Simone de Beauvoir described her companion and fellow philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, as her `greatest achievement’. But it was the American writer Nelson Algren who was the great love of her life. They began a passionate affair just as she was embarking on her landmark feminist text, The Second Sex. In her letters, she tells of her longing for him, and of her work – as well as the latest Left Bank literary gossip
Simone de Beauvoir was invited to go on a lecture tour of several American universities in early 1947. By February, she had arrived in Chicago, where she looked up the writer Nelson Algren at the suggestion of a friend. Algren showed De Beauvoir the underside of the city which was the setting for several of his books, including The Man with the Golden Arm.
Algren was amused at the contrast between their instant connection and his complete ignorance of who De Beauvoir was and what her thinking and writing meant to the world; all he knew about her, he’d learned in a New Yorker article about existentialism. She was 39 when they met, he a year younger.
When she returned to Paris in mid-May, they began a correspondence that went on until 1964.
Sunday, May 18 1947
I think of you in Paris, in Paris I miss you. The whole journey was marvellous. We had nearly no night since we went to the East. At Newfoundland the sun began to set, but five hours later it was rising in Shannon, above a sweet green Irish landscape. Everything was so beautiful and I had so much to think that I hardly slept …
My beloved one, I don’t know why I waited so long before saying I loved you. I just wanted to be sure and not to say easy, empty words. But it seems to me now love was there since the beginning. Anyway, now it is here, it is love and my heart aches. I am happy to be so bitterly unhappy because I know you are unhappy, too, and it is sweet to have part of the same sadness. With you pleasure was love, and now pain is love too. We must know every kind of love. We’ll know the joy of meeting again. I’ll write very often. Write to me very often, too. I am your wife forever.
Friday, May 23 1947
I have read a novel of Carson MacCullers; I was pleased to read an American book, but it was not good at all. I read [Franz] Kafka, too, as I told you. I thought I really should like you to read all you can find of French modern literature: The Stranger of [Albert] Camus, The Flies and No Exit by Sartre have been translated. And, too, some articles by Sartre and by myself in Partisan Review. You must, my dearest husband, you must try to get something of my French life as I tried to live your Chicago life with you. Will you?
I write to you with the little red bright stylo you have given to me, and I have your ring at my finger. It is the first time I ever wore a ring and everybody in Paris was very amazed, but they found the ring beautiful. I wait eagerly for a letter. I miss you, you know. I miss your lips, your hands, your whole warm and strong body, and your face and your smiles, your voice. I miss you.
Friday, 20 June 1947
Yesterday I went to one of these smart caves in which smart people dance and drink nowadays in Paris. Micheline Presle came there, the beautiful French star who plays in Le Diable au Corps and who plays now in Sartre’s feature. Pagliero, the Italian actor of Open City, who is her partner in the same feature came, too. They held no banner. But the other ones were either existentialist (including myself) or communist or fascist. There was a very strange, crazy and hateful man who should have been shot after the Libration and who danced with a drunk, hateful girl; they had some ex- collaborationist and pro-fascist boys with them. So the atmosphere was very tense.
In the end of the evening, the fascist ones made some unpleasant reflexion about Jews; and a communist boy asked what was the matter with Jews? So some existentialists came and said to the communists they must make a kind of union for just a while and fight the fascists with their fists. But the communists would not, and they began to argue harshly with the existentialists. Then the communists went away. The existentialists grumbled and one of them went to one of the fascists and walked on his toes. Then they began to fight with words.
Saturday, July 19 1947
I stayed in London one day more. On Thursday evening it was the first performance of Sartre’s plays in a little art theatre of Hammersmith, that is one of the nicest boroughs of London. There was the beautiful Rita Hayworth, bright as an evening star. The first play, Men without Shadows, was half killed, because the interesting point is Sartre showed French “miliciens” torturing and killing French “rsistants”: French young men on both sides, some of them having done a bad choice, and the others a right one. That was the very harsh and crude and non-conventional thing. But the English director was afraid and he cut nearly everything about the bad French “miliciens”, and what he did not suppress he did not understand; so he left only an heroic story of good French “rsistants” struggling against nobody. I was very angry with it, though the actors acted very well.
Afterwards there was a party; you could think it would be rather bright with Sartre, who has a good brain, and Rita Hayworth, who has such good looks. But it was really funny (in a way). I never saw such a dull supper. We went to a little sad dining room and we sat at small tables; Sartre was alone in a corner, eating sadly some corned-beef, and I sat in front of Rita Hayworth, trying to speak with her, and looking at her beautiful shoulders and breasts which could have made so many men crazy but which were so useless for me. She was very bored, and Sartre very bored too, and everybody was bored. So we left as soon as we could.
Wednesday, July 23 1947
This afternoon I saw Sartre’s movie [Les Jeux Sont Faits]; it is over now, rather good, but not as good as it could have been. No matter, it is not the question. The question is, I was a little disturbed by the story. It is the story of a dead man and a dead woman meeting each other and loving each other, and as they are in love they are allowed to come back to earth: if they succeed in making this love a real living human one, they will live a whole human life once more; if not, they will die again. And indeed, they fail.
It is very moving and I thought of you and me. We love each other through remembrances and hopes, through distance and letters: shall we succeed in making this love a happy, living, human love? We must. I believe we shall, but it will not be so easy. Nelson, I love you. But do I deserve your love if I do not give you my life? I tried to explain to you I cannot give my life to you. Do you understand it? Are you not resentful about it? Will you never be?
Algren responded that he had planned to ask De Beauvoir to marry him when she returned. For each of them, marriage would have meant giving up a substantial part of their worlds. They agreed to a less conventional relationship; she would spend time with him in the United States; if he could, he would visit her in France. They agreed there would be no scenes, no melodrama. After a two-week visit in September, De Beauvoir resumed her letters.
Sunday, September 28 1947
Well, yesterday I worked in the Caf des Deux Magots and [Arthur] Koestler came to see me, you know Darkness at Noon and A Spanish Testament, which I think very good. I do not remember what you think about him as a writer. What a strange night we spent with him, Sartre and Camus, everybody being drunk and crying about friendship and political discrepancies; it was very funny. I like him and he has a very pretty, sweet wife.
What I did not tell you is that I happened last year to sleep with Koestler one night; it was rather strange because we were attracted by each other, but in the same time there were “political discrepancies”. He thought I was not anti-communist enough. I do not care for such differences, but he does and so he was very challenging, and I hate challenge, chiefly in sexual business; so it never happened any more.
What I felt yesterday, anyway, is this: it is true what you said once, you have not to be faithful in the conventional way if you don’t feel like it. But for myself, I just know I could not sleep with any man now until I meet you again. I just could not bear to feel another man’s hands or lips when I long so bitterly for your beloved hands and lips. I’ll be faithful as a dutiful and conventional wife just because I could not help it – that is the way it is.
Friday, October 3 1947
When I spoke of my coming to America in spring, I spoke rather casually of spending a long time with you. I spoke of it among other things: travelling, seeing people in New York, lecturing and so on. But that is not the truth and you have to know it. Besides my working-life in France, I care for nothing actually but you. Canada, New York, trips, friends, I should throw everything else away to spend a longer time with you. I could have a room of my own so you could work quietly and be alone when you would wish. I shall not interfere with your freedom …
Tuesday, October 7 1947
Yesterday evening I had a dinner and drank a glass with the ugly woman [Violette Leduc, author of the novel L’Affame, who referred to herself in this way]. She brought to me the last part of the diary she wrote about me: it is tremendously good. She writes a beautiful language and then living all alone as she does, being in heart a lesbian, she is much more daring than any woman I know. Nearly all women writers are a little shy, even in the artistic ground, a little too sweet and subtle, if you see what I mean.
This one writes like a man with a very feminine sensitiveness. You know, she feels so ugly that she does not want to sleep with man or woman, and yet she says quite frankly she needs it and she waits eagerly for old age; when she’ll be older, maybe she will not care for sex any more and she will be quieter! I should not like to live in her skin.
Tuesday, October 14 1947
We said goodbye to Koestler yesterday, he is coming back to England. After quarrelling and apologising, after so much fretting, it all ended by him saying suddenly: “I am hundred per cent Gaullist.” So we said nothing and everybody kissed everybody goodbye very warmly, but Sartre and I knew all friendship is impossible with Koestler. Gaullism is hateful and there is nothing to do about it. So it seemed useless to have spent so much time with K and given our jaws so much work, hoping to find some ground of understanding – and this sudden declaration: “I am a Gaullist.” Well, good-bye to him.
Wednesday, October 21 1947
Please, please, don’t take the phoney blonde in our nest. She would drink my whisky, eat my rum-cake, sleep in my bed and maybe with my husband. Please, struggle hard and keep my home for myself. I feel dreadfully selfish and stubborn about it. Well, indeed, I am kidding, darling. You’ll do what you have to do, I shall not interfere with your freedom.
More and more fretting and fuming today about our radio-feature [the Gaullists had the largest share of the vote in the elections, and De Beauvoir and Sartre broadcast a programme highly critical of them]. All night people phoned to the man who is at the head of the radio, threatening to kill him and Sartre, too.
Thursday evening, October 23 1947
I did not believe [Charles] de Gaulle was that much worshipped by so many people; it is a little dreadful. In the Quartier Latin students are beginning again to persecute Jewish students, and they write anti-Semite articles against Jewish teachers, and so on, in some newspapers. It seems it is really fascism threatening. I hope they will not win. A good point is America was not so pleased with De Gaulle. Terrible, in your country too, this loyalty check, and in Hollywood the prosecution of “reds”.
January 2 1948
My own Nelson, It is very nice of me to write you tonight, for I am dead-tired, having worked and worked the whole day. I’ve come back to my essay about women [eventually to become The Second Sex]. I told you I never felt bad for being a woman, and sometimes I even enjoy it, as you know. Yet when I see other women around me, I think they have something very peculiar in them.
We had a nice New Year’s night. We bought champagne and the old lady [Madame Morel, a friend of long standing] and the little grand- daughter were quite drunk; the girl was very pleasant because she danced and did kind of somersaults in a childish, boyish way, and yet she is nearly 15 and very pretty. It is really funny, such a young girl knowing so many things and not knowing so many other ones. If I were a man, maybe I should be a very wicked one, because I surely should enjoy to make love to young girls and having them love me, and then indeed I should drop them because they are often very silly, too childish, and become quickly tedious.
Friday, January 9 1948
Do you know? I was 40, today. I feel ashamed of it. I should like to give you a younger girl’s love, though I know you love me as I am. I am sad to be far away, to be old, to be able to give you so little of all which I could have given, in another life. Well, you never reproach me anything, and true love, that I give you, I know, but … I don’t like to feel old. Last year I did not care; now I do, because of you.
Tuesday, January 13 1948
Well, for a change we had a drunken night with Camus, Koestler and his wife. It began nicely in a little restaurant of the Quartier Latin, the owner of which is a very fine coloured girl: nice Creole cooking, nice songs, Koestler telling funny stories about blue cinema in Marseille, very gentle with everybody. But then he took us for a drink into one of those silly awful Russian places he is fond of, and we drank glasses and glasses of vodka, and he became violent, as he is when drunk, in a rather womanly, childish way, hurling glasses at Sartre’s head and nearly hitting him, and hitting Camus so as to give him a big fat eye. Poor Camus went crazy with anger and wanted to knock Koestler down, but we prevented him to do so, and Koestler just vanished in the night while we all came back home. Sartre was dead drunk and a lot of money was stolen from him. Koestler was stolen too; he lost about 200 dollars in traveller’s cheques. It was not a very funny evening, I do not like this kind of things anymore; I drank a lot but without getting drunk.
Sunday, January 18 1948
Every time we see Camus he is with a new girl (though he has a wife and children). This one is really a pleasant girl, now a singer in a little night-club, having worked hard in factories when she was younger. I do not know how she came to be a singer, I know she had very sad experiences with men and thought they all were dirty beasts when she met Camus, who was very kind to her. The bad point is, I am afraid he will drop her some day and then she will be more unhappy than ever, for she seems awfully in love with him.
Friday, February 6 1948
You’ll soon receive $250 from a New York magazine; that is money I earned for us. Please, don’t give it to the phoney blonde, don’t waste it in poker game, don’t eat it in rum-cake shape. Just keep it for our trip, please. I hope I’ll soon earn some more. These ones were nicely earned: I gave a chapter of my book about women to a new magazine which was to be issued now, but it is not.
De Beauvoir and Algren had planned to spend three months travelling in Central America in the summer of 1948. A few days before setting off, she decided to spend only two months with him, waiting to tell him face to face. De Beauvoir wrote in Force of Circumstance: “I hadn’t yet brought up the question of my departure; and in the weeks that followed I lost my nerve. With each passing day it became more urgent and more difficult. On a long drive between Mexico and Morelia, I rather awkwardly announced to Algren that I had to go back to Paris on July 14. `Oh, really,’ he said.” Several days later, Algren declared that he’d had enough of Mexico, enough of travelling; he was in a bad mood. I left on July 14, not knowing if I would ever see him again.”
Monday night, July 19 1948
You know, I could give up most of things for your sake; but I should not be the Simone you like, if I could give up my life with Sartre. I should be a dirty creature, a treacherous and selfish woman. I want you to know that, whatever you decide in the future, it is not by lack of love that I don’t stay with you. I am even sure that leaving you is harder for me than for you,
that I miss you in a more painful way than
you miss me; I could not love you, want you, and miss you more than I do. Maybe you know that. But what you have to know, too, though it may seem conceited to say it, is in which way Sartre needs me. In fact, he is very lonely, very tormented inside himself, very restless, and I am his only true friend, the only one who really understands him, helps him, works with him, gives him some peace and poise.
For nearly 20 years he did everything for me; he helped me to live, to find myself, he sacrificed lots of things for my sake. Now, since four, five years, it is the time when I can give back what he did for me, help him who helped me so much. I could not desert him. I could leave him for more or less important periods, but not pledge my whole life to anyone else. I know that I am in danger of losing you; I know what losing you would mean for me. But you must understand how it is, Nelson. I must be sure that you understand the truth: I should be happy to spend days and nights with you until my death, in Chicago, Paris, or Chichicastenango; it is not possible to love more than I love you, flesh and heart and soul. But I should rather die than deeply hurting, than making a real harm to somebody who did everything for my happiness.
Sunday, August 8 1948
I was 22 and Sartre was 25, and I gave enthusiastically my life and myself to him. He was my first lover, nobody had even kissed me before. We spent a long time together and I told you already how I care for him, but it was rather deep friendship than love; love was not very successful. Chiefly because he does not care much for sexual life. He is a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed. I soon felt it, though I had no experience; and little by little, it seemed useless, and even indecent, to go on being lovers. We dropped it after about eight or 10 years rather unsuccessful in this way.
In letters to De Beauvoir through the autumn of 1948, Algren explained how unhappy he was with the existence he was leading, how tired he was of solitude and intellectual isolation. His love for De Beauvoir had not diminished; he realised he had never before experienced a love like hers, and would never experience it again. However, he did meet someone he thought for a while of marrying.
Sunday, November 6 1949
A friend told me two young men were speaking in the Deux Magots about The Second Sex; they rather liked it, but one said: “Well, it is all right, but I shall not let my wife read it; it is too daring.” Saturday, I was asked 1) to write a play for a great French actress; 2) to write a movie-script for a great French movie actress. But I go on stubbornly writing your novel [De Beauvoir was translating Algren’s novel, Never Come Morning, for publication in France]. The Second Sex comes third in these last month’s bestsellers list; Sartre is only seventh – that is not bad for an essay, is it?
Ghardaa, Saturday, March 18 1950
I am reading the last book of Miller translated in French, Sexus, awfully tedious. Well, when you are in bed with the man you love, it is new each time, and each time it is fine, but when you read about bed-time of the other people, it is not new at all, always the same old game, though Miller tries so hard to make it different. Then he talks and talks a lot of nonsense; he bores me.
No more luck with Hemingway’s book about hunting, Green Hills of Africa, or something like that. He makes hunting look as tedious as Miller sex. You just wish never to go hunting, never to go to bed, when you read these people. Then Hemingway seems to be a little too much in love with himself; it is certainly the worst of all those he wrote.
Simone de Beauvoir stayed at Alggren’s from July until the end of September, 1950. It was a disaster. The Korean War had broken out in June, and De Beauvoir left Paris with great anxiety, fearing that if the conflict spread, she might be prevented from returning to France. Although well aware of the change in tone of Algren’s letters over the last months, despite their brevity and infrequency, she was nevertheless completely shocked by his greeting: a brutal announcement that he no longer loved her. She spent an unbearable summer on Lake Michigan.
New York, September 30 1950
Nelson, my dearest sweetest one, I cannot think that I shall not see you again. I have lost your love and it was (it is) painful, but I shall not lose you. Anyhow, you gave me so much, Nelson, what you gave me meant so much, that you could never take it back. And then your tenderness and friendship were so precious to me that I can still feel warm and happy and harshly grateful when I look at you inside me. I do hope this tenderness and friendship will never, never desert me. As for me, it is baffling to say so and I feel ashamed, but it is the only true truth: I just love you as much as I did when I landed into your disappointed arms, that means with my whole self and all my dirty heart; I cannot do less. But that will not bother you, honey, and don’t make writing letters any kind of a duty, just write when you feel like it, knowing every time it will make me very happy.
Simone de Beauvoir returned for the last time to stay with Algren in the cottage on the lake in October 1951. The month passed peacefully; she finished an essay on the Marquis de Sade. But at the last minute, the status of their relationship was once more thrown open to question by Algren’s response when De Beauvoir congratulated herself on keeping his friendship: “It’s not friendship. I could never give you less than love.”
Sunday, December 2 1951
I got your letter. No, it did not hurt much. I wanted to know where I stand with you; it is better to know. But you are not fair. You remember that I did not say a word of love during my whole stay, and you upset me terribly, because you said love words, half an hour before I went away. What I felt in New York is that I could not stand this game of taking me back, rejecting me, year after year. Since you had spoken so tenderly and told me yourself you did not want to evict me any longer, I asked you to keep to that decision, not to talk me one thing one day and another the following one. Well, that is what you just did, but now it is definite and I’ll cling to it. You are not fair when you say I want to keep your life without giving mine. I always accepted the idea (since three years) you would love another woman; and even in Gary the last day, I told you I wanted to stay your friend even if you were married.
Italy, August 3 1952
Well, Nelson, you know the most incredible things happen: so, it happened to me that somebody wants to love me. It makes me half happy, half sad – happy because it is hard to be unloved, and sad because I did not want to be loved by anybody else. He [Claude Lanzmann]is a young, 27 years old, Jewish boy with black hair and blue eyes, whom I saw in TM [Les Temps Modernes, a leftist, but not communist, journal of politics and philosophy founded by De Beauvoir, Sartre and others in 1945] working- meetings and liked; I knew he considered stupidly I was “beautiful”, the secretary told me that in the beginning of the year, and I thought they were kidding, but noticed the boy always looked at me in a very nice way…
Well, we talked one whole afternoon, and then another one, and then he came home and spent the night there, and came another time, the day I was leaving for Italy. I am fond of him; we are going to have a real affair in October, and it seems strange, because utterly and sincerely I had accepted now to live an old woman loveless life. He believes I am still young and he loves me. It seems strange, too, to write that to you. I write as I should to a friend, since friendship is all which you accept from me. But you never have been nor will be exactly a friend for me: I loved you too much. Nobody will ever be what you have been for me, but nobody can help that past is past, and if you are a living being, in spite of all, you cannot stay in the past. So, nothing is changed in the past, but I shall not cling to the past as stubbornly as I did.
Algren remarried his ex-wife Amanda in 1953 and then divorced again in 1955. Although his novel, The Man With The Golden Arm, won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize (presented to Algren by Eleanor Roosevelt to a standing ovation) and was eventually made into a film, as was another of his novels, A Walk On The Wild Side, Algren sank into a depression in the mid-Fifties, poverty-stricken and engaged in draining battles with his publishers, his agents and lawyers.
Rome, October 1963
Saint Genet has been published in USA; you should read it if patient enough, because it’s rather thick. My Force des choses will be published within two or three weeks. It is very harsh against nearly everybody and will be hated by most people. I guess, like The Lost American [a novel by Algren]: “It had no right to be written.” I hope you’ll not be unpleased by what I tell about you, because it was written with all my heart.
The US edition of Force Of Circumstance was published in 1965, in part describing De Beauvoir’s relationship with Algren and the painful dilemmas it posed. He responded angrily with repeated bitter public comments, followed by silence, unbroken until he died in 1981. Given his furious rejection of her, De Beauvoir was surpised to learn that Algren had kept all her letters. When she died in April 1986, she was buried wearing the ring Algren gave her.
This is an edited extract from Beloved Chicago Man: Letters To Nelson Algren 1947-1964 by Simone de Beauvoir.