Sexistentialism
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Love for the woman is a total abdication for the benefit of a master.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir once thought about becoming a nun but reconsidered after a crisis of faith. Instead the lapsed Catholic made a scandalous vow to fellow academic Jean-Paul Sartre and boldly embarked on an unconventional lifestyle. Despite her insistence on independence, the resolutely single feminist icon was as much of a fool for love as any married woman.
One of the most infamous relationships in literary history had a surprisingly mundane beginning. Using a mutual friend as an intermediary, Jean-Paul Sartre invited Simone de Beauvoir to hit the books with him at the Sorbonne, the Parisian university where in 1929 they were both studying for an elite graduate degree in philosophy. In two weeks’ time, a partnership had been forged that would last half a century and push social and sexual mores to an extreme.
The diminutive, unprepossessing Sartre seemed an unlikely match for beautiful Simone, a blue-eyed brunette who had no shortage of admirers at the university. But what he lacked in physical attributes—he was five feet tall, almost completely blind in one eye, and hardly handsome—Sartre made up for with his brilliant mind and outsize personality. He favored boldly colored shirts, played pranks, generously spent his mother’s money on his friends, and became a campus legend for turning up naked at a university event.
At twenty-one, Simone was the youngest student ever to sit for the agrégation in philosophy, a competitive exam for a teaching position in the French school system. Although jury members agreed she was the best philosopher (and only the ninth woman to garner the degree), she had to settle for second place. Top honors were awarded to Sartre, presumably because he was male.
Simone didn’t hold the slight against him, claiming that they had become “necessary” to each other and continuing to see him nearly every day. To her delight, he turned up out of the blue in southwest France, where she was vacationing with her family. Simone snuck out to meet him in the surrounding fields, where they talked about philosophy and made love for the first time. Concerned their daughter’s reckless behavior was becoming fodder for local gossips, her parents confronted the couple and demanded Sartre leave. His refusal, on the grounds that they were working on an important thesis, was a triumphant moment for Simone, emotionally emancipating her from her parents.
After the young lovers were discovered, Sartre asked Simone to marry him. “He felt he had to propose to me after my father accosted us,” she later explained. “I told him not to be silly and of course I rejected marriage.” Crushed at being rebuffed, her would-be husband admitted that at the time he “was foolish enough to be upset by it: instead of understanding the extraordinary luck I’d had, I fell into a certain melancholy.”
Sartre then suggested they make a radical pact that would have been most men’s dream scenario: the pair would remain devoted to one another but were free to see other people. “What we have is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs,” he told Simone. To his surprise, she readily agreed, believing as he did that even their intense relationship “could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.” They later made a second promise, vowing never to lie to one another the way married couples often do and to share the details of their contingent love affairs.
Although monogamy didn’t appeal to Sartre, he had nothing against marriage and came close to tying the knot with other women several times. As for Simone, she had no intention of ever marrying, believing it inevitably led to deceit and cheating and that the female spouse usually drew the short straw. Instead she planned to live her life with the same independence as a man. Making the unconventional choice not to wed and to freely engage in affairs was significantly more courageous for de Beauvoir than it was for Sartre, given society’s double standards. Sartre’s parents were among her earliest critics, disapproving of her association with their son and refusing to entertain her in their home.
To maintain the independent life she craved, de Beauvoir needed to support herself and didn’t balk at being assigned a teaching position in southeastern France, some six hundred miles away from Sartre. Devastated at the separation, he proposed marriage for the second time so they could request a joint assignment. Again Simone turned him down.
At the time Sartre began seeing de Beauvoir, he was also involved with another Simone, Simone Jollivet, a vivacious, intelligent woman he had met at his cousin’s funeral. True to their pact, he regaled de Beauvoir with spicy details about his liaisons with the other woman, who received callers in the nude and threw legendary theme parties that included a Roman orgy. Stricken with jealousy, de Beauvoir began to lose focus on her writing. “Watch out,” Sartre cautioned her, “that you don’t turn into a housewife.”
There was no danger of that happening, given the unconventional “trios” the couple began orchestrating. The first was with one of Simone’s students, seventeen-year-old Olga Kosakiewicz, the daughter of a Russian émigré. After the two women struck up a friendship, Olga moved into the hotel where de Beauvoir was living and they began an affair, the first of numerous sexual encounters the teacher initiated with female students. Throughout her life, she misled biographers and denied in interviews that she had affairs with women. After Sartre’s death, she published his letters to her but claimed the ones she wrote to him were lost. When the missives came to light after her demise, they were published unedited, including passages in which she vividly described her lesbian encounters.
Perpetually on the hunt for fresh conquests (particularly virgins), Sartre relished pursuing the female students that attached themselves to Simone. He fell madly in love with Olga and spent two years futilely trying to seduce her. “As for O., my passion for her burned away my workaday impurities like a Bunsen-flame,” Sartre candidly acknowledged. As he and de Beauvoir vied for the young girl’s affections, Olga performed her part, vacillating between the two of them and playing them against each other.
No matter how progressive de Beauvoir thought herself when it came to relationships, the green-eyed monster once again had her in its grip when faced with Sartre’s unabated desire for another woman. Working through her conflicted feelings, she used the love triangle as the basis for her first novel, She Came to Stay. “The unfortunate episode of the trio did much more than supply me with a subject for a novel,” she explained. “It enabled me to deal with it.”
Understandably, rage and resentment reverberate throughout She Came to Stay. The emotions de Beauvoir wouldn’t allow herself to express in real life were transferred to her fiction. Her novel, the tale of a Parisian couple and the girl who throws their marriage off kilter, remains fairly true to life, with a notable exception. In a grisly act of metaphorical revenge, the character based on Simone coldly and calculatingly murders the stand-in for Olga (to whom, ironically, she dedicated the novel).
Sartre’s licentious hopes for a tryst with Olga were crushed when she fell for Jacques-Laurent Bost, one of his pupils. Despite being denied physical gratification, Sartre, too, got literary mileage out of the situation. His novel The Age of Reasonis the story of a philosophy teacher in a tired relationship with his girlfriend of seven years. He falls in love with a student, the daughter of a Russian aristocrat who bears a striking resemblance to Olga, but as in real life, lust went unfulfilled.
A consolation prize came along for Sartre in the form of Olga’s younger sister, Wanda, although another two years passed before he succeeded in bedding the striking sibling. When he finally did, he was titillated as much by the opportunity to brag about it as by the deed. Ever the cad, he left his lover lying in bed while he dashed off to a café to write Simone with the scintillating details.
Sartre and de Beauvoir’s association with Olga was the beginning of an extended network they dubbed the “family,” made up mostly of their former students. They not only influenced their young acquaintances’ careers but also managed their personal lives, paying doctor bills and bankrolling vacations. While Sartre pursued Wanda, Simone took up with another “family member,” Olga’s boyfriend Jacques-Laurent Bost. Their relationship, kept secret from the other woman, blossomed while they were hiking in the Alps. Sartre gave his nod of approval, and a new trio was formed when he spent several weeks traveling through the Greek islands with Simone and Bost.
Sartre’s sexual escapades were curbed for a time while he served in World War II and became a prisoner of war for nine months, although he continued wooing with words, declaring his affection for Simone before telling her he planned to write to Wanda next. When de Beauvoir heard that enemy forces had broken through the area where he was serving, she was consumed with worry and fear. He reassured her and urged her to have faith and patience. “My love, it’s our eleventh anniversary and I feel so close to you,” he wrote during his internment. “You must never again dream that I don’t love you anymore.”
After his release, the couple’s dangerous liaisons with de Beauvoir’s students resumed and eventually almost brought about her ruin. The parents of one pupil lodged a complaint, accusing her of corrupting a minor. The charges would be dropped if she was dismissed from her teaching position and forbidden all contact with underage students. Although she vehemently protested her innocence, in 1943, after more than a decade in the French school system, de Beauvoir was out of a job.
The professional downturn didn’t last long for the philosopher, who rebounded almost immediately with the publication of She Came to Stay.. Also appearing that year was Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which he’d begun writing while a prisoner of war. In the weighty philosophical tome, which heralded the rise of existentialism in twentieth-century France, he espouses the belief that there is no God and that individuals are responsible for their own choices.
Existentialism gained popularity during the post–World War II years and launched its two most famous proponents into the media spotlight. De Beauvoir and Sartre traveled together to promote their books and often gave joint interviews. Paparazzi shadowed them, eager to share photos of the trendy philosophers with a public both fascinated and scandalized by their lifestyle.
De Beauvoir’s unorthodox life gave rise to The Second Sex, her famed treatise on the status and nature of women and the sources of gender inequality. The seeds of the book were sown during a discussion with Sartre in which she confided that she had been considering the ways in which she was typically feminine and the ways in which she was not. He encouraged her to delve more deeply into the idea, and the result was her most well-known work. Published in 1949, the controversial book was an instant best seller and became a cornerstone of the feminist movement, garnering praise while also rousing indignation for questioning traditional notions about women’s roles.
While on a lecture tour in the United States, Sartre embarked on an affair that nearly tore asunder his long-standing pact with de Beauvoir. When he became enraptured with Dolorès Vanetti, a French actress married to a wealthy American doctor, Simone correctly perceived the relationship as a serious threat. The lovebirds met in New York and rendezvoused in France before Sartre ultimately bid Dolorès—who had no interest in a romantic relationship that included Simone—a regretful farewell.
The female philosopher had her own stateside liaison with Chicago-based journalist and novelist Nelson Algren. Meeting him, she declared, was one of the most auspicious events of her life. They fell for each other almost instantly and carried on a transatlantic affair for years. De Beauvoir constantly wore a silver ring Algren gave her (which accompanied her to the grave she shares with Sartre) and wrote him letters, referring to him as her husband and only love. She connected on an intellectual as well as physical level with the writer, who in looks—blond, handsome, and six feet tall—was the antithesis of Sartre. More importantly, he was better in the sack than the Frenchman. Despite the innumerable sexual encounters de Beauvoir had before meeting Algren, she claimed she had her first orgasm with him, at age thirty-nine.
Algren desperately wanted to marry Simone, but like Dolorès, he was uninterested in a three-way emotional relationship and resented playing second fiddle to Sartre. Despite her deep love for Algren, Simone stood firm on her antimarriage stance, unwilling to give up either Sartre or her freedom. Even the great sex wasn’t enough to entice her to abandon the pact she had made long ago, and the ill-fated lovers eventually parted ways for good. Algren went on to marry and divorce twice but never forgave Simone, whom he cursed to a reporter shortly before he died.
Some of Algren’s animosity stemmed from de Beauvoir’s vivid, thinly veiled depiction of their private life—in particular their sexual exploits—in her 1954 novel The Mandarins, which she dedicated to him. (He was further outraged when she revealed even more in her autobiographies.) De Beauvoir’s novel, a fictionalized take on the lives of those in her and Sartre’s intellectual circle, centers on an adulterous married woman torn between her inner desires and keeping up appearances. The book garnered the coveted Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary prize, and finally moved de Beauvoir out of Sartre’s shadow.
The couple’s decades-long partnership eventually began to fray around the edges as they both reneged on aspects of the pact. The closest they had ever come to living together was taking rooms in the same hotel, yet in middle age de Beauvoir relinquished her coveted solitude and invited a much younger lover to move in with her. Having children was also against their creed, and yet fifty-nine-year-old Sartre shocked Simone by adopting his Algerian mistress, who was in her midtwenties. Legally declaring the younger woman his heir and giving her posthumous control of his literary estate seemed an enormous betrayal to his longtime partner. An enraged and humiliated de Beauvoir responded by formally adopting her own female protégé and creating a rival family.
Despite the bitterness that erupted between the former lovers in Sartre’s last years, de Beauvoir was devastated by his passing. A half century after they made their notorious pact, he professed his love for her on his deathbed in 1980. She kissed him a final time and kept vigil by his side. When he slipped away, she laid next to his lifeless body, wishing she could go with him.
THE ART OF SEDUCTION 