Simone de Beauvoir

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Introduction

On 19 April 1986, some 5000 mourners, young and old, crowded behind Simone de Beauvoir’s funeral cortège and followed it through the streets of Paris to the Montparnasse Cemetery where her ashes found their place next to those of Jean-Paul Sartre, her partner in life and death, though never in marriage.

‘Women, you owe her everything!’¹ The phrase moved from lip to grieving lip. Yet the funeral oration for the writer and philosopher many considered the greatest French woman of the 20th century, the mother of the modern women’s movement, was spoken, to the dismay of some, not by another woman, but by her one-time lover and ever-loyal friend, Claude Lanzmann.

He read from the end of the third volume of her autobiography, where Beauvoir, 23 years younger in her mid-fifties, rages against the loss the years bring: It is not I who am saying good-bye to all those things I once enjoyed, it is they who are leaving me; the mountain paths disdain my feet. Never again shall I collapse, drunk with fatigue, into the smell of hay. Never again shall I slide down through the solitary morning snows. Never again a man. Now, not my body alone, but my imagination too has accepted that. In spite of everything, it’s strange not to be a body any more. There are moments when the oddness of it, because it’s so definitive, chills my blood.²

Beauvoir was a woman who was ardent for life in its full sensuous possibility. A highly trained intellectual, she was yet intensely aware of her body – which is what made her such a perceptive observer of women’s and her own condition. She also made a habit of racing, not only in speech and thought, but often ahead of herself.

If she felt her body left her well before the end, not even burial has been able to keep her indomitable spirit down. Controversy has trailed Beauvoir in the decades of her after-life, as it did before. So too has a series of books, her own amongst them. These, like phantom writings, lure us back to confront a younger, secret Simone and may shatter or deepen or change any fixed image attributed to her.

Biography, like any other discipline, dons the colours of its times. When I was growing up in the snowy vastness of French Canada in the 1960s, Simone de Beauvoir was already a legendary creature, a rebel with a great many causes who wore sophisticated, existentialist black and held the keys to a magical Paris, crucible of 20th-century culture. Her relationship with the times’ most celebrated philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, gave the couple a mythical flourish. They were the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall of the intellectual world, partners in a gloriously modern love affair lived out between café, jazz club and writing desk. Indissolubly united, bound by ideas, they were yet unmarried and free to engage openly in any number of ‘contingent’ relationships. This radical departure in the possible forms of coupling was spoken. It was known. It was also written in the autobiography Simone began to publish in the late 1950s. Her particular defiance can be gauged from the fact that a 90-minute television interview filmed and intended for broadcast on 13 November 1959 by Radio-Canada was not shown until after her death and then not in its entirety. That relatively rare step of censorship was taken after pressure from the Archbishop of Québec and the church hierarchy. Simone’s views on religion, on marriage and maternity, were far too bold for television. The Pope, after all, had put The Second Sex on the Index.

For my generation of women, reading The Second Sex was a little like having the scales ripped from one’s eyes. Here was a terrifyingly lucid, encyclopaedic and sometimes shocking account of woman’s condition as ‘other’ in a world where the norm, with all its overarching and defining power, was male. The book showed us how we were made over in a world of male descriptions, what contortions we performed in order to fit, and how to challenge both. Simone de Beauvoir became something of an idealized mother – a woman who had given up having her own children in order to retain her independence, in order to write, and give birth to a movement of which the agenda was set out in The Second Sex.

Idealizations of parents, biological or cultural, rarely last, not that the rebellious negative versions are necessarily any more accurate than the earlier romanticized ones. As the decades passed and the women’s movement burgeoned, Beauvoir’s omnisciently rational world, the authority and moral rigour of formulations which seemed to imply that all achievement was simply a question of individual will, lost some of its glow. Her imperatives left no room for murky confusions, uncontrollable circumstance, the irrationality of daily living. Her universalizing assumption in The Second Sex that the masculine, or at least the reasoning male, is the absolute human type to which women should aspire began to look like a capitulation during the years when an alternate women’s way of being, with its relational norms, was being championed. The growth of a politics of identity, its emphasis on a respect for difference, placed women alongside various minorities whose ‘otherness’, rather than being the sign of a lamentable secondary status, was occasion for advocacy. Wrongs were now linked with rights – of all kinds.

Simone de Beauvoir, herself, was hardly immune to change and grew into the women’s movement with age. A solidarity which hadn’t been there in her brilliant analysis of the second sex now became part of her life. But during her lifetime, her image never altogether regained its early perfection, particularly for women in America and Britain. The main stumbling block was her personal life, both the way she shaped it in her autobiography and the gloss she gave it in interviews. It seemed that not only did Beauvoir consider her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre to be the greatest achievement of her life, not only did she deem him superior to herself, but in this lifelong relationship of supposed equals, he, it turned out, was far more equal than she was. It was he who engaged in countless affairs, she who responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passionate affairs of her own. Between the lines of her fiction and what are in effect six volumes of autobiography (if one includes her Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre, and A Very Easy Death), it was also evident that Beauvoir suffered deeply from jealousy. Yet this most apparently honest and lucid of women preferred to avoid the issue, to evade the exploration of any irrational upsurge, and, like any good bourgeoise, keep the image of a model life intact.

With the posthumous publication in 1988 of her letters to Sartre, a good proportion of them written during the war years, Beauvoir’s integrity and iconic status suffered another public blow. The exposure of the intimacies of this particular relationship might have courted scandal at any time, but those years had a particular moral tilt to them, especially in America, where a good part of Beauvoir’s feminist following was. Oddly, the period was far more moralizing, despite its seeming sexual openness, than the distant time at which many of the Sartre-Beauvoir letters were written. What the letters express is not only her over-arching love for a man who is never sexually faithful to her, a man she addresses as her ‘dear little being’ and whose work she loyally edits. They also underline the dailiness of Simone’s accommodations to his wishes, her acceptance of what many women would reject as demeaning, her dependence.

But the dependence is hardly simple or passive. It is a shared attachment from which power also comes – as Beauvoir has shown us it did for all women. From early on, Simone organizes the comings and goings of Sartre’s ‘contingent’ women; she encourages and consoles and manipulates. With a few exceptions, she does whatever Sartre at the Front asks of her, including finding money for him, or having an affair. The voyeuristic narration of the details of sexual passion for the other’s interest and entertainment, the ups and downs and seamy manoeuvres of these relationships – often more complicated than anything that Sartre could report on from the war front – shocked commentators and followers. Like some latter day Valmont and Madame de Merteuil, Sartre and Beauvoir plan and report on their dangerous liaisons, analyze assaults and retreats, and deliberate over the propaganda which is to surround them.

Amidst all this, came the revelation of Simone’s lesbian pursuits with her students, and the sequential sharing of partners with Sartre. This was a shock to some, though the more careful readers of her life and fiction had long been alert to this side of her, not only through her attachment to her adolescent friend, Zaza, but through the permutations of love in her first novel, L’Invitée. With the publication of Beauvoir’s wartime journal in 1990 and the appearance in 1994 of the memoir of Bianca Lamblin, or Bienenfeld as she was before her marriage, the whole matter of shared lovers was once again reiterated.

It would be easy to condemn Sartre and Beauvoir, to dismiss their sex lives as squalid and find in that a reason to invalidate their work, and more particularly in Beauvoir’s case on grounds of dishonesty, since so much of her writing is enmeshed with narrating her life and times. This would be to miss the great edifice Simone constructed out of their mutual experiment in living; the often gruelling honesty they both brought to bear on the other, if not to the world, and the ways in which the living and changing organism that was their partnership shaped both their philosophical writings and their fiction.

Beauvoir’s after-life, with all the tensions it reveals within her – between her near-puritanical rectitude and the life of her desires, between the dutiful daughter and the rebel – has hardly ended with the scandal of personal revelations. New feminisms and gender politics always need to take her writing into account, if only to defy her formulations and show that woman is neither other, nor a lack, but perhaps a linguistic absence, and a challenge to the very philosophy which underpinned such formulations. There have been many reassessments of her contribution to philosophy, even moves to see her as Sartre’s theoretical forerunner, so that – given the conceptual content of the 1927 diary – one might need to speak of the ‘mother’ rather than the father of existentialism.³ Elsewhere, Judith Butler notes that although Beauvoir, like Sartre, is haunted by Cartesian dualism, she radicalises the Sartrean programme to make the body both ‘instrument and situation of freedom’.⁴ There is even something of a campaign to have The Second Sex, so influential in its cut and often inaccurate English-language version, re-translated, so as to rectify misapprehensions.

Beauvoir, it is clear, still matters, and her life remains as resonant as her work. In a sense, whilst Sartre constructed a philosophy around the idea that life should be a continually recreated project, Simone de Beauvoir’s life became her teaching: it was itself an exemplary project. From fiction to essays to autobiography, she wrote her life into her work, while her work became distilled life. Fuelled by an irrepressible energy, she had a gift for living and that rare kind of intelligence which allowed her to seem eternally young, indeed to grow more radical with time. In 1968, at the age of 60, she and Sartre, founders of Libération, still one of the leading French dailies, stood on street corners selling revolutionary newspapers. A few years later when she marched for abortion and women’s rights, she seemed to have vaulted over the generations and become a woman of a new time.

Yet Beauvoir’s formative experience belongs to an epoch whose moral and intellectual codes are distant. It marked her indelibly with a sense of propriety, a formality of speech and demeanour, as well as with a faith in human possibility and in the value of writing. Seen from within her own historical moment, her contradictions seem at once more comprehensible and the scope of her achievement even more remarkable.

The Dutiful Daughter

Simone de Beauvoir was born on 9 January 1908 in Montparnasse, the Paris district that was to be her home for all but five years of her long life. From the window of the modest family flat, above the soon to be famous Café de la Rotonde, the little Simone, already an inveterate observer of the human spectacle, looked out on the hurly-burly of a neighbourhood in transition. Village was being transformed into city. All around demolition crews competed with construction workers, while the streets echoed to the sounds of hawkers, streetcars and herds of donkeys and goats bound for the grazing fields of the Luxembourg Gardens.

Simone’s extended family belonged to the wealthy bourgeoisie. As such, certain moral and social codes prevailed. Girls, it was assumed, would grow up to marry and do so within their own class. They would remain chaste until married and would pass from obeying their parents to obeying their husbands without straying inappropriately beyond the circle of approved families. Servants, city residences, summers in the country – all this was a matter of course.

Simone’s birth coincided with the decline of her family’s fortunes. Her maternal grandfather, a wealthy and speculation-loving Verdun banker, was declared a bankrupt and arrested. The attendant scandal in those days of Victorian respectability was considerable and Simone’s mother felt herself thoroughly dishonoured. Not only did she break with all her previous circle, but she felt indebted towards Simone’s father for the remainder of her life; her marriage dowry was never paid.

Prior to this, Simone’s mother, Françoise Brasseur, had already suffered two emotional setbacks. As Beauvoir points out in A Very Easy Death, the deeply moving book which marks her ultimate reconciliation with her mother, Françoise Brasseur had had an unhappy childhood. Her own mother had never been interested in her children, while her father had a marked preference for her younger sister. In reaction, Simone, elder daughter that she was, reaped the ambivalent reward of being the primary object of her mother’s attentions and