew up without a father. Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, died of tuberculosis when the infant Jean-Paul was just a year old. Throughout his early childhood, Sartre was doted on by his mother, Anne-Marie Sartre, and her parents, with whom they lived. Everyone loved his girlish curly hair and his delicate beauty. But he developed eye problems after an infection at the age of three. Under the bouncing curls, the results were barely noticeable — until his grandfather took him for a brutal
haircut one day, and his damaged eye emerged into the light, together with his fishy lips and other disconcerting features. Sartre describes all this with high irony in his memoir
Words
, which recounts his early years. His amused tone becomes more intensely jaunty than ever when he discusses his looks, but he was genuinely hurt by the change in people’s reactions to him. He remained obsessed with the topic of his ugliness — which he always referred to with this blunt term. It made him shy away from people for a while, but then he decided that he would not let it spoil his life. He would not sacrifice his freedom to it.

(Illustrations Credit 5.4)

His mother married again, to a man Sartre didn’t like, and they moved to La Rochelle, where he was bullied by bigger and rougher boys. It was a great crisis in his childhood: later he said that being a loner in La Rochelle had taught him all he ever needed to know ‘
about contingency, violence, the way things are’. Again, however, he would not be cowed. He got through it, and he blossomed again when the family moved to Paris and he was sent to a succession of good schools, culminating in the École normale supérieure. From being a pariah, he became the leader of the most fashionable, anarchic and formidable clique in the school. He always remained a sociable, alpha-type person, riddled with hang-ups, yet never hesitant about dominating a circle.

Sartre’s group of iconoclasts and provocateurs, revolving around him and his best friend Paul Nizan, spent their days sitting in cafés, loudly slaughtering the sacred cows of philosophy, literature and bourgeois behaviour to anyone who ventured into their ambit. They attacked any topic that suggested delicate sensibilities, the ‘inner life’ or the soul; they created a stir by refusing to sit school examinations
in religious knowledge, and they scandalised everyone by talking of human beings as bundles of fleshly urges rather than as noble souls. Beneath their brashness, they had the easy confidence of the impeccably educated.

It was during this era, in 1929, that
Beauvoir met the Sartre clique through a friend named Maheu. She found them exciting and intimidating. They laughed at her because she took her studies so seriously — as of course she did, since being at the Sorbonne represented everything she had worked so hard to achieve. Education meant freedom and self-determination to her, whereas the boys took it for granted. But the group accepted her, and she and Sartre became friends. He and the others called her Castor, the Beaver, supposedly as a reference to her constant busy-ness, but also as a pun on her surname and the similar English word. Sartre had none of the off-putting tranquillity of Merleau-Ponty: he was a loud-mouthed and uncompromising extremist. He was not demoted to being a brother; he became her lover, and soon they were even more important to each other than that. Sartre came to regard Beauvoir as his ally, his favourite conversationalist, the first and best reader of anything he wrote. He gave her the role that Raymond Aron had played in his earlier school days: that of the symphilosopher with whom he talked out all his ideas.

They considered marrying, but neither wanted a bourgeois marriage — or children, since Beauvoir was determined not to replay her own fraught relationship with her mother. Sitting on a stone bench in the Tuileries one evening, she and Sartre agreed a contract. They would be a couple for two years, after which they would decide whether to extend the contract, separate, or change their relationship in some way. Beauvoir admitted in her memoirs that this temporary arrangement frightened her at first. Her account of the conversation is filled with the imprinted details that come from strong emotion:

There was a kind of balustrade which served as a back-rest, a little way out from the wall; and in the cagelike space behind it a cat was miaowing. The poor thing was too big to get out; how
had it ever got in? A woman came and fed the cat some meat. And Sartre said, ‘Let’s sign a two-year lease.’

Confinement, entrapment, distress, the tossing of charitable scraps: this is terrifying imagery for a story supposedly about freedom. It sounds like an ominous dream sequence. Did it really happen this way, or did she flesh out the memory with symbolic detail?

In any case, the panic subsided, and the arrangement worked well. They survived the two years, and became partners in a long-term but non-exclusive relationship which lasted all their lives. It was perhaps made easier by the fact that, after the late 1930s, it was no longer a sexual one. (She wrote to her lover Nelson Algren, ‘
We dropped it after about eight or ten years rather unsuccessful in this way.’) They also agreed two long-term conditions. One was that they must tell each other everything about their other sexual involvements: there must be
honesty. They only partly kept to this. The other was that their own relationship must remain primary: in their language, it would be
‘necessary’ while other relationships could only be ‘contingent’. They did stick to this, although it drove away some long-term lovers who grew tired of being considered accidents. But that was the deal, and everyone who became involved knew it from the start.