42 The New York Review
brilliant by reputation, named Jean-
Paul Sartre. Maheu invited Beauvoir to
Sartre’s rooms one evening to help them
study Leibniz (she wrote a dissertation
on him). The meeting has entered leg-
end as the beginning of Beauvoir and
Sartre’s fifty-plus- year partnership, a
relationship that still seems notably
modern yet was arranged sensibly, with
seemingly little rebellious energy. Sar-
tre had once been engaged and was now
determined never to marry. Beauvoir
also had her doubts about marriage
(marriage “doubles one’s domestic re-
sponsibilities”). About three months
after they met, Beauvoir and Sartre
made a pact about the future course
of their partnership beside a fountain
in the Luxembourg Gardens: theirs
would be each’s primary relationship,
while they would continue to see other
people. They would tell each other
everything about their other lovers.
They made a two-year plan, after
which they might renew the terms of
the agreement. One imagines them
shaking on it.
Beauvoir’s success in the agréga-
tion is another matter of legend. She
not only passed on her first try, at age
twenty-one (making her the youngest
person ever to pass), but scored sec-
ond place out of that year’s group. First
place went to Sartre, though he was
taking the exam for the second time
after having failed the previous year.
As Kate Kirkpatrick writes in a new bi-
ography, Becoming Beauvoir:One judge held out for Beauvoir
as “the true philosopher,” and at
first the others favoured her too.
But in the end their decision was
that since Sartre was a normalien
(someone who had studied at the
elite École Normale) he should
receive first place.They were posted, at first, to teach-
ing assignments at lycées in different
cities, she in Marseilles and Rouen, he
in Le Havre, but they eventually both
secured positions in Paris. They took
rooms in the same residential hotel in
Montparnasse, saw each other most
days, and often worked side by side—
famously in local cafés like Le Dôme
and La Rotonde. They read and ed-
ited each other’s work. Beauvoir would
have serious, long-term relationships
with three other men, as well as shorter
relationships with women, and Sartre
had many affairs and relationships of
his own, but per the agreement, they
told each other everything and re-
mained essential partners until Sartre’s
death in 1980, drawing around them a
network of friends, former lovers, and
protégés.
A colleague of Beauvoir’s in Rouen,
the novelist and critic Colette Audry,
tried to convey the dazzling quality of
their conversation to Beauvoir’s first
biographer, Deirdre Bair: “I can’t de-
scribe what it was like to be present
when those two were together. It was so
intense that sometimes it made others
who saw it sad not to have it.” Beau-
voir’s brother-in-law said that “through
their constant talking, the way they
shared everything, they reflected each
other so closely that one just could not
separate them.”At the time that she wrote The Sec-
ond Sex, Beauvoir was mentioned al-
ways in the same breath with Sartre(though the reverse was not true). They
were a glamorous and charismatic
couple, prominent in the Parisian in-
tellectual world and enthusiastically
embraced in the US. She had pub-
lished L’Invitée (She Came to Stay)
and a short book of philosophy, The
Ethics of Ambiguity; he had published
Being and Nothingness, in which he
first outlined the principles of his Ex-
istentialist philosophy, as well as No
Exit and the novel Nausea. In their
press coverage, it was Sartre who was
the prodigious philosopher, she the
devoted apprentice and popularizer of
his ideas. There was some truth in the
public gloss, as well as sexism, and to
complicate matters for Beauvoir’s later
feminist devotees, Beauvoir herself
more or less signed on to this view ofthings: Sartre was the prodigious phi-
losopher, she maintained in her mem-
oirs and many of her interviews after
the publication of The Second Sex, and
she was not really a philosopher but a
novelist.
As their correspondence and re-
spective diaries were posthumously
published, beginning in the 1990s, it
emerged that Beauvoir probably had
a greater influence on Sartre’s think-
ing than she’d taken—or been given—
credit for. Scholars have puzzled over
why Beauvoir seems to have disavowed
her own ambitions and downplayed her
i n fl u e n c e o n S a r t r e i n t h e m a n y v o l u m e s
of her popular memoirs. In Becoming
Beauvoir, Kirkpatrick digs deep into
the discrepancies between Beauvoir’s
diaries and her memoirs, yet suggests a
simple reason for her self-deprecation:
“Despite her early sense of vocation
as a writer, she lacked confidence....
The image of their relationship that
has been passed down to posterity re-
flects Sartre’s self- confidence and her
self-doubt.”
A different theory is floated by Mar-
garet A. Simons, a coeditor of the Eng-
lish translations of Beauvoir’s diaries,
of which a new volume, Diary of a Phi-
losophy Student, Volume 2, 1928–29,
has recently been published. Simons
suggests that Beauvoir’s downplaying
of her own ambitions and influence was
a sacrifice that she deliberately made
to protect the legacy of the The Second
Sex. She didn’t want readers to think
she had written it out of bitterness, or
a sense of failure—which is of course
what many critics immediately thoughtabout her work of so-called feminine
resentment.Beauvoir researched and wrote The
Second Sex between 1946 and 1949.
She had not originally planned to
write a brick-sized treatise but rather
an auto biographical essay about what
being a woman had meant to her. In
her twenties, she had not been troubled
by women’s lesser legal and social sta-
tus. Her friend Audry has recalled that
she was maddeningly certain that her
life was as free as Sartre’s. Yet even
so, she began to register the ways their
freedom was different, or felt different.
Before he wrote his first book, when
he was merely teaching, Sartre felt
like a loser. Beauvoir, by contrast, was“dizzy with sheer delight” just to have
a teaching job. “To pass the agrégation
and have a profession was something
he took for granted,” she would later
write, while “it seemed to me that, far
from enduring my destiny, I had delib-
erately chosen it. The career in which
Sartre saw his freedom foundering still
meant liberation to me.”
You could hastily conclude that this
reflected a temperamental difference:
Sartre was more ambitious than Beau-
voir. But it wouldn’t be true. Beauvoir’s
being a philosophy teacher already
marked the triumphant fulfillment of
an improbably grand ambition—for a
woman of her place and time. As she
considered what being a woman had
meant to her personally, the book be-
came political. Her contemporaries
might look at the ranks of the elite pro-
fessions and conclude that men gener-
ally were more ambitious than women,
or perhaps just better at most things.
But, Beauvoir hoped to demonstrate in
the book that swelled to eight hundred
pages, that probably wasn’t true either.
Throughout The Second Sex, Beau-
voir makes the category “female” dis-
appear and then reappear. Disappear,
because, as she argues, when you look
across the natural world there is no
particular, consistent female role or
even physiological definition. It is no
more inherently female to serve your
mate dinner than it is to kill and eat
him—it just depends on your species.
Indeed, when you sift through the ways
in which people have defined female-
ness, and justified male dominance,
the arguments vary and contradict oneJean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, 1970Bruno Barbey/Magnum PhotosSTATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP,
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