Carolyn Burke & Hazel Rowley, pt. 1

I first met Carolyn Burke several years ago, when I interviewed her about her biography of Mina Loy. Last year, she wrote Lee Miller, a biography of the acclaimed photographer that was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle review. She suggested to me a month ago that she'd love to chat with Hazel Rowley, who had just published Tête-A-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, about some of the issues surrounding literary biography. I thought it was a great idea, and here we are...

Carolyn Burke: I'm interested that rather than writing a conventional biography, you chose to write about Sartre and Beauvoir's relationship. How did you decide on this approach? What were the consquences for the way you shaped the narrative? What sorts of things did you choose to emphasize, to omit?

Hazel Rowley: I was keen to move away from womb-to-tomb biography, and to feel freer as a storyteller. And I did feel freer. I have never enjoyed writing a book more. Obviously I still had to get the facts right, but I didn't have to take on board their whole lives (the narrative begins in the summer of 1929, when Sartre and Beauvoir met, and it pretty much ends with Sartre's death in 1980). I talk about their writing lives and their iconic roles as public intellectuals (intellectuels engagés) because these were important aspects of their relationship, but I didn't feel obliged to fill out the picture. What a liberation! After my other books, I felt as if I were wearing dancing shoes.

I tried to give equal space to Sartre and Beauvoir. It's true that most readers sense that my sympathy lies with Beauvoir, but I admire both of them in many ways. Sartre's insecurities made me feel a real tenderness towards him. He drank a lot; he took enormous quantities of speed; at times he was on the verge of madness. It's my belief—contrary to public opinion—hat he needed Simone de Beauvoir more than she needed him.

What did I choose to emphasize or omit? As philosophers and as writers, Sartre and Beauvoir adamantly believed they should tell the truth. I was guided by the same principle in my book. I wanted to tell the truth about their relationship and not to whitewash their behavior, but the fact is, their love life does not always show them in their best light, and I was conscious of the danger of trivializing these two 20th-century icons. In order to tell this story without simply muckraking, I took pains to sketch in the broader picture—to give a sense of their intellectual trajectory and their writing.

At the same time, I was determined to keep the book fairly short. I had loads of material. I was dealing with not one but two people, and this love story contains many other characters as well. The danger was clear. I could easily produce summary rather than story. The answer, I realized, was selectivity; I had to trim my narrative with a sharp razor. What to choose? Well, you tell stories that are revealing. Above all, you tell a good story!

Hazel Rowley: How did you solve this problem, Carolyn? Your Lee Miller biography also gives a lot of focus to a relationship. You made some interesting decisions about how to present your subject's relationship with Man Ray, her mentor, lover, and employer when she was a young photographer in Paris. What were your reasons, and how did these choices alter the way you told the story of their affair?

Carolyn Burke: When I began writing, Lee's professional reputation had long been overshadowed by her relationship with Man. His erotic portraits of her, as well as the scandalous aspects of their affair, colored everyone's understanding of her role in his life, not to mention his in hers. The familiar case of the beautiful woman artist who is known chiefly in relation to her male companion! First, I wanted to bring out her contributions to their artistic partnership, which had not been adequately presented (like her role in their discovery of the technique they called "solarization"); then, I wanted to see their relations through both partners' eyes, with, I admit, the emphasis on what Lee felt—judging by her words on the subject and the visual record of its permutations in her poses for Man, who saw her nude body as his "material."

These emphases also meant exploring the Surrealist milieu in which Man operated (André Breton considered him the Surrealist photographer), especially in its treatment of the women who gravitated toward the movement. Within a year of Lee's arrival in Paris in 1929, Man's portraits of her were appearing in Surrealist magazines, where she was promoted as a quintessential "femme surréaliste." His untiring focus on her anatomy, whole and in parts, may have resulted in her decision to photograph outdoor scenes, humorous "found" images or moody Paris shots inspired by the work of Eugène Atget, and her relative lack of interest, judging by her own, in the human body.

And when it came to their break-up in 1932, precipitated by Lee's decision to return to New York to open her own studio, it meant shaping the narrative to bring out her reasons as well as his reactions, just as their reconciliation five years later received narrative emphasis so that I could continue to write about their lifelong affinity, especially in their later years.