It’s funny what you run across by chance when you were looking for something else. I was searching the library bookshelves recently for biographies of Francis Bacon and Oliver Cromwell (a recent book about Shakespeare had piqued my interest in both men) when I happened upon a fairly new dual biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Carole Seymour-Jones’s 2008 book is titled A Dangerous Liaison: a revelatory new biography. I checked it out and read it quickly. The book prompted some thoughts about honesty -- with oneself and with the public face one offers to others.
I had read two previous books about the existential philosopher and his brainy companion who was a fair country theorist in her own right and became a mother to the feminist movement with her 1949 book The Second Sex. Though never married, Sartre and Beauvoir were lifelong partners. They traveled together, often lived in various hotels and friends’ homes (neither had any interest in owning property), and critiqued each others’ writings before publication. The picture one gets of them changes dramatically from one book to the next.
The first dual biography I read was in the early 1980s, I believe titled Hearts and Minds and authored by Noel Riley Fitch. It depicted a nearly idyllic partnership between intellectual equals who had an open relationship, with an understanding they might occasionally get involved with others, but “never went to bed angry.” That idyllic picture of intellectual and emotional harmony stuck in my memory.
Some years later, Deirdre Bair published a biography of Beauvoir. The subject cooperated to some extent by submitting to interviews with her biographer, and this partly explains the extent to which Beauvoir comes across in Bair’s book as something of a shadow to, even a victim of, Sartre. He seduced a succession of her female students, and late in life adopted one of his young admirers so that the girl became his heir and literary executor, which Bair writes was incredibly painful to Beauvoir. On the other hand, Bair managed to catch her subject out in some of her prevarications, too. Beauvoir made some questionable compromises with the Nazi occupiers of Paris, and hotly denied sexual affairs with other men besides the American novelist Nelson Algren, let alone women. But the questions remained open.
It is in this new book that the depths of the famous couple’s deceptions and self-deceptions are brought to light. Beauvoir not only seduced many of her own female students, but passed them along knowingly to Sartre as a method of holding his attention. Since several were quite young, the author does not scruple to avoid the phrase “child abuse.” Beauvoir also slept with many young men, and tried to seduce tall and handsome Albert Camus but decided she hated him after he turned her down. Both Sartre and Beauvoir seemed casually unaware of the mortal dangers that faced their young Jewish friends, as well as continuing their literary and journalistic careers under the Nazi and collaborationist authorities.
Sartre’s overlong flirtation with Communist governments (his hatred of Western imperialism and capitalism made him turn a blind eye to Stalin's death camps; here, the two of them chat with Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba) is deepened in this book by the revelation of a longtime romantic affair with a Soviet spy, who herself may have been acting under compulsion from her Communist masters. Seymour-Jones also confirms the terrible pain Sartre inflicted on his lifelong partner when he adopted Arlette Elkaïm, a former student and lover 32 years his junior, and suggests Beauvoir retaliated by adopting a student-daughter of her own, Sylvie Le Bon. These disagreements have been carried on long after the deaths of Sartre and Beauvoir, as Elkaïm-Sartre and Le Bon Beauvoir have fought publicly over their mentors’ estates and papers.
What to make of all this? Nearly all of us have secrets that, if paraded in public, would make us appear less noble than we would prefer to be. Fortunately, most of us don’t live our lives in public, serving as spokespersons for political and moral causes the way Sartre and Beauvoir did. So we’re less likely to serve as poor examples, and we don’t have to decide whether to gild the lily in public. The truths that writers write are, to some extent, independent of their lived lives. Each of us must decide for himself whether the scuzziness of a Sinatra or Polanski is enough to make their creative work unworthy of our time.
Sartre and Beauvoir (like Keith Richards, who once famously told a British magistrate during a 1967 hearing for drug possession, “We are not old men; we are not worried about petty morals”) might have earned the right, or at least possessed the ability, to live in a free and open relationship, but they continued to share a world with others who were less able or inclined to live under such conditions. A free mind (more or less) does not confer the right to hurt other human beings.
But that’s what they seem to have done. Repeatedly and sometimes even blithely.
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