Sartre & Simone De Beauvoir
A Story Weaved Through Letters
Sartre gave us Nausea and showed us ‘No exit.’ Simone de Beauvoir concentrated on the Second Sex.
Sartre was a man of short stature and towering intellect.
Simone De Beauvoir was a fierce feminist and a leading existential philosopher of her generation.
In the early nineteenth century, they made a pact: They would be tied in friendship but not in marriage, having an open relationship. Their friendship was no ordinary but one extraordinary, filled with radical candor, where they shared the inner workings of their intellect. It’s hard to tell if they were equally accessible in that relationship, but they kept writing to each other till the twilight years of life.
For Sartre, the gap between reality and the world of words could never be filled, and he maintained that we will always be inadequate in that expression. Though Sartre spent his life writing vehemently and vigorously, he finished only a few of his many literary projects.
De Beauvoir and Sartre met in 1929 when they were both studying for the aggregation in philosophy, the elite French graduate degree. De Beauvoir came second to Sartre’s first. Sartre took the exam a second time, though the examiners agreed she was strictly the better philosopher. At 21, she was the youngest to sit the exam.
Bouvoire came from an upwardly mobile family in Paris and was born in 1908 to a Catholic family. Bouvoir’s first novel, published in 1943, told the story of a trio in relationships: Olga, Beauvoir, and Sartre.
She wrote in her autobiography,
He explained the matter to me in his favorite terminology. “What we have,” he said, “is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did; but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from the encounters with different people. How could we deliberately forego the gamut of emotions-astonishment, regret, pleasure, nostalgia-which we were as capable of sustaining as anyone else? We reflected on this problem a good deal during our walks together.
Simone published Sartre’s letters in 1983 after his death, maintaining that they were lost. Her adopted daughter published them after her death. The letters showed her rather vulnerable side that she perhaps didn’t want to reveal to the world.
