Left Bank by Agnès Poirier

Author:Agnès Poirier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER NINE

LOVE, STYLE, DRUGS, AND LONELINESS

HUSBANDS, LOVERS, AND FRIENDS

The tall, handsome, and brooding Nelson Algren, of Jewish, Swedish, and German descent, whom Simone de Beauvoir had briefly met in Chicago on February 21, 1947, was about to distract the French philosopher from her incessant analyzing. She had spent only an evening and an afternoon with the thirty-eight-year-old novelist, who was struggling to write his third book, but it had left its mark on her. Algren had taken her to West Madison Street, also called the Bowery, on a tour of the city’s downtrodden to meet the “bums, drunks and old ruined beauties.” At a “sordid dance hall,”1 ancient, ugly, and very poor couples danced, losing themselves, happy, as if time were suspended. Beauvoir, stunned, found the scene moving and beautiful. In America, Algren told her, “beautiful and ugly, grotesque and tragic, good and evil, each has its place. Americans do not like to think that those extremes can mingle.” Algren then put her in a taxi, kissing her “clumsily but very seriously and intently.”2 Algren had found in Beauvoir a kindred spirit.

Sartre had asked Simone to delay her return to Paris by a week: Dolorès intended to fight her ground and would not budge. Little did Sartre know that she in fact hoped to stay indefinitely and replace Beauvoir in Sartre’s heart. Simone jumped at the opportunity and flew to Chicago to see Algren for three days, and even persuaded him to accompany her back to New York so they could stay together longer. In New York, Algren was the tourist and Beauvoir his guide. Having traveled little outside Chicago, except during the war, when he was stationed in France, Algren was bewildered to see New York and its colorful laundry hanging from the fire escapes, tailors for fat gentlemen, and they tattoo parlors. Together they toured the “ghetto” of the East Side, and they fell in love. On May 11, 1947, Algren slipped a cheap Mexican ring onto Beauvoir’s finger, and she told him she would wear it till the day she died.3

Meanwhile, on the Paris boulevards, Sartre could be seen with Dolorès Vanetti at a showing of Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine), a forceful, anguished, uncompromising, and beautiful film about Italy’s homeless and hungry children after the war.4 Sartre and Dolorès were both deeply moved by it. Sartre, rather smitten with Dolorès, did not know how to persuade his lover to go back home, but neither could he ask Simone to delay her return a second time. They had written to each other every two days those last four months and Sartre was not prepared to break his life arrangement with his soul mate for Dolorès, no matter how much he loved his American girl.

When Beauvoir touched down at Orly airport at dawn on Sunday, May 18, he was still in bed with Dolorès. The American woman had decided that she would not exit the stage for Simone unless Sartre promised to marry her. Beauvoir had given Sartre the extra week he’d requested, precisely so that he could “properly” see Dolorès off.

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