Her new biography on French writer Pierre Loti – traveller, romantic, egocentric and shameless and passionate poseur, who was admired by the adolescent Proust and even by an ironic Henry James – is again an intimate portrait, a kind of conspiracy with her dubious and nowadays rather discredited hero. ‘A wonderful combination of subject and author,’ says her publisher Philip Ziegler of Collins, with the air of a man who perhaps got more than he bargained for. Not that Lesley Blanch idolises Loti as his contemporary fans did: ‘I would have found him maddening, not at all attractive, despite all the women … imagine, a midget charmer.’
What she recognises in Pierre Loti is the completeness of his dedication to fantasy: the house in provincial Rochefort that concealed a lavish private mosque behind its quiet, bourgeois frontage; the discontented spirit that sent him off again and again on new journeys, new affairs of the heart; the romantic hubris that drove him to reject his own appearance (‘I was not my type,’ is his immortal line) and to try every means from gymnastics to lifts and cosmetics to transform it. She does, of course, find him frequently funny, whereas he seems to have found himself grandly pathetic. Nonetheless, the identification is close.
One thing she certainly shares with Loti is his hatred of the colonising culture he himself (as a French naval officer) was a part of. Like him, she is fierce against the West’s arrogant materialism – what she sums up in shorthand as ‘machine-mindedness, big business’: ‘West’ spells true alienation to her.
Her response to this is a combination of domestic retreat and rebellion. She will rhapsodise about clothes: ‘I’ve a beautiful collection of exotica … gold-embroidered velvet jackets, pantaloons, Turkish court robes, men’s kaftans and burnous …’ She’s a skilled needlewoman, too, and used to create pictures in gros point of places she’d visited. ‘I’d do the picture as I’d go, no tracing in advance, just stick in the needle and start on the Nile or a tea-house in Afghanistan … Like the heroines of Wilder Shores, she finds the habits of submission exciting because they’re strange – a role to play.
Otherwise, she’s all for rebellion: ‘I’ve been a rebel throughout my life. I am disciplined about some things, but I’ve no social disciplines … I haven’t wanted to be as selfish as I probably am; I do have regrets that I haven’t been more understanding of certain people – the few I’ve really cared about.
Again, she finds parallels with Loti – ‘he had nearly everything, but there’s something that makes people miserable’ – and with Romain Gary, who committed suicide two years ago: ‘Adventurous people cut and run’.
As my time with her ran out, and I was about to plunge again into the green pool of her garden, she suddenly sounded hungry for change, as though she might strike camp any minute: ‘I might live in Turkey, I’m very tempted, I long to have a house-slave, someone who’d make me more time to write … North Africa perhaps? They do cherish the old, which is a very glorious thought.’
But then, her great gift to her readers has all along been her romantic restlessness and sheer dissatisfaction. It’s this quality that makes her writing addictive – what she calls in a nice phrase from the new book, ‘the habit of faraway places’.
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR TRANSLATED BY PATRICK O’BRIAN
THIS BOOK IS A deliberate affront to conventional notions of privacy and dignity. It’s an exact, stoical account of Sartre’s disintegration during his last 10 years, and in writing it Simone de Beauvoir is testifying, with a kind of obstinate scrupulosity, to their shared freedom from all such conventional decencies as would – for example – keep a great man’s image ‘intact’.
‘Honesty suited us,’ she said in a 1973 interview – as though too much truth might be damaging in less extraordinary lives. And there’s something of the same pride in the writing here. Sartre’s dying, you are meant to feel, is watchable because he had himself unfolded the possibilities of his experience (in the books, in his political life) so honestly. The book is as much a matter of keeping the record straight as a labour of love, from this point of view, and indeed the refusal of sentimental language is itself part of the pain of the thing.
We start in 1970, with Sartre at 65, in a frenzy of activity, involved with the militants, the Maoists in particular. Protest meetings, speeches, articles, manifestos, demonstrations, jostle with his work on Flaubert. He is working to redefine the role of the intellectual, in terms of ‘decentralising and concrete’ alliances when, out of the blue, come the first cruel intimations that old age means to decentralise him in its own way: at the start only hints of dizziness and vertigo; then in May of the following year a slight stroke, that pulls his mouth sideways in the night; and in July, another.
Still, he’s most inconvenienced by terminal problems with his remaining teeth. He resurrects himself, almost magically. At the same time, he suffers from incontinence, leaving behind occasional small puddles that could be blamed on the cat, if there was a cat. You get the sense that the people around him now start to divide into two groups – those intimate (mostly women) friends, de Beauvoir above all, who read the signs; and the activists and literary contacts who see him as a figurehead, a spokesman, a signatory, and through whom he maintains a kind of collusion with youth.
Since de Beauvoir insists on the material truth, her focus shifts more and more onto the daily business of living (dying), away from the political life and the projects. They go on, but at a painful distance after the third stroke, in 1973, which leaves him for the first time undeniably mentally damaged, ‘wandering’, haunted by phantom appointments, and wearing ‘a fixed smile of universal kindness’ upon his face, ‘caused by a slight paralysis of the facial muscles’. Worse blows follow: the progressive failure of his eyesight, which divorces him from the world of books; the last cigarette, the never-quite-last whisky; the diabetes. All this interspersed with happy but no longer believable periods of recovery, travel, talk.
One of the things that de Beauvoir most wants to insist on is the way the style of life they’d evolved held up under the strain. The women friends that surrounded Sartre shared him with her, as usual, and shared something of her dread. And he was helped, supported, ‘coddled’ even, without being immobilised or isolated. Until nearly the end he lived in ‘vagrant’ style, which removes some of the bitterness from her account of the closing stages of his public career – the legs that won’t carry him on marches, his being increasingly ‘spoken for’ by others, in particular by Pierre Victor, under the guise of the ‘dialogue’ with a new generation he so prized.
She tried, she says, to persuade herself that he had somehow ‘chosen’ his death, but she failed. True, he had driven himself obsessively, but he was not ‘the master of his fate’. When the end came in 1980 she wanted him lied to, and was grateful for the drugs that blurred his consciousness. At the funeral, ‘I told myself that this was exactly the funeral Sartre had wanted, and that he would never know about it.’
His dispersal was finally complete. The only kind of consolation she allows herself is his afterlife in words: here (in the second part of the book) she transcribes a series of taped conversations they had in 1974, as a substitute for the work he could no longer do, in which she prompted him to gather his thoughts, once again, on writing, childhood, sexuality, and time.