Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  Victor Brombert called it ‘A breviary of existential beliefs’ that Beauvoir ‘dramatizes’. But the The Blood of Others does not just apply or dramatize Sartre’s philosophy – it expresses Beauvoir’s. It anticipates themes from The Second Sex, particularly concerning the ways women conduct themselves and the ways love is lived differently in the situations of individual men and women.

  Early in the novel Hélène wants to love Jean because she thinks this will ‘justify’ her existence. However, as she ages – ‘becoming a woman’ – she is ‘no longer content to love without hope of a return’.6 Jean, too, realizes the fragility of Hélène’s early love for him: he does not want to be the only thing she lives for because he could give her ‘nothing but a wan tenderness’. He realizes that his love is a kind of imprisonment for her.7

  This love is not satisfying for Jean or Hélène. For Jean, ‘love is not the only thing’ in life, and Hélène’s demands are oppressive;8 when Hélène ‘awakens’ to the reality of her responsibility for others she begins to see the place of love in her life differently.

  Beauvoir later wrote that the mission of a writer is ‘to describe in dramatic form the relationship of the individual to the world in which he stakes his freedom’.9 But the world, for women, had different ideals and limitations from those it had for men. Beauvoir brought this disparity to life by telling the story of Hélène’s awakening alongside Jean’s, and also by weaving in ways women do not receive or demand the respect men are afforded. Jean’s mother, for example, is always ‘making excuses’, apologizing and trying to take up less space;10 Jean, by contrast, knows that he takes up space on earth.11 In space and conversation, throughout the novel women are valued less than their male counterparts: Hélène notes that when Jean speaks to his friend Paul, he speaks ‘man to man’ and she is only a ‘wayward, superficial little girl to them’.12 She reproaches Paul for his hypocrisy: ‘You have said to me so often that you respect other people’s liberty. And you make decisions for me and treat me like a thing.’13

  The novel also presents two men’s approaches to sex, one that objectifies women and one that does not: Jean sees a full person in the lover who smiles in his embrace, and enjoys the mixing of his embodied consciousness with another’s; Marcel, by contrast, ‘can’t bear to touch a body unless he sees it as an object – absolutely’.14

  Beauvoir concluded the second volume of her memoirs with a paragraph of reflection on her work: she was dissatisfied with She Came to Stay because ‘murder was not the solution’. In The Blood of Others and Pyrrhus and Cinéas, Beauvoir ‘attempted to define our true relationship with other people’: ‘Whether we like it or not, we do impinge on other people’s destinies, and must face up to the responsibility which this implies.’15 The Blood of Others opens with an epigraph from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.’ It was dedicated to Nathalie Sorokine.

  In later life, when Beauvoir had begun to defend her own originality, she returned to the reception of The Blood of Others. In Force of Circumstance she wrote that its main theme was ‘the paradox of this existence experienced by me as my freedom and by those who came in contact with me as an object’. Her intention was not, she says, ‘apparent to the public; the book was labelled a “Resistance novel”’ and an ‘Existentialist novel’. It was bad enough that readers assumed her novels were ‘thesis novels’ – and worse that they thought that their theses could be found in Sartre’s philosophy.

  The word ‘existentialist’ was coined by the Catholic philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel to refer to Sartre’s philosophy, and Beauvoir objected to the way people tried to stamp her with the same label: she had not even heard the term when she wrote the novel, and claimed that her inspiration ‘came from [her] own experience, not from a system’.16 In the Wartime Diary Beauvoir’s early notes for The Blood of Others are explicit that she wanted the novel to show, among other things, a female character who fell prey to ‘the illusion of the recognition of consciousness through love’.17

  On 29 October, Beauvoir’s one and only play, Useless Mouths, opened in Paris, with a benefit performance at the Théâtre des Carrefours. Set in medieval Flanders, the action unfolds in a fictional city-state called Vaucelles. Vaucelles has revolted against the Duke of Burgundy, and the play opens with a scene displaying the starvation of its inhabitants after a long siege. The leading aldermen decide that in order to preserve the city they must expel ‘the useless mouths’ – namely, women, children and the elderly. Food was scarce, they reasoned, so only workers and soldiers should have it. The town’s name, pronounced ‘vaut-elle’ in French, is a homophone for the question: ‘Does she have worth?’

  Well before her better known political works The Second Sex (1949) and Old Age (1970), Beauvoir’s play showed that some categories of people are considered useless simply for being what they are – child, woman, old. And, like so many of Beauvoir’s works, the play also raises the question of whether all love or commitment is ‘a prison’. One of its characters, Jean-Pierre, does not want to be ‘given’ a wife: ‘Give her to me? Do you think that I would agree to lock her up and tell her that I alone am her portion of the world? I don’t have the soul of a jailer.’ Throughout the play, both Jean-Pierre and Clarice discover that another ‘love’ is possible. When he professes this love for Clarice, she asks him:

  Clarice ‘And how does one love on this earth?’

  Jean-Pierre ‘We struggle together.’18

  Beauvoir dedicated the play to her mother19 and the proceeds from opening night went to feed children who had been orphaned by their parents’ deportation to Germany.20

  Beauvoir later portrayed the critical response to Useless Mouths as hostile – ‘the dailies tore me to pieces almost unanimously’.21 And it is true that some reviews were critical, particularly about the production; others thought its message was too forced, that it was ‘much less theatre than idea’.22 But not all: ‘How come in all Paris there wasn’t to be found at least ten directors fighting for this manuscript? If there is any justice, if the public is still in a state to appreciate its worth, Useless Mouths will triumph on the boulevard de la Chapelle.’23

  On the same night that Useless Mouths opened, 29 October 1945, Sartre was in another part of town giving a now-famous talk: ‘Existentialism: Is it a Humanism?’ The venue was a small one called Club Maintenant but even so the event’s organizers were concerned it would be embarrassingly empty. When Sartre arrived there were crowds waiting to get in and he worried that he wouldn’t be able to get in himself. When he finally made his way to the podium he said that ‘existentialism’ was a popular word but no one knew what it meant. The Christians thought it godless and immoral; the communists thought it nihilistic. But it was neither, Sartre said. People objected to his views because they preferred to be in bad faith than to face their freedom. ‘Existence precedes essence,’ he said: you are only what you make of yourself. That night’s lecture (later published as Existentialism is a Humanism) became the locus classicus of French existentialism.

  Shortly after Sartre’s lecture the Club Maintenant had another, less well remembered existentialist evening: Jean Wahl gave a short talk on the history of existentialism, and other philosophers were invited to respond. Nikolai Berdyaev, Georges Gurvitch and Emmanuel Levinas discussed the ways it was indebted to Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger.24 And less remembered still is a lecture that took place there on 11 December – on ‘The novel and metaphysics’, by Simone de Beauvoir.25

  Sartre’s Club Maintenant lecture would become an iconic intellectual event of postwar Paris. Beauvoir’s, by contrast, would not; she gave it less than a sentence in her autobiography. She was testing the limits between literature and philosophy, and defending her reasons philosophically. Others began to take note, and some to agree with her. Earlier in 1945 Merleau-Ponty had published an essay arguing that Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay represented a new way of doing philosophy.26
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br />   But in the meantime, despite the initial success of The Blood of Others, like Useless Mouths it had begun to be accused of sacrificing literature for philosophy. In the press Maurice Blanchot had praised She Came to Stay for being philosophically rich but remaining virtuously ambiguous, not forcing a conclusion on the reader. But he condemned The Blood of Others as a thesis novel, and he was not the only one to do so. So in ‘Literature and Metaphysics’, Beauvoir responded to her critics, defending her attempts to reconcile philosophy and literature in personal and philosophical terms. ‘When I was eighteen,’ she began,

  I read a great deal; I would read only as one can read at that age, naively and passionately. To open a novel was truly to enter a world, a concrete, temporal world, peopled with singular characters and events. A philosophical treatise would carry me beyond the terrestrial appearances into the serenity of a timeless heaven. […] Where was truth to be found? On earth or in eternity? I felt torn apart.

  Beauvoir chose to write novels because of the capacity for literature to give us ‘imaginary experiences that are as complete and disturbing as lived experiences’.27 Philosophical works are often written in an abstract voice that wants to compel or persuade its reader to adopt their point of view, rather than inviting the reader to see different perspectives unfold in particular situations. A metaphysical novel, Beauvoir said, is an ‘appeal’ to the reader’s freedom.

  Beauvoir noted that she was in excellent literary and philosophical company in being accused of writing thesis novels – Dostoevsky had been accused of writing a philosophical treatise in The Brothers Karamazov, and she thought Kierkegaard demonstrated her point that the more a philosopher values the subjective side of human experience, the unique inner life of each person, the more likely they are to use a literary form that described the singular experience of individuals becoming themselves in time. Even Plato was torn between these two temptations: in one and the same dialogue he banished the poets from the Republic (because he was concerned that art would corrupt its citizens); and yet saw the power of art to encourage us to pursue the Good (after all, this giant of Western philosophy wrote dialogues – a literary form).28

  After 1945 – the year she would later call their ‘existentialist offensive’ – neither Sartre nor Beauvoir could escape their celebrity. At home people stared at them in cafés and photographers snapped candid shots in the street. In America Sartre and Beauvoir appeared in the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Atlantic Monthly. Sartre was an icon, but he was made all the more intriguing by the attractive and unconventional woman who was, in some sense, by his side. Beauvoir also published philosophical essays expounding existentialism that are ‘more carefully considered and composed’ than Sartre’s.29 But her intellectual contributions to this philosophical moment and her disagreements with Sartre have been relentlessly downplayed. In 1945 the sensationalist postwar tabloid Samedi Soir called her ‘la grande Sartreuse’ and ‘Notre Dame de Sartre’.

  Figure 8 Beauvoir on air in 1945, the year of the ‘existentialist offensive’.

  In the public eye they were inseparable. But privately Beauvoir was suffering through one of the most difficult of Sartre’s ‘contingent’ relationships, which had thrown her into ‘great perplexity’.30 In the 1970s, in an interview with Sartre in which they discussed the other women in his life, Beauvoir said that she was frightened of Dolores Vanetti because Sartre was so attached to her. He dedicated the first issue of Les Temps Modernes ‘To Dolores’ and instead of spending Christmas with Beauvoir he left on 12 December 1945 to spend two months with Vanetti in America. When Deirdre Bair asked Beauvoir about Vanetti in 1982, she reported that Beauvoir became ‘agitated and emotional’.31 But this kind of statement tells us very little: what kind of agitation, what kind of emotion? Was it jealousy or grief that was still raw over thirty years later? Or was it agitation or anger that she was still being asked about this, still defined so much by Sartre and his other women?

  In December 1945 Beauvoir published an essay in Les Temps Modernes entitled ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’. Existentialism continued to face accusations that it was a pessimistic philosophy with an unhealthy emphasis on human depravity and death, so Beauvoir wrote an essay wryly pointing out that it was hardly new of existentialism to notice human misery or mortality, nor to ask why we are born, what we are doing here, or what is the point of suffering.32 She was beginning to tire of people asking her what they would gain by being an existentialist: it was a very strange question to ask a philosopher, she said. ‘Neither Kant nor Hegel ever asked himself what one would gain by being Kantian or Hegelian. They said what they thought was the truth, nothing more. They had no other goal but truth itself.’33

  The truth, as Beauvoir saw it, was that people took flight from their freedom in alibis. The pessimism Sartre expressed in Being and Nothingness was very like the pessimism of the French moralist tradition – a tradition including the celebrated writers Pascal and La Rochefoucauld. Pascal thought that humanity was capable of both great ‘misery’ and great ‘grandeur’, but tended towards the former. This gained him the nickname ‘miserabiliste’ (miserabilist) and a literary afterlife in works like Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables – The Miserable. La Rochefoucauld’s similarly pessimistic Maximes describes the deceptions of human self-love as narcissistic delusions of epidemic proportions. Even in charity, he saw self-interest in disguise.

  French readers well-versed in their nation’s culture did not see much hope in Sartre’s account of the human condition, in part because they recognized so much of these philosophies of misery and despair in it. What Beauvoir found surprising was that this should ‘raise so much outrage’: ‘The theme of man’s misery is not new,’ she wrote. ‘The Church fathers, Pascal, Bossuet, Massillon, preachers, priests, the entire Christian tradition has for centuries tried its best to fill man with the feeling of his abjection.’ Secular moralists, too, have attacked propriety and convention: ‘La Rochefoucauld, La Fontaine, Saint-Simon, Camfort, and Maupassant have vied with each other in denouncing baseness, futility, hypocrisy.’34

  As Beauvoir saw it, both the Christian and moralist answers to the ambiguity of human existence were alibis. If human beings are by nature sinful, or by nature driven by self-interest, then they could comfortably consider themselves determined to their misery rather than free to resist the injustices that perpetuate it. If Sartre thought human beings were by nature doomed to desire domination, then there really was no exit from living with our own oppressors. Beauvoir’s philosophy, by contrast, refused ‘the consolations of lies and resignations’ – it was an excuse to think that it’s just human nature to dominate or submit.35

  People like to think that virtue is easy. […] They also resign themselves, without much trouble, to believing that virtue is impossible. But they are reluctant to envision that it could be possible and difficult.36

  Determinism of any kind – Christian, secular, moralist, Marxist – relieved the human being of the burden of her freedom. Just as importantly, it relieved them of the weight of trying to use it ethically.

  As Beauvoir gained prestige, she also gained opportunities to use it for the benefit of others. One day in the autumn of 1945 she was waiting to buy cinema tickets with a friend on the Champs Elysées when the friend saw an acquaintance who was an aspiring writer: Violette Leduc. A few days later Leduc gave Beauvoir her manuscript to read. Beauvoir read the first half in one sitting but the second half, she told Leduc, lost momentum. Leduc redrafted it and Beauvoir liked it so much she suggested the book to Camus for publication. He accepted the novel – L’Asphyxie – on her recommendation.37 Beauvoir would go on to play an encouraging role in Leduc’s life and work.

  While Sartre was away she continued to work on her next novel, All Men Are Mortal, and also edited Sartre’s lecture ‘Existentialism: Is it a Humanism?’ for publication under the revised title ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’. Nathalie Sorokine was still at the Louisiane with Beauvoir; she was pregnant an
d preparing to move to California to be with her boyfriend, an American GI. ‘She’s gentle and nice and she’s blooming,’ Beauvoir wrote to Sartre, ‘as is the child.’38 Beauvoir and Bost were still lovers but his work as a journalist required frequent travel and he had begun to feel overshadowed by Sartre – even though the latter was almost as rarely present.

  Beauvoir spent Christmas in Mégève with Bost, Olga and Wanda. Given the successes of the year, it is interesting that she described this skiing holiday as ‘one of the best times [she]’d had this year’. She was already beginning to recognize that for her public success wasn’t necessarily conducive to private satisfaction; she liked the well-worn intimacies of old friendship and the revitalising solitude of fresh air. When she returned to Paris in mid-January she found the change abrupt: one day she was in skis; ‘Now I’m in town clothes, I’ve just had my hair done, and what’s more I’m stunningly handsome because I’ve a magnificent complexion, all tanned and with my face all relaxed – which is quite out of keeping in Paris.’39 Waiting for a plane to Tunisia, Beauvoir wrote to Sartre that her fame had followed her to the slopes: ‘Did you know I’m really rather famous too? The good lady from the Idéal-Spirt asked Kos.: “Is she very well known, that Mlle de Beauvoir? Customers keep coming up to me and asking if that’s really her.”’40

  After that, Sartre didn’t hear anything from her for a month; he kept hoping for a letter and sent ‘scads’ of his own to Tunisia, but they had to rely on postes restantes and often missed each other.41 In New York Beauvoir’s novels were making trouble for him – Dolores had asked Lévi-Strauss if he liked Sartre. Lévi-Strauss feigned not to know that Dolores and Sartre were an item, and replied, ‘How do you think I could like him after reading She Came to Stay?’ He was such a ‘filthy bastard’. (‘Thanks a lot, little jewel,’ Sartre wrote to Simone, ‘for the portrait.’42)