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.
