At the Existentialist Café (19 page)

It has become common to express concern for Beauvoir’s well-being in this relationship, as if she (typical woman!) had allowed herself to be bullied into something she did not want. The Tuileries scene does suggest it might not have been her first choice when she was young, and she suffered episodes of panic and jealousy at times. But a conventional bourgeois marriage would hardly have provided protection against such feelings either.

I suspect that the relationship gave her exactly what she needed. Had she and Sartre attempted a normal marriage, they would either have split up or it would have ended in sexual frustration. Instead, she had a great sex life — better than Sartre’s, apparently, thanks to his squeamishness. Beauvoir’s memoirs attest to moods of
‘languorous excitement’ and ‘feelings of quite shattering intensity’ in her youth, and her later relationships were physically fulfilling. Sartre, if we can
judge by the vivid descriptions in his books, found sex a nightmarish process of struggling not to drown in slime and gloop. (Before we mock him too much for this, let’s remember that we know it only because he revealed it so candidly. Well, okay, let’s mock him a little bit.)

The physical lusciousness of life was never a threat to Beauvoir: she could not get enough of it. As a child, she wanted to consume everything she saw. She would gaze greedily into the windows of sweet shops — ‘
the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscopic inflorescence of acidulated fruit-drops — green, red, orange, violet — I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me’. She wished the whole universe could be edible, so it could be eaten as Hansel and Gretel ate from the gingerbread house. Even as an adult, she wrote, ‘I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset.’ Travelling to New York in 1947, she felt an urge to eat the neon signs, brightly arrayed against the night sky.

Her appetite extended to collecting things, including many gifts and souvenirs from her travels. When she finally moved from hotel rooms to a proper apartment in 1955, it quickly filled up with ‘
jackets and skirts from Guatemala, blouses from Mexico … ostrich eggs from the Sahara, lead tom-toms, some drums that
Sartre had brought back from Haiti, glass swords and Venetian mirrors that he had bought in the rue Bonaparte, a plaster cast of his hands, Giacometti’s lamps’. Her diary-keeping and memoir-writing also reflected an urge to acquire and relish everything that came into her grasp.

She explored the world with the same passion, travelling and walking fanatically. While living alone in
Marseilles as a young schoolteacher, she would pack buns and bananas on her days off, put on a dress and a pair of espadrilles, and set out at dawn to explore the mountainous countryside. Once, carrying bread, a candle and a water bottle full of red wine, she ascended
Mont Mézenc and spent the night in a flint hut at the summit. She woke to find herself looking down on a sea of cloud, and ran down the path on rocks which, when the sun came out, heated up and burned her feet through the
soles of her inappropriate shoes. On another walk, she got
stuck in a gorge and barely managed to scramble out. Later, in the Alps in 1936, she fell down a sheer rock face while out alone, but escaped with a few scratches.

Sartre was different. He would be persuaded to join her on walks, but didn’t enjoy the sensation of fatigue.
Being and Nothingness
contains a marvellous description of slogging up a hill behind an unnamed companion, whom one pictures as Beauvoir (although the scene has something in common with Petrarch’s famous ascent of Mont Ventoux). While this companion seems to be having fun, Sartre experiences the effort as a nuisance, something that intrudes on his freedom. He gives in quickly, throws down his knapsack and collapses at the roadside. The other person is tired too, but finds it blissful to forge on, feeling the glow of sunburn on the back of the neck and relishing the way the roughness of the path is revealed afresh by each trudging step. The whole landscape presents itself differently to the two of them.

Sartre preferred
skiing, and that experience also found its way into
Being and Nothingness
. Walking over a snowfield is hard work, he pointed out, but skiing over it is a delight. The snow itself changes underneath you, phenomenologically speaking; instead of presenting itself as viscous and clinging, it becomes hard and smooth. It bears you up, and you slide flowingly over it, as easily as the notes of
Nausea
’s jazz song. He added that he was curious about waterskiing, a new invention which he had heard of but not tried. Even on snow, you left a line of ski marks behind you; in water, you left nothing. That was the purest pleasure Sartre could imagine.

His
dream was to pass through the world unencumbered. The possessions that delighted Beauvoir horrified Sartre. He too liked travelling, but he kept nothing from his trips. He gave away
books after reading them. The only things he always kept by him were his pipe and his pen, and even these were not for getting attached to. He lost them constantly, he wrote: ‘they’re exiles in my hands’.

With people, he was generous to the point of obsession. He gave money away as fast as it came, in order to get it away from him, like a
hand grenade. If he did spend it himself, he preferred not to use it on objects but ‘
on an
evening out
: going to some dancehall, spending big, going everywhere by taxi, etc. etc. — and in short, nothing must remain in place of the money but a memory, sometimes
less
than a memory’. His
tips to waiters were legendary, as he took out the large wad of cash he carried everywhere and peeled off bills. He was equally generous with his writing, flinging out essays or talks or forewords for anyone who asked. Even words were not for hanging on to and eking out cautiously. Beauvoir was generous too, but her openness was two-way: she liked to gather as well as to dispense. Perhaps, in their divergent styles, one can see the two sides of phenomenological existentialism: the part that observes, collects and pores over phenomena, and the part that discards accumulated preconceptions in the Husserlian
epoché
, so as to be free.

With all these differences, they had a mutual understanding that no outsider seemed able to threaten. When Beauvoir’s biographer Deirdre Bair was talking to her subject’s friends, one of them, Colette Audry, summed it up by saying, ‘
Theirs was a new kind of relationship, and I had never seen anything like it. I cannot describe what it was like to be present when those two were together. It was so intense that sometimes it made others who saw it sad not to have it.’

It was also an extremely long relationship, lasting from 1929 to Sartre’s death in 1980. For fifty years, it was a philosophical demonstration of existentialism in practice, defined by the two principles of freedom and companionship. Lest this sound too earnest, their shared memories, observations and jokes bound them together just as in any long marriage. A typical joke began soon after they met: visiting the zoo, they watched an enormously fat and tragic-looking
sea elephant which sighed and raised its eyes to heaven as if in supplication while the keeper stuffed its mouth with fish. From then on, every time Sartre looked glum, Beauvoir would remind him of the sea elephant. He would roll up his eyes and heave comical sighs, and they would both feel better.

In later years, Sartre became more remote as his work took him away from their private duo, but he remained Beauvoir’s constant
reference point; someone she could lose herself in when she needed to. She knew she had a tendency to do this: it had happened with Elisabeth Le Coin in her schooldays, and she had tried it with Merleau-Ponty but been frustrated when his smiling and ironical manner deflected her. With Sartre, she could easily play at losing herself, without
actually
losing her real-world freedom as a woman or as a writer.

That was the most important element: it was a writers’ relationship. Both
Beauvoir and Sartre were compulsive communicators. They kept diaries, they wrote letters; they told each other
every detail of their days. It is overwhelming even to think about the quantity of written and spoken words that flowed between them for half of the twentieth century. Sartre was always the first to read Beauvoir’s work, the person whose criticism she trusted and who pushed her to write more. If he caught her being lazy, he would berate her: ‘
But Castor, why have you stopped thinking, why aren’t you working? I thought you wanted to write? You don’t want to become a housewife, do you?’

As the emotional dramas came and went, work remained the constant. Work! Work in cafés, work while travelling, work at home. Any time they were in the same city, they worked together, whatever else was going on in their lives. After Sartre moved into a proper apartment (with his mother) in 1946, at 42 rue Bonaparte, Beauvoir met him there every day so they could spend the morning or afternoon sitting side by side, at two desks, working. In a 1967 documentary made for
Canadian TV, you can see them there, both smoking furiously, with no sound but the scratching of a pen. Beauvoir is writing in an exercise book, Sartre is reading over a manuscript. I find myself imagining this as a kind of endlessly looped video memorial. Perhaps it could have been installed on their shared grave in the Montparnasse cemetery. It’s spooky to imagine them writing away there, all night, when the cemetery is closed, and all day as the visitors pass — but it would suit them better than a white grave, or any still image.

6

I DON’T WANT TO EAT MY MANUSCRIPTS

In which there occur a crisis, two heroic rescues, and the outbreak of war
.

As titles go, that of Husserl’s last unfinished work
The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
is not as arresting as
Nausea
. But the word at its head, ‘crisis’, perfectly sums up mid-1930s Europe. Mussolini’s Fascists had been in power in Italy for over a decade, since 1922. In the Soviet Union, following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin had manoeuvred himself into a position of control by 1929 and spent the 1930s starving, torturing, imprisoning and executing people in vast numbers. Hitler, having consolidated his first election victories in 1933, made his expansionist ambitions increasingly clear. In 1936, civil war broke out in Spain between the left-wing Republicans and the fascist Nationalists led by General Franco. Everything seemed to be conspiring to divide Europeans and lead them into another war. This was a prospect greatly feared, especially in France, where the First World War had killed around 1.4 million French soldiers in the trenches alone. The country itself was literally scarred by war, since so much of it had been fought on French soil, and no one wanted to see it happen again.

France did have some far-right organisations — Action française and the newer, more radical Croix-de-Feu or Iron Cross movement — but the general mood of pacifism kept their influence limited. The novelist Roger Martin du Gard voiced a common feeling when he wrote to a friend in September 1936, ‘
Anything rather than war! Anything!… Even Fascism in Spain! And don’t push me, for I would say: yes … and “even Fascism in France!” ’ Beauvoir felt similarly, and
said to Sartre, ‘Surely France at war would be worse than France under the Nazis?’ But Sartre, who had seen the Nazis at close hand, disagreed. As usual, his imagination supplied lurid details: ‘
I have no wish to be made to eat my manuscripts. I don’t want Nizan to have his eyes gouged out with teaspoons.’

By 1938, few dared hope for a reprieve. Hitler annexed Austria that March. In September he turned his attention to the strongly German Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia, which included Husserl’s homeland of Moravia. The British and French leaders Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier agreed to his initial demands, and the Czechs had little choice but to accept. Hitler took this as encouragement to go further, so on 22 September he demanded the right to a full military occupation that would effectively open the doors to the rest of Czechoslovakia. There followed what became known as the Munich Crisis: a week during which people listened to their radios and read newspapers, fearing the announcement of war literally at any hour.

For a young existentialist of the individualist kind, war was the ultimate affront. It threatened to sweep away all those personal thoughts and concerns like toys from a table. As the English surrealist poet David Gascoyne, then living in Paris in a delicate state of mind, wrote in his journal during that week, ‘
What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance.’ Listening to his radio, Gascoyne tried to visualise bombers flying through the sky, and buildings falling. Similar visions of impending disaster haunt George Orwell’s novel
Coming Up for Air
, published the following year: the advertising executive George Bowling walks down his suburban street imagining houses being smashed to the ground by
bombs. Everything familiar seems about to disappear; Bowling fears that afterwards there will be only endless tyranny.

Sartre would try to capture the mood of the crisis in
The Reprieve
, the second volume of his
Roads of Freedom
sequence — not published until 1945, but set during the crucial week of 23–30 September 1938. Each of his characters struggles to adjust to the idea that their future may be curtailed and that nothing will be the same again. Sartre slips
from one person’s thoughts to another’s, in a
stream-of-consciousness method borrowed from the novels of John Dos Passos and Virginia Woolf. The young character Boris (based on Sartre’s former student Jacques-Laurent Bost) calculates how long he is likely to survive in the army when war begins, and thus how many
omelettes he can expect to eat before dying. In a crucial moment, as everyone gathers to hear Hitler speak on the radio, Sartre draws back from the scene to show us all of France, then all of Germany, and all of Europe. ‘
A hundred million free consciousnesses, each aware of walls, the glowing stump of a cigar, familiar faces, and each constructing its destiny on its own responsibility.’