In her vibrant account of the Sartre–Beauvoir couple (described as ‘the story of a relationship’ rather than as a biography), Hazel Rowley concentrates more on the private lives of her subjects than on the content of their work. One of the dangers of entering into the minutiae of the lives of famous people is that the banalities of daily life can sometimes obscure what it was that made the people worth talking about in the first place. Rowley does not entirely escape this pitfall: there is a certain tedium in the almost endless procession of Sartre’s lovers, which she ascribes to his ‘bottomless need for female attention’. This is less the case with Beauvoir, though she too seems to have been singularly trite in the language of love. For the most part, however, Rowley unfolds her narrative with masterful skill: the meeting in the 1920s of Sartre and Beauvoir as brilliant university students; the pact through which they pledged themselves to each other; their tough apprenticeships in teaching and writing; their Resistance work during the Occupation; their rise to fame and influence; their numerous affairs; their difficulties in confronting old age and approaching death.

In many ways, apart from both being workaholics, they were an unlikely couple. Sartre was short, pudgy and ugly; and for most of his life he abused his body by eating badly and excessively, smoking and drinking heavily, and stuffing himself with amphetamines and barbiturates. Beauvoir never quite matched his level of self-indulgence, and she never cast off entirely the proprieties of her upbringing. Rowley shows that the couple survived not so much because of their ‘open’ relationship as despite it. On various occasions, their relations with others almost drove them apart permanently, but in the end they always returned to the pact, recognising that they could not live without each other. For Sartre, Beauvoir was the only honesty in his life; for her, he was the essence of the freedom to which she aspired. A very great strength of Rowley’s book is her evocation of the complexity of this process. Using documentation derived from existing written sources as well as from many interviews with key figures in the story, she creates a gallery of detailed portraits around the central subjects, so that the reader appreciates fully the tangled intensity amongst which these lives developed. (Not all of her witnesses are entirely reliable: for instance, what appears to be Michelle Vian’s testimony about jazz being banned in wartime France is quite false: it never thrived so much as during the Occupation. Generally, however, Rowley weighs her material with a judiciously critical eye.)

Both Sartre and Beauvoir did some rather sordid things, which appear the more reprehensible through their subsequent dispassionate discussions of them. Beauvoir seems eventually to have realised that their sexual seduction of young people (including their students) might have been harmful; in the case of Bianca Bienenfeld, who suffered a major nervous breakdown, it certainly was. Indeed, the Sartrean community, largely made up of past and present lovers, and supported by Sartre’s royalties is hardly a compelling example of existentialist philosophy in action. Sartre was generous with his time and money but he also collected people and bound them to him, at the risk of turning them, as Sylvie Lebon complained, into parasites. Olga Kosakiewicz was even more critical: ‘We were all like snakes, mesmerised.’

In their analysis of the events that were shaping the world, Sartre and Beauvoir agreed on most things: both leaned more towards Russian positions than the American ones, and both were profoundly anti-colonialist. They did have significant differences over the Arab–Israeli conflict, with Beauvoir more sympathetic than Sartre to Israel. Rowley rightly stresses the fundamental shift of power within the couple during the post-1968 years, when Sartre, in adopting more and more radical positions, became politically marginalised, while Beauvoir, as a leader of the feminist movement, became more central. There was poetic justice in this, given Sartre’s dominance of the relationship in its earlier years. Rowley’s account of Sartre’s decline and death is both moving and harrowing, as Beauvoir tried to maintain her dignity and influence against unscrupulous ‘friends’ intent on exploiting Sartre’s weakness. (A series of strokes had left Sartre a much diminished man both physically and mentally.) Despite the huge crowds that attended his funeral, there was no glory in this death, and Beauvoir found no consolation for her grief.

Rowley’s book brings out the humanity – flawed but overflowing with vitality – of two of the twentieth century’s intellectual giants. Understandably, we learn more about Beauvoir’s feelings than we do about Sartre’s. Whereas Beauvoir’s great achievement in writing was to forge a language and literary forms through which she could most completely give herself to her readers, Sartre from early on used ironical self-analysis as a way of avoiding self-revelation. Although Beauvoir’s admiration for Sartre never faltered, she was manifestly often hurt and disappointed. She could not avoid the jealousy that they had promised not to experience, and it seems that many of her affairs, with women as well as men, were reactions to Sartre’s relentless pursuit of the women who took his fancy. People are often mystified by Sartre’s success with women. Rowley has gathered impressive testimony that his essential secret was verbal: amusing, witty, intelligent and full of promises, he knew how to ‘talk to women’. One gets the feeling that for him the seduction was the main game; he was bewildered by the desire of women to attach themselves to him in ongoing relationships, and frustrated by the difficulties of managing several of them at once. As for Beauvoir, her great dilemma was in knowing where her loyalty should lie. The most poignant example in this respect is her relationship with the American writer Nelson Algren, whom she loved deeply but nonetheless betrayed by belittling their relationship in her account of it to Sartre. Algren would later take revenge by writing sour reviews about Beauvoir’s books. The Algren story, like Rowley’s, serves to demonstrate that the pact between Sartre and Beauvoir produced at least as much pain as happiness or well-being. But it was never broken.