A Dangerous Liaison

There were times in A Dangerous Liaison:  Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Carole Seymour-Jones (Arrow Books, 2008) that I did not know if I was reading about a sex cult or two great philosophers of the 20^th century.  This book is disturbing on so many levels, and the central figures in this biography are by no means admirable nor could I find empathy for them.  In light of the way our current culture and law enforcement view sexual molestation, exploitation and rape, if these events occurred today, Sartre and Beauvoir would find themselves in deep legal trouble as well as mired in moral and ethical battle zones.

Of the two, Simone de Beauvoir is the more relatable and Sartre is a monster in Seymour-Jones’ telling.  Much has been made of the two working in one of the French cafes, making their early forays into Existentialism and examining some of the darkest times of the century, namely the Second World.  They worked in those cafes for good reason:  there was no heat in their flats, and the cafes offered workspace with ample coffee and warmth.  Beauvoir learned early on to work amid noise and chaos because growing up, that is what she had to work in at home.  It is clear Beauvoir also had the more wholesome home life despite the noise.  She was taught that “a cultivated mind and true righteousness counted for more than money.”

Sartre had his eyes set on being a writer first, and then a philosopher.  He believed the study of the humanities would lead him to the Divine.  In Sartre’s mind, God was dead.  If man was to find the higher order of things, he would have to look for it in his own existence.  Life was what you made it to Sartre.  From a young age, he scribbled secretly, writing novels and stories for his own enjoyment.  “By writing, I existed, I escaped from the grown-ups,” he tells us.

Both were voracious readers, consuming not only more philosophical and difficult work, but also pulp fiction and murder mysteries.  Beauvoir, ever the auto-didactic, read widely in French and English.  Sartre thought he could interpret his interior life by examining his lived experience.  He wanted, more than anything else, to be a novelist.  He read with that intent.  He lived only to write, says Beauvoir, and he considered books as “fountains of light.”  Sartre was more explicit about how he saw the world:  “All things carry the seeds of their own death,” he wrote.  People must “create meaning in a meaningless world.”  This was the beginnings of his Existentialism.

Both Beauvoir and Sartre eschewed the professorial route at university to teach in the lycee system, the equivalent to high school in the U.S.  As a teacher, Sartre was highly influential to his students who were only a few years younger than he was when he started out in the classroom.  He was a little man, walking into a room with his hands in his pockets.  He did not wear a hat and he smoked a pipe.  His teaching consisted of him sitting on his desk and lecturing the class sans notes and preparation.  He often made the fundamental error of teaching by treating his students as friends and equals.  This made him a popular teacher but it also led to complications when these relationships soured.  Sartre and Beauvoir came to consider their students “family.”  As the relationships turned sexual and manipulative, they fed Sartre’s narcissism and Beauvoir’s sexual passions for both men and women.

Many of these students were scarred for life, as Seymour-Jones explains.  Olga Kosackiewicz, one such student turned lover of both Sartre and Beauvoir, became a “deep cutter” with devastating mental health issues.  Seymour-Jones describes these relationships as the two writers preying on young and influential minds.  Sartre’s nickname was Kobra, a snake in the garden who threatened to overwhelm his young charges.  Beauvoir had the tamer name of Castor, French for beaver.  This nickname stuck because it was indicative of her last name and her hard-charging work ethic that mirrored the animal’s busyness.

The two agreed early on to a sort of mission statement for what they planned in their own sex life and when involving students in that life.  Their “agreement” involved “absolute freedom” and “complete openness” with each other.  In fact, even though their own relationship grew less sexual, they functioned as a committed partnership.  They were free to have “sexual adventures” as long as they told each other everything.  This is the twisted and dangerous liaison of the title.  Sartre, by all accounts, was a good lover but had little interest in the sex act; his interest was more in the conquest, the possession, even taking the virginity of some of his female students.  Beauvoir engaged in couplings more akin to love affairs, both male and female, although these affairs often involved students under the age of legal consent.

The Second World War divided the couple and created a crisis in their lives.  Sartre worked through issues of courage and cowardice, seeming to embrace his role in the military while Beauvoir at home became passionate about history and current events.  In these pages, and indeed throughout, it is clear Seymour-Jones considers Beauvoir the better philosopher, the more talented writer.  She recounts how Beauvoir won the top prize for her school work with Sartre coming in second.  Arguably, her work, especially The Second Sex (Vintage, 2011), written during the war, remains an influential and important treatise in the feminist tradition.  Often in the biography, she suffers under the shadow of Sartre, and this led to her coming into her own as a feminist and refusing to live the traditional life of a woman at the time—getting married, having children, supporting her man by cooking and cleaning.  She yearned to free herself from being simply the fairer sex.  It is she who believed that every first penetration of a woman is rape, a startling idea in a time of continuing oppression of women.  Seymour-Jones also recounts how she was raped and abused in a one night stand with novelist Arthur Koestler.  Throughout her life, she had relationships with men and women.  Was she gay, straight or bi-sexual?  Seymour-Jones presents the facts and what Beauvoir, herself, wrote in her journals, much of which was edited before publication.  Beauvoir resists labels in her life and her work.  However, what is clear is that her longer relationships were based in love.

Sartre’s sexual orientation was much more focused.  During the war, he loved being with men but it was never sexual.  Seymour-Jones tells us that “Cheek by jowl with his fellow soldiers, he was happy ‘hemmed in by the human, big guys who shit, wash themselves, snore and smell of man.’”  His assertions were intriguing, if enigmatic.  He relished his masculinity and dominance over his multitude of women.  One could say he had a “little man’s complex,” compensating for his diminutive stature, wall eye, and ugliness with hyper-sexuality and conquest.

Both writers had hygiene issues:  Beauvoir often had a hint of body odor, according to Seymour-Jones.  Sartre is described, in his younger years, as having blackheads and bad skin.  During the war, he refused to bathe and had lice.  Once back, he was often unwashed.  This lack of hygiene also extended to the female lovers they shared sexually.  One, Bianca Bienenfeld, had a fecal odor about her.  Beauvoir designated these female shared-lovers as “unripe fruit.”  It was a competition between Beauvoir and Sartre to pick them at just the right time.  Many of these acolytes were traumatized by the two and often left “the family” to have psychiatric breakdowns and episodes.  They were victimized by sexual predators, that much is clear in Seymour-Jones writing.  It is also clear that this abuse was dark, evil, and manipulative.  The sexual congresses were rapid fire and numerous—ménage a trois, three-in-a-bed, orgies, one-night-stands.  Beauvoir and Sartre were hunters and their students, prey.  At times, Beauvoir might be said to pimp out students for Sartre’s sexual proclivities.  It is not a good look for either.

Many of Sartre’s issues seemed to stem from early incestuous thoughts about his mother and his fear of being a coward, especially during the war.  He had a hero complex.  The dangerous thing, though, was his gullibility.  It is a forgone conclusion from Seymour-Jones’ research that he was a collaborator with the Vichy government, and after the war, he was easily seduced by the Russian Communists.  His conduct during and after the war haunted him.  The old defense of just doing what was necessary to survive does not hold up here.  Seymour-Jones states that French writers, including Sartre, practiced effective self-censorship; the French culture continued to flourish during the occupation—new books were published and the theatre, a community Sartre was a part of, drew crowds.  The Germans bragged about this, and included these achievements with “La collaboration horizontal,” the number of French women who sexually accommodated German soldiers.  These unions, whether by rape, prostitution or consent, produced up to 200,000 babies.

The hardships of war impacted the couple.  They worked in the cafes for heat, and often stayed all day and into the evening.  They ate spoiled food and maggoty meat and butter.  Sartre looked in the street for cigarette butts to stoke his pipe with tobacco.  Times were bleak.  Death stalked the country, and people feared they would be sent to the camps or rounded up in the middle of the night for some act of defiance, or even the rumor of such acts.  Sartre became resigned to death—it was simply a part of life.  “It made no difference whether one died at nineteen or eighty,” he wrote.  This as people were shipped off to concentration camps never to be heard from again.

A lot of time during the war and after, Sartre competed against Albert Camus.  He never let the author of The Stranger (Vintage, 1989), forget that he was a journalist and not a philosopher like Sartre himself.  Camus could not keep up with the blistering pace of creation that Sartre maintained.  Little did he know that Sartre was a life-long user of amphetamines to increase his production.  He took orthedrine as well as corydrane, the latter being a concoction of fifty milligrams of aspirin with 144 milligrams of speed.  It made him more productive but with major consequences for Sartre’s health.  His skyrocketing blood pressure assured him of a cardio-vascular incident and he suffered several strokes toward the end of his life.

Beauvoir found herself at the center of the fight for women’s rights.  She faced a backlash for her writing about motherhood, namely that she considered the fetus in the womb a parasite in a woman’s body.  Critics, mainly male, claimed she had no right to her views since she had never become pregnant or given birth.  She also believed in the right to an abortion for women with an unwanted pregnancy.  Illegal at the time, this was a dangerous, often deadly procedure performed in home or at a secret location often lacking the proper medical resources in case of an emergency.  However, she is considered one of the heroes of feminism, a celebrated figure.

Sartre’s legacy came with a price.  He collaborated with the Germans during the war, and he collaborated with the Russians after.  He was susceptible to manipulation, mainly because of his outsized ego.  He simply refused to see the murderous regime of Stalin even when the evidence became clear.  All the while, he continued his self-destructive pattern to keep writing:  chewing tablets of corydrane while working all day; four to five sleeping pills to come down at night; black coffee and rich tobacco at all hours; two packets of cigarettes on top of the pipe; and a litre of red wine with lunch.  Seymour-Jones calls this a “chemical rollercoaster” with horrific consequences.  His blood pressure hovered in the most dangerous range for a stroke.  He continued his intensive work schedule while also collecting women even after he became blind and sexually dysfunctional.  He began seeing the “family members” as “patients” in need of his psycho-analytical skills.  He fancied himself an intellectual descendent of Freud.

As the end of their lives approached, each writer had a different view of death.  Beauvoir feared the blackness on the other side.  She believed her only defense against this void was to seize life.  If one lived life to its fullest, death would retreat.  Sartre believed death was a part of life, and that man must suffer.  Death is a part of that suffering.  Sartre’s health problems were cause for intense suffering, but he kept on.  Late in life, he actually wanted to adopt one of his young lovers as his daughter.  Seymour-Jones portrays this as Sartre finally fulfilling a reverse of his incest fantasy from his childhood.  He seemed not to have any remorse for what he did to the women who dallied with him.  Towards the end, Beauvoir recognized how their victims were scarred by the two.  Indeed, Beauvoir had adult relationships with men, namely the writer Nelson Algren.  This does not excuse her behavior with Sartre, but it does, in Seymour-Jones’ telling, make her a little more sympathetic as a character.  She seemed to recognize that their victims felt “used and thrown away like a worn glove.”  Beauvoir took Existentialism in another direction from Sartre.  For her and for women, it was a way forward to freedom and self-realization.  This made her an inspiring figure in the feminist movement, but Seymour-Jones does engage in a bit of hagiography.  She recounts how “women reached out as she passed and touched the hem of her skirt:  she carried the aura of royalty, the sanctity and mystique of Mother Teresa.”  Sainthood is not for Beauvoir, but was Sartre an embodiment of evil?  At the end of his life, he was just a disabled, blind, confused old man.  Strokes took a major toll on his mind and body, with the worsening of his diabetes and skyrocketing blood pressure.

Beauvoir was haunted by the public’s demand for her to admit her lesbianism, or at the very least, her bi-sexuality.  She remained elliptical and circumspect about the subject, however, she did give an interview at the end of her life that Seymour-Jones recounts.  In it, she says about women that “They are more attractive, softer, their skin is nicer.  And generally, they have more charm.  It is quite often the case with the usual married couple, that the woman is nicer, more lively, more attractive, more amusing, even on an intellectual level.”  What she says here might be true of her and Sartre.  It might be true of all couples.  However, considering the source, and the 500 pages of biography compiled by Carole Seymour-Jones, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were anything but conventional.  Theirs was indeed a dangerous and destructive liaison, at least for their students upon whom they preyed.  And that overshadows everything else.