Paul Johnson
SLAYING LE MONSTRE SACRE
Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
By Hazel Rowley (Chatto & Windus xxpp £20)

The fuss the French are making about the centenary of Sartre’s birth is a sad commentary on the present state of French letters. It is not for want of money. They spend more state cash per capita on culture than any other country. There are over 3,000 literary prizes to be had every year – and no literature. Sartre was their last world figure of any importance, a monstre sacré in the tradition of Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire and Victor Hugo. So they make the most of his still-recent reverberations. But he has had no successor (any more than Bertrand Russell, a comparable figure, has had in England). Nor is there anyone on the horizon.

The way in which Sartre became world-famous is itself interesting and shows how useful it is for a writer to operate simultaneously in different fields. A schoolteacher, he had made a study of the phenomenalists, and in 1938 published a novel, La Nausée (a good title, thought up by his publishers: Sartre wanted to call it Mélancolie), based on Heidegger’s principles. It was a deliberate attempt to make a splash, but failed. Then he had a good war. It is amazing he was conscripted at all since he had been virtually blind in one eye since the age of four and his sight became progressively worse; towards the end of his life (he died in 1980) he was virtually blind. As it was, he served in the meteorological section at Army Group HQ, where he tossed balloons of hot air into the atmosphere to test which way the wind was blowing. Taken prisoner during France’s ignominious collapse in June 1940, he was released the following March, having been classified as ‘partially blind’. He got a job in the famous Lycée Condorcet teaching philosophy, gave a wide berth to the active Résistance, and concentrated on promoting himself. As he put it later: ‘We have never been so free as we were under the German occupation.’

An only child, spoilt by his adoring mother, Sartre had never been bothered by consideration for other people. He believed to his dying day that he was the centre of the universe. He spent his time writing, effortlessly and at great speed: he was the only person I have ever come across who could regularly produce 10,000 words a day (on occasions as much as 20,000). Perhaps the darkest year of the war, 1943, was his annus mirabilis. He published his philosophical tract, L’Être et le néant, wrote the screenplay of Les Jeux sont faits for Pathé, had his play Les Mouches put on, and helped to found a new review, Les Lettres françaises, which became a key organ for his personal propaganda. The following year his best play, Huis clos, was a smash hit. At the end of the war, when the Communists and the Catholics were slugging it out in competition for the hand of youth, Sartre introduced what came to be called Existentialism as an alternative. It was a doctrine of libertarian individualism, and he popularised it at an amazing meeting at the Salle des Centraux, 8 rue Jean Goujon, on 29 October 1945. There was a great mob of people there, chairs were smashed, women fainted, and huge chunks of Sartre’s lecture were published verbatim in the press.

When I paid my first visit to Paris, as an undergraduate in 1948, I found that everybody talked about him. He was to be seen in the Deux Magots and the Café Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and lunching at the Brasserie Lipp opposite (he had a flat in the nearby Rue Bonaparte), and also in the jazz cellars which then provided the night life of the Quartier Latin. Two of his friends, the singer Juliette Gréco and the trombonist-trumpeter Boris Vian, provided a musical background to the new philosophy of youth, and there were various other props on the Sartre stage, notably the then handsome Simone de Beauvoir, also an author and playwright, and reputed to be the love of his life. In fact they had done philosophy at university together, had become lovers in the early Thirties, and were to have an on–off relationship for the rest of their lives. (De Beauvoir died five years after Sartre, in 1985.)

Both wrote a great deal about themselves, and have been written about perhaps more than their intrinsic interest merits. Hazel Rowley, who has already published a useful life of the black American writer Richard Wright (also to be seen in the Paris of those days), has now added to the hagiography with a romantic and breathless account of their partnership in publicity. Its opening sentence is: ‘Like Abélard and Héloïse, they are buried in a joint grave, their names linked for eternity.’ There is much in the same vein. Thus Chapter Two begins: ‘On October 14, 1929, in that fifth-floor orange-papered room overlooking the plane trees on the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, Beauvoir gave up her virginity.’ If you like that kind of thing, then this is the book for you.

I am not sure, however, that the Sartre–de Beauvoir story is one of the great romances of all time, or a model for emancipated youth today, as Ms Rowley seems to think. Both were tremendous liars. They lied in their autobiographical books and they lied to each other. Their affair was based on a code whereby each was free to have affairs with others provided they confessed them and regaled each other with all the salacious details. They called this ‘transparency’. But in fact both, and especially Sartre, broke the code. He had surreptitious girlfriends, attracted by his notoriety, money and influence in the theatre. De Beauvoir, it seems to me, got the worst of the bargain. She was a proto-feminist, whose book The Second Sex launched the movement on the Continent, but in much of her relationship with Sartre she was an old-fashioned doormat. The final betrayal was Sartre’s determination to leave his copyrights to one of his floozies.

The great love of de Beauvoir’s life was not Sartre but the American novelist Nelson Algren. She would visit him in Chicago. His friend, the photographer Art Shay, took a snapshot of her just after she had emerged from a bath. He wrote: ‘She had taken her bath. It was while she fussed at the sink afterwards that I had the sudden impulse. She knew I took it because she heard the click of my trusty wartime Leica Model F. “Naughty man,” she said.’ Ms Rowley reproduces this photo of de Beauvoir seen nude from the rear, with her rather elegant upper half and sturdy buttocks and legs. I am tempted to say it is the most interesting item in her book. The affair with Algren had a nasty aftermath when de Beauvoir wrote about it, to Algren’s fury.

She also wrote about her brief fling with Arthur Koestler, who is described in her novel Les Mandarins. Of all the Sartre–de Beauvoir oeuvre, this seems to me the most memorable work, giving as it does a vivid period view of how intellectuals thought and behaved in their postwar heyday.

Sartre’s philosophy was never very coherent and means nothing now; his novels are unreadable, in French and still more in English. One or two of his plays may survive. Indeed I would like to see Huis clos revived here so we can see whether it has lasted. He himself ended up rather a pathetic figure, blind, usually drunk, often incontinent, dirty and bewildered – and broke. He was a beneficiary and a victim of the old Paris publishers’ practice of giving favoured authors any money they asked for, then chalking it up on the slate. Sartre’s one real virtue was generosity (he was the only left-wing intellectual I have ever known who was ready with his money), and much of the large sums he earned at the time went into the unworthy hands of sycophants and camp-followers. He had terminal rows with all his male friends who matched him in intellect or talent – Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus and so on. Sartre’s funeral was a grotesque mass celebration, rather like Victor Hugo’s, and equally humbugging. Looking back on it, the whole of his life and fame had something vulgar about it. Perhaps the crowning touch of vulgarity was the decision of the Paris municipality to rename the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés the Place Sartre–Beauvoir.