Sex and the single scholars

“TeTE-a-Tete,” Hazel Rowley’s compulsively readable account of the lifelong relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86), is the surprise page-turner of the season. Their sexual high jinks make the stuff of tabloids seem tame and conventional by comparison. As Rowley states at the outset, her book is neither a full-scale biography of the two most famous French writers and existentialists of the 20th century nor a study of their work. It is, rather, “the story of a relationship ... certainly a great story.” How right she is.

Sartre and De Beauvoir met in 1929 in Paris as students studying for their philosophy teaching exams. He was 24 and she was 21. They quickly recognized each other as soul mates and became lovers shortly after he placed first and she took second in the prestigious national exams. She was lovely and brilliant and worked so hard that she soon earned the nickname that Sartre and their circle called her for life: the Beaver (Le castor in French, though the English word made a better play on her surname). Sartre, according to Rowley, was “cruelly short” and homely; writer Arthur Koestler described him as “a malevolent goblin or gargoyle.” But he was funny, vibrantly smart and charismatic, especially to women.

Largely at Sartre’s impetus, the couple made a pact that freed them to have other relationships while recognizing that theirs would remain primary. They would achieve this through full disclosure to each other, which they termed “transparency.” Rowley explains that both considered it “ ‘bad faith’ to look to another, whether a human being or a god, for a sense of salvation.”

Neither De Beauvoir nor Sartre wanted children, although each legally adopted an acolyte late in life. De Beauvoir’s heir and literary executor, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, was helpful to Rowley; Arlette Elkaim-Sartre has been a repeated roadblock to Sartre scholars. In fact, her prohibitions against publishing Sartre’s letters have necessitated a second, less inclusive European edition of this book, where fair-use laws are stricter than in North America. In her otherwise remarkably evenhanded account, Rowley reveals her vexation with Elkaim-Sartre, quoting with gusto unflattering comments made about her by various members of Sartre’s circle.

Sartre and De Beauvoir each read every word the other wrote throughout the five decades of their relationship, spent two months of exclusive tete-a-tete time abroad every summer and worked together most afternoons when they were in Paris. They never lived together but often resided in the same threadbare hotels. Neither was the least bit domestic or materialistic.

When they were apart, they wrote each other long, intimate letters almost daily -- often about their “contingent” relationships. As Rowley astutely notes, “Turning life into narrative was perhaps their most voluptuous pleasure.” When their letters were published posthumously, many of their lovers were aghast at the intimacies betrayed. Although Sartre advocated transparency, he lied to many -- including De Beauvoir -- adopting what he called a provisional “temporary morality” when it was expedient.

Sartre and De Beauvoir’s open relationship worked better in theory than in practice. At least initially, De Beauvoir probably would have preferred monogamy. She suffered great paroxysms of jealousy and loneliness throughout her life, which she tried to assuage with attachments to adoring young female students and several men, including writer Nelson Algren and documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who was 17 years her junior.

Sartre apparently was a somewhat indifferent lover, preferring, by his own admission in a frank interview, to follow the initial conquest with cuddling rather than copulation. With time, De Beauvoir recognized that her physical needs were better met elsewhere. Within 10 years, their sexual relationship was over.

Although she always publicly denied lesbian leanings, De Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre reveal otherwise. Often, young women with whom De Beauvoir slept would later have affairs with Sartre, or with De Beauvoir’s other male lovers -- sometimes carrying on multiple liaisons simultaneously. Oh, what a tangled web they wove. Rowley keeps the overlapping triangles straight with the deftness of a geometer. Much of it is eyebrow-raising. And much of it, to the horror of those concerned, made its way into De Beauvoir’s memoirs and novels, including “She Came to Stay” and “The Mandarins.”

Bizarrely, Sartre ended up supporting for life many of the unstable young women he had seduced, adding them to “the family.” He wrote plays, including “No Exit” and “Dirty Hands,” with roles for several of them, the only parts they would ever land. And he continued to slot them into his packed schedule for an hour or two a week and a week or two every summer, calling himself “the district nurse” when he made his rounds. If this was free love, it did not come without costs. Sartre, Rowley notes, “felt beholden to his women for loving him.”

Several times, both De Beauvoir and Sartre considered marrying other people, but without relinquishing their intimacy with each other. In each case, the lover in question objected to sharing them.

Is “Tete-a-Tete” just highbrow gossip? With her use of well-chosen quotations from letters, memoirs, novels, essays and interviews, Rowley captures not just her subjects’ sexual shenanigans but also their voices, their unflagging work ethic and their drive to unfetter mankind from self-imposed limitations. An admiring but balanced portrait emerges of activist intellectuals determined to practice the freedom they preached. Rowley summarizes their ideas with impressive clarity and brevity. She also points out unsavory or misguided aspects of their behavior, such as Sartre’s heartless descriptions of taking a lover’s virginity or his long support of Stalinist communism.

Not surprisingly, given his complicated love life, one of Sartre’s central arguments in his philosophical treatise, “Being and Nothingness,” is that “relations with other people always involve conflict.” Love, he wrote, is “a battle in which two free subjects each try to get hold of the other’s freedom while at the same time trying to free themselves from the hold of the other.”

De Beauvoir was never free of Sartre’s hold. Although the author of “The Second Sex” became a feminist role model of the independent woman, she remained unshakably attached to her stimulating companion, even through his sometimes careless treatment of her and his dismaying physical decline. She lived in dread of being left behind and of “the metaphysical void.” The picture Rowley evokes of De Beauvoir “clutching a rose, weeping her heart out” at Sartre’s burial is deeply moving -- as is this fascinating study of a passion that transcended convention. *