About book Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultuous Lives And Loves Of Simone De Beauvoir And Jean-Paul Sartre (2006)
Do you want your biographer in the story or not? I’ve been thinking about this question after reading this book which Rowley has described as being “about the life of a relationship, rather than about a singular life - a relationship that just happened to be perhaps the most notorious and well-documented one of modern times: between the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.” (www.smh.com.au/news/books/intimateobs...)I began this read thinking about studying French History at uni in the mid to late 70’s. Both de Beauvoir and Sartre were still alive. The heady days of May ’68 felt quite fresh. Feminism was not a dirty word. The iconic The Second Sex, with its blue Matisse-like figure on the front was on every second woman’s bookshelf. I’d been much influenced by reading The Outsider at the age of 16 and considered myself an existentialist (so serious and pretentious at this age!). I’d read ‘Words’ and ‘Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter’ and Sartre writing about the Algerian war and other political issues. I probably knew that Sartre and Beauvoir had an usually open relationship. I came to this book with some enthusiasm.A Sydney Morning Herald interview with Rowley describes the way in which she wrote her first biography (of Christine Stead). “Rowley at first moved carefully: she determined to develop a style that was not judgemental; she determined she would not let the reader know what she herself thought about her subject.” With Tete a Tete, she says she “wanted to write a biography that matched the lives to the ideas, how one was, as it were, an embodiment of the other. Both Sartre and de Beauvoir preached of life's contingency - yet between them they were aspiring to the absolute. How to understand this? Was their commitment absolute, given their innumerable affairs and open partnerships?”What we get is a book of lists. Lists of the open partnerships, diaries of Sartre’s onerous relationship commitments (lunch with one woman, afternoon work with Simone, dinner with another woman, Sunday lunch with his mother) but not nearly enough of why these unusual relationships flourished or lasted (sometimes decades) as Sartre is depicted in most unappealing ways, despite Rowley saying “sometimes people she was interviewing for the book would sigh, shake their heads, look away and say, "You have no idea how exciting it was to be with him or to be with her, they were magnetic."” (www.smh.com.au/news/books/intimateobs...)I think she really did not like Sartre – and so what we get is a pared back, impartial view that delivers none of what he offered the circle of people in his life. Sartre is often described as being funny, charming - but that doesn't come through at all in the examples of his behaviour or writing.Tete a Tete is strangely empty of context – we learn very little about what was happening around this couple during the decades of their relationship – a small amount about Sartre as a soldier, going hungry in the war, the communist years, going to Russia, May 68 and the war in Algeria but these major political events are really a backdrop for a strange kind of day by day account of who Sartre was having lunch with. She does a much better rapid-fire outline of content whenever she is interviewed – see this as an example from an interview with Ramona Koval: “these two met in 1929. It was a time when women, to be married to a good bourgeois man, to get a good catch, you had to bring along a dowry. Can you imagine? This was Catholic France in 1929, and that's not even to talk about the fact that women couldn't vote, that Sartre was coming through the l'Ecole Normale Superieure, the most elite educational school in France, that Beauvoir, as woman, did not have access to, that Simone de Beauvoir until she was 19 had never stepped foot in a cafin France because cafes sell alcohol and nice women didn't go into a caf And not to mention the double standard sexually, where men sowed their wild oats, as it was called, and Sartre like all his friends went to brothels, went to prostitutes. Simone de Beauvoir was, of course, a good little virgin right up until the time she met Sartre. So that's the 1929 context in which these two met and in which Sartre said to Simone de Beauvoir-we're going to be equals. What I propose to you is that we have a relationship between equals. You do just what I do and we tell each other everything-well, you know, how many men say that to a woman? Even today.” 9 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/p...)Rowley adds more depth in her portrayal of de Beauvoir, whom she wrote her PHD about in the 70’s. She clearly likes her a lot more than Sartre. The book also manages to remind you of the ideas of de Beauvoir – it is much less strong of Sartre. It presents a very clear picture of Beauvoir’s struggle with aging- eg writing at age 44: “The tragedy, as she saw it, was that women lost their sexual desirability long before they lost their sexual desire. No sooner had they attained their full erotic development than they were observing the first signs of aging in the mirror.” (p209) In her writing about 1960s America, she could be describing contemporary Australia: "Relations between the sexes are a struggle. One thing that was immediately obvious to me when I came to America is that men and women don't like each other... This is partly because American men tend to be laconic, and in spite of everything, a minimum of conversation is necessary for friendship. But it's also because there is mutual distrust, a lack of generosity, and a rancor that's often sexual in nature. " (p 180)What I ended up thinking was that the description by de Beauvoir’s one-time (disgruntled) lover “All the characters of her novels, although drawn directly from life, have no life on the printed page.”(p303) could equally be applied to this biography. Tete a Tete - no life on the printed page! If only Rowley had inserted more of herself into this oh-so-careful narrative, it would have sung a lot more.PS – For those interested in Intellectual Property issues, as I am, it’s well worth reading Rowley’s article for The Monthly. (http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-...) If we think it’s a tough IP world here – try France!!!
My wife found this for me in a secondhand bookshop, while I was reading Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée. The title seemed to suggest something a bit prurient, I thought, but it has turned out to be a very good follow-on from de Beauvoir's memoir. De Beauvoir's book ends and Rowley's book begins in the same year (1929), when de Beauvoir and Sartre met, and significant people represented in the latter book needed no introduction.Anyone reading this for titillation is likely to be disappointed. Sartre and de Beauvoir's relationship, though strong and central to their lives, isn't all that sexy and ceased to be a physical one after some 20 years. In those years they had both, by dint of prodigiously hard work, achieved literary fame and financial success. From quite early in their careers they attracted young disciples with whom they would soon become emotionally and physically intimate, and Sartre would sooner or later make a conquest of nearly every one of de Beauvoir's female partners. They set about educating a number of promising young women, and continued to support them even when it became apparent that they weren't going anywhere in particular with their education. The expanding group of lovers, acolytes, ex-lovers, sometime partners of ex-lovers, close friends and Sartre's secretary were designated "The Family", but it was a family without children, or only on the margins (Michelle Vian had children before she met Sartre). Sartre, for whom the pursuit of women appears to have been more sport than the fulfilment of physical or emotional need, would take a new lover nearly every time he travelled. He was a very short man with a wall eye, but what he lacked in looks he apparently made up for in other ways. He was evidently very persuasive.Both de Beauvoir and Sartre ran their lives by the clock. Time was allotted to work, to relaxation and to lovers (not always relaxing). Imagine the lives of some of Sartre's women: he supported many of them, they knew about de Beauvoir but maybe not some of the other women, he would see them at designated hours on particular days and perhaps overnight once a week, and they would go on holiday with him for 2-3 weeks each year. When they were apart he would write or call regularly, often repeating the same phrases to different women in the course of the same day. He would return from travel and begin his "hospital rounds" (his own phrase), visiting various women and soothing them with assurances of his love. He was very conscientious, never dumping anyone when the relationship became fraught. De Beauvoir's relationships were fewer and overlapped less, but similarly slotted into the diary. This book will cure anyone tempted by the idea of polygamy. It's just too exhausting. I can't find the quote, but at one point Wanda (I think) becomes so demanding that Sartre, for whom the burden of freedom is that one must work out one's own moral framework and live by it conscientiously, pronounces that sometimes it is necessary to adopt "a temporary moral code" towards people who make our well-thought-out morality unworkable: he was lying to her to keep the peace.Before reading this I had believed Sartre and perhaps de Beauvoir to have been a figures of the Résistance. They convened a few clandestine meetings but the net effect of their activism was negligible. De Beauvoir's book The Second Sex is a seminal text of modern feminism. They were both vocal opponents of French colonialism. Sartre was a conspicuous supporter of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, until the invasion of Hungary compelled him at last to denounce Moscow. He lent his support and prestige to the May 1968 revolutionaries. Apart from Sartre's support for stalinism, they were generally on the side of the angels on the important global issues of their time.Sartre did little exercise, ate a rich diet with little fruit or vegetables, smoked, drank heavily, kept up punishing levels of work and for many years took massive doses of the stimulant "corydrane". He suffered several strokes, but even blind, dribbling his food, incontinent and mentally diminished he continued to seek new sexual conquests. Some may see that as indomitable spirit, but to me it just appears like a lamentable lack of dignity. Simone de Beauvoir was utterly bereft when Sartre died, but like the faithful Boswell that she was she lived long enough to write the book of Sartre's death in all its drawn-out detail.This is an excellent book with plenty of good information about two important figures, as well as a small planetary system of minor satellites.
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Of the dozens of books I've read this year (most of which have been unrecorded; I vow to change that in 2012), two in particular stand out: The Human Stain by Philip Roth, because it's an amazing story told in an amazing way, and then Tete-a-Tete by Hazel Rowley. Tete-a-Tete is a biography of the lifelong relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although the two were undeniably committed to one another, their relationship was unconventional. They never married nor had children, never lived together, and had multiple lovers (some of their lovers seemed content to be shared, whereas others were kept in the dark as to the extent of the relationship between the two philosophers.) In particular, I was most intrigued by de Beauvoir's story. Simone de Beauvoir, like Sartre, was a champion of freedom and publicly outcried the social shackles thrust upon women, and yet she still struggled with many of these shackles, herself. Despite the open relationship with Sartre, she struggled with jealousy. Despite claims that she was true to herself, she kept details of her lesbian relationships hidden from the public. Through the well-layed out biography, we witness the effects of age on de Beauvoir's thoughts and well-being and, like Sartre, her tendency to surround herself with young, beautiful people, attracted to the vitality she herself had in her youth. The two were reckless with both themselves (especially in the case of Sartre, whose obsessions with work, smoking and drinking cast a major toll on his body) and with others, lying frequently to their lovers and shuffling them around based on personal convenience. These lies when made public had tragic consequences, and some of their friendships were forever stained by the dishonesty. However, de Beauvoir and Sartre clearly cared for these individuals. Many of Satre's current and past lovers were financially dependent on him for decades, to the extent that he found himself destitute by the end of the month. The reader sees the effects of World War II on the philosophies and works of both writers, as well as the effects of fame on their daily lives. Above all, though, the reader is provided with an incredibly detailed glimpse into an intense, productive, loving relationship. Many of my friends will be receiving this book as gifts, and I'm already looking forward to re-reading it.
—Sarah
It's definitely a good read to get a solid grasp on Sartre and de Beauvoir's relationship, and I found it significantly engaging as I'd never known what their lives were like as people, beyond what they'd written.That said, though well-researched, it's REALLY poorly written, and that got very annoying. However, I could overlook that and enjoy excerpts from their own writings and so forth. So I'd still recommend it, as the story's interesting, but only if you're taking it out of the library or borrowing it from a friend.
—Colie!
Why not celebrate Valemtime's Day by reading an account of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and their fleet of polyamorous friends? Nothing says "I love you" like "Sit down and listen to the sordid details of my most recent affair with a lover much younger than you are." This is how Sartre and Beauvoir liked to roll. I'd hoped this book would shed more light on Beauvoir's relationship with Sartre, how they really were together, how they managed to make their arrangement work, how they managed to not kill each other, etc. While this book contains excerpts from their letters, I think it's more interesting to just read the letters themselves. Still, the book helps put some of my favorite books - 'She Came to Stay' and 'The Mandarins' - in context.
—Alicia
