Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  Beauvoir was the third woman to receive the Goncourt since its inception in 1903. A month after she won it, her friend Colette Audry explained that Beauvoir ‘had chosen for herself the life of an intellectual’, and that her novel showed the ‘wounds of individual maturing and the seriousness of collective experience’. Beauvoir’s work, Audry wrote, ‘asks readers to reflect on themselves and their own situation’.57 Her aim as a writer was still to appeal to the reader’s freedom, and in a 1963 interview Beauvoir expressed frustration at the insistence of some readers that The Mandarins was autobiographical: ‘in reality, it was truly a novel. A novel inspired by circumstances, by the postwar era, by people I knew, by my own life, etc., but really transposed on a totally imaginary plane widely straying from reality’.58

  Despite Beauvoir’s protest, even today the book is sold as a true-to-life an account of the left-bank intellectuals in their famous circle. The Harper Perennial edition published in 2005 describes it as ‘an epic romance and philosophical manifesto’ that will give readers insight into the lives of famous men:

  In wartime Paris, a group of friends gather to celebrate the end of the German occupation and to plan their future. […] Punctuated by wickedly accurate portraits of Sartre, Camus and other intellectual giants of the time, this is a love story that you will never forget.

  Although The Mandarins was prize-winning, its reception also demonstrates the trope that Beauvoir was a self-centred woman whose literature lacked imagination and drew only from her own life. According to this reading, Anne Dubreuilh is Beauvoir, her husband Robert is Sartre, Henri Perron is Camus, his lover Paule is sometimes thought to be Violette Leduc (although as Beauvoir noted, several women saw themselves in this character59). There is also an American man called Lewis Brogan – a man with whom Anne has an affair.

  We have already seen that Beauvoir acknowledged that the novel was inspired by her life. But from her point of view it was neither autobiography nor a thesis novel, and since people accused it of being both she explained her own intentions in Force of Circumstance. The theme of The Mandarins is what Kierkegaard called ‘repetition’, which Beauvoir understood to mean that ‘truly to possess something, one must have lost it and found it again’.60 She did not want to impose a thesis on the novel, instead showing ‘the perpetual dance of conflicting points of view’.

  Here Beauvoir says two rather shocking things, from the point of view of her legendary relationship with Sartre: first, that she deliberately used a philosophical technique called ‘indirect communication’, in which the reader is presented not with a direct imperative to live a certain way, but with a choice. Kierkegaard used this technique in his writings – sometimes publishing under pseudonyms, and sometimes creating pseudonyms within pseudonyms to provoke reflection in his readers about what was true, and about what way of living they should choose for themselves. Such writing, when penned by Kierkegaard, is called philosophy – so why not hers? Is the answer simply that Kierkegaard was a man, and she a woman? Time and time again, she was dismissed as a superficial and imaginationless thinker, as incapable of being a ‘true’ philosopher. And when she defended the depth and originality of her own philosophy, she was rarely believed.

  Second, Beauvoir says outright that this novel is a reworking of the philosophical questions she asked in her diary before she met Sartre: ‘The basic confrontation of being and nothingness that I sketched at the age of twenty in my private diary, pursued through all my books and never resolved, is even here given no certain reply. I showed some people, at grips with doubts and hopes, groping in the dark to find their way; I cannot think I proved anything.’61

  In Force of Circumstance Beauvoir defended both the philosophical nature and originality of her work forthrightly and firmly. By the early 1960s she had nearly two decades’ experience of her own thinking being dismissed as ‘applied existentialism’, and her intellect and creativity being described as parasitic on Sartre’s. She now knew all too well that tensions could arise not only because of what an author said, but between what was said and who said it. So she stated, unequivocally but quietly, that she had had her own ideas.

  But a critical legend developed according to which Beauvoir had ‘written an exact and faithful chronicle’,62 a roman-à-clef:

  Études, 1955

  ‘Yes, it is the story of “Sartre’s band” that we are told.’63

  Informations sociales, 1957

  ‘The sale of 185,000 copies of The Mandarins is not only explained by Simone de Beauvoir’s Prix Goncourt but also by all the legend that proliferates around Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Simone de Beauvoir is considered the muse of Jean-Paul Sartre, the icon of existentialism, and many readers have hoped to have, by reading this novel, new light on a movement that seems full of mysteries.’64

  American reviews, too, claimed that, ‘As expected, we find Simone de Beauvoir herself in the novel.’65 For Beauvoir, this was not only a frustrating reception but it led to personal difficulty: ‘this legend turned my inventions into indiscretions or even into denunciations’.66

  Doris Lessing praised The Mandarins above all for its ‘brilliant portraits of women’.67 Its women are told that women are all the same.68 And yet we see some suffering on account of unreciprocal love;69 others frustrated that men do not take them seriously enough to discuss serious matters with them. An intergenerational dimension is brought into the story through Anne’s daughter Nadine, who objects to her lover that: ‘You discuss things with other people […] But with me you never want to. I suppose it’s because I’m a woman, and women are only good for getting laid.’70

  One problem with indirect communication is that it leaves so many possible interpretations open. Although Beauvoir claimed that there was as much of herself in Henri as there was in Anne, one part of The Mandarins – the posthumous publication of Beauvoir’s letters to Algren revealed – resembled life quite closely:

  The Mandarins

  ‘Oh! You’re already in bed!’ Brogan said. His arms were laden with clean sheets and he looked at me questioningly. ‘I wanted to change the sheets.’ ‘It’s not necessary’ […] ‘Anne!’ ‘The way he said it moved me deeply. He threw himself on me and for the first time I spoke his name. ‘Lewis!’

  Letters (SdB to Algren)

  ‘Don’t forget to change the sheets when I come and sleep there. I’ll always remember you so puzzled with the sheets in your arms, when you saw me already lying in the bed, the first, first night. It seems to me I began to really love you this very minute, never to stop.’

  Once such lifelikeness was established after the publication of Beauvoir’s letters, readers speculated about what other examples the book contained. Where should they draw the line between the real and the imaginary?

  On 9 January 1955 Beauvoir turned 47 and felt ‘really middle-aged’.71 Birthdays had the unfortunate effect of reminding her of death, which she still couldn’t think about with equanimity.

  That year, with her Goncourt prize money, she bought a studio flat on the rue Victor Schoelcher, a small road off the boulevard Raspail that bordered the southeast side of the Montparnasse cemetery. It was a nine-minute walk from the apartment she was born into, near the Dôme and the Coupole. She and Lanzmann moved in in August. Lanzmann remembered crossing the threshold together, commemorating the occasion with a ‘sexual housewarming’.72 But Beauvoir barely had time to unpack before she left with Sartre to visit China at the beginning of September. They had a month in Peking and then travelled around the country, curious about the kind of lives people led under Mao’s communism. On this trip they felt their foreignness and their privilege keenly: here there were no luxuries, and no one had heard of them. They travelled back via Russia.

  In the spring Violette Leduc’s novel Ravages was published. In an earlier draft it had included a lesbian relationship that had offended Gallimard’s readers and was therefore – in Beauvoir’s word – ‘amputated’.73 Leduc was so upset that they wanted to cut it that she became ph
ysically ill. Beauvoir spent time with her while she recovered, writing to Sartre about the ‘hard day’ they had together.74 The missing scenes were not restored when the book was published. But, even so, she and Leduc strolled through hyacinths and tulips discussing their hopes for it. Among other literary friendships, Beauvoir still saw Ellen and Richard Wright when she could; they often entertained her with her American publisher. They were working on a translation of The Mandarins but would have to cut some of the sex, he told her, since, ‘In the States, it’s all right to talk about sex in a book,’ ‘but not about perversion.’75

  That June Merleau-Ponty published Adventures of the Dialectic; reviewers announced that it had dealt Sartre’s philosophy a death blow. Beauvoir thought it had not – so she wrote a reply contradicting Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Sartre point by point. Her contemporaries were critical of her for doing this – why did she defend him? In Force of Circumstance Beauvoir discussed the way her response drew attack. Some said that she should have left the replying to Sartre since it was his philosophy being condemned, others that she was too ‘virulent’. To the former criticism she said that anyone who sees the defects of a philosophical argument can reply to it. And as to the latter, her friendship with Merleau-Ponty ‘was great’: ‘our differences of opinion were often violent; I would often get carried away, and he would smile’. Beauvoir’s acerbic wit comes through in her description of this episode. To the claim that the tone of her philosophical essays would benefit from being more temperate – a charge rarely levelled against male philosophers in those days – she said ‘I don’t think so. The best way to explode a bag of hot air is not to pat it but to dig one’s nails into it.’76

  By the autumn of 1955 the Algerian War was raging and France was divided over questions of race and colonialism. Morocco and Tunisia were about to gain their independence. Algeria wanted independence too, however the French had just suffered a defeat in Indochina in May and the government was humiliated. French empire – and French pride – had to be defended, and it would be defended by keeping Algeria. Beauvoir was deeply discomfited – even disgusted; she thought France’s actions were indefensible. She struggled to sleep and felt ashamed of her nation’s torture of innocents. Les Temps Modernes came out in support of Algerian independence early, and once again she faced the accusation that she was a traitor to her nation, anti-French.

  In 1955 she published a collection of three essays under the title Privileges. The question that linked them together was: how can the privileged think about their situation? The ancient nobility ignored this question altogether: they used their rights without worrying about whether they were legitimate. So the first essay examined the Marquis de Sade because, she said, he illustrates the point that if one wishes to contest unjust hierarchies, the first condition of doing so is not to be ignorant of them. Sade failed to do what Beauvoir thought writers should: to reveal the world’s possibilities and appeal to the freedom of their readers to work for justice. Instead, Sade took flight into the imaginary, and developed justifications for cruelty and perversion. Sade’s so-called eroticism missed the truth of the erotic, which can only be found by those who abandon themselves to their vulnerability to and emotional intoxication with their beloved. But nevertheless, she said, Sade has enduring merit: he showed ‘with brilliance that privilege can only be desired egotistically, that it cannot be legitimized in the eyes of all’.77

  In the second essay she examined the processes by which some conservatives justify inequality: usually by conflating ‘general interests’ with their own. It is impossible to defend privilege philosophically, she says. So those people who think it defensible have succumbed either to ‘forgetfulness’ – a kind of lack of attention to the world – or to bad faith. The third essay analysed a particular case: culture. Here she wrote that culture is a privilege, and that many intellectuals are guilty, like other privileged classes, of forgetting the lives of less fortunate people.

  Just eight years before, Beauvoir had written an article for France-Amerique about the ‘incompetence’ of ‘nonspecialists’ who wanted to understand existentialism, saying that it could not be summarized in a sentence or even an article:

  No one would dream of demanding that the system of Kant or Hegel be dispensed in three sentences; existentialism does not lend itself to popularization any easier. A philosophical theory, like a physics or mathematical theory, is accessible only to the initiated. Indeed, it is indispensable to be familiar with the long tradition on which it rests if one wants to grasp both the foundations and the originality of the new doctrine.78

  Even then she recognized that the wider public was interested in existentialism because it was ‘a practical and living attitude toward the problems posed by the world today’. It spoke to people. But in America, this led some critics to doubt that existentialism was, in fact, philosophy. In France philosophy was not so narrowly defined.79 But even so, she must have wondered: had she forgotten that it wasn’t just intellectuals who need answers?

  After the essays on privilege, Beauvoir decided to write a book about China. She wanted a break from novel writing, but she also wanted to challenge her Western readers’ prejudices about communism. The Long March (published in 1957) drew on Beauvoir’s reaction to her travels in 1955; this trip challenged her not to take the wealth of Europe and the United States as her norm. ‘Seeing the masses of China upset my whole idea of our planet; from then on it was the Far East, India, Africa, with their chronic shortage of food, that became the truth of the world, and our Western comfort merely a limited privilege.’80 She wanted her first-hand experiences, her sights and conversations, to be available to others, so they too could see that the Chinese were ‘fighting hard to build a human world’.

  She wrote an account of the transition from ‘a democratic to a socialist revolution’ because she wanted to do justice not to their abstract philosophical definitions but rather to what she called ‘the most concrete of all truths: the present is nothing but evolution, a becoming’. Whatever she saw during her time in China, she told her reader, it was ‘simultaneously a survival from the past’ and ‘something in the throes of being born’.81 Although her optimism about Mao proved ill-founded, she found much to praise in what she saw.

  In 1956 The Mandarins joined The Second Sex on the Catholic Church’s index of forbidden books, and Beauvoir joined Sartre for what would become a routine they followed until death did them part: autumn in Italy. They had hotel rooms next to each other in the centre of the Eternal City, and their days followed a harmonious rhythm of solitude and companionship, work, whiskey and gelato. Now that she had found her literary stride again, Beauvoir especially liked the period between the ‘vertigo’ of the blank page and the ‘minutiae’ of the final draft; after comments by Sartre, Bost and Lanzmann she described the process as one where ‘she cut, amplified, corrected, tore up, began again, pondered, made decisions’.82

  That year Beauvoir resumed the project she shelved a decade before, in 1946: her memoirs. A lot had changed since she first had the idea: she’d written The Second Sex, met Algren, struggled with ‘the monster’ that became The Mandarins and won the Prix Goncourt. She had travelled to America and China and many other places, and she had developed the conviction – as she put it in her final essay of Privileges, that culture was a privilege and that intellectuals should not forget the people whose lives did not afford it.

  In Italy that autumn Beauvoir read Sartre passages she had written about her cousin Jacques, which would become part of the Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. She wrote to Lanzmann regularly, describing her days, and the books she found interesting, including C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite. Its opening sentence describes the way that ‘the powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighbourhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern’. Mills thought that men and women in mass society felt ‘without purpose in an epoch in which
they were without power’.83 How, Beauvoir must have wondered, could people recognize the power they did have?

  It is striking that Beauvoir’s turn to autobiography coincides with increasing criticism of intellectual privilege and involvement in politics.84 This may be simple coincidence, but it seems more likely to me that Beauvoir’s life writing was one of the ways she put her politics in action. Margaret Simons has argued that Beauvoir’s trip to China – and more specifically, her encounter with a very popular book by Ba Jin entitled The Family – was what inspired Beauvoir to write her life in a way that might serve to liberate her readers from convention. The Family was about two brothers, one who accepted arranged marriage and one who rebelled; it sold by the tens of thousands and Beauvoir thought it ‘gave voice to the resentments and hopes of an entire generation’.85

  The Second Sex had articulated many of Beauvoir’s objections to ‘conventions’ constraining women and her hopes for their liberation, but she had not written it with the ordinary woman in mind – the book’s language, style and length were characteristic of works of the 1940s Parisian philosophical elite, employing and adapting concepts from philosophers who are not exactly known for being accessible: Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. By the mid-1950s Beauvoir knew that many people weren’t buying – let alone reading – both volumes of it. By May of 1956, volume I of The Second Sex had gone through 116 editions in French. Volume II was selling more slowly (reaching 104 editions by 1958) – and that was the volume where women spoke, in their own voice, about their experiences of becoming women; that was where she wrote about love, independence and dreaming one’s own dreams.86 She must have wondered why the second volume sold more slowly than the first – perhaps even feeling disappointment that the one that talked about love and liberation was less read. Did she also wonder whether she had done enough to share her privilege with other women, whether she had shared it in the best ways?