Interview: Hazel Rowley, author of a forthcoming book about the long partnership of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, talks to Belinda McKeon in New York
As a young PhD student living in France, Hazel Rowley wrote to the woman who was, for her, more than a dissertation topic, more than a figure in the history of philosophy and the feminist movement. For Rowley, Australian-born but educated in Europe, Simone de Beauvior was nothing short of an icon. It was the summer of 1976, and the months went by without a reply. It was the era when post was delivered more than once a day, and Rowley would cycle home from university every morning and afternoon, "just in case, just in case", she remembers with a smile. "And then I gave up; she wasn't going to write. And then I got this handwritten letter, and I almost threw it out, because the handwriting was so appalling. It took me a long time, but I worked out that it was from Simone de Beauvoir, on this square notepaper - she never typed - and she said she'd been in Rome for the summer, and that she would see me in November for an hour at 12 o'clock." Beauvoir, then 68, was preoccupied both with her work and with the task of caring for her long-term companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, who had been left blind, helpless and depressed by a series of strokes. She was seeing very few people; requests for meetings from other thinkers, including fellow philosopher-author Iris Murdoch, were turned down. Rowley knew she had been granted a rare audience.
When Rowley turned up at Beauvoir's apartment in the Rue Schoelcher, opposite the Montparnasse cemetery, her subject was not happy. She was depressed about Sartre; she was pressed for time; and, she insisted her time had been wasted by Rowley, who had come an hour late. "Which wasn't true," Rowley shakes her head at the memory, "because I'd checked the letter again and again, and it was the last thing I would do. For an hour before the interview I was hanging around on her street corner, waiting for the time. Beauvoir had the most amazing relationship with time - everybody says this, that she lived by the clock, and so did Sartre; you had your appointment and then you moved on, she was going to lunch with somebody or she was seeing the next person - so the fact that she thought I was late made her answers to my questions very automatic, like a sort of cannon pistol, which was very disappointing for me."
Rowley found Beauvoir so attached to her own myth that she resisted any hint of real interrogation. "I asked her burning questions, like was she ever jealous about Sartre's other lovers, did this arrangement with Sartre have any problems, about double standards for men and women, and she said never, none, that there were no problems. I don't suppose she was going to sit down and exactly have a fireside chat with me, a complete stranger. But nevertheless I strongly sensed that she was polishing up her image and not really telling much."
And then it was over, and Rowley was ushered out the door, out to face the cemetery across the street where, within 10 years, both Beauvoir and Sartre would be laid to rest. But in her mind, time was not up. There was too much of the story yet to be heard, yet to be told. The story, as it emerges in her superb new book, Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, is an utterly compelling one.
American readers may get a fuller glimpse of the lives Rowley reveals than their European counterparts - two separate editions of the book, one for either side of the Atlantic, had to be published after Sartre's executor, his adopted daughter Arlette Elkaim, refused to grant copyright for quotations from, or overt references to, his letters to several lovers. American copywright law being somewhat more permissive, those elements are included in the US edition, but the European edition will lack them. However, says Rowley, the controversy which has blown up around the affair concerns a matter, ultimately, of only a few lines here and there, and the spirit of the book has not been lost.
Many biographers before Rowley have taken on the lives of these thinkers, the highs and lows of their relationship - the "pact" they made as young lovers, in which they vowed to be one another's "essential" loves, while enjoying the freedom to take as many other "contingent" loves as they wished - and the thrills and trials of their extraordinary careers as writers and philosophers. But where Rowley strides ahead is in her understanding and communication of the voices, the inner lives, the conversations of the 20th century's great intellectual couple. Much of the material was unearthed in Paris, where Rowley moved for almost two years so that she could devote more time to the challenging task of getting information and access from Beauvoir's literary executor, her adopted daughter Sylvie Le Bon Beauvoir, and this marriage of setting and subject shows.
The reader of Rowley's book has the impression not so much of reading, or of finding information, as of hearing, of listening in. To read her prose, both weighty and sinuous, is to become as absorbed in these lives as though their dramas and their dilemmas, their triumphs and their disappointments, were unfolding at the next table in a Parisian cafe. "I tried to keep it as lively and as slangy as possible," says Rowley."They swore a lot, their French was very youthful, and I tried to render it in English."
Even those who thought they had heard all from the couple, who thought they had known them, were stunned by the details contained in the correspondence of Sartre and Beauvoir, published a few years after their deaths; the true extent of the deception and duplicity they had lived was far greater than anyone - acquaintances and academics alike - had ever suspected. Reponsibility, transparency, and truth had been the rallying calls of this couple's life, yet they lied compulsively to those around them, to the young women they took - and often shared - as lovers, to the young men who were lovers to these young women and sometimes to Beauvoir, to the people they professed to love and frequently (in Sartre's case) promised to marry. To each other, though, they told everything, and the letters came as a shock, Rowley remembers, for two reasons. "We reeled. Because we felt we'd been conned, just like the lovers had been conned. I mean, firstly, Beauvoir had spent her life saying she'd never had an affair with a woman, and there she was . . . and then the way Sartre talked about the girlfriends was really quite unpleasant sometimes, I mean, he was something of a sadist, and you read these letters to Beauvoir where he describes in clinical detail taking somebody's virginity."
Rowley, unlike some commentators, is intrigued rather than outraged at Beauvoir's decision to hide her bisexuality as she wrote her memoirs. "I think what came into play for her, finally . . . homophobia is too strong a word . . . but she definitely likes to portray herself as a man's woman." The memoirs, Rowley believes, were Beauvoir's way of telling the world, telling Sartre's other lovers, and telling herself that, despite all the hurt he caused her - with his intense and prolonged love affairs with other women, with the letters in which he described his lovemaking with mistresses, with the times he cancelled holidays and meetings to spend time with someone else - that she was his priority. "That she was the real thing, and all the others were in the background," says Rowley.
Beauvoir had her lovers too, of course - most notably the American novelist Nelson Algren, with whom she was intimate for decades - but she did not flaunt them in the same way that Sartre did, and she seems to have felt the strain of their arrangement far more sorely than did he. If Rowley does not shirk from presenting the vulnerable side of Beauvoir, however - a woman who weeps often, who dreads death and the loss of love - neither does she portray de Beauvoir, even momentarily, as a victim. She is sharp, focused, determined - and, as Rowley discovered upon meeting her in 1976, deeply concerned with how she appears to others. "She wanted us to model our lives on her," says Rowley. "And she gave us very strict guidelines. Better not to be married, maternity is a danger; be a writer, ideally; think, travel, read a lot, ask questions, have affairs, be alive, live life to the full. Well, it was a fantastic message, and to realise that the person who'd been this wonderful model had told you lies was difficult." But hardly insurmountable.
"There was enough in the letters to still inspire me, and I'll tell you what inspires me: the fact that they were writers to the core. And the way they turned life into stories . . . ultimately, that's inspiring."
The news that Harold Pinter had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature put Rowley, she says, in mind of the fearlessness with which Sartre and Beauvoir spoke out, just like Pinter, on political injustice and on the turn of events - Vietnam and the McCarthy era - in the US, a country they both adored upon their first visits there in the 1940s. "They were committed public intellectuals, they spoke out, believed in telling the truth, in debunking myths. During the Algerian war, their lives were at risk. And they frequently risked arrest. Not to mention all the nastiness Beauvoir had to endure after publication of The Second Sex."
Sex, lies and coffee cups offer the scandal that every biographer craves, but for Rowley, there was so much more to these figures. "I don't know anybody who worked harder than them," she says. "And I don't know anybody who left more of a legacy to the world. I mean, all the sex and the deception . . . well, that was after-hours." She laughs. "That was after an incredibly hard day's work!"
Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, by Hazel Rowley, is published by HarperCollins ($26.95 in the US). It will be published in the UK by Chatto & Windus in January