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What Algren
Really Felt About Beauvoir
by Bettina Drew
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In 1947, Nelson Algren was home from the war, living off a contract
with Doubleday, and writing in his ten-dollar a month Chicago
flat when Simone de Beauvoir called and asked her to meet him
at the swank downtown hotel the Palmer House. There he found that
“Simone de Beauvoir’s eyes were lit by a light-blue
intelligence,” and that “she was possessed by something
like total apprehension.” First he told her all about the
war, then he took her to a West Madison Street dive where the
hostess talked French literature and she watched very poor and
outcast people enjoy dancing to a little band. For Simone, this
strange evening on the arm of an unprepossessing man who wanted
to show her the contrasts in American society was upsetting and
emotionally draining.
Th ey went back to his place. “I think he initially wanted
to comfort me,” she said later, “but then it became
passion.” Their relationship lasted seventeen years. In 1948
they went to Central America, and the year after that they went
to Europe. They kept
up a great and regular correspondence from which it is clear that
they were very devoted. She called him her husband and herself
his frog wife. Sartre didn’t seem like a threat to Algren
because Sartre wasn’t sleeping with her. When Algren first
realized that his time with her was dictated by Sartre, it was
shocking. But the The Man with the Golden Arm won the National
Book Award and was sought after by Hollywood and he bought a house
on the Indiana dunes where they stayed together.
Sartre’s mental domination notwithstanding, when they discussed
exile it was clear neither could do it because she had a full
life in Paris and his job was to write about Chicago. He was crushed
that she would not commit to living with him and he began to try,
as he put it, to get his life back from her. Knowing he would
never occupy first place just wasn’t acceptable. And then
Uncle Sam
intervened by denying him a passport, apparently for speaking
on liberal causes and having been in the John Reed Club in the
1930s with Richard Wright. In the mid-fifties Algren wanted badly
to get out of the country and went to Cuba for a couple of days
in 1955 and met Hemingway. He published A Walk on the Wild Side,
which he felt he wrote in mid-air, but for the most part he endured
the fifties and as soon as he got a passport again in 1960 he
headed to Paris to see if the woman who still said she loved him
really did.
He wanted to stay six months and who can blame him? They lived
together.
They traveled together. She still worked with Sartre, which was
okay because he was writing a travel book, but she disapproved
of his hanging out with successful expatriate American authors
who likely hosted and treated him to food and drink. He did not
learn French. The end came when she left him to go with Cuba with
Sartre, which must have hurt him badly. He stayed on in the apartment
but he drank too much before he went home. After that she complained
that his letters were too light and entertaining
and that she couldn’t get a sense of what he was feeling.
It’s obvious that he had made up his mind never again to
reveal his inner feelings to her. He dated other women. He traveled
to Southeast Asia and wrote Notes from A Sea Diary: Hemingway
all the Way, which Harold Bloom said he found very underrated.
In the summer or fall of 1964, his editor Bill Targ, whose house
was also bringing out the English translation of Simone’s
autobiography, Force of Circumstance, asked Nelson for permission
for Simone
to quote from his letters in it. Algren had no desire whatsoever
to grant it, but, cajoled by Targ, who said he would be serving
the cause of literature, he reluctantly agreed. In an interview,
he had already spoken of Simone with a bitter, sexist attitude,
insisting
that despite her reputation as a feminist, she had accepted an
inferior position in their relationship—though since she
had him doing dishes in Indiana, he may well have meant physically.
In November and December, excerpts from the autobiography appeared
in Harper’s under the titles “A Question of Fidelity”
and
“An American Rendezvous,” and Algren was clearly appalled
to read Simone’s ‘non-fictional’ account of their
affair. Their love
as she presented it was merely an interlude in her life with Sartre;
Algren read that her vows of deep undying love were but “the
passion of a moment only.” It was bad enough that she had
put a pleasant, nostalgic gloss on his 1960 trip. But truly incredible
was the way she offered him as proof positive of her theory of
“contingent love,” her term for relationships outside
of her pact
with Sartre. The description of their affair was almost wholly
self-serving. He found himself reading about a woman who wanted
a taste of what she had, in choosing Sartre, dedicated her life
to living without.
Being publicly betrayed and held out as the other man by the most
important woman in his life was surely staggeringly painful.
He felt that the affair “could never have meant a great deal
in the first place, if its ultimate use has so little to do with
love. . . .
When you share the relationship with everybody who can afford
a book, you reduce it. It no longer has meaning. It’s good
for
the book trade, I guess, but you certainly lose interest in the
other party.”
It was certainly true that he could not, as de Beauvoir rather
egocentrically and high-handedly put it, tolerate being number
two.
Most of us can’t, and shewould never have accepted such a
position herself except with Sartre, yet she knew that in becoming
involved with Algren she had put him there. She had wanted love
without commitment, and all this confirmed to Nelson that he
must rid himself of her publicly and put an end to the pretense.
The difference in their conception of love was total. Algren felt
that the risk one took in declaring true love to another person
was precisely the loss of one’s own freedom. Algren could
not
forgive being used to prove a theory any more than he could forgive
her for having publicized a private part of his life without
concern for his feelings.
About de Beauvoir’s assertion that with him she had experienced
‘contingent love,’ Algren felt unequivocally that this
was a contradiction in terms. “Anyone who can experience
love contingently has a mind that has recently snapped. How can
love
ever be contingent?”’ he asked. “Contingent upon
what?” His reaction was a devastating critique in Harper’s.
In “The Question of
Simone de Beauvoir,” Algren describes her as a writer whose
message is largely so true and unswerving in its commitment to
social justice that we cannot help but listen to her. She is “a
writer who has moved millions of women, leading submerged lives,
toward lives of their own….[But] “no chronicler of our
lives since Theodore Dreiser has combined so steadfast a passion
for human justice with a dullness so asphyxiating as Mme. de Beauvoir….All
the characters from her novels, although drawn from life, have
no life on the printed page.” About Madame’s personal
life, “procurers are more honest than philosophers,”
he wrote succinctly, about the “how-about-a- quickie gambit”
he now felt his love had been to her. The review ended with an
image of the end of the world, with Simone’s voice burbling
up from the ocean’s depths: “In this matter man’s
sexuality may be modified. The dead are better adapted to the
earth than the living. Sartre needs peace and quiet. Bost is on
the Cinema Vigilance Committee. I want to go skiing. Merleau-Ponty—’
“Will she ever quit talking?” Algren demanded to know.
As far as he was concerned, “Mme. Utter Driveleau” had
reached “‘complete pomposity.” In 1985 Simone was
still shocked that anyone in her circle of friends could write
such a devastating review.
Because Algren’s commercial star faded with the Cold War,
he was unable to get a contract for a novel. He was repulsed by
the crass commercialism of the publishing industry and began publishing
in small literary magazines, often in college towns where he spoke
or held workshops. He gave a short-lived Michigan literary journal
called Zeitgeist the poem he called “Goodbye Lilies,
Hello Spring,” for Simone de Beauvoir, which published it
in May, 1966. In wanting her buried where she can’t be heard
so
he can breathe the air of life, it is brutal; but as a mental
picture it is definitive, and the last word on their affair.
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