Biography: In 1963, Jean-Paul Sartre proposed marriage to Lena Zonina, a young Russian woman who worked for the Soviet Writers' Union as an interpreter.
Sartre, accompanied by Simone de Beauvoir, his companion of more than 30 years, had been visiting the Soviet Union regularly during the brief Khrushchev thaw, and had fallen in love with Zonina, and she with him. Marriage to Sartre would have meant a new start in the West for her and her daughter, with excellent healthcare (she suffered from diabetes), freedom from the stifling censorship of the Soviet Union, and a comfortable life.
However, she turned him down. She explained her reasons in a letter: "It does not just depend on us . . . The more I read the Beaver's [Sartre's pet name for Beauvoir] memoirs, the more I understand that I could never decide to change things . . . You know that I feel friendship for the Beaver. I respect her, I admire the relationship you have . . . But you and the Beaver together have created a remarkable and dazzling thing which is so dangerous for those people who get close to you."
The "remarkable and dazzling thing" was a relationship which lasted for 50 years, begun when Sartre and Beauvoir met as students in 1929, and ended by Sartre's death in 1980. They agreed that they would be each other's "essential" lovers, while allowing, indeed encouraging, "contingent" love affairs with others. They would be scrupulously honest with each other, keeping nothing back about their activities and feelings. They would not live together, but would spend most of their time with each other. They would not have children.
This high-minded, earnest and admirable edifice depended more than anything on the fact that Sartre and Beauvoir were intellectual equals, who shared philosophical, literary and political perspectives, and who were always each other's best readers. It would have been virtually impossible for anyone to replace either of them as provider of ideas, intelligent criticism, editorial skill and encouragement to the other. Their 50-year conversation meant that their knowledge of each other's thought processes, interests and capabilities was so dense and profound as to create an entity unbroachable by the sometimes very frustrated "contingent" individuals who constituted the Sartrean "family".
Hazel Rowley, previously a biographer of Christina Stead and Richard Wright, has undertaken to explore both the essential and contingent elements of the Sartre/Beauvoir relationship, bringing together already published material, such as both parties' autobiographies, letters and fiction, the memoirs (many) written by those in their circle, and various biographies, with some new sources, mainly unpublished letters and interviews with key people. The result is a well-written, largely chronological account of a kaleidoscope of relationships over a 50-year period. Rowley is refreshingly non-judgmental about her primary subjects, but a little more analysis of the forces underlying their relationships would have been welcome.
SARTRE HAD FAR more affairs than Beauvoir, mostly with vulnerable young women who became emotionally and financially dependent on him. Two who did not fit this template were Dolores Vanetti, an American who worked for the US Office of War Information, and Lena Zonina, referred to above. While he proposed marriage to almost everybody (including Beauvoir in the early days), these were the two whom he might have actually married. Vanetti would have required him to relinquish his relationship with Beauvoir, and Zonina understood its importance and did not want to damage it.
Both relationships ended when marriage was rejected, unlike those with Wanda Kosakievicz, Michelle Vian and Evelyne Rey; the first two lived on allowances from him all of their lives, and the last, tragically, committed suicide. Sartre slotted all of these women into his schedule with great rigidity - Wanda Friday evenings, Michelle Wednesday evenings, Beauvoir Tuesdays and Saturdays etc - and often kept them in the dark about each other, except Beauvoir, who knew everything.
Beauvoir had several affairs with young women too, some of whom also had relationships with Sartre. Her bisexuality was not revealed until after her death, when her letters were published. But her most serious affairs were with men, Nelson Algren, the Chicago writer, and Claude Lanzmann, the film- maker (director of Shoah, the monumental film about the Holocaust). Both of these relationships were long-lived, although Algren broke with her when he read Force of Circumstance, the volume of her autobiography in which she details their affair. He never spoke to her again, and reviewed the book viciously wherever he could. Lanzmann remained one of her closest friends until her death.
Both Sartre and Beauvoir adopted young women as their daughters late in life. In this respect, Sartre fared less well than Beauvoir. Arlette Elkaïm, a French Algerian, was adopted by him in 1965; she never liked Beauvoir, and treated her appallingly after Sartre's death, taking everything from his apartment the day after his cremation and responding negatively to requests that Beauvoir be allowed to retrieve some keepsakes. Her behaviour as literary executor has been a repeated roadblock to Sartre scholars. In fact, her prohibitions against publishing Sartre's letters have necessitated a less inclusive European edition of this book, as fair-use laws are stricter here than in North America.
Beauvoir's daughter, Sylvie le Bon, exemplifies good practice in this regard, and was genuinely good to her adoptive mother in her later years. She has been to the fore in seeking a new English translation of The Second Sex, Beauvoir's ground-breaking examination of womanhood. (The first translation was commissioned by Knopf from a retired professor of zoology with student French and no training in philosophy.)
THIS FASCINATING STORY reveals two atypical individuals attempting to live by the precepts of freedom, choice and responsibility which underpin existentialist philosophy. On the face of it, it could seem that Sartre had the better part of the bargain, living a life not so different from a womanising monogamist, with a faithful and understanding wife prepared to stand by him. Beauvoir can look like a dupe who sacrificed marriage and motherhood to a relationship which could not compensate her for such losses. But in the end, this is an account of lives lived with passion, commitment and love, and a great deal of generosity and goodness to others. The inevitable flaws and failings merely point up the great achievement of the whole.
Crucially, Beauvoir, whose courage far outweighed Sartre's in publicly undertaking such an unconventional partnership, took control of the experience by writing about it, directly in her six volumes of autobiography, and analytically, and greatly to our benefit, in The Second Sex.
We owe her, in particular, a great debt, not just for providing a new model for relationships between women and men, but for using her experience to write what is arguably the most important philosophical treatise of the 20th century.
Catriona Crowe is a senior archivist in the National Archives of Ireland
Tête-á-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre By Hazel Rowley Chatto and Windus, 429pp. £20