Letters to Sartre

  Copyright © 1990, 2011 by Editions Gallimard

  Introduction copyright © 1991, 2011 by Quintin Hoare

  English translation copyright © 1991, 2011 by Quintin Hoare

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  Originally published in France under the title Lettres a Sartre

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-498-7

  Contents

  Introduction — Quintin Hoare

  Preface to the French Edition — Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir

  LETTERS

  January 1930 —July 1939 Before the War

  September 1939 — March 1940 The Phoney War

  July 1940 — March 1941 Sartre Prisoner

  July 1943 — February 1946 Before Liberation and After

  January 1947 — October 1951 America

  June 1953 — July 1963 Later Interludes

  INTRODUCTION

  Simone de Beauvoir (born 1908, died 1986) was for the last four decades of her life — indeed is stilly after her death — not just one of the most famous women of the age, but also one of the most public. Six autobiographical works were published in her lifetime (four volumes of memoirs, and her accounts of her mother’s and Sartre’s deaths). Innumerable interviews covered all her various personae: existentialist philosopher; prize-winning novelist; courageous political campaigner; pioneer theorist and role-model for the women’s movement internationally; Sartre’s lifelong companion — in that notorious ‘morganatic union’ allowing contingent loves. A vast secondary literature, in many languages, has been devoted to her life and works. All this taken together might lead one to believe that everything had already been told and retold, so De Beauvoir could now go gentle into the good night of easy oblivion that so often swallows up public figures for a while after their physical demise. It has turned out, however, that nothing could be farther from the truth.

  Within two years of her death, De Beauvoir was once again at the vortex of a controversial maelstrom, investing the central core of her entire public being — her very integrity, as a valid inspiration to successive generations of women pursuing the elusive grail of equality and freedom (and, of course, to men identifying with those goals). What unleashed the maelstrom? It was the publication of her correspondence with Sartre, translated in the present volume. This revealed what a very partial segment of the human truth had, in reality, ever been disclosed, in all that welter of biographical and autobiographical coverage. It also demonstrated the radical incompatibility of her and Sartre’s whole conception of free human relations — as they actually lived it — with the somewhat rose-tinted, soft-edged public image she had herself at times helped to create.

  Of course, it had long been manifest that De Beauvoir’s own account of her life had been ruthlessly censored, pruned and sanitized to present the public facade she deemed fitting. People important in her life or Sartre’s had been concealed behind one, two, three, even four successive pseudonyms. Friends’ susceptibilities and Sartre’s good name had alike been jealously protected. What was much more of a surprise was how successful she had been in taming any too impertinently intrusive lines of enquiry on the part of her biographers. Taking them into her apparent confidence — admitting them to the privilege of her friendship, adroitly burdening them with gratitude — she blithely misled them as she pleased, making even the best of them into unwitting hagiographers. Outsmarted, they underestimated her toughness and savvy — and turned the old iconoclast into a benign totem. How she must have chuckled into her whisky, on evenings after their earnest visits!

  What provoked the outraged reaction of so many to the posthumous publication of these letters? At least three strands converged here. First, traditional sexism: eager for revenge on the woman who, more than anyone else, had come to symbolize the whole 20th-century assault on male privilege and masculinist values; newly emboldened, in the late-eighties climate of modish, cynical ‘post-every thing’. Secondly (overlapping with the first), ideological Reaction: the posturing apostles of intellectual yuppiedom who — back in the seventies, under the banner of the marvellously misnamed ‘new philosophy’ — had emerged to challenge the long dominance in Paris of the Left intelligentsia of which De Beauvoir had been such a central figure. But these two categories of detractor were predictable. More significant was a third strand made up of former or still-would-be sympathizers, who now felt De Beauvoir had revealed herself in her letters to be dismayingly other than the idealized image of her they had so long been nurturing.

  What kind of letters are these, then? Described banally, they trace the gaps in the joint existence of De Beauvoir and Sartre — so rarely separated for any length of time. By far the longest such separation was imposed by the Second World War, with Sartre’s mobilization and subsequent imprisonment; it is thus from this period that the largest number of surviving letters — a daily correspondence — date. A second large batch were written during the lengthy stays De Beauvoir made in the United States between 1947 and 1951, especially after her passionate affair began with Nelson Algren. Apart from these (and the year Sartre spent in Berlin in 1933-4, from which regrettably no letters survive), De Beauvoir and Sartre were parted — hence, corresponded — mainly during separate holidays. At all such times, the letters of each provided the other with the ‘everyday dust of life’ of which Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir speaks below — the news, the gossip, the progress-reports on work, the passing reflections, the daily moods, fears, hopes — thus maintaining the continuity of a shared life that extended over almost half a century.

  But beyond this banal description, De Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre have two other, more dramatic, dimensions: they are love letters (from first to last), and they are concurrently the unsparing account of those other — ‘contingent’ — loves allowed for in her pact with Sartre. In the war years at the centre of this volume, De Beauvoir is settling down into a long friendship with her former lover Olga Kosakiewitch, detaching herself from her most recent lover Bianca Bienenfeld, edging towards a new loving relationship with Natalie Sorokine, pursuing an intermittent affair with Olga’s partner and future husband Jacques-Laurent Bost. Meanwhile Sartre — by letter — is sustaining a passionate affair with Olga’s sister Wanda, likewise detaching himself from Bianca with whom he had had a whirlwind prewar fling, and negotiating tortuously with other recent ephemeral lovers. All this complex web of interlocking liaisons is recorded, analysed, agonized over, smiled at, on a daily basis by the central couple — whose exchanges are thus love letters of a radically unconforming kind. It is this, above all — the hint of voyeurism, the whiff at times of Valmont and Mme de Merteuil — which some readers have found disconcerting.

  But how misguided. For it is precisely this blazing, disconcerting truthfulness that forms the bedrock of De Beauvoir’s lifelong passionate relationship with Sartre, giving it its radical edge. In this sense, sexual freedom for them had as muc
h — indeed ultimately far more — to do with freeing a marriage (albeit a morganatic one!) from sex as with freeing sex from the ties of marriage. Love and ethics themselves were being redefined, not just mores. The modernist creation that is pehaps how best to view their union — embedded in its time, yet possessing a durable charge; seminal, yet never to be repeated — was, like Ulysses or The Bride Stripped Bare’, always going to remain a hard bite to swallow, digest or, of course, spit out. De Beauvoir herself is a validly heroic figure, not as some kind of bloodless image d’Epinal, but for the specific way she resolved (while assuming) her human contradictions — in her life as well as in her work. For she always remained the dutiful daughter as she rebelled, the matriarch of the Family as she theorized the supersession of the traditional family, the puritan as she broke taboos, the loyal friend as she ‘deceived’, the apolitical woman refusing to read newspapers as — into her old age — she took to the streets and challenged the law, the observer of formalities as she gave rein to her emotions: strong as she was weak, and weak as she was strong. Above all, of course, she stepped back from the ordinary human realities of her own existence — love and passion (straight or gay), frustration, disappointment, frigidity, jealousy, fear, anger, hope, wish, dream — and produced a work which stands and will stand as the baseline of all aspirations for equality between the sexes in the modern world,

  The selection of De Beauvoir’s letters translated here represents some two thirds of the French edition published in 1990, It was easy to omit a number of letters included there, which were addressed not to Sartre but to ‘Toulouse’ (see note 63 below) and recuperated after her tragic death. It also seemed preferable to leave out material overlapping with De Beauvoir’s autobiographical volumes or, in particular, her book on the United States. Other cuts were harder to make, but the overriding aim was to produce a shortened version as close as possible to the original in terms of both tone and content. To leave the overall balance as little changed as possible, while preserving the essential exchange with Sartre — as well as all discussion of De Beauvoir’s own or Sartre’s work; everything touching on their mutual relations, her relationship with Algren, or their respective more contingent or ephemeral liaisons with others; her reflections on the War or politics; and everything likely to be of specific interest to feminists. I have further sought to do all this without altering the quotidian (often literally) and sometimes mundane character of letters crammed with details of books read, films seen, cafes frequented, friends encountered, parties attended, or natural beauties admired.

  The translation itself requires little comment, except perhaps for the endearments and salutations exchanged by De Beauvoir and Sartre. Nothing in English can convey, of course, the idiosyncratic flavour of a mode of address between them that always maintained the formal vous (in speech and writing alike). Nor, for example, the sheer perversity of the ungrammatical vous autre — inadequately rendered here as ‘your-self. I have attempted to compensate for the loss of these untranslatable features of De Beauvoir’s style by elsewhere preserving — more than I should otherwise have done — forms of address striking an unfamiliar note in English. I have also kept the obsessively repeated use of the adjective little’ — so characteristic that it has been the subject of scholarly exegesis! Finally, in explanation of my preference for the translated form of De Beauvoir’s nickname le Castor, I shall just quote the passage from her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter where she explains its origin: ‘One day he [René Maheu] wrote on my exercise-book, in large capital letters: BEAUVOIR = BEAVER. “You are a beaver,” he said. “Beavers like company and they have a constructive bent”.’

  Quintin Hoare

  October 1991

  PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION

  When Simone de Beauvoir published the letters Sartre had written her (Lettres au Castor, Paris 1983), her friends were puzzled: ‘How about your own, Beaver?’, they asked. That was my reaction too. I still retain a sharp memory of how my pleasure in reading them was tinged with frustration: ‘How about your own, Beaver?’ We were, of course, suffering primarily from disappointed curiosity: so many allusions, jokes and details remained enigmatic or hung fire. Simone de Beauvoir herself could not always fill in the gaps, or revive that ‘everyday dust of life’ that was the contingent and irreplaceable matter of the letters she wrote to Sartre. But the loss and forgetfulness further affected, at a deeper level, the truth itself of their relationship, interrupting and muddling the correspondence that relayed their ‘sustained conversation’: in other words, their very life. For speaking — speaking to one another — was for them like breathing. At all events, she would always meet enquiries with the same response: ‘My own letters? They’re lost.’ And this is what she believed to the end. In March 1984, a Canadian feminist magazine interviewed her at length:

  ‘— After the appearance of Lettres au Castor, many people wondered why you hadn’t published your replies. We feel the lack of them. Do you intend to do that?

  ‘— No. In the first place, my letters have mostly been lost, because they weren’t in my possession but in Sartre’s. And since there was a bomb attack at his place, lots of his papers were lost. Secondly, I don’t feel that I ought to publish letters of my own during my lifetime. When I’m dead they might perhaps be published, if they can be found.’

  I did find them. One gloomy day in November 1986, while rummaging aimlessly in the depths of a cupboard at her place, I unearthed a massive packet: letters upon letters in her hand, most of them still folded in their envelopes. Addressed to ‘Monsieur Sartre’. It was as unexpected and moving as suddenly discovering a secret chamber in a pyramid explored countless times. She had been mistaken, her letters did exist. A strange mistake for her to have made, but no stranger than the one she had made earlier in connection with Sartre’s letters, likewise supposedly lost. For in The Prime of Life she had written in error, with respect to Sartre’s wartime service at Brumath in 1939: ‘He used to write to me almost every day, but I lost this correspondence during the exodus.’ And a few pages later, about leaving Paris in June 1940: ‘I packed my bags, taking only essentials. I took all Sartre’s letters — I don’t know where or when they were lost.’ Well, the letters in question were the very ones she herself was to publish in 1983. The confusion must assuredly be due to some mix-up with the fate of the earliest letters she had received from Sartre, in 1929 and 1930 while he was doing his military service, which really have vanished, alas!

  Once the manuscripts had been discovered, a major obstacle still frequently impeded my labours: the Beaver’s handwriting. Remarkable for the perverse resistance it puts up against its first duty — that of being legible — it subjects its supplicants to torments and contortions more reminiscent of the decoding of Linear B than of the delights of epistolary communication. Sartre used to complain bitterly about it: ‘Really, my dearest, how badly you do write! It’s almost unreadable . . . Here, for example, is how you write impression: imp . Make sense of that! I think I must read you with the eyes of love, because I never go astray. But to put me even further to the test, you displace letters within the words. This is how you write ‘fear [crains]’: . No matter, I read it all.’ [3 December 1939] Very few words, in fact, have showed a determination superior to my own. I note them as they occur. This correspondence is unexpurgated. Since any reasons that may have justified cuts in 1983 no longer exist, I have made almost none. Is it not, by now, preferable to tell all in order to tell the truth? Through the indisputable power of direct testimony, to set aside cliches, myths, images — all those lies — so that the real person, as she really was, may appear? Simone de Beauvoir used to say that one of her most enduring fantasies involved the conviction that her singular existence, with all its frivolous incidents and the incomparable taste of mortal instants — her entire existence — was recorded somewhere on a giant tape-recorder. These letters, in their own way, form part of that dream of a complete recording. At all events, you can certainly hear her voice in them
, its most fleeting along with its most constant tones: her true, living voice.

  Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir

  LETTERS

  JANUARY 1930 - JULY 1939

  Before the War

  1930

  [91 Place Denfert-Rochereau

  Paris 14]

  Tuesday [6 January 1930]

  My love,

  I’m writing this in bed. Yesterday, I couldn’t have managed it but just slept, with gargling as my sole distraction. I had a very sore throat and even some temperature. My grandmother nursed me with the most tiresome devotion.1 She’d come into my room every couple of minutes, to add a dash of lemon or brandy to tea I’d no desire to drink, since I was sleeping. My mother came by, and was very sweet. My sister came by as well, but too late to mail you the letter, which she must have taken to the post this morning. She took Nizan the article too.2 She told me all the gossip, and I was very pleased with her.

  If one has to be ill, it’s nice to do so just after you’ve left, my dearest love. I’d be sliding from sleep into wakefulness and back, without ever quitting the memories of that miraculous week we spent together. There you were at my side, dearest little man, all tenderness and solicitude — like at That Lady’s last Sunday3 — and as for me, I was brimming over with love for you and happiness. Today I’m fine and my benign feelings persist. I’m still in bed, just to be on the safe side, but I’ve eaten two nice little boiled eggs and some bananas and I feel like reading Rabelais, seeing my sister who’s due to drop in, and playing the convalescent.