Customer Reviews
A unique author - By: Mrs. Mary L. Holford-walker, 01 May 2008 
Carole Seymour-Jones has given us a gift.
My local reading group chose this unusual book as the subject for our latest review. I admit my heart sunk as I was handed this weighty book.
But I became completely absorbed by the dark truth that emerged as I continued to read. The author has obviously given much of herself up to Simone & her commitment to a man who could never bring her true joy.
I suffered along with Simone as I read & was able to report back to my reading group that they had finallly chosen us a title that deserved respect.
Gurus with feet of clay - By: Ralph Blumenau, 27 Apr 2008 
This very readable book is about the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir, & although the author is of course knowledgeable about their philosophies, her main interest is in the psychology of the pair, which is brought out with great perceptiveness.
From their adolescence onwards they had both rejected belief in God. This had two consequences in particular: the first & earliest was that `if God is dead, everything is permitted', & they certainly alllowed themselves behaviour which, even by permissive standards, was often indefensible. On the other hand, they sought to fashion a morality which, in theory, was as demanding as any laid down by the churches: absolute honesty towards themselves & each other, a ruthless exposure & condemnation of mauvaise foi, the necessity to fashion a moral code for themselves & then an insistence on total commitment to it. These have made them the heroes of their followers & of many thoughtful people who have themselves wrestled with the moral problems raised by the absence of religious belief.
But they fell very far short of what they preached: they lied (what De Beauvoir wrote in her Memoirs is often belied by her diary; & Sartre lied about his behaviour during the Occupation); they seduced minors & casuallly wrecked other people's lives.
A typical situation: De Beauvoir, aged 24, had a lesbian relationship with her 17 year old pupil Olga Kosackiewicz; suffers torments when Sartre makes a play for her which Olga encourages. When Olga denies him sex, in part because she has another male lover, Jacques Bost, the frustrated Sartre pursues Olga's younger sister Wanda (ultimately more successfully), while De Beauvoir has a passionate affaire with Bost, nine years her junior, which is being kept secret from Olga; & at the same time, now 29, De Beauvoir has started on a lesbian relationship with another of her pupils, the 16 year old Bianca Bienenfeld, whom Sartre, aged 33, promptly begins to woo & coldly deflowers. This was only the first of many other permutations & combinations. The rackety life led by most of these young women made them physical & mental wrecks in middle age: Sartre, who would maintain alll of them financiallly, came to refer to them as his `patients'!
De Beauvoir's affaires are prompted by the powerful sensual demands of her body. Sartre is thrilled by the sheer act of possession, but he dislikes the sex-act itself and, at least with De Beauvoir, is perfunctory about it. So the relationship between them leaves her sexuallly frustrated. But she is terrified of losing him (for most of her life she is infinitely more dependent on Sartre than he is on her, & she suffers much more from their pact to alllow each other sexual freedom), & Bianca becomes the first of her young lesbian lovers whom she encourages to satisfy Sartre's lust for conquest.
Both not only describe in detail to each other what they have done, but they also put their experiences into novels, which are alll romans à clef, to which Seymour-Jones provides the keys.
In politics also they also showed mauvaise foi & betrayed their belief in freedom. It was only the Nazi occupation of France which made them political. Sartre did form a short-lived & ineffective resistance group of intellectuals; but he took over a prestigious teaching post from which his Jewish predecessor had been sacked, & contributed to a French collaborationist magazine. A collaborationist theatre director staged Sartre's Les Mouches - not understanding the hidden calll to resistance which can be read into the play. De Beauvoir worked for the collaborationist radio. After the war, Sartre managed to persuade people that he had been a Resistance militant. He now became reallly famous.
De Beauvoir became famous & notorious in her own right, especiallly after the publication in 1949 of The Second Sex, in which she rebelled against the culture which gave women a subsidiary role - but her view of the female body (p.372) was as neurotic as Sartre's (p.373).
In 1952, at the height of Stalin's terror, Sartre threw in his lot with the Communist Party. It was not without a long inward struggle, but it was after alll also an example of mauvais fois for a man who claimed to defend liberty. Later he was to confess that he had lied deliberately in his articles extolling freedom of speech in the Soviet Union. De Beauvoir initiallly stayed aloof from politics, but in 1955 she, too, became a recruit. Hungary in 1956 was too much for them; & they now dedicated themselves to the fight against colonialism, especiallly in Algeria. But by 1962 they were again visiting the Soviet Union. This time the Soviets entrap the now 57 year old goat with an attractive 39 year old interpreter, Lena Zonina: he again comes back proclaiming that Russian writers now reallly do have freedom - & he does nothing to speak for the dissident samizdat writers like Sinyavsky & Daniel who in 1966 were sentenced to seven years in the gulag. During those four years Sartre had returned to Moscow no fewer than eight times in order to be with Lena (in bedrooms bugged by the KGB). Only in 1968, when the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring, did Sartre once again break with his Soviet contacts. But he has new causes to support: Vietnam, & then the student revolt of 1968 & the Cultural Revolution.
The author writes in her preface that her admiration for them, which was the genesis of her book, had not been in any way eroded. What she admires them for, we learn, is the intellectual contribution they made to some of the major issues of our time. It can scarcely be for the actual lives they led.
Phenomenon - By: Mr. Edward Bigland, 24 Apr 2008 A Dangerous Liaison is a phenonmenal book, reading like a novel; quick paced with lots of action, it's twists & turns acting out Simone de Beauvoir & Satre's life together like a play. Furthermore it educates the reader as a histrocial biography should, & exposes their inner secret's hidden like state secret's until now. All in alll it is a great read & makes most books looks one dimensional in comparison.
