Love Hurts

Simone de Beauvoir came to the United States for the first time in the winter of 1947 (the trip is described in her book “America Day by Day”). Passing through Chicago on her way to California, having been given his number by a casual acquaintance, she called Nelson Algren--left-leaning, working-class, tough-guy American writer--and spent an evening with him touring the city’s low-life neighborhoods, at the end of which they fell into bed. Weeks later, on her way back east, she stopped again in Chicago. This time, to their mutual astonishment, passion flared between them and, on the strength of it, they declared themselves in love. They spent her last month in the States together and, as she got on the plane to Paris, assured one another that the feeling between them was extraordinary and would never die.

The letters began--one a day from her--letters that fed the fever and kept their mutual devotion intact for 18 months. Then came the first break between them, brought on by Algren’s mean and moody announcement that the situation was becoming intolerable, and he thought he wanted out. “It’s different for you,” he wrote in the spring of 1949. “You’ve got Sartre and a settled way of life, people, and a vital interest in ideas. You live in the heart of the world of French culture. . . . I lead a sterile existence centered exclusively on myself; and I’m not at all happy about it. I’m stuck here, as I told you. . . . But it leaves me almost no one to talk to. . . . Last year I would have been afraid of spoiling something by not being faithful to you. Now I know that was foolish, because no arms are warm when they’re on the other side of the ocean . . . life is too short and too cold for me to reject all warmth for so many months.”

This letter was the beginning of an end that, remarkably enough, took 15 years to accomplish itself. Despite an onslaught of humiliating disaffections brought on by a passion that was erotic in nature and doomed to fail, if for no other reason than that each of the lovers was a writer entrenched in a culture the other one could not enter, the connection between them stayed open, coming to a truly dreadful close only with the American publication in 1965 of de Beauvoir’s memoir, “Force of Circumstance,” and Algren’s bitter denunciation of her in countless interviews published on both sides of the Atlantic.

The affair had come as revelation for de Beauvoir. With Algren, as she said, heart, soul and flesh were one. She was alive in her senses as never before. It was the kind of feeling for which most people gladly “give up everything.” But Simone de Beauvoir was not most people.

The letters, written in English, are amazing, both for the articulateness de Beauvoir achieves in a language she’s not fluent in and for the rich, textured balance they strike throughout the years, never once hitting a false or mean note. It’s all there from the very beginning. These early letters are filled--and I mean filled--with a besotted pastiche of “I love you I love you, I kiss you I kiss you, I can’t believe you’re mine I can’t believe you’re mine” that, inevitably, is followed by an account of her daily doings--marvelous pictures of Paris after the war, people thronging the streets hungry for talk, music, drink, the bars and cafes jammed morning noon and night, de Beauvoir and Sartre out there with their friends, doing it nonstop like everyone else--and then leading easily into some discussion of her intellectual life (what she and Sartre are writing, thinking, doing) intermixed throughout with a running commentary on books read, movies seen, encounters with neighbors, friends and relatives. Here’s a sampler taken from the letters of 1947-49:

“Now it is midnight and I am dead tired but I must write to you to say, ‘I love you so much’. It is strange how quickly I understand you and you understand me, it is one of the most precious things in our love, this understanding.”

“I was very busy today. At noon, these socialist guys of whom I spoke to you came with a big car and took us to the country, Merleau-Ponty [one of the leaders of Les Tempes Modernes], Sartre and myself. We had a lunch and we spoke about a possible connexion between existentialism and socialism. I don’t hope much, because this Socialist party is very corny, very old and weak, yet, it is the only chance [for mediation between the Communist Party and the right-wing movement]. So we have to try something with them and we shall do it.”

“I cannot help nevertheless to cry madly this evening, because I was so happy with you, I loved you so much, and you are far away. . . .”

“Well, yesterday I worked in the cafe des Deux Magots and [Arthur] Koestler came to see me. What I did not tell you is that I happened last year to sleep with Koestler one night [before she and Algren met]; it was rather strange because we were attracted by each other, but in the same time there were ‘political discrepancies.’ He thought I was not anticommunist enough. I do not care for such differences, but he does and so he was very challenging, and I hate challenge, chiefly in sexual business; so it never happened any more.”

“I was a bit sad yesterday. In a magazine a huge article about Sartre saying I was married with Sartre since six months, which is untrue, that I was good-looking and talented but, indeed, in the sense of unkind, hard, without a heart; and on the picture I was not ugly, but very grave, and hard-looking indeed. I thought of this face of me you know and like, always happy and laughing at you, and loving you and missing you.”

“Now I guess you would be rather angry with the May-June issue of Politics: that is about [Henry] Wallace and very harsh with him. The man, Dwight Macdonald, who is one of these left-wing people always more left than anyone else, and going more left, and as the world is always turning, comes to the right wing.”

“Oh! I feel mad tonight. Nelson, my beloved lover, I am so stern and dry and old when I no longer dare to enjoy my love for you. Your letter gave me back my own heart and all the sweet memories of this sweet faraway and closest time.”

“This afternoon I went and saw ‘Kiss of Death’ with Victor Mature, and it seemed to me a regular masterpiece, the best Hollywood picture I saw for years. I could hardly breathe from beginning to end. Did you see it? If not, go on your knees, if necessary, and see it.”

And so on and on, for the next 15 years, throughout breakup and betrayal, travels with Sartre, two more visits taken by herself to the States, two by Algren to Europe--and an astonishing amount of her own writing. They are the letters of an educated woman very much out in the world written to a talented autodidact living mainly inside his own head. But in some odd way--and this is exciting--an equalizing strain runs through them. It is as though they both think they’re doing much the same thing--she as part of a famous intellectual circle in a great world capital, he as a lonely and compulsive tourist among the underclass of a Midwestern American city. The thing they’re both doing is making existential drama out of the materials close to hand. Clearly, this is an urgency that stirs them equally, the thing that each most appreciates in the other; the thing that got converted into sexual emotion and kept them attracted throughout the years. In the end, of course, it proved an insufficient influence, because neither of them could ever organize a life around sensual experience. Not he, not she. The key to existence for each of them lay elsewhere.

In September 1947 (just months into the affair), Algren asks her to marry him and move to Chicago. Reluctantly, she refuses and explains: “The reason I do not stay in Chicago is just this need I always felt in me to work and give my life a meaning by working. You have the same need, and that is one of the reasons for which we understand each other so well. You want to write books, good books. . . . I want it too. I want to convey to people the way of thinking which is mine and which I believe true. I should give up travels and all kinds of entertainments. I should give up friends and the sweetness of Paris to be able to remain forever with you; but I could not live just for happiness and love, I could not give up writing and working in the only place where my writing and work may have a meaning.”

One way or another she repeated these words a number of times over the years, and when she did, she seemed often to be saying, “Give up Paris? Give up French? Give up Sartre?” Her severest critics pounce on this construction, as though it is proof that the most famous feminist of the century was, finally, just another woman in thrall to the Great Man. I find this reading appalling. What is true is that it’s hard to pull those sentences apart. For her, I think, they actually were of a piece. Taken together, they did mean a definition of self that turned on work.

They were not good people, neither she nor Sartre--ruthlessly self-absorbed, sexual predators, always needing to exert power over those within their orbit--but they were passionate about the life of the mind, and for each of them, writing was a religion. Whatever else Sartre did to her or for her, the association with him was irrevocably bound up with the idea of work. Indeed, his presence in her life was iconic, and she seemed often to be worshiping the man himself. But I don’t believe she was. Crudely put, in a bid for independence on the part of a woman born in 1908, devotion to one man promised joy of the body, devotion to another man joy of the mind. That was the best she could do. She made her necessary--her distinctive--choice.

And it seems to me it stood her in infinitely better stead to hold work rather than love as a first value. It made her a better human being (the same cannot be said for Algren, a thin-skinned man, easily humiliated, capable in his neediness of cruel and reckless raging). In these letters, de Beauvoir never whines, pleads, threatens or insults; no matter what is happening between them, the letters open with love and close with warmth. Out of them can be intuited the woman who applied herself to the task of researching and writing a report on the condition of her own sex with so much passionate steadiness that she transformed a polemic into one of the great books of the century.