Letters to Sartre
Tell Michelle that Algren never stops talking admiringly about her. He says she’s the most interesting of all the individuals I’ve introduced him to, and entertains a host of tender little dreams regarding her. He’s helping me collect matchboxes for her, and last Sunday we pillaged all his friends. He’d like her to translate the Chicago book (which I’ll bring back with me) herself.
Goodbye, my dear soul. I’m sure you’re having a good time, but I’d really like to know what you’re writing. As for me, I’ve had a lot of trouble compressing more than 100 pages into 5 pages. Do write to me. I kiss you most tenderly.
Your charming Beaver
Last night there was a sensational storm lasting for hours, and this morning for the first time the weather’s all grey. Yesterday at about 11 the night was truly splendid at the lakeside, with the blast furnaces spitting fire to the heavens and the lights of Chicago in the distance.
[Gary, Indiana]
Wednesday 3 [October 1951]
My dear little soul — I’ve had two letters from you, so you’re in Naples at this moment, or Capri or somewhere. I’m glad the weather’s fine and you’re enjoying writing about the baroque. Thank you for attending to the car,490 I hope that dreadful fellow will look after it for us. I’m the one basically who’s not writing much, but I’ve very few things to tell. The days go by very quickly and repeat one another. There have been big storms here too, but the weather has become magnificent — it’s what they call an Indian summer’. The countryside has all the colours of autumn, yet the weather’s as hot as in August. I sunbathe as I work in the garden, and today we bathed in a lake as blue as the Mediterranean — immense, and absolutely solitary — we feel as if we’re the owners of an ocean. The nights are as warm as the days. I’m working five or six hours every day, without having yet quite finished Sade; but it’s a matter of a day or two now and, after all, it is a very long article. We listen to a bit of good music on the radio; we watch a bit of boxing and a few entertaining programmes on television; I read a bit; we go for a walk by the lakeside in the evening, or a boatride on the lagoon during the day — and our day’s over. I’m in the middle of reading S . . . . Boy,491 an account of that business of the kidnapped prostitute by one of the guys who was convicted for it, who spent 17 years in prison and eventually escaped — it’s a pity Bost hasn’t read it. There was also a sensational book on the sea. You’re always saying one ought to know some geography in order to understand landscapes, so I hope it’ll be translated so that you can read it. It’s pure, exact science and fantastically poetic at the same time. I wonder if we might do something with it for the Temps Modemes. I’ve also found a big book on Oliver Goldsmith, all about his relations with Dr Johnson — whom I come across everywhere: as soon as you touch the English 18th century, there he is.
Algren has bawled out all his friends in the course of the year, so nobody disturbs us. He’s more cheerful than I’ve ever seen him. His little book on Chicago has come out, and I find it excellent. On the other hand, he has vaguely started a novel which goes over exactly the same ground as the others but less well. I didn’t hide the fact from him that I didn’t find it at all good. He’s not pleased with it himself, actually — but he really must renew himself. He busies himself with trifles — lectures, short stories — but without conviction.
I enjoyed your story about the Silone’s and Carlo Levi — yes, they must have odd ideas about us. I don’t have any news from Paris, except from my mother — I hope Queneau will have received the little article on Sade.
Yes, I’m having a very good time here, although upon reflection it strikes me as pretty strange. If I don’t reflect, however, but live in the present, it’s just a good time, agreeable and put to good use. For anyone not wanting to budge, it would be impossible to live better. There are some shocking and astounding American stories I must tell you about: the affair of the so-called spies, the Rosenbergs, condemned to death without a scrap of evidence; and the repercussions of the Cicero affair, when people wrecked the apartment of a black man who’d moved into a white neighbourhood. It’s the owner whom they’re suing, for having rented him the apartment — thus provoking a riot, and lowering the value of the neighbouring buildings — pretty unexpected, isn’t it? Apart from that, I see nothing of this country — I’m in total retreat.
I’m sending the next letter to Venice. Do write again, my sweet little one. It still seems so close — our journey and your own self. But I’ll be seeing you again soon. I kiss you with all my might.
Your charming Beaver
Envelope:
M. Sartre
Hotel Hassler
Piazza di Spagna
Roma, Italy
[Gary, Indiana]
Tuesday 9 [October 1951]
My dear little yourself. I’ve just seen a strange photo of you in a Chicago magazine on the theatre, all done by double exposure: it was to illustrate a big article on ‘Devil. . .’,492 which simultaneously showers praises on you and reproaches you for not doing justice to your adversaries. I’ll try and send it to you. I’ve had another really peaceful week, which has allowed me to finish off the Sade. It has given me so much trouble, I’d almost like to offer it to Gallimard as a short book. But you’ll see whether it’s worth it. The weather continued with blazing sun and blue skies for two days, then: storms, rain, high wind. But it’s poetic here, when it’s warm in the house and outside everything’s in motion. On Saturday evening some people came round — as they do every Saturday — to watch a television programme that’s really very funny. There’s a woman who’s a first-class comedian, which is rare. They suggested we go off to a ‘frontier town’ on the state border between Illinois and Indiana, i.e. between Gary and Chicago. That means a big sector’s given over to gambling and prostitution, and that’s where you find far the best burlesque shows. It’s not so much the burlesque shows which interest me as seeing the place: it’s so artificial — in the middle of a landscape of blast furnaces, at the end of a little provincial town — that kind of Reno which suddenly appears. There were a few really good sketches. But the astonishing thing in that area at night is the spectacular sky, with its chimneys spitting fire and the clouds which look as if they’d been painted by hand.
Algren has shown me a truly extraordinary letter, sent him by one of his friends who’s a drug addict. The guy makes a general confession covering his whole life, accusing himself among other things of having ruined his wife by making her into an addict, regretting not having written a big book in collaboration with Algren, etc. And to get out of his tragic situation (he’s deep in debt — he’s a jazz musician who has ruined himself with morphine), he proposes to sell — to a friend who specializes in pornographic films and rubber Johnnies — a film representing in full colour a decapitation: his own. He describes the mechanism of the guillotine minutely, and the way in which the camera would be set up to catch the facial expressions properly, once the head was separated from the body. Algren’s role is supposed to be that of ‘silent partner’: he’d go and pick up the camera, negotiate the film rights, and give the money to the guy’s wife. He didn’t answer. A few days later, he read in the newspaper that the guy had jumped under a subway train; he didn’t kill himself, though, and was treated in hospital along with his wife. It’s not known what has become of them since. I’d like the letter as a document for the Temps Modernes.
Wednesday
There’s a blazing sun again, but I’m disgusted: I’m rereading the novel in order to work on it again, and it’s terrible how stale it smells. I have my return seat booked on the 31st. I’m leaving at midday, which puts me in Paris about 14 hours later — or at 8 in the evening, Paris time. I imagine I’ll be at the Gare des Invalides by about 9. If you’ve got back the day before, come and pick me up. Otherwise send a note — or a wire — to Rue de la Bûcherie, where I’ll go if I don’t see you. And I’ll do what you tell me to. How glad I’ll be to see you, my sweet little one. How nice you were, reading that rot
ten novel and giving me such good advice.493 Here’s the photo of you and the article. I’m also enclosing a letter from Algren for Michelle. Give her lots of greetings. I kiss you with all my heart, my dear little soul.
Your charming Beaver
Envelope:
M. Sartre
Poste Restante
Venice, Italy
Footnotes
370In January 1.945.
371Maurice Sachs, writer of memoirs of the interwar period, plays, novels and essays — a friend of Violette Leduc and contributor to Les Temps Modernes.
372The flight had been postponed at the last moment.
373In March 1946, Olga had gone down with a serious lung illness, and after initial treatment (a pneumothorax) at the Beaujon hospital was sent to a clinic at Leysin in Switzerland, where De Beauvoir had visited her prior to her departure for the United States. Her illness was to keep Olga off the stage until 1950.
3741942 film co-directed (with Norman Foster) by Orson Welles.
375Philippe Soupault (1897- ), founded the review Littérature — organ of the Dada movement — with Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, collaborated with Breton on Les Champs Magnétiques, and was one of the main leaders of the surrealist movement of the 1920s. It was he who had organized an invitation for De Beauvoir — whom he had first met at the Flore in May 1946 — to speak at various universities in the United States, thus making her present trip financially possible.
376Where Sorokine had lived since February 1946 with her husband Ivan Moffat.
377They’ here refers to the French Institute in the United States. De Beauvoir had known the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (incidentally a cousin of Sartre) since they had done their teaching practice together in 1930. He had emigrated to the United States when the war broke out, and was at this time working in the Cultural Relations section of the French Institute.
378Joxe was the French minister of culture at this time.
379Marion Saunders, a literary agent.
380Dolores Vanetti Ehrenreich, with whom Sartre had begun an affair on his first trip to the United States which was to last for five years. The first issue of Les Temps Modernes was dedicated to her. Married to a wealthy American doctor, she had worked for the Office of War Information giving French-language broadcasts.
381Sartre moved into his mother’s apartment at this address in July 1946, and remained there until it was bombed by the O.A.S. in 1962.
382A play by Corneille.
383The Lycée Molière, see note 75 above.
384The Éditions Gallimard, De Beauvoir’s publisher.
385Camus had visited the United States the previous year.
386The back portion of De Beauvoir’s diary for 1947 is full of addresses of bars and restaurants written in Sartre’s handwriting, itineraries recommended by him, and information provided by Bost who had also recently visited the United States.
387Another literary agent.
388Dolores was on the point of leaving for Paris, where she was to spend the first of several lengthy stays with Sartre.
389In French slang, a bidard is a lucky fellow, while a bidasse is a squaddie or grunt.
390The sculptor Alexander Calder, whom Sartre had met on his first trip to New York and on whose work he was to write an essay in 1946.
391Andre Breton’s former wife Jacqueline, now remarried to an American sculptor, David Hare.
392Dorothy Nordman, ‘A.M.’ in America Day by Day.
393See note 253 above.
394Richard Wright, the novelist, and his wife Ellen (a literary agent) had met De Beauvoir and Sartre on a visit to Paris in the summer of 1946: she was to dedicate her book America Day by Day to them.
395Her brother-in-law was a state cultural functionary.
396Dolores’s husband.
397John (Tito) Gerassi, bom in 1935.
398Blanche Knopf, wife of De Beauvoir’s U.S. publisher Alfred Knopf.
399Owner of a bookshop in Rue Bonaparte designed by Toulouse, where Dullin had signed his books.
400Erwin Piscator, German anti-fascist director with two theatres in New York, who was thinking of staging The Flies.
401Lionel Abel was an editor with Nicola Chiaromonte of the left-liberal, Trotskisant journal Politics, founded by Dwight Macdonald after he split from Partisan Review.
402Dolores’s husband.
403Possibly a garbled reference to Arnaud d’Usscurt and James Gow, authors of the play Deep are the Roots (1946).
404Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1946), based on the book by Raymond Chandler, is entirely shot as though from the viewpoint of the detective Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell).
405Sartre had been a scriptwriter for Pathé since 1943, beginning with Les Jeux Sont Faits — though it was only shot in 1947, not by Clouzot but by Delannoy.
406Paris Theatre manager.
407Clement Greenberg, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, editors of Partisan Review, now entering upon a slide to the right under the impact of the Cold War.
408Doubtless a reference to Merleau-Ponty’s article in Les Temps Modernes, No. 3 (December 1945) The Yogi and the Proletarian’ — a critique of Koestler’s The Yogi and the Commissar.
409The Respectful Prostitute had been staged in France in November 1946, together with Men Without Shadows.
410De Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity was published later in 1947, and this refers no doubt to the proofs.
411Conflict: 1943 film directed by Curtis Bernhardt.
412Sorokine.
413In December 1946, see Force of Circumstance, pp.117-8.
414Mezz Mezzrow.
415Marcel Duhamel, editor of the Série Noire.
416James Farrell, the Trotskyist author of Studs Lonigan who, with Nelson Algren and Richard Wright, made up what was often known as the Chicago School.
417Reference to End As A Man (1947), by Calder Willingham.
418William Barrett, later to be the author of The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals (1982).
419Georges Blin, the literary critic, had published his Baudelaire in 1939.
420At Utrecht, on the trip mentioned in note 413 above, De Beauvoir and Sartre had enjoyed undergoing ‘personality tests’ at the Psychological Institute headed by Van Lennep.
421Mary Guggenheim (called D.V. in America Day by Day and Nelly Benson in Force of Circumstance) met De Beauvoir through a friend at Harper’s Bazaar responsible for entertaining distinguished visiting foreign contributors, and introduced her to her former lover Nelson Algren.
422 A bar where elderly actresses and female singers and dancers — aged between sixty and eighty — used to perform.
423Alfred Koestler’s wife.
424 A poet who had been published in Les Temps Modernes.
425Dwight Macdonald (1906-82) had been an editor of Partisan Review from 1937 until 1943, when he left it to found Politics. He was De Beauvoir’s senior by just two years!
426Shortly before this, De Beauvoir had for the first time bought a dress that she considered expensive (25,000 F.). She felt very guilty about it, calling it her ‘first concession’. See Force of Circumstance, p.120.
427Wife of the inspector-general of schools, who had always been very kind to De Beauvoir and Sartre, appointing them to schools close to one another even though they were not married.
428Boris Vian, novelist and jazz musician friend of De Beauvoir and Sartre, had pretended to have translated the book which he had in fact written himself, hoping to cash in on the vogue for all things American.
429Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937), by John Dollard.
430André Masson (1896-1987), the surrealist painter.
431The actress.
432Nelson Algren (born Abraham, 1909-81) had published his first novel in 1935 but was not to achieve success until the publication of The Man with the Golden Arm in 1949 (see notes 416 and 421 above).