Letters to Sartre
433De Beauvoir’s novel All Men Are Mortal, published in 1946.
434George Stevens (1904- ) had made Gunga Din in 1939, and De Beauvoir had seen it before the war.
435Jean-Pierre Aumont: see note 103 above.
436A cocktail containing seven different rums of contrasting colours.
437Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
4381943 film by William Wellman, which indicted bigotry through the story of a lynching in the last century.
439Version by Robert Siodmak (1946).
440dartre’s Les Jeux Sont Faits was due to appear later in the year: see note 405 above.
441By Erich von Stroheim (1924).
442Kenneth Patchen (1911-72), poet and novelist (Memoirs of a Shy Pornograpber, 1945). The ‘Miller’ in question is Henry Miller, whose influence on Californian writers De Beauvoir had already noted.
443The so-called Truman Doctrine, intensifying the Cold War.
444There were no supermarkets in France at this time.
445Man Ray (1890-1976), American artist and experimental film-maker influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism.
446 A Greyhound.
447Victor Kravchenko defected from the Soviet embassy in 1944 and published I Chose Freedom in 1946. Its French translation was to provoke a big controversy in 1949, when Les Lettres Françaises denouncd it as an American intelligence fabrication and Kravchenko successfully sued for libel (see Force of Circumstance, pp. 173-4). The surrounding disputes were to resurface, lightly transposed, in De Beauvoir’s The Mandarins.
448Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiography.
449Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Dadaist painter and inventor of readymades, was living in New York at this time.
450Maurice Coindreau, translator of Faulkner and other American novelists.
451Gyorgy Gurvitch, the sociologist.
452Bernard Wolfe, a former secretary of Trotsky’s now working as an editor and subsequently a novelist, appears in America Day by Day as L.W. and as Z.
453Roma, città aperta, by Roberto Rossellini (1945).
454See note 125 above.
455Yves Tanguy, the surrealist painter, had lived in the United States since 1939.
456Duchamp’s famous glass ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even’ is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
457Harold Rosenberg, close to Partisan Review, was the author notably of studies on Thomas Mann.
458A writers’ association founded in 1839 by Louis Desnoyers and still flourishing.
459Nelson Algren.
460For this trip, see Force of Circumstance, pp. 157-9; it is also used in The Mandarins.
461Town in the far north of Sweden where De Beauvoir and Sartre stayed in August 1947 (see Force of Circumstance, p.134).
462A year later, when Algren came to Paris for three months and he and De Beauvoir travelled to Italy and North Africa, she was to write (Force of Circumstance, p.184): ‘We had never got on better together. Next year I would go to Chicago; I was certain when I said goodbye to him that I would see Algren again. And yet there was something terribly tight around my heart as I accompanied him to Orly.’
463After having problems cashing her traveller’s cheques at hotels where she was registered under Algren’s name, De Beauvoir had on this occasion registered them as M. and Mme de Beauvoir.
464René Maheu was already working for UNESCO, whose director-general he was to become in the sixties, and had recently returned from a Latin American conference when De Beauvoir saw him just before leaving Paris for this trip.
465Le Deuxième Sexe had been published in 1949.
466A reference to fears that the Korean War, which had just broken out, might lead to a third world war.
467Jean Cau was working as Sartre’s secretary at this time; ‘Claude’ is Claude Gallimard, publisher of De Beauvoir and Sartre.
468Michelle Vian, wife of Boris (see note 428 above), who began an affair with Sartre probably soon after their first meeting in 1946; she was to remain a lifelong friend of both him and De Beauvoir.
469Algren had won the Pulitzer Prize and used it to buy a little house at Miller, on Lake Michigan, near Gary, Indiana.
470Sartre was attempting to end his five-year relationship with Dolores.
471In Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta): for the trip made by De Beauvoir and Sartre to Black Africa in the spring of 1950, see Force of Circumstance, pp.204-23.
472Where the Pulitzer Prize had taken him.
473Oreste F. Pucciani, a Californian friend of Sorokine’s.
474Psychologie de la colonisation by Octave Mannoni (1950).
475The play had an unsuccessful revival in 1951 at the Vieux Colombiers (see Force of Circumstance, p.238).
476At her villa in Juan-les-Pins.
477The USSR had temporarily withdrawn from the United Nations, which allowed the Security Council to endorse the US-led intervention in Korea on the Southern side, following the outbreak of war in June 1950.
478Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s vice-president 1941-4, had opposed the cold war policies of the Truman administration and run on a Progressive Party ticket in the presidential elections of 1948.
479This was the high point of the MacCarthyite witch hunt in Hollywood.
480In other words, that he had completed the break with Dolores.
* Letters 4 to 24 August 1950 addressed as above
481The Mandarins, on which she had been working since 1949.
482On 14 or 15 August, De Beauvoir — always a poor swimmer — was almost drowned (see Force of Circumstance, pp.226-7). Unfortunately, the letter relating the episode has disappeared, though it is recorded in a drawing by Algren on an envelope.
483In July 1950.
484Name of a taxi firm.
485Since October 1948, De Beauvoir had had an apartment in Rue de la Bûcherie.
486After a year of languishing correspondence, Algren had invited De Beauvoir to spend the month of October with him at Miller: it was to be her last visit.
487In the immediately preceding months, Sartre and she had been on a cruise to Norway, revisited Iceland, toured Scotland and stayed in London.
488Sorokine had arrived in Paris at the end of June with Oreste and Jacques, and was now returning to the United States by sea.
489In June De Beauvoir, after finishing a first version of The Mandarins, had undertaken a twofold writing assignment on the Marquis de Sade, in whom she had been very interested since reading Justine a couple of years previously. She was working simultaneously on a short essay requested by Raymond Queneau for a forthcoming volume on ‘Famous Writers’, and on a longer essay intended for Les Temps Modernes and which was to become her Must We Burn Sade?.
490De Beauvoir had just bought her first car, an Aronde.
491Illegible.
492Le Diable et le Bon Dieu had been staged in the spring of 1951.
493During their cruise to Norway.
LETTERS
JUNE 1953 - JULY 1963
Later Interludes
1953
[Trieste]
Friday [June 1953]
Dear little yourself. It was nice seeing each other in Venice and made me really happy. Lanzmann was loud in his praises of you when we left — and I agreed, of course. Did you see your article came out in l’Unità?494 It must have caused quite a stir — and it sounded good in Italian too.
Anyway, we left Venice at about noon and circled the lagoon in the other direction — it’s really the most astonishing kind of landscape. Bidding farewell to Venice in the distance, we lunched beside the sea in a little resort looking a bit like the Lido — we even bathed. From there to Aquileia which is a staggering place, with three superimposed layers of mosaics (Roman, 3rd C. Christian and 4th C. Christian) — it’s amazing and very beautiful, you must see it one day. We went on to Grado, which looks rather like Venice in the middle of another lagoon, and arrived at Trieste after dark. An astonishing city. You have the impression the people are prisoners in this free terr
itory so arrogantly occupied by the English,495 who’ve taken up residence in the castles, ban access to the beaches, etc. The location is fantastic — there are hills and stairways like in Genoa — yet the city manages to have no character. The people are very friendly, but dull — nothing Italian about them. It’s reminiscent of Geneva, but an oppressed Geneva. They look punished, but you don’t know what for. The porter told us nothing was simpler than getting a Yugoslav visa, so yesterday we took the necessary steps and will have our visas in ten minutes — it’s midday now. We’ve bought six litres of oil for the car and a reserve supply of petrol, and we’re going to buy some salami, because everyone tells us that sustenance for people and motors is equally dreadful in Yugoslavia — and the roads appalling. This would be of no importance if the car were new, but just yesterday it had a breakdown which was easy enough to get fixed in Trieste, but in Yugoslavia would probably have been impossible to repair. Apparently they don’t have garage mechanics or, above all, spare parts. Well, we’ll soon see. Living seems to be dirt cheap and the scenery very beautiful, so we’re fantastically excited at the idea of going there. Write c/o Putnik, Sarajevo. Putnik is the in-tourist agency that takes care of everything and is reckoned to save the tourist from every ill. Our itinerary is still uncertain, but we’ll certainly go to Sarajevo. Write as soon as possible, because letters are sure to take ages to arrive.
Goodbye, little yourself. May you flourish. All my best wishes to Michelle. And tender kisses for you.
Your Beaver.
[Cahors]
[Summer 1953] Friday morning
Dear little yourself. I felt quite touched as I left on Wednesday morning. It was very sweet and helpful of you to keep me company to Lausanne.496 I hope they woke you up in good time, that you arrived punctually, and so on. As for me, that dawn departure couldn’t have been more poetic. It was still dark — huge deserted road as far as Geneva. When I reached the border, the frontier guard pulled a face at your name and looked at me suspiciously: ‘Jean-Paul Sartre. So he lends you his car, does he?’ ‘Oh, yes!’, I said. I drove at top speed to Lyons, which I bypassed: 220 km. in 3¼ hrs. But afterwards on the way to St Étienne, with the traffic now terribly heavy, I felt ravenous and realized I was all in, because I shot a red light and a policeman bawled me out. I stopped for an hour to drink cups of white coffee, read the papers, and ring Lanzmann. I got his father: the son was being bandaged and doing fine. Cheered by the rest and this news, I set off again. Busy road as far as Le Puy, where — in order to save 30 km. — I made the mistake of trying to reach Espalion by minor roads. Still, it was fantastically beautiful — one of the most beautiful roads in France, across the heather and limestone plateau of the Aubrac — but impossible to go fast, and at Nasbinals there was a cattle fair harder to get through than that one in Sicily last year. I almost did myself in too on a bend, pitching from one precipice to another before emerging safe and sound with thudding heart and weak knees. I realized I was all in again, so I stopped at Aubrac to have lunch (it was 3.30) and telephone again. This time I got Lanzmann and suggested his father should take him to Cahors, which would save me the 80 km. I’d have had to do at night. His father didn’t have a car, but said they’d hire a taxi. I had only 180 km. left, on main roads. I set off again at 4.30 and was able to take my time. The sun in my eyes did rather...............497
.......which is very reprehensible with a little Renault. He remained at the roadside for an hour and a half, since the doctor had forbidden his being moved without an ambulance, fearing a fracture of the spine. He was in dreadful pain, and dictating his (sentimental) last will and testament to his photographer pal who’d landed painlessly on the grass. Finally they took him to the clinic. He didn’t want to send a telegram, clinging to the idea of being in Bale at the appointed hour without having warned me at all. But, of course, first France-Ditnanche498 and then his father intervened. His father showed up and was rewarded by a frightful scene, in which he was accused of being the one responsible for wrecking our plans and obliging me to put myself out. L. was aghast when I told him that his second telegram had thrown us into panic. In fact, he was living in the clouds for 48 hours without being at all aware of it. Anyway, we had dinner with his father, who went off again into the darkness. He amazed me by his youth — he seems younger than you and I — and you’d say he was a total mediocrity if you didn’t know him to be capable, in his own way, of wild flights of passion. After that I slept, though badly, because L. was in pain; and yesterday I spent the whole day sleeping, rising only to send off the cables and have lunch. Since his watch had been broken in the accident, we never even suspected how late it was; when I woke up after lunch, I thought it was 4 — whereas it was already 8. We went for a tiny walk, had dinner, then went back to bed again. Which means that I couldn’t write to you yesterday, but this morning am feeling as fit as twenty fiddles. It’s bright sunshine and I’m in a dentist’s waiting-room with no paper, which explains why I’m writing on these scraps. In an hour’s time it will be midday, my tooth will be fixed and the car too, and we’ll leave Cahors. We’ll drive gently round the region until Wednesday.
Here I am again. I have my tooth and am just leaving. Listen, I’d like to show you the Lascaux caves. So, instead of coming to Cahors, get out at Brive. The train leaves at 8.50 and arrives at 14.39.* I’ll be at the station to meet the first and second trains — or at the Poste Restante, if so instructed. We could also arrange to meet at the Truffe Noire hotel, 21 Bd Anatole-France, and you can also wire me there on Wednesday.
Instructions
1. Ring Morazzani to transfer your total royalties for last month to your bank account, as he did before. Morazzani knows about it.
2. Ring Hirsch to sign the final proofs of Henri Martin.499
3. Ring Germaine about the T.M.500 Does she have the [article] by Dzélépy which Grenier was supposed to deliver to her? Mediocre, but there’s nothing else. Germaine should be in contact with Peju about the issue.501
4. Call at my place. Ask the concierge for shirts, socks, underpants and handkerchiefs.
My mail is scattered over the centre table (letters from Algren, my sister and another American) and on the mantelpiece, in a bundle of letters where there are two or three for you as well. They could be on the gramophone too.
The Kean502 is on the centre table, in a yellowy-beige folder.
On the little table, there’s some work of Lanzmann’s in a notepad-wrapper: take the whole packet.
Till Wednesday, o little yourself. A big hug and lots of kisses.
Your charming Beaver
*There’s one at 13 hrs too, which arrives at 18.37. You choose.
1954
[Bou sââda, Algeria]
Sunday [late January 1954]
Dear little yourself. I’m writing from Bou sââda — not the hotel where we stayed,503 but another even prettier one right at the foot of the dunes. Do you remember those dunes, with the little children and their teacher, and the pretty colours of the children against the sand? It really is a lovely place here, and the weather’s very fine, with very cold evenings. But I’ll tell you everything from the beginning. Well, as the meeting of the Left proceeded I slipped out again, and an hour later we were leaving Paris. We couldn’t go very fast at first, because the car wasn’t properly run in yet, but we still made good time overall. An hour for lunch at Auxerre, an hour for dinner at Vienne (not in the great restaurant,504 but in a little one attempting to ape it), and by 2 in the morning we were at Marseilles. We slept at the Hôtel Bellevue — which has become quite squalid, believe it or not (as the Little Subject505 did not fail to observe irritably). In the morning, I phoned to ask if it was yet time to load the car: Yes! The boat was leaving at noon, so the Aronde was taken along a bit beforehand and they hoisted it by crane to an upper deck. We then found our own way on board. At first the ship was rolling dreadfully, and some families left the table during lunch. I’d taken a travel pill and held up well, but I’d slept only fou
r hours the night before so I spent the rest of the day recuperating. I dozed, vaguely read thrillers, vaguely had dinner, then slept again — this time for real. Our arrival at Algiers at 7 in the morning was very beautiful — we passed an enormous American aircraft carrier, on which people apparently move about only by jeep, and disembarked in a fine drizzle. We then drove up to the St Georges. A fairly contingent day. We had hundreds of little things to do — in connection with the car, our itinerary, etc. — and when it came to looking round Algiers, it rained. The Casbah was too dismal anyway, with all those beggars and cripples: it struck me as even worse than the other times.506 We repeated that very pretty excursion you and I made through the forest to Bouzareah — which was very beautiful. But in general there was nothing enchanting about being in Algiers. So we decided to leave in the morning — which was yesterday — and that’s what we did.