> > At first, I chuckled. But, then, the flip side of
> > that is: someone plain
> > can become very attractive when they have political
> > views you love.
>
> No they can't. ;)
If not political and philosophical views, what could lovers of Sartre and Beauvoir have possibly seen in them (especially Sartre, who wasn't handsome by the standards of any culture)?
<blockquote>For killing ladies - or at least deflowering, dumping and duping them at a rate unrivaled by the Marquis de Sade - seems to have been one of Sartre's life preoccupations. At an age when John Huston described the walleyed little Frenchman as just about "as ugly as a human being can be" and Edward Said remembered him as "uncommunicative," with "egg and mayonnaise streaming haplessly down his face," Sartre still boasted he had nine women fighting for his heart - in addition to the one with whom his name will be forever linked, Simone de Beauvoir.
. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . . Beauvoir and Sartre's relationship started with a pact, a pact critics generally assume was foisted upon the 20-year-old Beauvoir by the 23-year-old Sartre, when they met as rebellious philosophy students in Paris in 1929. It said, in so many words, that they would be unfaithful to each other. They would have "contingent" relationships, even while preserving their "essential" alliance based on radical honesty - or, as they called it, "transparency." Privacy and hypocrisy were trappings of the bourgeoisie. They would tell each other everything and they would do everything.
If it was Sartre who suggested such an arrangement, it was Beauvoir who became its fiercest guardian. She refused to marry him when, in a moment of weakness, he proposed. She had affairs more easily - at least initially. No sooner had she taken her first teaching post in 1932 than a "harem" of female pupils (as Sartre called it) materialized in her bedroom. When Sartre attempted to seduce Beauvoir's favorite, a waifish 21-year-old called Olga, he failed resoundingly. He redirected his attentions onto the girl's sister, Wanda, who rewarded him for his first kiss by running to the bathroom to vomit.
Most important, Beauvoir devoted a huge part of her oeuvre to the championship of her and Sartre's peculiar kind of love. "Can there," she demands in her autobiography, "be any possible reconciliation between fidelity and freedom?" "The Second Sex" may be read as in large part an attack on matrimony. "The proponents of conjugal love are quite prepared to agree," Beauvoir writes, that marriage "is not a love affair, and that this is precisely what gives it a marvelous character. For the middle class has . . . invented an epic style of expression in which routine takes on the cast of adventure, fidelity that of a sublime passion, ennui becomes wisdom, and family hatred is the deepest form of love." Whatever else she may be, Beauvoir is a formidable philosopher of domestic life. Severely critical of the erotic status quo, she tried to forge an alternative. To suggest she was simply dragged along behind "that execrable male chauvinist Jean- Paul Sartre," as Rowley characterizes one feminist critique, is to patronize her.
The result is another matter. The cost of the philosophers' experiment proved high - less because their principles were rotten than because they did not abide by them. Take "transparency," which they attempted with some valiance, except that for every truth they told each other, they spun a surreal web of lies for other people. When Sartre finally succeeded in seducing Wanda, he invented the most fantastic fictions to keep her from knowing he still bedded Beauvoir, and, in time, a bevy of other women. On leave from a meteorological unit stationed in Alsace during World War II, he made his comrades send Wanda a letter a day from the war zone, so she wouldn't guess he was actually in a hotel around the corner with Beauvoir.
Meanwhile, Beauvoir was sleeping with Olga's fiancé - and exchanging exceedingly unkind letters about both sisters with Sartre (after all, happiness in a polygamous relationship depends on your rivals looking less good than you do).
As Sartre matured into the literary Don Juan he'd always wanted to be, as he proved unable to wait for one married mistress to conclude a divorce before financing the abortion of a second, Beauvoir only pitied him. She fretted he might lose his cool over "some stupid girl's sobbing."
She needn't have fretted much. Before long, Sartre was implicated in the suicide of one such "girl," the beautiful and effervescent Evelyne Rey (sister of Claude Lanzmann, who directed the film "Shoah"), whom he had refused to acknowledge in public throughout their multiyear relationship. Michelle Vian, another woman who had divorced for Sartre - and had three abortions while with him - attempted suicide too, a fact Rowley accommodates nonchalantly in half a sentence. Wanda bought a gun and threatened to shoot Beauvoir. Sartre's last girlfriend, Hélène, had a "psychotic episode on the street."
The fact is, Beauvoir and Sartre cared about nobody but themselves for much of their lives. And that, romantic as it might sound, is exactly the problem. In lying to everyone around them, Sartre and Beauvoir came to lie to each other. Or rather, they began deploying honesty the way a painter deploys a particular color of paint: when it looked good. Truth became an aesthetic choice, a calculation.
The danger, when one surveys this battlefield of bruised feelings and broken hearts, is that one renounces all further thought about what caused the carnage. As the widowed Mary Shelley once cried (Percy's experimental ways had created some corpses along the way, too), "God save me from freethinkers!" Yes, free thought can lead to free fall, especially since it often comes with the same selfishness and greed that besets all human enterprise.
But such a conclusion would be a loss. Sartre, and especially Beauvoir, turned with new boldness and urgency to age-old questions of intimate relations. They are questions we have not yet answered. How does one, over the course of a life, combine stability and kindness with passion? For passion is a virtue and not just an indulgence. It leads, as Sartre and Beauvoir knew, to the greatest creativity, the deepest grasp of others, the most vivid self-renewal.
However much Sartre and Beauvoir got wrong, they got some things right. Five decades into their love they still addressed each other in the most intensely affectionate of terms and shared conversations whose intellectual electricity fired their lives' work.
If they terrorized many, they championed others. Sartre lived, for much of his career, in a spartan hotel room (or, at the height of his fame, with his mother!), but he bought apartments for a bewildering number of women - often after his sexual relationship with them had ended. Nor is Beauvoir the only woman whose work profited from his intervention; so did Wanda's and Olga's. He wrote plays that made their reputations as actresses.
WE live in a culture of excision. When we break with someone we are expected never to speak with that person again. Sartre and Beauvoir did better. Where possible, they retained close friendships with the people they had once loved. This did not work every time: Beauvoir's greatest love, the tough-talking Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, felt too betrayed by the lies he discovered when he read her memoirs. This is a tragedy, for the bristlingly brilliant Algren might have given Beauvoir precisely what she lacked. She discovered a whole new side of herself with him: she grew funny, tender and profoundly emotional.
"Oh!" she exclaimed in a letter. "I feel mad tonight, and here are tears, since you like them, tears of love and joy. Nelson, my beloved lover, I am so stern and dry and old when I no longer dare to enjoy my love for you." Had Beauvoir stayed with Algren, perhaps their two opposing intensities - her "stern" theory of passion and his hot- blooded embrace of it - would have melded into a new amorous philosophy, the one we are still missing. Algren put his finger on the gravest problem with Sartre and Beauvoir's doctrine: the notion of secondary people, of secondary or contingent love: "Anyone who can experience love contingently has a mind that has recently snapped," he wrote in Harper's Magazine, years after their relationship ended. "How can love be contingent?" His fiery conclusion: "Loving too violently is a lesser affliction than loving only contingently." Algren was the "other" whom Beauvoir needed. Their fused thought might have lit a new path for us. As it is, we must still feel our way forward in the dark.
(Cristina Nehring, "No Exit," <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/ books/review/04nehring.html>)</blockquote>
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>