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From their first shag to their last, in Tete a Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre (Chatto & Windus £20) Hazel Rowley has written the definitive account of the couple's bed action. As we all know, the freethinking existentialists had a messy, long relationship with endless affairs, some mutual, certainly in the case of Olga Kosakiewicz. I didn't realise just how self-centred, manipulative and narcissistic de Beauvoir and Sartre were, though I'm not sure that was the point of this book.
Rowley, an Anglo-Aussie academic based in New York and Paris, claims that she wanted to disentangle the reality from the myth. However, she does admit to having worshipped de Beauvoir particularly, and to having taken, in the Sixties at least, de Beauvoir's and Sartre's idea of an open relationship to heart.
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An erotic life of Sartre reads well but has its ugly side, says henry sutton |
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She even says she was "personally invested" in that relationship.
With so much at stake, Rowley was never going to write a detached, analytical view of the world's most "unconventional" love story. From the outset, she tries to justify Sartre's obsessive whoring and adulterous behaviour, and de Beauvoir's extraordinary capacity to put up with it. Quite possibly, at just 5' 1", and hugely ugly, Sartre only developed his whole "freethinking" philosophy as a way of seducing as many women as possible. And judging by the picture of a naked de Beauvoir, posted in the centre of the book, she was lucky to have had as many lovers as she notched up.
No question, Rowley has written a rollicking easy read. In fact, she's turned the lives of two fascinating intellectuals, whose real home was only ever on the page, not the bed, into total smut, pics included. 
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POSTED JANUARY 9
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