Product Description

They are one of the world's legendary couples. We can't think of one without thinking of the other. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre -- those passionate, freethinking existentialist philosopher-writers -- had a committed but notoriously open union that generated no end of controversy. With Tete-a-Tete, distinguished biographer Hazel Rowley offers the first dual portrait of these two colossal figures and their intense, often embattled relationship. Through original interviews and access to new primary sources, Rowley portrays them up close, in their most intimate moments.

We witness Beauvoir and Sartre with their circle, holding court in Paris cafes. We learn the details of their infamous romantic entanglements with the young Olga Kosakiewicz and others; of their efforts to protest the wars in Algeria and Vietnam; and of Beauvoir's tempestuous love affair with Nelson Algren. We follow along on their many travels, involving meetings with dignitaries such as Roosevelt, Khrushchev, and Castro. We listen in on the couple's conversations about Sartre's Nausea, Being and Nothingness, and Words, and Beauvoir's The Second Sex, The Mandarins, and her memoirs. And we hear the anguished discussions that led Sartre to refuse the Nobel Prize.

The impact of their writings on modern thought cannot be overestimated, but Beauvoir and Sartre are remembered just as much for the lives they led. They were brilliant, courageous, profoundly innovative individuals, and Tete-a-Tete shows the passion, energy, daring, humor, and contradictions of their remarkable, unorthodox relationship. Theirs is a great story -- and a great story is precisely what Beauvoir and Sartre most wanted their lives to be.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63865 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Released on: 2005-10-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Though Rowley identifies her engaging and accessible chronicle as the "story of a relationship," it is in fact the story of the many relationships forged by two of the most brilliant, unorthodox and scandalous intellectuals of the 20th century: Beauvoir and Sartre, who from 1929 until Sartre's death in 1980 remained "essential" to each other but never monogamous. Without undue prurience, Rowley (Richard Wright) romps through the major entanglements, loves, triangles, friendships and affairs engaged in by the authors of, respectively,the seminal feminist work The Second Sex andthe controversial autobiography Words. And to place these fascinating interactions into literary and biographical context, Rowley draws from vast stores of published and unpublished writings, correspondence and interviews. Though Beauvoir is the heroine of the book, Rowley offers revealing insights into Sartre: including the extent to which he juggled, depended upon and supported his many mistresses and the compulsive need he had to seduce women far more beautiful than he, despite his tepid sensuality. Intrigues aside, however, Rowley concludes that, for both Sartre and Beauvoir, the most enduring commitment was not to each other or to their many lovers but to their writing, politics and philosophical legacy. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
The Washington Post calls Tête-à-Tête a "highbrow Francophile edition of US Weekly"; most critics seem to welcome an opportunity to indulge in scholarly fluff. That reviewers devote the bulk of their column-inches to thrilling over de Beauvoir and Sartre says much for Rowley's choice of material as well as her skill as a storyteller. Whether they find this storied relationship despicable or admirable, the critics praise Rowley, the biographer of Richard Wright (Richard Wright: His Life and Times) for her skillful prose and, one imagines, her prurient interest as well.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
No matter how many other lovers the radical French intellectuals and prolific writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre got involved with, their symbiotic relationship remained sacrosanct, providing them with great solace while causing the men and women they snared like two spiders in a sturdy web much anguish. Rowley, Richard Wright's groundbreaking biographer, reveals in full the chimerical nature and painful consequences of this infamous alliance. Patiently and analytically, she chronicles the impetus and consequences of Sartre's relentless mania for seduction and Beauvoir's defensive bisexuality, and she details with some dismay the astonishing tangle of their vaguely incestuous, always manipulative affairs. Sartre financially supports the lovers he betrays, while Beauvoir is stunningly two-faced. But in spite of their exhaustingly complex and cruel love lives, Sartre and Beauvoir never stop writing or taking courageous stands against fascism, prejudice, sexism, and war. Ultimately, what Rowley so shrewdly and fairly reveals in this explicit and insightful double portrait is that these two charismatic champions for justice and freedom were committed at any cost to transmuting existence into art. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Vivid and engaging portrait of a relationship -- but philosophically unenlightening
This well-researched and detailed portrait of a remarkable and unique relationship between two remarkable and unique people is never less than engaging. It is well worth reading for anyone who has even a passing interest in the intellectual climate in France just preceding, during and after WWII, a period that produced an amazing list of artists and philosophers: Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lanzmann (all of whom figure in this narrative), the nouvelle vague in cinema, and many more. For that matter, it is well worth reading for anyone who is interested in life, and the details of these lives are intrinsically fascinating (which is not always to say admirable). Rowley had an almost unprecedented access to historical materials, and to many of the people involved, and put together a sensitive and coherent picture of Sartre and Beauvoir from roughly the time they met to their deaths. That she is able to paint such an intimate and compassionate portrait that does not shy away from depicting faults and inconsistencies in their lives and thought is a testament to Rowley's skills as a writer and as a historian.

The major weakness of the book is that her talent with philosophy is not equally on display here. In the course of telling her story, Rowley mentions the philosophical works of Sartre and Beauvoir, but says very little to illuminate the connection between their thinking and their lives. Even where she does discuss such connections, the links are fairly superficial. (Or, the connections are of the sort that can be made at the level of pop psychology between an artist and his or her work.) Existentialism comes across in her book in its fairly popular form: that there is no essence of human being and that we define ourselves through our actions. The connection between Sartre's existentialism and phenomenology gets summarized in the claim that Sartre learned from phenomenology that philosophy could be about everyday life. What she doesn't note is that beyond the fact Sartre learned from phenomenology to focus on everyday life, he also engaged in a systematic effort to redescribe life -- to show that our ordinary ways of conceiving everyday life are deeply flawed. Beauvoir's own significant and original philosophical work (apart from "The Second Sex") is hardly discussed -- her "Ethics of Ambiguity," for example, is never even mentioned. What she doesn't note is that Beauvoir had developed a powerful typology of ways in which one might respond to and realize freedom in one's life, in her "Ethics of Ambiguity" -- and it would be interesting to consider where she must have fit on that continuum. Perhaps most egregiously, she fails to emphasize that for both Sartre and Beauvoir, existentialist freedom is not primarily about the rejection of traditional bonds but about the recognition of the ways in which we bind ourselves to others through our projects and commitments -- so that "authenticity" is not just about being oneself but about the discovery that one cannot avoid belonging to others and to deny one's commitments to others is bad faith. If Sartre painted this inevitibility as a kind of hell in "No Exit," Beauvoir especially in the "Ethics of Ambiguity" depicts an acceptance of the ambiguous commitments that emerge from our being with others as the only genuine freedom and the only possible salvation. (In spite of her desire to depict Beauvoir as independent of Sartre, and her emphasis of Sartre's unwavering respect for her as a thinker, Rowley doesn't really give a sense of the independence of Beauvoir as a thinker -- and what comes across for the most part here is the popular but I think misleading picture of Sartre as the philosopher and Beauvoir as the memoirist who occasionally also applied philosophy to subjects like women and aging.) On this reading, then Sartre and Beauvoir come across primarily as writers whose ideas and commitments evolved over time to become more political, who rejected standard morality including and especially the moral prescriptions that reinforce the family, and who shared a unique form of relationship (that involved fidelity to each other in the sense that they would always tell each other the truth, even where they were willing to lie to others with whom they had secondary relationships). One might have wished for a more detailed account of their thinking if only because such an account would help to pose the question how their life must have been conceived by themselves, in accordance with their own thinking. Otherwise, and in spite of the book's other merits as a piece of history and biography that can complement a study of their work (or of the period), the book ends up reading like a soap opera for intellectuals. While I think this point deserves emphasis I don't want to overemphasize this. One of the merits of Rowley's book is that she takes as her model of biography the autobiographical works of Beauvoir -- and to that extent she does employ a similar approach to reflection on their lives that Beauvoir employs in her published works. I just would have liked to see a bit more reflection in the book about the relation between their lives and their more focused philosophical reflections. First and foremost, Sartre and Beavoir are engaged thinkers and a biography that rarely engages with their deepest thinking except at the superficial level of brief summary, seems to me to be lacking. Having said that, I should reiterate that apart from such misgivings I found the book to be very well written and thoroughly enjoyable and could hardly put it down.

Corps au corps
This book is a factual chronology of the relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre, particularly as it relates to their extracurricular sexual relations. It is not an in-depth commentary or analysis on how they influenced each other's thinking and writings. I found this aspect of the book disappointing.

Attention should have been paid to how Sartre's way of life runs counter to his existential philosophy- freedom in action is paramount to JPS's existential man and yet he succumbs to addictions to drugs and alcohol in his mid-to-later life. Why does Beauvoir give Sartre her uncritical approval to his meaningless, manipulative and lecherous courtships? And how does such compliance reflect on her nascent feminism?

I expect biographies of two seminal philosophers to raise such questions and provide some level of explication. Despite these reservations, I recommend this book as it is well-researched and well-written.

Tete-a-Tete : Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
I felt part of that tangled and emotionally complex world that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sarte wove around themselves while reading this book. It balanced the passion of their creativity with the very calculating anti-passion of their emotional lives. Never judging, just describing how one phase played into the next and the work that was born out of all that was inspiring enough. All the people who were caught up or made certain to be caught up in those two lives never really made a difference in the final out come. Their work was all that really mattered.