Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  Intellectuals, she said, should not forget those who lacked access to culture. That meant writing things they would read – stocking their minds with new possibilities through story. Whether or not she had these exact thoughts, the memoirs were reaching a new audience. The Prime of Life sold 45,000 copies before it was even in the shops, and in the first week it sold 25,000 more.33 It was amazing! She wrote to Nelson in December – it had already sold 130,000 copies.34

  It was in this volume that Beauvoir wrote that she was ‘not a philosopher’. She did not think of herself as the creator of a system, like a Kant or Hegel or Spinoza – or a Sartre. The English translation of her explanation describes her rejecting philosophical systems as ‘lunacy’ because they made universal claims that didn’t do justice to life and ‘women’ ‘are not by nature prone to obsessions of this type’.35 These claims have perplexed English-speaking readers of Beauvoir – what does she mean, not a philosopher? Why does she, of all people, make such huge generalizations about women? The truth is, she didn’t – her translator did. In French she wrote that philosophical systems arise from the stubbornness of people who want to find ‘universal keys’ in their own rough judgements. And she said that ‘the feminine condition’ did not dispose one to this kind of obstinacy. Her scepticism made it through the translation, but nuanced sarcasm did not.36

  By now Beauvoir was under few illusions about the ways in which she was dismissed as Sartre’s derivative double, and misunderstood by people who had a vested interest in not understanding her. So she got straight to the point: She did not want to be anyone’s disciple, and was not content with developing, collating or criticizing someone else’s views instead of doing her own thinking. In The Prime of Life she asked outright: how could anyone ‘bear to be someone else’s follower?’ She admitted that at times in life she did ‘consent’ to play such a role, to an extent. She did not give up on ‘thinking life’ as she put it in her student diaries, but rather decided to think life in literature because she deemed it the best vehicle for communicating ‘the element of originality’ in her own experience.37

  Because the English translation of this passage has so often been interpreted as internalized sexism on her part, it is important to emphasize that being a woman is not the only reason one might feel excluded from the title ‘philosopher’. In fact reading Beauvoir’s story in this way distracts us from the philosophical reasons underpinning her denial. Many well-known ‘philosophers’ have denied that title – including Albert Camus, who criticized philosophy’s confidence in reason as overblown, and Jacques Derrida. It is important, therefore, not to shoehorn Beauvoir into a single trope about what women can and can’t be: the issue of what philosophy can and can’t be was also in play.

  For Beauvoir, whether she was 19 or 50-something, philosophy had to be lived. But now she had come to the view that being committed to the freedom of others meant participating in concrete projects of liberation. As the conflict over Jeanson’s trial intensified, Sartre decided to use his position to protest the way the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121 were being treated. He called a press conference in Beauvoir’s apartment and defended the thirty signatories who had been charged with treason: if they were found guilty, he said, then all 121 were. And if not, then the case should be withdrawn. The government dropped the charges. Sartre’s reputation spared all of them since, in de Gaulle’s words, ‘One does not imprison Voltaire.’

  This was good news, but they were not out of the woods; in July 1961 Sartre’s rue Bonaparte apartment was bombed with a plastic explosive. The damage was limited, but even so he moved his mother out and went to live at Beauvoir’s. In October 1961 30,000 Algerians demonstrated against the curfew imposed on them in Paris: it was a peaceful march with a clear purpose – they wanted to be allowed to stay out past 8.30 p.m. But the French police reacted violently, with guns and clubs, even throwing some Algerians into the Seine. Eyewitness accounts reported policemen strangling Algerians, and at least 200 Algerians were killed that day.

  The French press covered it up. But Les Temps Modernes did not.

  In July 1961 Beauvoir met C. Wright Mills, the author of White Collar and The Power Elite – she was interested in his work and its popularity in Cuba. Then she left for her summer trip to Italy with Sartre. They spent evenings in the Piazza Santa Maria del Trastevere and she tried to work on the third volume of her memoirs. But it was hard to think about the past when she felt ‘hounded by the present’. Lanzmann had recently brought Sartre a manuscript by Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth – passing on a request for a preface to it. Sartre agreed, and all three of them were delighted when Fanon said he would visit them in Italy. After the Algerian revolution began in 1954, Fanon joined the Algerian National Liberation Front. He had been expelled from Algeria in 1957, but kept fighting even so – even after being diagnosed with leukaemia early in 1961.

  Lanzmann and Beauvoir went to meet him at the airport. Beauvoir caught sight of him before Fanon saw them. His movements were jumpy and abrupt: he kept looking around and seemed agitated. Two years earlier he had arrived in Rome for medical treatment after being wounded on the Moroccan border, and an assassin had come for him in his hospital room: when he landed, Beauvoir said, this memory was ‘very much on his mind’.38

  On this visit Fanon talked about himself with unusual frankness, prompting his biographer David Macey to comment that Beauvoir and Sartre must have been ‘both skilful and sympathetic interrogators. There is certainly no other record of Fanon speaking as openly as this to anyone’.39 He told them that when he was a young man in Martinique he thought education and personal merit were enough to break the ‘colour barrier’. He wanted to be French, served in the French army, and then studied medicine in France. But no quantity of merit or quality of education stopped him being ‘a Negro’ in the eyes of the French.40 Even as a doctor, people called him ‘boy’ – and much worse. His life story opened up conversations about Frenchness, blackness and colonization.

  Beauvoir suspected that Fanon knew more than he was telling them about Algeria. He was open and relaxed when they talked about philosophy, but then they took him to see the Appian Way and he couldn’t understand why. As Beauvoir tells the story Fanon told them outright that ‘European traditions had no value in his eyes’. Sartre tried to move the conversation along to Fanon’s experiences of psychiatry. But Fanon pressed Sartre: ‘How can you continue to live normally, to write?’ As he saw it, Sartre wasn’t doing enough to denounce France. Fanon left her with a strong impression, long after they said goodbye. When she shook his hand she ‘seemed to be touching the very passion that was consuming him’, a ‘fire’ that he communicated to others.41

  That autumn Sartre wrote the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth while Beauvoir wrote the preface to a book by Gisele Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, which told the story of the woman behind the trial. Just as she’d criticized the Marquis de Sade for fleeing the horrors of reality for the illusory safety of the imagination, Beauvoir wanted the French state to look the ugliness of their actions in the face. Its publication brought her a death threat.

  On 7 January 1962 there was another attack of plastic explosives at the Rue Bonaparte. It had been placed on the fifth floor by mistake – Sartre’s apartment was on the fourth – but when Beauvoir went to see it the next day the door of the apartment had been torn off. An armoire had disappeared, too, and its contents – manuscripts and notebooks of Sartre and Beauvoir – had been stolen.42 Sartre’s mother was now living in a hotel permanently, for her safety. By 18 January the owner of the Saint-Germain apartment evicted Sartre, so Sartre moved to 110, quai Blériot, in the 14th arrondissement.43

  By February, the reaction to Beauvoir’s stance on Djamila Boupacha made her realize that her own apartment was at risk so some students from the University Antifascist Front stayed with her as guardians. That spring she attended antifascist meetings and walked in marches protesting state violence. After the United Nations pa
ssed a resolution recognizing Algeria’s right to independence, de Gaulle began negotiating with the Liberation party, and in March 1962 they signed the Évian Accords – it went to a vote in France in 1962 and the French electorate approved it.

  On 1 July there was a referendum in Algeria: 99.72 per cent voted for independence. But when Beauvoir and Sartre boarded a plane for Moscow on 1 June they were disillusioned by the way France had desperately clung to colonialism: in their eyes it was bad faith on a national scale. Sartre was also surprised to have received an invitation to Russia after what he wrote about Hungary in 1956. But under Nikita Krushschev, Russia was thawing. The abuses of Stalin were condemned. Was the thick Western wall wearing thin?

  When Sartre and Beauvoir arrived they were amazed at what they saw: Russians were hearing jazz and reading American novels. Krushchev had even allowed the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The Soviet Writers Union had provided Sartre and Beauvoir with a guide, Lena Zonina.44 She was a literary critic and translator – in fact, she was hoping to translate them. It didn’t take long for Sartre to follow what his biographer has called ‘the unwritten rule by which Sartre fell in love in every country he visited’. Sartre fell for her – and he fell hard.45

  Sartre had come to life again after meeting Zonina. He wrote to her daily, and she wrote back, but they couldn’t use the post because of Soviet censors. This meant that they had to rely on messengers to deliver letters, waiting for long periods with no way of communicating. It was not an easy way to conduct a courtship, and when Sartre told Zonina about his ‘medical round’ (that was what he now called the rotation of women in his life) she was unimpressed. He still saw Wanda twice a week; and Evelyne, and Arlette Elkaïm, as well as Michelle. Why should she believe he’d have time and attention for her too? That December Sartre and Beauvoir flew to Moscow to spend Christmas with her, and went to Leningrad to see the white nights. As an employee of the International Commission of the Writers Union, Zonina was an official representative of the Soviet government. Over the next four years Sartre and Beauvoir made nine trips to the USSR.

  By the early 1960s Sartre had distanced himself from existentialism, which was beginning to be seen as a philosophy of its time, for its time. In the late 1950s Sartre wrote that Marxism was really ‘the unsurpassable philosophy of our time’, and in the 1960s he was criticized by Claude Lévi-Strauss and others for focusing too much on the conscious subject and not enough on the unconscious.46 Sartre’s philosophical star was waning, but feminist interest in Beauvoir was on the rise. In her sixth decade Beauvoir was well practised at using words subversively and skilled at creating imaginary experiences that appealed to her readers’ freedom. But she wanted more than subversive words and imaginary freedoms – she wanted legislation that would make concrete differences in the situations of real women’s lives.

  During this decade second-wave feminism was gaining momentum. Until the 1960s, family planning was taboo and legislation restricted the sale of contraceptives. In 1960 the pill was approved for sale in the United States; in the UK the National Health Service made it available in 1961 – but only for married women. It would not be legalized for sale in France until 1967 (when unmarried women in Britain also gained legal access), and Beauvoir would play a significant role in advocating for this change. But The Second Sex continued to inspire women and feminist writers around the globe. In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique – a work that is often seen to have inaugurated the feminist movement in the United States, and that was deeply influenced by The Second Sex.47

  In the summer of 1963 Sartre and Beauvoir went back to the USSR, visiting Crimea, Georgia and Armenia with Lena Zonina. All the hopes of ‘the thaw’ had hardened into disappointment. There were food shortages again and Krushchev was back to defending Stalin and attacking the West. Sartre spoke to Beauvoir: should he propose to Zonina? It was far from clear that they would be able to see each other if he did not. If a man with his international intellectual reputation asked to marry her the Russian government would probably say yes, and she and her daughter would be allowed to come to France. But Zonina did not want to leave her mother, or become Sartre’s dependent, another stop on his ‘rounds’. She said no. But accepted or denied, Sartre’s proposal to yet another woman shows how far removed from romance his relationship with Beauvoir had become.

  After Russia it was time for Rome again. They stayed in the Minerva, a hotel in the centre of the city on a Piazza of the same name. Beauvoir was taking a break from writing to enjoy reading and seeing Italy – they took the car to Sienna, Venice, Florence. When in Rome Sartre had a letter from Zonina. The more she read Beauvoir’s memoirs, Zonina said, the more she realized that she could not change the bond between them – and she did not want to be a second-tier woman in his life. She admired Beauvoir as a friend and respected her. ‘But you and the Beaver together have created a remarkable and dazzling thing which is so dangerous for people who get close to you.’48

  At the end of October, just before they were supposed to return to Paris, Bost called Beauvoir: her mother had had a fall and broken her femur. By the next month it was hopelessly clear: she was dying.

  After the fall Françoise was taken to a clinic and while there they discovered a terminal cancer. When Beauvoir heard the news Sartre accompanied her in a taxi to the nursing home; she went in alone.49 The doctors had told Simone and Hélène the diagnosis, but not Françoise. The daughters decided it was wisest not to tell her. After the operation there were two optimistic weeks when Simone and Hélène were with her in her room, peacefully. It wasn’t love that made her stay, Simone wrote to Nelson, but ‘a deep and bitter compassion’.50 The night of her mother’s operation, Beauvoir went home, talked to Sartre, and listened to Bartók before bursting out into ‘tears that almost degenerated into hysteria’.51 The violence of her reaction took her by surprise; when her father died she hadn’t shed a single tear.

  A few weeks after the operation Françoise began to experience more pain, and to be exhausted by it. So they asked the doctors to give her more morphine – even if her life would be foreshortened, so would her suffering. After that she spent most of her days sleeping. She never called for a priest or any of her ‘pious friends’, as Beauvoir called them. During that November Beauvoir felt closer to her mother than she had since early childhood. The night after the operation Beauvoir had been overcome by a tidal wave of emotion: she was grieving for her mother’s death, but also for her mother’s life – she had sacrificed so much to the suffocating straitjacket of convention.

  After her mother died, Beauvoir threw herself into writing A Very Easy Death, an account covering the final six weeks of her mother’s life and her own aching experience of love, ambivalence and bereavement. She had never felt so compelled to write something, to think life with her pen. And she knew to whom it would be dedicated: Hélène. She had been keeping a journal during the months of her mother’s decline (when she gave it a title she called it ‘My Mother’s Illness’; she didn’t know it would be Death). It chronicled the companionship of Bost, Olga and Lanzmann in a way that A Very Easy Death did not. Her days were punctuated with helpless and unsuccessful attempts to hold back tears, and at several points she mentions taking tranquillizers before seeing Sartre so that she could be sure ‘not to annoy Sartre by crying’.52

  In A Very Easy Death Beauvoir recorded her mother saying ‘I have lived for others too much. Now I shall become one of those self-centred old women who only live for themselves.’53 She described Françoise’s loss of inhibition, and how it jarred Beauvoir to see her mother’s naked body in the hospital, a body that had filled her with love as a child and repulsion as an adolescent.54

  I had grown very fond of this dying woman. As we talked in the half-darkness I assuaged an old unhappiness; I was renewing the dialogue that had been broken off during my adolescence and that our differences and our likenesses had never allowed us to take up again. And the early ten
derness that I had thought dead for ever came to life again, since it had become possible for it to slip into simple words and actions.55

  When it was published some journalists accused her of capitalizing on her mother’s suffering and her own grief; they even got a surgeon on the record stating that Beauvoir sat at her mother’s bedside callously taking notes because she wanted to get ‘material’. Once again, the view from without was casting her in a sinister light. From within, she said, writing gave her ‘the same comfort that prayer gives to the believer’.56 As she saw it, there was no such thing as a ‘natural’ death.

  Since meeting Sylvie Le Bon in November 1960 Beauvoir had kept in touch with her, and they met occasionally. By 1964 their meetings had become more regular; Sylvie was a huge support to her during the time of Françoise’s death. Beauvoir wrote that she appreciated the reciprocity of their relationship; Sylvie was intellectually capable and shared many of her passions. Beauvoir felt a connection to her, and the more she got to know her the more like her she felt. Sylvie listened well, she was thoughtful, generous and affectionate.57 All Said and Done, the last volume of Beauvoir’s autobiography, would be dedicated to her.

  Beauvoir described their lives as mutually intertwined, and she was grateful that life had brought her this new companionship. She was wrong, she said, when she had said in 1962 that she’d already had her life’s most significant relationships. Both women denied that the relationship was sexual, but it was physically affectionate – Sylvie called it ‘charnel’ in French, which many have chosen to translate as ‘carnal’. It can also mean ‘embodied’, encompassing non-sexual forms of physical affection.

  On 30 October 1963 Force of Circumstance was published in French, just over five months after she submitted it to the publisher.58 In it Beauvoir continued to self-consciously evaluate her legacy, denying implications that her works were intellectually parasitic on Sartre and owning her own philosophical interests and insights. It was in this volume of autobiography that Beauvoir discussed the shift in treatment she experienced after the publication of The Second Sex: ‘I was never treated as a target of sarcasm until after The Second Sex; before that, people were either indifferent or kind to me.’59 She could see for herself that this book in particular provoked ad feminam reactions, and she wanted her readers to see it too.