When Roudy founded the Commission on Women and Culture, Beauvoir was made its honorary chair. She was an active participant, and the group informally called itself ‘the Commission Beauvoir’. She attended monthly meetings at the ministry headquarters, where they studied the structure of society in order to make concrete proposals to the government to improve women’s situations. In 1982 François Mitterrand offered her the Legion of Honour, but she refused it. She was an engaged intellectual, not a cultural institution.
After twelve years, Claude Lanzmann was finally coming to the end of his film Shoah. It was a difficult film to make, and he relied heavily on Beauvoir’s companionship and support: ‘I needed to talk to her, to tell her of my uncertainties, my fears, my disappointments.’ He came away from his conversations ‘strengthened’ on account of ‘the unique and intensely moving way she had of listening, serious, solemn, open, utterly trusting’.33 In the early years after the death of Sartre, Lanzmann saw her weariness of living. Several times during the making of the film he invited her to the studio where Shoah was being edited – she still liked to be involved in his projects, to see sections of the film in progress.
In 1982, President Mitterrand asked Lanzmann for a private screening of the first three hours. Beauvoir went with him to the Elysée Palace, watching the not-yet-subtitled scenes as Lanzmann shouted translations from the aisle. She wrote to Lanzmann the next day: ‘I don’t know if I’ll still be alive when your film is released.’ She would go on to write a front-page article in Le Monde when it was, and later the preface for the book Shoah. But the day after the presidential screening she sent Lanzmann her thoughts, in case she did not live to see the film released:
I have never read or seen anything that has so movingly and so grippingly conveyed the horror of the ‘final solution’; nor anything that has brought to light so much evidence of the hellish mechanics of it. Placing himself on the side of the victims, of the executioners, of the witnesses and accomplices more innocent or more criminal than the others, Lanzmann has us live through countless aspects of an experience that, until now, I believe, had seemed to be inexpressible. This is a monument that will enable generations of mankind to understand one of the most malign and enigmatic moments of their history.34
Apart from notes like this one (which were written with half an eye on posterity) little private material is available from the end of Beauvoir’s life. But over the 1980s she participated in several interviews. In one of them Alice Schwarzer asked her how she had succeeded in remaining independent alongside her relationship with Sartre. Her answer was that she always wanted her own career: ‘I had dreams, not fantasies, but very bold dreams, things I knew I wanted to do, long before I met Sartre! To be happy, I owed it to myself to fulfil my life. And to me fulfilment meant work.’35 In these interviews she revealed that she did have doubts about her relationship with Sartre during the affair with Dolores Vanetti, and she regretted that their relationship had caused so much suffering for the third parties in their lives. She had already readily admitted, in a public interview, that Sartre did not treat women well. He made her an exceptional case, a token – like she herself had when she was younger. But he also encouraged her like no one else – believing in her own potential even in times when she struggled to see it for herself. Neither of them would have become who they were if it weren’t for their dialogue with each other – if it weren’t for the sum of both their actions.
Large portions of her days were still dedicated to writing: she wrote prefaces and introductions for books she believed in, and wrote tenure references, encouraged activists, replied to correspondence. She gave financial support to feminist publishers and donated to women’s shelters. At times she felt that her public reputation had become that of a ‘sacred relic’, she said, whose words were commands to younger generations of women who had the energy to take the next steps for change.36
Two years after Sartre’s death, she was satisfied with her work, past and present, and her desire to travel had been rekindled. When she was still recovering Sylvie had suggested a trip to New York as a dangling carrot: and it worked. Since the 1940s Beauvoir had had ambivalent feelings about America: she found so much to adore about it and so much to detest. When she received the Sonning Prize for European Culture in 1983, it carried a cash award of $23,000 and she was ready for another adventure. So in July of that year she and Sylvie boarded the Concorde for New York. She did not want to be in the public eye, so careful precautions were made by her American editor at Pantheon Books. She met Stépha Gerassi and her son John, and some more recent friends like the feminist Kate Millett, but she wanted the trip to be restful and personal. She would give no lectures, take no notes.
Despite their efforts, when they checked in to the Algonquin Hotel in New York they were spotted almost immediately by a journalist from The New Yorker. He phoned her room and she told him in no uncertain terms that she did not do phone interviews. So he backed off and she and Sylvie visited museums unharassed: the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, MOMA, and – Beauvoir’s favourite – the Frick. They went to the top of the World Trade Center. They had dinner at Elaine’s one night, and were introduced to fellow diners Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. After that they travelled through New England for six weeks, and she visited Kate Millett’s Christmas-tree farm in Poughkeepsie, where Millett had started an all-female artists’ commune. This farm was the setting for the only professional engagement of the trip: the filming of a conversation with Kate Millett for a TV series on The Second Sex. They returned to France in time for Sylvie to go back to teaching. Beauvoir brought back hordes of books.
In December of 1983 Beauvoir had a fall: Sylvie found her lying on her floor, and she had been there so long that she caught pneumonia. She spent Christmas and most of January in the hospital, but was well enough at Easter to go to Biarritz. By summer she had recovered enough to travel further afield, so she and Sylvie flew to Budapest and drove around Hungary and Austria.
Beauvoir was still the head of Les Temps Modernes in 1985, although Claude Lanzmann was managing more and more of it. They met in her apartment and she read submissions, selected articles, and edited and proofread like she always had – she continued to attend meetings until a few weeks before her death. Claire Etcherelli remembered Beauvoir’s ‘physical presence, her strength, her authority, which inspired her to keep the journal alive’37 as holding the committee together despite many storms, personal and political.
She was still engaging in feminist activism and giving interviews, expressing her hope that a new translation of The Second Sex would be released in English, ‘An honest translation, with the philosophical dimension and with all the parts that Mr. Parshley judged pointless and which I consider to have a point.’38 In conversation with Margaret Simons she clarified the sense in which she meant the confusing claim in The Prime of Life that she was not a philosopher:
Figure 14 A scene from Beauvoir’s activist life: at the Women and the State Debate in Paris, 15 May 1984.
I’m not a philosopher in the sense that I’m not the creator of a system, I’m still a philosopher in the sense that I’ve studied a lot of philosophy, I have a degree in philosophy, I’ve taught philosophy, I’m infused with philosophy, and when I put philosophy into my books it’s because that’s a way for me to view the world and I can’t allow them to eliminate that way of viewing the world.39
Centuries before Beauvoir, thinkers like Pascal and Kierkegaard rejected ‘systematic’ philosophers like Descartes and Hegel for forgetting that part of what it means to be human is that each person must live their life without knowing their future – craving a meaning that cannot be known in advance. Beauvoir, too, was committed to the view that because life can’t be understood forward we feel anxiety about who we will become, for ourselves and in the eyes of others.40 But for many of Beauvoir’s French contemporaries, even Pascal and Kierkegaard were considered ‘subphilosophical’, not because they were female, clearly, but because they were religi
ous. Beauvoir’s early philosophical insights – and her concern to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of egoism and devotion – were written in dialogue with many thinkers who might not be called ‘philosophers’ today for the same reason.41
In 1985 Beauvoir’s health deteriorated. She put it down to the upcoming election in March 1986, but everyone could see that the whiskey was taking its toll. Her cirrhosis had made her belly so distended that she could not stand upright. Walking was painful, and friends stood by in agony as she pretended not to notice. Sylvie tried to dilute Beauvoir’s whiskey, but now Beauvoir was the patient who rejected moderation: she just kept pouring more. Bost was not a virtuous influence in this respect so Sylvie appealed to Lanzmann, who thought it might distract Beauvoir to write the preface to the book version of Shoah. She agreed with pleasure – and she wrote the preface to another book, too – but she did not stop drinking.
At the beginning of 1986 Beauvoir was still conducting her meetings with friends, scholars and writers. Her only concession to age was that she now conducted them in a red bathrobe.
In February of 1986 she saw Hélène: Simone was walking poorly, but they went around a gallery together. She was characteristically encouraging of her sister’s artistic endeavours: that year Hélène was looking forward to an exhibition of her art in California – at Stanford University, funded by the French Ministry for the Rights of Women. But the legislative elections of 16 March dictated otherwise: the minister for women, and the funds, were no longer available. Simone refused to countenance the idea that her sister wouldn’t attend her own exhibition, and insisted on paying her way.42
On the evening of 20 March Simone de Beauvoir had stomach cramps. She thought it was the ham she ate for dinner, but the pain persisted long enough that Sylvie insisted on a visit to the hospital. After several days with no clear diagnosis they performed an exploratory surgery: apart from diabetes and damage to her arteries she had everything Sartre had: cirrhotic damage, fluid retention and pulmonary edema. After the surgery she developed pneumonia and was moved into intensive care. She was there for two weeks, during which she tried to convince her masseuse not to vote for the far-right nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Hélène and Lanzmann were both in California – she at her exhibition, he to receive an award – when they received the news. Simone was dead.43 It was 4 p.m. on 14 April, eight hours short of the anniversary of Sartre’s decease. She was 78 years old.
The next day, when her death was announced in Le Monde, its headline proclaimed: ‘Her works: more popularization than creation.’44
17
Afterwords: What Will Become of Simone de Beauvoir?
We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only truth.1
VOLTAIRE
Le Monde was not alone in announcing Beauvoir’s death – and setting the tone for her terrestrial afterlife – in sexist, disparaging, false terms. Obituaries in global newspapers and literary reviews noted that even in dying she followed Sartre, dutifully taking her proper place: second. Whereas some obituaries of Sartre made no mention whatsoever of Beauvoir, obituaries of Beauvoir never fail to mention him – sometimes at great length, dividing the column inches dedicated to her work into shockingly diminutive fractions.
The Times of London declared that Sartre was ‘her guru’; that as a philosophy student Beauvoir was ‘nominally the pupil of Brunschvicg, but in practice she was coached by two fellow students with whom she had liaisons, first René Maheu and then Sartre.’2 In fact, she was actually the pupil of Brunschvicg, achieved her first philosophical successes without either of these men, coached Maheu and Sartre on Leibniz before their oral exam, and provided critical feedback on almost everything Sartre ever wrote.
In the The New York Times we read that ‘Sartre encouraged her literary ambitions and was credited by her with pushing her into the investigation of women’s oppression that led to the rage and accusation of “Le Seconde Sexe.”’ Sartre did encourage her literary ambitions; it is beyond dispute that she valued the ‘incomparable friend of her thought’. But in fact, her book was called Le deuxième sexe, and she had been developing her own philosophy and analysis of women’s oppression for years before writing it. The Washington Post got the title right, but also described her as Sartre’s ‘nurse’, Sartre’s ‘biographer’, Sartre’s ‘jealous’ woman.3
One might hope for better justice in specialist literary reviews, but there too such hope is disappointed. The entire seven-page entry from the 1986 Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook on ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ is dedicated to both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s lives. Sartre is the agent in this narrative, credited with making her feel ‘intellectually dominated’ and suggesting the idea for The Second Sex.4
In the Revue de deux mondes we read that, even in death, ‘The hierarchy is respected: she is number two, behind Sartre’; ‘because she is a woman, Simone remains a fan of the man she loves’. She is a fangirl, an empty, imaginationless receptacle: ‘she had as little imagination as her inkwell’. Nor were these her only vices. Through her role in ‘the family’ she limited and impaired a great man: ‘Sartre’s life would have been different without this impermeable wall built little by little around their couple, without this carefully maintained revenge.’5
When Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre were published in English in 1991, including the passages in which Beauvoir recounted her sexual encounters with Bienenfeld and Sorokine, she was called ‘a vindictive, manipulative woman’, not so much ‘scandalous as vapid and self-centred’.6 Claude Lanzmann objected to the letters’ publication at the time, writing that Beauvoir and Sartre had been ‘arrogant and competitive’ letter writers in their youth, and
that while Beauvoir might at times have thought ill of those closest to her, the idea of hurting them was unbearable to her: I never knew her to miss an engagement with her mother, with her sister, with interlopers if she had agreed to meet them, or with pupils she had known long ago out of loyalty to some shared idea of the past.7
Lanzmann’s fears proved well founded; Beauvoir’s words proved hurtful. After Deirdre Bair’s biography made her identity public, Bianca Lamblin wrote a memoir of her own, A Disgraceful Affair, accusing Beauvoir of lifelong lies. Beauvoir was, in Lamblin’s words, ‘a prisoner of her past hypocrisy’.8
But it is utterly dissatisfying to reduce Beauvoir’s life to its worst moments, to mummies of dead selves that she herself deeply regretted. She may have been a hostage to her own past, but she was also a prisoner of society’s prejudice; her life is a testament to double standards that beset women in ‘the feminine condition’, and especially to the ways that women are punished when they dare to speak the truth as they see it – when they claim the power of being the ‘eye that sees’ and to find men’s actions wanting.
Personally, philosophically and politically, Sartre did not escape her criticism: she thought he had blind spots, and published some of them for world to see too.9 But, even so, she chose to love him.
Beauvoir was buried next to Sartre in the Montparnasse Cemetery, in her red turban, red bathrobe and Algren’s ring. She was honoured by groups around the world, from the Socialist Party of Montparnasse to universities in America, Australia, Greece and Spain. At her funeral the crowd chanted the words of Elisabeth Badinter: ‘Women, you owe her everything!’
They may have spoken with the hyperbole of grief, but Beauvoir was the first to admit that some women found her ideas ‘upsetting’.10 Within days of her death, Beauvoir’s last preface was published: it opened a novel, Mihloud. The book was a love story between two men which raised questions about sexuality and power. Like many others Beauvoir lent her name to in this way, it told a story that was dangerous to make public: the Holocaust, the torture and rape of Algerian women, the struggles of feminism, or the alienation of a gifted lesbian – these were facets of humanity that many found difficult to look in the face.
At the time of her death Beauvoir had been a celebrity for forty years; loved an
d hated, vilified and idolized.11 Then and since, famous chapters of her early life with Sartre have been used, ad feminam, to undermine her moral integrity as well as the philosophical, personal and political challenges of her work – especially The Second Sex. She had claimed that if men wanted to be ethical, they needed to acknowledge the ways that their actions contributed to the oppressive conditions for others in the world, and do better. And she had challenged women, too – to stop consenting to submit to the myth that to be a woman is to be for men. It is hard to flourish, as a human, when you’re so relentlessly defined from without.
From within Beauvoir never saw herself as ‘an idol’. In an interview with Alice Schwarzer Beauvoir said, ‘I am Simone de Beauvoir for other people, not for myself.’12 She knew that women were hungry for positive models to emulate; they often asked her why she hadn’t created more positive heroes in her novels, instead of writing women who failed to live up to her feminist ideals. When readers claimed to see Beauvoir in her female characters,13 they wondered: Did they fail to live up to her feminist ideals because Beauvoir herself had not?
Beauvoir responded that she found positive heroes ‘horrifying’ and books with positive heroes uninteresting. A novel, she said, ‘is a problematic’. And, in Beauvoir’s own words, so was her life:
The history of my life itself is a kind of problematic, and I don’t have to give solutions to people and people don’t have a right to wait for solutions from me. It is in this measure, occasionally, that what you call my celebrity – in short, people’s attention – has bothered me. There is a certain demandingness that I find a little stupid, because it imprisons me, completely fixing me in a kind of feminist concrete block.14
Becoming Beauvoir Page 39