Carolyn Burke & Hazel Rowley, pt. 2

Carolyn Burke and Hazel Rowley continue their discussion about biography and the issues that concerned them in the writing of Lee Miller and Tête-A-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Carolyn Burke: Could you describe how you came to writing about the Beauvoir/Sartre relationship? Was it initially one or the other who attracted you?

Hazel Rowley: Their relationship had always interested me. In my twenties I wrote my Ph.D. on Simone de Beauvoir and xxistentialism. As a graduate student—it was 1976, and this was one of the highlights of my life—I interviewed her in her apartment in Montparnasse. Like many others in the women's movement, I looked to Beauvoir as a model independent woman. Her relationship with Sartre had me fascinated. As I say in my preface:

When I read Beauvoir's memoirs in the late 1960s, I was exhilarated—intoxicated, one might say. She made the impossible seem possible. Didn't we all want an intellectual partner with whom we could share our work, ideas, and slightest thoughts? Didn't everyone want to write in Paris cafés amid the clatter of coffee cups and hubbub of voices, and spend their summers in Rome in complicated but apparently harmonious foursomes? Who wanted monogamy when one could have freedom and stability, love affairs and commitment?

Thirty years later, I wanted to come back to the relationship that had meant so much to me over the years, and see what it was really like. What the world knew about it came almost entirely from Beauvoir herself: her memoirs, her letters, and what she said to Deirdre Bair, her biographer, in the 1980s. I wanted to know more about Sartre's point of view. I wanted to talk to their friends and lovers. What did they feel, after all these years?

Hazel Rowley: And you, Carolyn? Why Lee Miller? She's less well known than Beauvoir, and this is risky for a biographer. I'd never heard of her before you brought her to my attention.

Carolyn Burke: Which is amusing, since Lee was already known in Paris as a notorious femme moderne by 1929, when Beauvoir and Sartre were getting together. But they moved in different circles, even though they frequented some of the same cafés in Montparnasse.

I have to say that while writing about her, I felt emboldened by her spirit. It was exhilarating to pace my narrative to her headlong rush into experience even before the war—going to Paris to study with Man Ray, acting in Cocteau's movie Blood of a Poet, taking off to Egypt in 1934 with her then husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, organizing treks into the desert to escape from cosmopolitan Cairo—all this was tremendously exciting. As the biographer must, I followed in her footsteps, sometimes literally, sometimes in my imagination.