The following quotes are all from Kate Kirkpatrick's beautiful Becoming Beauvoir: A Life:

While Beauvoir was in America she noticed things she wanted to remember for her book on women. Being in a different culture – and seeing it with foreign eyes – made her look at the way men and women related to each other from a different standpoint. She wrote in America Day by Day that she was surprised to find herself thinking that women were less free in the United States than they were in France. Before her visit, she took the words ‘American woman’ to be synonymous with ‘free woman’. But to her shock she found that here unmarried women were less respected. At first, she wrote, American women’s dress ‘astonished me with its flagrantly feminine, almost sexual character. In the women’s magazines here, more than in the French variety, I’ve read long articles on the art of husband hunting’. In the United States Beauvoir saw an antagonism between men and women; she felt they didn’t like each other, which made their relationships struggles against each other. ‘This is partly because American men tend to be laconic, and in spite of everything, a minimum of conversation is necessary for friendship. But it’s also because there is a mutual distrust.’

Outside the ivory tower, what she saw of America with Ellen and Richard Wright was eye- opening. When she was with them – that is, when two white women and a black man went out together – New York taxis passed them by. Wright took her to the Abyssinian Baptist Church to hear the political sermons of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, to see a poor church in Harlem. Wright’s novel Native Son had told the story of 20-year-old black man Bigger Thomas, which drew discussion about what it meant to be black – from the likes of James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon. The Wrights helped Beauvoir see segregation: ‘From the cradle to the grave, working, eating, loving, walking, dancing, praying, he can never forget that he is black, and that makes him conscious every minute of the whole white world from which the word “black” takes its meaning.’

Richard Wright and Ellen Poplar Wright.

The Second Sex had made Beauvoir money as well as earning her a largely unwanted reputation, so she bought a record player and some records; Sartre came to the rue de la Bûcherie a couple of nights a week to listen to jazz or classical music. And in November 1951 Beauvoir wrote to Algren with excitement: she’d found a new passion: ‘As love is forbidden, I decided to give my dirty heart to something not so piggish as a man: and I gave to myself a nice beautiful black car.’ She was taking driving lessons three times a week. Since the war Paris had blossomed into one of Europe’s leading cultural centres. Miles Davis played in Left Bank clubs, and intellectuals, artists and writers – including anticolonial activists – gathered for meetings and events. In 1950 the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire published Discourse on Colonialism, in which he likened European Nazism to colonialism on account of their shared pursuits of domination and control. India had won its independence from the British in 1947 and anticolonialism was gaining ground. In 1952 Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks was published, passionately describing the effects of racism on the oppressed. But many in France were reluctant to relinquish their empire, despite the growth of anticolonial and Algerian nationalist movements since the 1930s.

Simone de Beauvoir.

For Beauvoir, whether she was 19 or 50-something, philosophy had to be lived. But now she had come to the view that being committed to the freedom of others meant participating in concrete projects of liberation. As the conflict over Jeanson’s trial intensified, Sartre decided to use his position to protest the way the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121 were being treated. He called a press conference in Beauvoir’s apartment and defended the thirty signatories who had been charged with treason: if they were found guilty, he said, then all 121 were. And if not, then the case should be withdrawn. The government dropped the charges. Sartre’s reputation spared all of them since, in de Gaulle’s words,‘One does not imprison Voltaire.’

This was good news, but they were not out of the woods; in July 1961 Sartre’s rue Bonaparte apartment was bombed with a plastic explosive. The damage was limited, but even so he moved his mother out and went to live at Beauvoir’s. In October 1961 30,000 Algerians demonstrated against the curfew imposed on them in Paris: it was a peaceful march with a clear purpose – they wanted to be allowed to stay out past 8.30 p.m. But the French police reacted violently, with guns and clubs, even throwing some Algerians into the Seine. Eyewitness accounts reported policemen strangling Algerians, and at least 200 Algerians were killed that day. The French press covered it up. But Les Temps Modernes did not.
In July 1961 Beauvoir met C. Wright Mills, the author of White Collar and The Power Elite – she was interested in his work and its popularity in Cuba. Then she left for her summer trip to Italy with Sartre. They spent evenings in the Piazza Santa Maria del Trastevere and she tried to work on the third volume of her memoirs. But it was hard to think about the past when she felt ‘hounded by the present’. Lanzmann had recently brought Sartre a manuscript by Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth – passing on a request for a preface to it. Sartre agreed, and all three of them were delighted when Fanon said he would visit them in Italy. After the Algerian revolution began in 1954, Fanon joined the Algerian National Liberation Front. He had been expelled from Algeria in 1957, but kept fighting even so – even after being diagnosed with leukaemia early in 1961.

Frantz Fanon.

Lanzmann and Beauvoir went to meet him at the airport. Beauvoir caught sight of him before Fanon saw them. His movements were jumpy and abrupt: he kept looking around and seemed agitated. Two years earlier he had arrived in Rome for medical treatment after being wounded on the Moroccan border, and an assassin had come for him in his hospital room: when he landed, Beauvoir said, this memory was ‘very much on his mind’.

On this visit Fanon talked about himself with unusual frankness, prompting his biographer David Macey to comment that Beauvoir and Sartre must have been ‘both skilful and sympathetic interrogators. There is certainly no other record of Fanon speaking as openly as this to anyone’. He told them that when he was a young man in Martinique he thought education and personal merit were enough to break the ‘colour barrier’. He wanted to be French, served in the French army, and then studied medicine in France. But no quantity of merit or quality of education stopped him being ‘a Negro’ in the eyes of the French. Even as a doctor, people called him ‘boy’ – and much worse. His life story opened up conversations about Frenchness, blackness and colonization.

Beauvoir suspected that Fanon knew more than he was telling them about Algeria. He was open and relaxed when they talked about philosophy, but then they took him to see the Appian Way and he couldn’t understand why. As Beauvoir tells the story Fanon told them outright that ‘European traditions had no value in his eyes’. Sartre tried to move the conversation along to Fanon’s experiences of psychiatry. But Fanon pressed Sartre: ‘How can you continue to live normally, to write?’ As he saw it, Sartre wasn’t doing enough to denounce France. Fanon left her with a strong impression, long after they said goodbye. When she shook his hand she ‘seemed to be touching the very passion that was consuming him’, a ‘fire’ that he communicated to others.

Djamila Boupacha.

That autumn Sartre wrote the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth while Beauvoir wrote the preface to a book by Gisele Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, which told the story of the woman behind the trial. Just as she’d criticized the Marquis de Sade for fleeing the horrors of reality for the illusory safety of the imagination, Beauvoir wanted the French state to look the ugliness of their actions in the face. Its publication brought her a death threat.

On 7 January 1962 there was another attack of plastic explosives at the Rue Bonaparte. It had been placed on the fifth floor by mistake – Sartre’s apartment was on the fourth – but when Beauvoir went to see it the next day the door of the apartment had been torn off. An armoire had disappeared, too, and its contents – manuscripts and notebooks of Sartre and Beauvoir – had been stolen. Sartre’s mother was now living in a hotel permanently, for her safety. By 18 January the owner of the Saint-Germain apartment evicted Sartre, so Sartre moved to 110 quai Blériot, in the 14th arrondissement.

Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://niklasblog.com/?p=24681

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