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| "Naughty" |
"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting"
... Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86)
The great love of de Beauvoir’s life was arguably not Sartre but the American novelist Nelson Algren (1909-81). She would visit him in Chicago, finding his small rundown apartment in the Polish section to be “refreshing, after the heavy odour of the dollars in the big hotels and the elegant restaurants which I found hard to take.” His friend, the photographer Art Shay, took a snapshot of her just after she had emerged from a bath, seen nude from the rear, with her rather elegant upper half and sturdy buttocks and legs. He wrote: “She had taken her bath. It was while she fussed at the sink afterwards that I had the sudden impulse. She knew I took it because she heard the click of my trusty wartime Leica Model F. ‘Naughty man’ she said”.
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| Buried beside Sartre with his ring |
The relationship had a nasty aftermath when de Beauvoir wrote about it in her 1954 novel The Mandarins, to Algren’s fury. Until his death in 1981, he was recalling the affair bitterly, although upon de Beauvoir’s death in Paris five years later, she was buried beside Sartre wearing a silver ring that Algren had given her nearly forty years before.
De Beauvoir's letters to Algren stop in 1964, long after they both realized that even the most willing hearts could not heal the wound of distance. It didn't help when her novel "The Mandarins" sketched Algren (aka "Lewis Brogan") as sulky and withdrawn--a boor. It was a violent blow to his heart and to his private code. He almost never wrote about his personal friends or the literati; she hardly ever wrote about anything but. He should have seen it coming. But what lover does?
ReplyDeleteNelson Algren was the last of a certain kind of man. Simone de Beauvoir was the first of a certain kind of woman. Despite everything, they stayed in love--in my opinion--for the rest of their lives. In 1981, Algren was killed by a fatal heart attack only minutes after exploding with anger at a reporter for asking him personal questions about de Beauvoir. When she died in 1986, she was buried in Montmartre cemetery alongside Sartre--but wearing Nelson Algren's ring.