Giacometti in Paris by Michael Peppiatt;

Author:Michael Peppiatt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK (Trade)

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris, 1970

This fascinating couple, whose every move was followed by a growing tribe of lovers, disciples and lost souls known as the ‘Sartre family’, started seeing Alberto in 1939, after an earlier chance encounter at the Dôme, and they responded instinctively to his unusual appearance, charm and intelligence. Alberto was first drawn to Sartre as not only a leading thinker and writer but as a conversationalist with as broad, unusual and contradictory a cast of mind as his own with whom he could engage in Homeric discussion. But he was even more receptive and eventually closer to Beauvoir, who had been immediately impressed by his presence, describing him as ‘a man with a craggy face, wild hair, avid eyes, who was out every night wandering the pavement, alone or with a very pretty woman; he looked both as solid as a rock and freer than an elf …’10 While Beauvoir wrote about him on several occasions, Alberto drew and made a small, sensitive bust of her (as he did of several women he knew well, including Marie-Laure de Noailles and Diane Bataille). The two became fast friends, confiding in each other, with Alberto talking about Isabel and meeting Annette, and Beauvoir describing her drawn-out, passionate affair with the American writer Nelson Algren.11

Sartre and above all Beauvoir’s friendship also extended to Annette, whom they met in 1946 on a trip to Geneva, and they actively encouraged her liaison with Alberto, later lending the pair money to survive the months of post-war penury (Sartre was unusually open-handed, carrying wads of cash on him to give large tips and share with those in need). When Annette arrived in Paris, without a proper winter coat or adequate shoes, Beauvoir made sure she was provided for by giving her hand-me-downs. The war might be over but, as Beauvoir put it, ‘it remained on our hands like a great, unwanted corpse, and there was no place on earth to bury it’.12

If Alberto still felt somewhat orphaned by his expulsion from the Surrealists, he now had friends united by what Beauvoir called ‘a deep bond of understanding’. With them and the group that had formed around them, he had at last rediscovered the kind of intellectual camaraderie that he had enjoyed within Breton’s circle. Everything could be discussed, from the latest jazz club to the finer points of a new philosophical system, but without the diktats and constraints that Breton had imposed: politics, for instance, was approached, as Beauvoir put it, as ‘a family affair’ in which everyone took sides, squabbled frequently and generally made up. The famous couple had just joined forces with the increasingly influential Merleau-Ponty to found Les Temps modernes, a political and literary review established in the autumn of 1945 that filled the gap left by the prestigious Nouvelle revue française, banned for ‘collaborationism’. In the second issue of the new publication (which took its title from the popular Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times), Beauvoir wrote a positive review of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.

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