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A Dangerous Liaison: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

Blood on their hands

Carole Seymour-Jones
Century, 574pp, £20,

David Pryce-Jones

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

Bavid Pryce-Jones on the new book from Carole Seymour-Jones

Where did the cruel and violent streak in Sartre come from? In Seymour-Jones’s opinion, physique determined conduct. He was ‘puny and cowardly,’ ugly and conscious of it. When Camus once asked Sartre why he took such trouble as a sexual predator, he got the answer, ‘Have you taken a look at my face?’ Camus thought Sartre had a servile nature, and this would certainly explain his self-hating politics. He was to rave about the likes of Genet and Frantz Fanon, adopting their appeals to violence and murder. Undoubtedly it was Soviet willingness to use force that made Sartre an unrestrained apologist for Communism. He was to sit at the feet of Khrushchev, Castro, Guevara, Mao, Ben Bella, Nasser, having thus fawned during his career on a clean sweep of Nazi, Communist and Third World dictatorships. The principled Solzhenitsyn refused to meet him.

At the height of his Communist fellow-travelling, Sartre made a particular fool of himself by falling in Moscow for one Lena Zorin and proposing marriage. Zorin was naturally a KGB agent, and her reports show how capably she manipulated Sartre whom Seymour-Jones calls ‘irresponsible and gullible’ as he submitted without demur to the Party’s demands of the moment.

Two of a kind, Sartre and Beauvoir were anti-humanists. Taken together, their writings promoted a concept of freedom that gave them licence to do whatever they might feel like doing. This left a tide-wrack of people treated as objects, abandoned to disappointment and pain, to abortions, self-harming and suicide. Remorse might take the place of regret, but they never faced the consequences of what they did or what they wrote in the attempt to justify themselves. Art for them had no redemptive quality, but was merely prescriptive. The elevation of this damaged and damaging duo to be standard-bearers of their day illustrates the depth to which intellectuals could sink in the 20th century. Competent as far as it goes, this book doesn’t quite get the full creepiness and moral dereliction of its subject.