Becoming Beauvoir Read online

  Becoming

  Beauvoir

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY

  How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses, Gary Cox

  Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gary Cox

  Antigone, Slavoj Žižek

  For Pamela

  in memoriam amoris amicitiae

  ‘All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. […] almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.’

  VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

  ‘To emancipate woman is to refuse to enclose her in the relations that she sustains with man, but not to deny them to her.’

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, THE SECOND SEX

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Abbreviations of Beauvoir’s Works

  Introduction: Simone de Beauvoir – Who’s She?

  1 Growing Like a Girl

  2 The Dutiful Daughter

  3 Lover of God or Lover of Men?

  4 The Love before the Legend

  5 The Valkyrie and the Playboy

  6 Rooms of Her Own

  7 The Trio that Was a Quartet

  8 War Within, War Without

  9 Forgotten Philosophy

  10 Queen of Existentialism

  11 American Dilemmas

  12 The Scandalous Second Sex

  13 Putting a New Face on Love

  14 Feeling Gypped

  15 Old Age Revealed

  16 The Dying of the Light

  17 Afterwords: What Will Become of Simone de Beauvoir?

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Illustrations

  1Simone surrounded by her paternal family at Meyrignac

  2Françoise de Beauvoir with Hélène and Simone

  3Simone and Zaza

  4Drawing by René Maheu, ‘The universe of Mlle Simone de Beauvoir’

  5Drawing by Jacques-Laurent Bost

  6Beauvoir and Sartre at Juan-les-Pins

  7Beauvoir at work in Les Deux Magots

  8On air in 1945, the year of the ‘existentialist offensive’

  9With Nelson Algren in Chicago

  10Signing books in Sao Paolo, Brazil

  11Claude Lanzmann, Beauvoir and Sartre at Giza

  12With Sylvie le Bon and Sartre in Rome

  13At home in Paris

  14A scene from activist life: at the Women and the State Debate

  Abbreviations of

  Beauvoir’s Works

  A Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. Patrick O’Brian, London: Penguin, 1984.

  ADD America Day by Day, trans. Carol Cosman, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

  AMM All Men Are Mortal, trans. Euan Cameron and Leonard Friedman, London: Virago, 2003.

  ASD All Said and Done, trans. Patrick O’Brian, London: Penguin, 1977.

  BB Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, trans. Bernard Frechtman, London: Four Square, 1962. First published in Esquire in 1959.

  BI Les Belles Images, Paris: Gallimard, 1972.

  BO The Blood of Others, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse, London: Penguin, 1964.

  CC Correspondence croisée, Paris: Gallimard, 2004.

  CJ Cahiers de jeunesse, Paris: Gallimard, 2008.

  DPS Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume I, 1926–27, ed. Barbara Klaw, Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir and Margaret Simons, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

  EA Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, New York: Citadel Press, 1976.

  FC Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard, London: Penguin, 1987.

  FW Feminist Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmerman, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

  LM The Long March, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, London: Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1958.

  LS Letters to Sartre, trans. Quentin Hoare, New York: Arcade, 1991.

  M The Mandarins, trans. Leonard Friedman, London: Harper Perennial, 2005.

  MDD Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup, London: Penguin, 2001.

  MPI Mémoires, tome I, ed. Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Eliane Lecarme-Tabone, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 2018.

  MPII Mémoires, tome II, ed. Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Eliane Lecarme-Tabone, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 2018.

  OA Old Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

  PL The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green, London: Penguin, 1965.

  PW Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret Simons with Marybeth Timmerman and Mary Beth Mader, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

  PolW Political Writings, ed. Margaret Simons and Marybeth Timmerman, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012.

  QM Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir 1940–1963, trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993.

  SCTS She Came to Stay, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse, London: Harper Perennial, 2006.

  SS The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, London: Vintage, 2009.

  SSP The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley, New York: Random House, Vintage, 1970.

  TALA A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, New York: New Press, 1998.

  TWD The Woman Destroyed, trans. Patrick O’Brian, London: Harper Perennial, 2006.

  UM ‘The Useless Mouths’ and Other Literary Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmerman, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.

  VED A Very Easy Death, trans. Patrick O’Brian, New York: Pantheon, 1965.

  WD Wartime Diary, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

  WML Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926–1939, ed. Simone de Beauvoir, trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992.

  WT When Things of the Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales, trans. Patrick O’Brian, London: Flamingo, 1982.

  Introduction: Simone de Beauvoir – Who’s She?

  One day in 1927 Simone de Beauvoir had a disagreement with her father about what it means to love. In an era when women were expected to aspire to marriage and motherhood, 19-year-old Simone was reading philosophy and dreamt of finding a philosophy she could live by. Her father claimed that ‘to love’ meant ‘services rendered, affection, gratefulness’. She begged to differ, objecting with astonishment that love was more than gratitude – not something we owe someone because of what they’ve done for us. ‘So many people,’ Beauvoir wrote in her diary the next day, ‘[have] never known love!’1

  This 19-year-old did not know that she would become one of the twentieth century’s most famous intellectual women, that her life would become copiously written about and widely read. Her letters and autobiography alone would amount to over a million words,2 and she would publish philosophical essays, prize-winning novels, short stories, a play, travelogues, political essays, journalism – not to mention her magnum opus, The Second Sex, which has been celebrated as ‘the feminist Bible’. She would co-found political journals, successfully campaign for new legislation, object to the inhumane treatment of Algerians, give lectures around the world and lead government commissions.

  Simone de Beauvoir was also to become one of the twentieth century’s most infamous women. She was half of a controversial intellectual power couple with Jean-Paul Sartre. And, unfortunately, for much of the twentieth century popular perception was that he contri
buted the intellectual power and she contributed the couple. When she died in Paris in 1986, Le Monde’s obituary headline called her work ‘more popularization than creation’.3 Reading the existing biographies, Toril Moi wrote in 1994 that ‘one may be forgiven for concluding that the significance of Simone de Beauvoir derives largely from her relatively unorthodox relationship with Sartre and other lovers’.4

  In the decades since these words were written a series of revelations about Beauvoir have come to light, surprising readers who thought they knew her. But they have also – ironically – obscured Beauvoir the thinker by perpetuating the illusion that her love life was the most interesting thing about her. After all, it was her philosophy that led her to live – and to continuously reflect on and re-evaluate – the life she lived. In her words: ‘there is no divorce between philosophy and life. Every living step is a philosophical choice’.5

  When the public figure Simone de Beauvoir picked up her pen she wrote not only for herself but for her readers. Her best-selling autobiographies have been described as embodying a philosophical ambition to show ‘how one’s self is always shaped by others and related to others’.6 But Beauvoir’s point was more than that ‘No man is an island’, as John Donne said. For, in addition to being related to others, Beauvoir’s autobiographies are upheld by a conviction that being a self does not mean being the same self from birth until death. Being a self involves perpetual change with others who are also changing, in a process of irreversible becoming.

  Philosophers since Plato have discussed the importance of self-understanding to living a good life. Socrates claimed that to be wise one must ‘Know Thyself!’; Nietzsche wrote that the task of each person is to ‘Become who you are!’ But Beauvoir’s philosophical rejoinder was: what if, as a woman, ‘who you are’ is forbidden? What if becoming yourself simultaneously means being seen as a failure to be what you should be – a failure as a woman, or as a lover, or as a mother? What if becoming yourself makes you the target of ridicule, spite, or shame?

  Beauvoir’s century saw seismic shifts in the possibilities available to women. During her lifetime (1908–1986) women were admitted to universities on the same terms as men and gained the rights to vote, divorce and contraception. She lived through the bohemian blossoming of 1930s Paris and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Between these cultural turning points, The Second Sex marked a revolutionary moment in the way women thought – and eventually, talked frankly – about themselves in public. Beauvoir’s philosophical education was unprecedented in her generation, but, even so, when she was in her late thirties and began to apply her mind to the question ‘what has it meant to me to be a woman?’ she was shocked by her own discoveries.

  In a century during which ‘feminism’ came to mean many different things, she wrote The Second Sex because she was irritated by the ‘volumes of idiocies’ that were churned out about women, tired of the ink that flowed in the ‘quarrel about feminism’.7 But when Beauvoir wrote her now-famous line – ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ – she did not know how much this book would affect the rest of her life or the lives of those who came after her.

  Much ink has been dedicated to the meaning of that sentence, to what it means to ‘become’ a woman. This book is dedicated to the question of how Beauvoir became herself. At the age of 18 Beauvoir wrote that she had reached the conclusion that it was impossible to truly ‘put her life in order on paper’ because it was a perpetual becoming; when she read what she’d written in her diary the day before, she said, it was like reading ‘mummies’ of ‘dead “selves”’.8 She was a philosopher, inclined to reflection and perpetually questioning the values of her society and the meaning of her life.

  Because of the role Beauvoir assigned to the passage of time in the experience of being human, this biography follows the chronology of her life. As she grew older, she said, the world changed and so did her relationship with it. When Beauvoir wrote her life for the purpose of others reading it, she wanted ‘to show the transformations, the ripenings, the irreversible deterioration of others and myself’. Because life unfolds in time she wanted to follow ‘the thread the years have unwound’.9 In this she resembled the young woman she had been, the teenage reader of Henri Bergson’s philosophy. A self is not a thing, Bergson wrote – it is a ‘progress’, a ‘living activity’,10 a becoming that continues to change until it meets its limit in death.

  The woman Beauvoir became was partly the result of her own choices. However, Beauvoir was acutely aware of the tension between being a cause of herself and a product of others’ making, of the conflict between her own desires and others’ expectations. For centuries French philosophers had debated the question of whether it is better to live life seen or unseen by others. Descartes claimed (borrowing Ovid’s words) that ‘to live well you must live unseen’.11 Sartre would write reams about the objectifying ‘gaze’ of other people – which he thought imprisoned us in relations of subordination. Beauvoir disagreed: to live well human beings must be seen by others – but they must be seen in the right way.

  The problem is that being seen in the right way depends on who is seeing you, and when. Imagine that you are a woman in your early fifties and you have recently decided to write your life story. You start with your girlhood and youth, your coming-of-age as a woman, and publish two successful volumes in quick succession. In them, you describe two conversations you had at the age of 21 with a now famous man who was once your lover. You are also accomplished and internationally known. But it is the late 1950s, and women’s life-writing has not yet reached the watershed moment in the twentieth century when women began to publicly admit that they had ambitions and felt anger, let alone that they had record-setting intellectual achievements or sexual appetites that could be disappointed even by a very famous man. Imagine that your stories become legendary – so legendary that they come to be a lens through which people read your entire life, even though they are just moments in it.

  Beauvoir’s public persona has been shaped – to the extent of being misshapen – by two such stories she told in her memoirs. The first takes us to Paris, in October of 1929, when two philosophy students were sitting outside the Louvre defining their relationship. They had just come first and second place (Sartre first, Beauvoir second) in a highly competitive and prestigious national exam and were about to embark on careers as philosophy teachers. Jean-Paul Sartre was 24, Beauvoir was 21. Sartre (as the story goes) did not want conventional fidelity, so they made a ‘pact’ according to which they were each other’s ‘essential love’ but consented to the other having ‘contingent loves’ on the side.12 It would be an open relationship, with first place in their hearts reserved for each other. They would tell one another everything, they said; and to start with it would be a ‘two-year lease’. This couple would become, as Sartre’s biographer Annie Cohen-Solal put it, ‘a model to emulate, a dream of lasting complicity, an extraordinary success since, apparently, it seemed to reconcile the irreconcilable: the two partners remained free, equal, and honest with each other’.13

  Their polyamorous ‘pact’ has provoked such curiosity that biographies have been written about their relationship as well as their individual lives; they are given an entire chapter in How the French Invented Love; they are called ‘the first modern couple’ in headlines.14 Carlo Levi described Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life as telling ‘the great love story of the century’.15 In her 2008 book about Beauvoir and Sartre’s relationship, Hazel Rowley wrote that: ‘Like Abélard and Héloïse, they are buried in a joint grave, their names linked for eternity. They’re one of the world’s legendary couples. We can’t think of one without thinking of the other: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.’16

  In one sense, this book exists because it is difficult to think of one without the other. After working on Sartre’s early philosophy for several years I grew increasingly suspicious about the asymmetries in the ways that the lives of Beauvoir and Sartre have been considered. Why, when Beau
voir died, did every obituary of her mention Sartre, while when Sartre died, some obituaries did not mention her at all?

  For much of the twentieth century, and even the twenty-first, Beauvoir has not been remembered as a philosopher in her own right. In part this is due to a second significant story Beauvoir herself told. Earlier in 1929, also in Paris, by the Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens, Beauvoir decided to tell Sartre about her own ideas: about the ‘pluralist ethics’ she had been developing in her notebook – yet Sartre ‘took it apart’, and she suddenly became uncertain of her ‘true capacity’ intellectually.17 There is little doubt that she was one of the star philosophy students of a famously stellar era; that summer – at the age of 21 – she would be the youngest person ever to pass the highly competitive agrégation exams. As well as Sartre, the budding philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty sought Beauvoir out for her conversation, and valued it enough to engage with her in person and in print for decades to come. But even later in her life Beauvoir would insist, ‘I am not a philosopher … [I am] a literary writer,’ she claimed, and ‘Sartre is the philosopher.’18

  This conversation by the Medici Fountain has led later generations to ask: did Beauvoir – the very woman who wrote The Second Sex – underestimate or deceptively understate her own ability? Why would she do either of these things? Beauvoir was a formidable figure: many of her achievements were without precedent, blazing the trail for women to come. In feminist circles she has been celebrated as an exemplary ideal, ‘a symbol of the possibility, despite everything, of living one’s life the way one wants to, for oneself, free from conventions and prejudices, even as a woman’.19 However, one of the central claims of The Second Sex is that no woman ever has lived her life ‘free from conventions and prejudices’. Beauvoir certainly did not. And this biography tells the story of how, in many ways, she suffered from them – and how she fought back.

  Close readers of Beauvoir have always suspected that she was editing her image in her autobiography, but it was not always clear how or why she did this. After all, the story of the pact showed a woman who was committed to telling the truth, and the author of The Second Sex wanted to shine light on the reality of women’s situations. Did her commitment to scrutiny stop short at herself? If not, why would she hide significant parts of her life – intellectual and personal – from view? And why is it important to reconsider the way her life is remembered now?