Variations on a Theme

Abstract

Several years before Doris Lessing and Clancy Sigal reciprocally purloined details of their intimate liaison for their respective literary purposes, another romantic relationship with uncanny parallels to theirs unfolded between a European woman writer in her late thirties and a Leftist Jewish writer from Chicago. The relationship lasted for four years, its “half-life” for many years afterward. Soon after the actual relationship ended, the female partner established herself as a pioneer of feminism, publishing a landmark book concerning, among other subjects, female sexuality, the vexed relations between the sexes, and the difficulty of autonomy for women in patriarchy. In 1947, several years before her major reputation was secured by her groundbreaking work, The Second Sex, the French writer and philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, visited the United States for the first time. While in Chicago, she met (through a friend’s reference) and fell passionately in love with Nelson Algren, a writer who had published two novels and a volume of short stories but not yet his own breakthrough and award-winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm (1949).1 Although de Beauvoir, then approaching 40, had been Jean-Paul Sartre’s intellectual and intimate partner for nearly two decades without benefit of marriage, her acquaintance with Algren rapidly developed into a full-fledged romantic affair that lasted until 1950. After the two confirmed their passionate love for each other during the winter of 1947, de Beauvoir returned to France. During the lovers’ time apart, they maintained a prolific correspondence; apparently, only de Beauvoir’s side has been preserved (A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren).