A Dangerous Liaison is a tautly written, riveting book. As a dual biography of two of the 20th century's most towering philosophical minds, it elucidates the interplay between their intellectual thought and their personal interactions. Much of Seymour-Jones' work centers on the poisonous frictions between the two. Yet it also works as an impressive analysis of their twin philosophies. It does all this with a lightly worn eloquence, the density of an occasional abstraction made palatable with a peppering of intimate detail.
Sartre's seemingly illogical devotion to the Soviet Union in later life is thus viewed through the prism of his passionate affair with Lena Zonina, who was almost certainly a KGB agent. His love of communism was also a replacement for Christianity. However hard Sartre tried to reconcile his devotion to individual freedom with the cyclical view of history perpetrated by Marxism, he never quite convinced his critics, among them Albert Camus. Sartre's protestation that we should "judge communism by its intentions and not by its actions" seemed grotesque in the face of between 15 million and 30 million deaths in the gulags.
But it is in her depiction of De Beauvoir that Seymour-Jones really hits her stride. Although De Beauvoir believed that her relationship with Sartre was "the one undoubted success of my life," Seymour-Jones gently scratches at the varnish of this statement until it flakes off like gilt from an icon. The appearance of unity was only achieved at the cost of De Beauvoir's emotional unraveling.
As a philosopher, De Beauvoir felt at one with Sartre. As a woman, she was left tormented by jealousy and the perpetual fear that Sartre would leave her for a younger, more nubile partner. The couple's sexual relations were more or less over after the war, and it was the short, bespectacled Sartre who enjoyed a string of ardent affairs. When De Beauvoir, aged 39, experienced "the most passionate relationship of her life" with American novelist Nelson Algren, she ultimately denied herself, insisting: "I could not desert Sartre and writing and France."
In her life, De Beauvoir sought to overcome the socially imposed limitations of her womanhood. It was, says Seymour-Jones, a heroic attempt to break "the mould of their century." But perhaps the most poignant conclusion to be drawn from this formidable biography is that De Beauvoir never quite managed to free herself of what it meant to be a woman in love.
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