A Love Letter, to a Collection of Them
On Sartre's love letters to Beauvoir, and why I refuse to return them
Why haven’t I returned the book? It’s on my windowsill right now, as I type, and not that heavy. I could stick it in a tote, or a purse, or under my arm. Theoretically, I can be in and out of the library I stole it from within the hour. I’m not a fan of this library, true — the thick, congested glass, the gold and brass climbing trellis, the history of suicide — but that is not justification enough.
In the first few pages of the book, a collection of letters, the man who writes them pokes fun at himself. This is before he becomes The Philosopher, and as someone who was only familiar with the argumentative, existentialism-IS-a-humanism Sarte, I was very pleased to discover another version. Throughout the collection, it gave me a certain sick joy to read about his deepest fears and insecurities. It was such a rush, like watching Big Ed on 90 Day Fiancé. In the very first letter, addressed to a Simone Jollivet, whom I imagine to be pale and underage with a generous rack, he writes:
“All of this is so banal. And unfortunately, what’s more, deep down, I have the personality of a little spinster. As you may not have guessed, I was born with a personality to match my face: stupidly emotional, cowardly, self-indulgent. My sentimentality can make me teary eyed about the least little thing...I’ve had unjustified, implausible attacks of pity and cowardice and weakness of character, that have relegated me to the nadir of failure in the eyes of my friends and relatives” (4).
This is the passage that wins me over. I wind through the stacks and check out the book. I want to say that this happened last January. If it was the olden days, I would pull out the card afixed to the inside of the back cover and read the stamped date. Unfortunately, we are in the days of multi-factor authentication.
With great horror, I have watched the book disintegrate wildly since that day. The turquoise green of the hardcover has ripened, over the course of many months, into an olive. The golden threads of the spine, which once held the greens together, now poke their wiry heads in every direction. The Dewey Decimal classification — PQ 2637.A82Z48313 — gets dewier with each passing day. I've looked up every so often to notice that a new water stain has bloomed over the cover. The rings are almost gold against the green, and add a certain vintage charm: this I will have to explain to a librarian eventually. I have a terrible habit of putting books on top of window sills, and steaming hot mugs on top of books. The challenge is to finish them before the combined forces of erosion do.
I’ve received dozens of emails about the book: informing, reminding, cajoling, pleading, threatening. They’ve roughly corresponded to the four seasons that have elapsed. I’m in the final stage of the emailing, which is the complete withdrawal of all email communications. The silent treatment. This stage, more than the others, has almost cracked me. How did it come to this?
Could I blame my irresponsibility on the pandemic? I could, of course, but pandemic stories are increasingly boring. We can’t help but fall into indifference, immunity — if not to the virus itself, then to the news. And it is after all just a book: a book doesn’t deserve a pandemic story as much as, say, a life, or even better, a death. Also, if I blamed it on the pandemic, I would be lying.
Here is the terrible truth: I just didn’t want to give it back. I filed extension after extension for it, well before the bat bit the human. Or the molecule leaked from the lab. Or whatever. And when I was kicked out of campus, I quickly shoved Sartre in the first box I taped together. It was my baby in a box. I had to protect it, in a way; the library was closed. My ovaries revved up in the face of abandonment — can you blame me for it? I could have left Sartre out in the street, his eyes lolling every which way in shock. I could have left him behind like countless other things that students left behind: spiraled Amazon tapestries, ineffective toaster ovens, white Ikea table legs, strictly-against-dorm-regulations vape pens, broken Muji gel pens, plastic bottles that smell like sewer.
Once upon a time, my attachment to the book had much to do with the book. I was convinced that with enough time, I would crank through all 438 pages, written between the years of 1926 and 1939. I congratulated myself for taking on such a feat. Not many people could sit through Sartre’s lengthy personal passages, most of which are addressed to Beauvoir, although some are addressed to others (side hoes). Weaker spirits would be deterred by casual flashes of racism or Orientalism. Less intellectual types would choose being social over reading the book on Valentine’s day. Not everyone has what it takes to read the ramblings of an existential philosopher, much of which have nothing to do with his philosophy, and a good portion of which are just war-time gossip about soldiers that Sartre found annoying, and logistical demands that Beauvoir drop off money here and pick up books there.
Have I kept the book as an act of love? Ironically, the book has witnessed the fraying of many loves. It has also witnessed the enlargement of others: like layers of skin, many of my interpersonal relationships have become amorphous, breathable, ever-shifting. As time passes, I care less about this, the instability. This book has peered, from a windowsill, into the most painful time in my life. It has been shocked by miraculous recovery. It has been lugged along 3 separate moves over the course of 9 months. It has eroded in a basement, on a porch step, in a coat closet, and in a blue-bellied suitcase. The book pops open almost before you touch it, such is the state of the spine.
What I like most about the letters is Sartre’s dramatic expressions of love, most evident in his magisterial sign offs. They are jarring in what feels like an age of aromanticism and general cowardice: I love you and send you a passionate kiss (50.) I so want to see you again, to tuck your little arm in mine and take a walk (120). For me you are solider than Paris, which could be destroyed, solider than anything: you are my whole life, which I will find again on my return (239). Goodbye, I still love you very much and very tenderly, and I kiss you on your dear little eyes. Soon I’ll have some photos of me in my helmet, I’ll send them to you (249).
Should I read these to the librarian, while I make a case against my replacement fee, which could climb into the hundreds? What do you all think? This is a conversation I can avoid entirely, however, if I keep the book (which is at this point mine?).
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One Recommendation
Honeybunch, Jane Green
One (Lazy) Citation
Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir 1926 — 1939, Edited by Simone de Beauvoir.
One (Passionate) Kiss
Thanks for reading, still!