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Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

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"Like Abelard and Heloise, they are buried in a joint grave, their names linked for eternity. They're one of the world's legendary couples. We can't think of one without thinking of the other." So begins Hazel Rowley's Tete-a-Tete, of which the author says, "This is not a biography of Sartre and Beauvoir. This is the story of a relationship."

And what a relationship it was! Although never married, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) lived together as "man and wife" for 51 years, dating from their meeting in 1929. Both were "free spirits" who contracted an "open marriage" in which other "contingent" sexual partners were welcomed, even encouraged. The only ground rule of their relationship was that they be honest with each other, and tell each other everything.

No other word describes Jean-Paul Sartre as well as the word "ugly." A short man (five-foot one), his atrocious eating habits soon led to a pot belly. When he was two years old, he went almost blind in his right eye, leaving him "wall-eyed." His face and neck were pock-marked and covered with blackheads. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, consumed vast quantities of alcohol, and gobbled amphetamines and barbiturates, especially corydrane, like candy. And yet, this guru of the existentialist movement attracted beautiful young women like honey attracts flies. Go figure!

"The story of a relationship" is actually the story of many relationships--of numerous sexual encounters and romantic attachments. Indeed, there are so many tempestuous liaisons and promiscuous affairs related in this book that one soon loses count of Sartre and Beauvoir's erotic adventures. The list of their amours is a long one: Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz, Bianca Bienenfeld, Nathalie Sorokine, Jacques-Laurent Bost; Delores Vanetti, Nelson Algren, Sally Swing, Michelle Vian, Claude Lanzmann, Evelyne Lanzmann (stage name, Evelyne Rey), Arlette Elkaim, Lena Zonina, Tomiko Asabuki, Sylvie Le Bon, Helene Lassithiotakis, and also various and sundry one-night stands.

As far as I can tell, Sartre was strictly heterosexual, a notorious womanizer whose real pleasure (so he claimed) was not in the sexual act itself, but in the thrill of the chase, in which he employed all the seductive stratagems of his intellectual arsenal. Beauvoir, on the other hand, was bisexual, and had affairs with many male and female lovers, the most famous of whom was the American novelist Nelson Algren, the "great passion" of her life.

Reading of Sartre's obsessive need to be loved by women, the image of a juggler comes readily to mind: How did he keep so many "ninepins" whirling through the air without a disastrous collision. When asked by an interviewer how he juggled so many women successfully, Sartre replied, "I lied to them all." "Even to the Beaver [Beauvoir]"? asked the interviewer. "Yes, I lied to the Beaver too," said Sartre.

The interminable series of Sartre and Beauvoir's sexual affairs strikes me as a tragicomic soap opera, and suggests the words spoken by Shakespeare's Puck, in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act III, sc. ii, line 115), "Lord, what fools these mortals be."

Hazel Rowley, who divides her time between New York and Paris, wrote her doctoral thesis on existentialism, and has closely studied the correspondence between Sartre and Beauvoir. Her academic career and intense research has qualified her to write authoritatively on her subjects. Although Tete-a-Tete doesn't go deeply into existential philosophy, it does contain enlightening pages that describe the kernel of this world view.

One is astonished that Sartre, an existentialist intellectual who gloried in the liberty and freedom of the individual, could have become a "fellow traveler" of communism. One can only surmise that, in his abhorrence of Western colonialism and imperialism, he allowed the pendulum of his thinking to swing so far toward the left. With the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, however, the scales finally fell from his blinded eyes.

Rowley also discusses the major works by Sartre--Nausea, Roads to Freedom (a trilogy), Being and Nothingness, Words (for which he won a Nobel Prize), Search for a Method, Critique of Dialectical Reason, and his plays (including "The Flies," "No Exit," "The Respectful Prostitute," "Dirty Hands," "The Devil and the Good Lord," and "The Condemned of Altona"--and by Beauvoir (The Second Sex, The Mandarins, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, A Very Easy Death, All Said and Done, The Coming of Age, The Woman Destroyed, and Force of Circumstance).

If you think this book is not for you, think again. Hazel Rowley has written an intriguing book about philosophy and literature, sexual politics, the clash of world powers, the angst of the human condition, and, above all, the unconventional love story of a man and a woman. Beneath their "unfaithfulness" to each other, there was a bedrock of "faithfulness" between Beauvoir and Sartre that lasted half a century. Rowley has told their story well.

Hazel Rowely's previous books include Christina Stead: A Biography and Richard Wright: The Life and Times. She has been a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and a Bunting Institute Fellow at Radcliffe College, and has taught at the University of Iowa and at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

Roy E. Perry of Nolensville, Tennessee, is an advertising copywriter at a Nashville publishing house. [...]

Life is sometimes more complicated than one wants it to be. Sartre and Beauvoir, one of the great intellectual couples of the century, had a fifty- one year relationship based on a compact of transparency, of revealing to each other the truth about themselves and their relationships. In the course of this each of them engaged in their own very considerable intellectual and creative endeavor.
But along with their relationship to each other was their 'open marriage' and their individual relationships with many others. And here the question of their morality, their image and projected image of themselves as moral arbiters for mankind becomes tainted and sad. For Beauvoir was often the procurer for Sartre, and both of them together went through and used many human beings and bodies, a few of whom were driven to despair by the process. One Claude Lantzmann's sister committed suicide over Sartre's rejection. And others too were used physically, mocked and abandoned. There was an element of cruelty in the Ecole Superieure couple's playing with the lesser beings. The great revolutionaries were great hypocrites in their personal lives, and immoral at least to some degree in their use of others. But this too is not so simple for Sartre bought the rejected misstresses apartments while continuing to live in his own little rented room.
Elements of deception also of each other were at play. But there is no doubt that each helped, fertilized each other's intellectual endeavors. There is something heroic and noble in their lifelong relationship, however ugly the price for others.
Adding it all up, and considering also their flawed political judgments( Here Sartre is that old cliche, the 'educated damn fool' in his one - time worship of Stalinism) one is nonetheless intrigued and moved by the courage of their continuing in creation to the end.
This work tells far more about the couple than most of us truly want to know. But in doing so it tells a story of high intellectual drama and provides a spellbinding read.

This book is a factual chronology of the relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre, particularly as it relates to their extracurricular sexual relations. It is not an in-depth commentary or analysis on how they influenced each other's thinking and writings. I found this aspect of the book disappointing.

Attention should have been paid to how Sartre's way of life runs counter to his existential philosophy- freedom in action is paramount to JPS's existential man and yet he succumbs to addictions to drugs and alcohol in his mid-to-later life. Why does Beauvoir give Sartre her uncritical approval to his meaningless, manipulative and lecherous courtships? And how does such compliance reflect on her nascent feminism?

I expect biographies of two seminal philosophers to raise such questions and provide some level of explication. Despite these reservations, I recommend this book as it is well-researched and well-written.

I felt part of that tangled and emotionally complex world that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sarte wove around themselves while reading this book. It balanced the passion of their creativity with the very calculating anti-passion of their emotional lives. Never judging, just describing how one phase played into the next and the work that was born out of all that was inspiring enough. All the people who were caught up or made certain to be caught up in those two lives never really made a difference in the final out come. Their work was all that really mattered.

It is a given that Mme Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre lived full rich productive lives according to their own existential philosophy and according to their own (to use their words) "temporary moral codes." Thus, this book begs an interesting question: Why waste 400 pages recounting and putting all of the emphasis on the voyeuristic details of their six-decades of sexual encounters? After about four chapters of middle (and old) age sexual debauchery, treachery, double (and triple)-crosses -- all interspersed between a lot of hiking, driving, suicides and all night drinking and "hanging out" in sleazy Left Bank hotels and bars, I think we finally get the picture of the letters. This existentialist "cult of personality," with de Beauvoir and Sartre at the epicenter of a group of young (mostly) virgins and "hangers-ons," was a fad that "came-and-went" and then, began to outlive its aura and its time.

At the end of the book I was still patiently waiting to finally get squarely into the "heavy stuff:" their existentialist philosophy, the couple's political activities, their attitudes towards the U.S.; their lectures and speeches, their books and plays, etc. I only realized as an afterthought and at the bitter end of the book that the numerous tidbits, which had been unceremoniously skimmed over and interspersed between the lines (and literally indeed between the sheets), as asides, en passant comments, or revelations from pillow talk, was all there was! It took a rereading of the entire book to isolate, collate and finally organize the nuggets of worthwhile substance for myself so as to be able to retain a fuller more balanced picture of this iconic couple's contributions to the world.

How could the author in good conscience hide in between irrelevant sexual trysts the fact that Sartre began and wrote most of his magnum opus "Being and Nothingness" while in a German concentration camp, after receiving a copy of Heidegger's "Being in Time" from a German officer (no less)! How much more important (than hearing about his serial sexual seductions of virgins) it would have been to know Sartre's exact state of mind during those trying days as he was grappling and struggling with this foremost intellectual beast?

The text begged (literally screamed) for more details about his long running dispute and feud with Camus and Arthur Koestler on the issue of Communism. In fact, I found it the height of tawdriness that many of the references to the couple's association with other famous political and literary figures such as the Koestlers, Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, Andre Malreaux, Merleau-Ponty, and Pablo Picasso, seemed to also have been "mined" as much for their salacious and prurient, as for their intellectual, content. It seemed that only Richard Wright and his wife escaped the gossipy muck.

Although the historical milestones, of both of these philosophical giants and trailblazers were artfully used to frame the chapters, these letters required being placed in context, otherwise they are allowed to overshadow and clobber everything else. Unfortunately, it seems that everything important about this couple has here been compressed into the spicy aspects of their sex lives. And while I cannot say that it did not interest me at all that Mme Beauvoir was dismissed from her teaching job because of her Lesbian activities, I was infinitely more interested in the fact that in her magnum opus, the "Second Sex" she explains that: the world is a masculine world nourished by myths forged by men. And that in all cultures, (even those said to be matriarchal) man is regarded as the subject, and woman as "the Other." Otherness, according to Mme Beauvoir, apparently is a fundamental category of human thought. No group can set itself up as the "One," without also setting up another as the "Other." How much more important it would have been to focus on Beauvoir's most profound thesis that: We think through a man's ideal, through his myths and hero system; that women's lack of freedom can either be inflicted, in which case it constitutes oppression; or it can be chosen, in which case it represents a moral failure. And that: no matter how it occurs, sexual discrimination, like racial discrimination is an absolute evil.

Beyond her Lesbianism, and above her sexual trysts, de Beauvoir in her letters, seems to have broken the code of American culture for, even though it was like pulling teeth, from the eighth chapter on, we learn (reading between the lines of her sexual conquests) that we organize our lives through "men directed values" and "men directed morals." Breaking away from this deeply embedded and built in framework requires not just determination, but also a great deal of moral courage. American society is not unique in that it makes it easy to forego one's liberty and become a thing (in a man's world) (or in the case of Blacks, in a white dominated world).

Since there are advantages to be gained by playing up to men (or to whites and their racist values), living through them, being supported by them, etc. As a result, many women (or Blacks in the case of racism) chose to take this easier route. On this easier route, one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. The central problem of the sexes (or the races) is that man's (or white's) advantages lie in the fact that their vocation as men (or as a white tribe) in no way runs counter to their destiny as human beings. Their respective social and spiritual successes in both cases endow them with a virile prestige and power. The male and the white tribe thus, are not divided in the pursuit of their self-esteem. Whereas it is required of women and blacks that in order to realize their human worth they must make inhumane sacrifices against their own natures. They must give up their subjectivity and become objects. In the case of women, they must become the prey to the stronger forces of a male dominated society. For blacks, they must bow to a bankrupt set of racist values and customs. Which is to say, in either case, they must renounce their claims to their own dignity and sovereignty as free human beings and subjects.

There are other bright spots in the book too.

For instance in chapter seven, in one of his first post war public lectures Sartre summarizes the meaning of Existentialism as being neither a pessimistic nor a negative philosophy, but one whose basic doctrine is that since God is dead, there is only liberty and contingency: man must thus make himself. There is no such thing as a priori human nature or essence; existence precedes essence. Each individual has to assume his freedom and create his own life. And in the classic Ayn Rand sense, with sufficient willpower, we can transcend all emotions, discomforts, and obstacles; and then we can choose, and without excuses, take full responsibility for ourselves. Sartre's existentialist philosophy could not be more aptly summarized than in his proclamation that it is frightening to be free. We hold our destinies in our own hands. It is up to us to determine the substance of our lives, including the way we choose to love. We are not born cowardly or lazy (or even debauched); we choose to be these things. Man is responsible for what he is condemned to be: free. Existentialism is not about possibilities or intentions for the future, or about mere words, but about concrete projects, about deeds in the present. No one is a genius unless it is expressed in his works. In fact, anything less is considered "bad faith:" a failure to achieve the authentic self. Bad faith is a failure of one to face up to, and properly orientate oneself towards, and then act to promote, his own freedom.

And finally, on his views on America, we discover that when Sartre visited the U.S. for the first time in 1945, he was astonished at the level of discrimination against blacks. "In this land of freedom and equality there live thirteen million untouchables," he wrote. "They wait on your table, they polish your shoes, they operate the elevator, they carry your suitcases into your compartment, but they have nothing to do with you, nor you with them. In 1946 after returning to France, he wrote a novel called "The Respectful Prostitute," inspired by the famous Scottsboro, Alabama case, in which nine black youths were falsely accused of raping two white prostitutes. As a result of the book he was accused of being anti-American, to which he replied: "I don't even know what the words mean. The writer's duty is to denounce injustice everywhere, and all the more so when he loves the country, which lets this injustice happen."

In conclusion, one can argue that all the pieces are here, the letters attest to this fact. But it takes a heroic effort on the part of the reader to reassemble them into a coherent and respectful whole. This is what I expected the author to do. How much better it would have been, had the author foregone so much of the nihilistic debauchery, and just focused on the world class contributions of this, one of history's most important couples as reflected in the letters? It would have made it so much easier for the reader. Four stars.

The father of modern existentialism along with his sometime friend Albert Camus was Jean Paul Satre (1905-85). Hazel Rowley has done herself proud in delineating the love affair between Sartre and the equally brilliant feminist author Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986).
Anyone interested in the finer points of Satrian existentialistic thought will not find it in the steamy pages of Rowley's tome. Her book focuses on the personal lives of Satre and Beauvoir. It is a fascinating tale of the French beauty (de Beauvoir) and the beast (Sartre). Sartre and Beauvoir led complex love lives; never lived together and Beauvoir never had a child. She was the daughter of George de Beauvoir one time lawyer and amateur actor and Francois Brasseur a native of Verdun. Beauvoir and Satre were both brilliant students who studied at the Sorbonne winning prizes for their academic achievements. The two never married and usually spent nights apart. They did travel widely in Europe, America and the Far East.
Sartre loved women. Many ladies were sexually attracted to Sartre who was wall-eyed, short and ugly.Sartre was a little man whose face was covered with blackheads able to talk non-stop about his ideas. Sartre and Beauvoir both taught for many years. Sartre served in the French military and was captured by the Nazis having to serve as a POW for several months. Both authors lived in occupied Paris and worked with the underground. Neither was Jewish. Following World War II Sartre was a fellow traveler and enamored of Communism. He and Beauvoir traveled to Russia and Cuba. They were among the leading Western intellectuals who were snookered by communistic propoganda. Sartre refused to accept the Nobel Prize. Sartre edited a magazine with the assistance of Beuvoir. He and she enjoyed a tight knit familial life including several of their lovers. Jealousy and sexual betrayal were rife in this menage of many!
His works include several plays including "No Exit" and long philosophical explanations of existentialism such as "Being and Nothingness". Beauvoir is most famous for "The Second Sex" a classic of feministic literature and such novels as "The Mandarins" and "She Came to Stay." Both authors were famous especially so among young intellectual. They were atheists and rebels against bourgeoisie society.
The authors sometimes shared lovers. Beauvoir had affairs with American novelist Nelson Algren and French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann best known for his film "Shoah" a nine hour examination of the holocaust as told by those who had lived through the hellish experience. Sartre was sexually insatiable with a very active libido.Sartre continued to have many mistresses until his death. He needed to be nourished and loved by female admirers. Beavoir had both male and female lovers, He and Beauvoir were kind people with brilliant minds. The two lovers and longtime friends are buried next to each other at the Cimeterie du Montparnasse in the Paris neighborhood of their apartments and coffee shops they loved to frequent.
Rowley has done an excellent job of researching the lives of this famous and influentual couple in the worlds of literature and modern philosophy. The book is well illustrated with photos and contains an excellent bibliography.

I'm surprised that it took so long, almost 20 years since the subjects' passing, for someone to assemble the record of their relationship. Perhaps it's been assumed that those who care about Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir know the story, as I thought I did. There is a tendency to keep relationships off limits, but this relationship is central to understanding the body of work of these two intellectuals. I found this book particularly relevant to understanding Simone de Beauvoir.

Rowley summarizes what is known of the various triangles, rectangles and complex situations resulting from Jean Paul Sartre's incredible need to be loved and surrounded by women... a passion he pays for both literally and figuratively. Sartre seems to see women as "prey" and to keep them he makes them in some way dependent on him (i.e. he takes their freedom away). This is the epitome of Beauvoir's thesis in The Second Sex. Beauvoir also has an active romantic life, but hers seems, more often than not, to be a reaction to Sartre's. While this content could easily be exploited, the writer avoids prurient language and the eroticism is only implied.

This book provokes old and new questions about their relationship and their views. Could the two have been so productive had they never met? How could Sartre condone/promote what was going on in Russia, particularly after visiting and experiencing his own and Zonina's lack of freedom? How could Beauvoir condone/promote Sartre when his liaisons were so sexist in nature? Did Beauvoir, despite the rhetoric, want Sartre exclusively? Did her vicarious romantic life stem from her unmet need for his secure and singular love?

between two of the most famouse philosopher of our time; Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. A must read! Roda Lerpold

This well-researched and detailed portrait of a remarkable and unique relationship between two remarkable and unique people is never less than engaging. It is well worth reading for anyone who has even a passing interest in the intellectual climate in France just preceding, during and after WWII, a period that produced an amazing list of artists and philosophers: Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lanzmann (all of whom figure in this narrative), the nouvelle vague in cinema, and many more. For that matter, it is well worth reading for anyone who is interested in life, and the details of these lives are intrinsically fascinating (which is not always to say admirable). Rowley had an almost unprecedented access to historical materials, and to many of the people involved, and put together a sensitive and coherent picture of Sartre and Beauvoir from roughly the time they met to their deaths. That she is able to paint such an intimate and compassionate portrait that does not shy away from depicting faults and inconsistencies in their lives and thought is a testament to Rowley's skills as a writer and as a historian.

The major weakness of the book is that her talent with philosophy is not equally on display here. In the course of telling her story, Rowley mentions the philosophical works of Sartre and Beauvoir, but says very little to illuminate the connection between their thinking and their lives. Even where she does discuss such connections, the links are fairly superficial. (Or, the connections are of the sort that can be made at the level of pop psychology between an artist and his or her work.) Existentialism comes across in her book in its fairly popular form: that there is no essence of human being and that we define ourselves through our actions. The connection between Sartre's existentialism and phenomenology gets summarized in the claim that Sartre learned from phenomenology that philosophy could be about everyday life. What she doesn't note is that beyond the fact Sartre learned from phenomenology to focus on everyday life, he also engaged in a systematic effort to redescribe life -- to show that our ordinary ways of conceiving everyday life are deeply flawed. Beauvoir's own significant and original philosophical work (apart from "The Second Sex") is hardly discussed -- her "Ethics of Ambiguity," for example, is never even mentioned. What she doesn't note is that Beauvoir had developed a powerful typology of ways in which one might respond to and realize freedom in one's life, in her "Ethics of Ambiguity" -- and it would be interesting to consider where she must have fit on that continuum. Perhaps most egregiously, she fails to emphasize that for both Sartre and Beauvoir, existentialist freedom is not primarily about the rejection of traditional bonds but about the recognition of the ways in which we bind ourselves to others through our projects and commitments -- so that "authenticity" is not just about being oneself but about the discovery that one cannot avoid belonging to others and to deny one's commitments to others is bad faith. If Sartre painted this inevitibility as a kind of hell in "No Exit," Beauvoir especially in the "Ethics of Ambiguity" depicts an acceptance of the ambiguous commitments that emerge from our being with others as the only genuine freedom and the only possible salvation. (In spite of her desire to depict Beauvoir as independent of Sartre, and her emphasis of Sartre's unwavering respect for her as a thinker, Rowley doesn't really give a sense of the independence of Beauvoir as a thinker -- and what comes across for the most part here is the popular but I think misleading picture of Sartre as the philosopher and Beauvoir as the memoirist who occasionally also applied philosophy to subjects like women and aging.) On this reading, then Sartre and Beauvoir come across primarily as writers whose ideas and commitments evolved over time to become more political, who rejected standard morality including and especially the moral prescriptions that reinforce the family, and who shared a unique form of relationship (that involved fidelity to each other in the sense that they would always tell each other the truth, even where they were willing to lie to others with whom they had secondary relationships). One might have wished for a more detailed account of their thinking if only because such an account would help to pose the question how their life must have been conceived by themselves, in accordance with their own thinking. Otherwise, and in spite of the book's other merits as a piece of history and biography that can complement a study of their work (or of the period), the book ends up reading like a soap opera for intellectuals. While I think this point deserves emphasis I don't want to overemphasize this. One of the merits of Rowley's book is that she takes as her model of biography the autobiographical works of Beauvoir -- and to that extent she does employ a similar approach to reflection on their lives that Beauvoir employs in her published works. I just would have liked to see a bit more reflection in the book about the relation between their lives and their more focused philosophical reflections. First and foremost, Sartre and Beavoir are engaged thinkers and a biography that rarely engages with their deepest thinking except at the superficial level of brief summary, seems to me to be lacking. Having said that, I should reiterate that apart from such misgivings I found the book to be very well written and thoroughly enjoyable and could hardly put it down.

All I can say about this book is that is was so hard to put it down ! It made you feel as if you were European sitting alongside Sartre and "The Beaver" sharing your most secret thoughts and being open minded sitting in your favorite cafe in Paris! You really do open your mind after reading this book ................it is something everyone should read. I will say that you must be a little open minded to even begin reading this because of some of the content but it lets you in on their most personal lives.