Becoming Beauvoir Read online

  As her mother pushed her along the path of propriety, Beauvoir wrote in her diaries that every position in life was acceptable – but to have value, it had to be valued by the person adopting it. It was painfully clear that she did not see love, life and happiness the way her parents did. She didn’t want to walk through life unthinkingly doing what was proper, reading what was suitable: by 1926 she had come to the conclusion that she could only genuinely have esteem for: ‘beings who think their lives, not for those who only think, or for those who only live’.70

  According to Deirdre Bair, shortly after the New Year of 1927, Françoise decided that Simone’s birthday should be commemorated with a photo portrait. Birthdays were often marked in this way, but Simone knew that her mother had another agenda: Jacques. Instead of the traditional birthday pose, Françoise arranged her daughter in the traditional posture of an engagement announcement, holding flowers in a hand that ought to bear her fiancé’s ring. Jacques accepted a copy of the portrait graciously, and that was that. Françoise was fuming.

  We don’t know how Simone felt about this, possibly because she did not record it and possibly because it didn’t happen. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir denied the existence of such a photo, and Beauvoir’s diaries are silent on the subject, with no entries from early December 1926 to April of 1927. But the story as Bair tells it does not end there. In the spring of 1927 Hélène graduated from the Cours Désir and the sisters – who had grown apart somewhat during the periods when Jacques distracted Simone’s attention – were again unified against their mother’s irascibility. Françoise’s anxiety about Jacques was noxious; she felt frustrated and powerless because the cards were all in his hand. When her confused emotions were not channelled into sarcasm and scorn for her daughter, they erupted on a humiliating scale. One night, frustrated after a proposal-less dinner with the Champigneulles, Françoise returned home. She paced for several hours, then screamed that she would deliver her daughter from disgrace and left the apartment. Georges was home but didn’t get out of bed; Hélène woke up, threw on clothes, and chased her mother down the boulevard du Montparnasse. Françoise stopped in front of the Champigneulle residence, shouting. The noise woke Simone, who rushed down to the street. The daughters silently escorted their shrieking mother back inside.71 From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, this story – if true – raises questions about Françoise de Beauvoir’s mental health. Later, the female characters in Beauvoir’s works often felt trapped, sometimes hovering on the verge of madness.72

  We know from both sisters’ memoirs that in the period from 1926–1927 they were gradually allowed to venture out more without suitors or chaperones: Simone went to read in the ladies-only section at the Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève (Lucretius, Juvenal, Diderot) and began teaching at a social-service institute called the ‘Equipes Sociales’, which was founded by a young philosophy professor to help the working classes in north-east Paris.73 Her mother approved of such philanthropic pursuits, so Simone gave the impression of teaching more nights than she actually did in order to escape the house. She walked around Paris some evenings, and on others she went to watch Hélène paint and draw: her sister’s world had expanded in fascinating directions. At the Equipes Sociales and Hélène’s life-drawing classes she saw men and women discussing their ideas and dreams, confidently nude models and their nonplussed observers. The sisters had never been exposed to so many, and such diverse, people.

  In addition to Gide and Proust, Jacques had introduced Simone to cocktails; now she made herself a habitué of bars. Simone and Hélène continued to visit La Rotonde, sometimes skipping art classes and teaching to spend evening hours in bars and cafés instead. Simone now had a little money at her disposal because she had taken a job as a teaching assistant at the Institut Sainte-Marie. It wasn’t much, but she could cover her expenses and books and have a small amount left over.

  Despite distress at home and distractions at night, she continued to shine in her studies. In March 1927 Simone passed her certificate in the history of philosophy. In April she reflected that this year had brought her ‘a serious philosophical formation’ that sharpened her ‘(alas!) too penetrating critical mind and [her] desire for rigor and logic’.74 What, one wonders, made her write this ‘alas!’? What is there to object to in having a penetrating mind that values rigour and logic? Did she lament this mind because, as we will see in the next chapter, God became anathema to it? Or because she thought it was anathema to femininity? Her happiness?

  In June she received another certificate in ‘general philosophy’, coming second to Simone Weil. Weil would become a prominent thinker, whose politics and self-sacrifice inspired many around her, including Albert Camus and Georges Bataille (philosophically, Beauvoir thought she accepted the conclusions of her teacher Alain without enough questioning). The third runner up in this exam would also become a leading French philosopher: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Beauvoir obtained a certificate in Greek as well: in just two years, she had already earned a licence and a half.

  Writing in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Beauvoir claimed that education and success brought more than esteem to her: it brought feelings of profound loneliness and a lack of direction. ‘I […] was breaking away from the class to which I belonged: where was I to go?’75 We see this loneliness expressed in the diaries, where she wrote, in May 1927, ‘I am intellectually very alone and very lost at the entrance to my life. […] I feel that I have worth, that I have something to do and say.’ Reflecting on the way that Jacques dismissed ‘her ‘intellectual passions’ and ‘philosophical seriousness’ ‘with a smile’, she wrote determinedly (and highlighted in the margins): ‘I have only one life and many things to say. He will not steal my life away from me.’76

  That day she was thinking about freedom again, writing that ‘it is only by free decision and thanks to the interplay of circumstances that the true self is discovered’. People around her talked about making choices (like deciding to marry) as if you did it once and for all. But she never felt like choices were made in that way – every choice was ‘constantly in the making; it is repeated every time that I become conscious of it’. That day she concluded that marriage is ‘fundamentally immoral’ – how could the self of today make decisions for the self of tomorrow?

  She could still imagine a life in which she loved Jacques, but she had had a conversation with another man – Charles Barbier – who talked with her about philosophy and literature with intelligent interest instead of dismissive smiles. The experience made her realize that her future held many possibilities (she called them her possibles in French), and that bit by bit, she would have to ‘kill all but one of them’, so that on the last day of her life there would be one reality; she would have lived ‘one life’. The question was, which life?77

  Instances like these show that from an early age Beauvoir felt a strong sense of vocation and the importance of her own voice. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter she would even invoke the language of Hebrew prophets – messengers of God – to express her calling. In one of the relevant stories in the Bible, God needs an emissary, and asks the people of Israel, ‘Whom shall I send?’ The prophet Isaiah replies to him: ‘Here I am. Send me.’ In the Memoirs, Beauvoir describes a voice that whispered within her, over and over again, ‘Here I am.’78 God or no God, she knew that what she had to say was important, and she had already begun to realize that some people would try to convince her otherwise – whether through outright confrontation or diminutive dismissals.

  Simone was determined, but she was not immune to self-doubt and others’ expectations of her. Her parents were beginning to make explosive scenes about what she was reading; she began to feel that they did not accept her – ‘at all’.79 She had more and more arguments with her father, who talked about sending her away and told her she had ‘no heart’; that she was ‘all brain and no feeling’.80

  The week before Jacques smilingly dismissed her intellectual passions, she had an argument with her father about
what it means to love. He said it was ‘services rendered, affection, gratefulness’. She had been reading more now-forgotten philosophers – Alain and Jules Lagneau – and claimed that she had found in Lagneau ‘how I would have to live’. So many people, she thought, had never known true love, in which ‘reciprocity is necessary’.81 In July Beauvoir again resolved to ‘clearly spell out my philosophical ideas’. She wanted to study in depth the questions that interested her, especially ‘love’ (which she put in quotation marks in her diary)82 and ‘the opposition of self and other’.83 For Beauvoir, even at this age, the concept of love was not just a romantic ideal, but an ethical one.

  In her diary she enjoined herself: ‘Don’t be “Mlle de Beauvoir.” Be me. Don’t have a goal imposed from outside, a social framework to fill. What works for me will work, and that is all.’84

  With Zaza, too, she discussed love – their shared love of philosophy and a shared concern over their futures brought them closer together than ever. They had been discussing the nature of love in their philosophy class at school, and their discussions continued throughout the week, while visiting museums or playing tennis.85 The friendship still met with Françoise’s approval, but Madame Lacoin was starting to worry that Zaza’s interest in education was going too far, and Simone was a bad influence in that respect. Zaza wanted to enrol at the Sorbonne instead of pocketing her 250,000-franc dowry: her parents found this incomprehensible.

  Slowly Simone began to make other friendships that stretched and softened her world. When she was 20, and on a visit to Zaza’s family’s country estate in the Landes, Beauvoir met Stépha Awdykovicz, their family governess, who would become one of her closest friends. In the eyes of Beauvoir, this Polish-Ukranian emigré was exotic and daring: she was wealthy and well educated but chose to work as a governess because she was curious about bourgeois Parisian life. She was not afraid of her sexuality and spoke frankly with Beauvoir about it. When they returned to Paris they met almost daily: Stépha lived nearby and worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs translating – she earned a sizeable amount, which she was happy to spend on her friends. She laughed Beauvoir out of some of her prudery, simultaneously challenging her reserve and expressing sisterly concern for her naivety.

  Hélène introduced Simone to Geraldine Pardo, whom she had met through her art classes. Gégé, as they called her, was a working-class girl who enjoyed her job so much that she planned to continue working whether she married a man or not. Simone was attracted by Gégé’s enthusiasm and eloquence; Gégé helped her see more clearly that social class did not determine human behaviour by necessity.

  But Stépha’s concerns about her naivety proved to be well founded. Simone started to indulge in ‘adventures’, which she thought were innocent pranks but could have had disastrous consequences. At first Stépha played too, but what started as accepting drinks from men gave way to more risky behaviour: frequenting the seediest bars, going on drives and back to apartments with no intention of delivering to their drunk companions what their drunk companions expected. Although she always managed to disentangle herself, Stépha was furious that Simone put herself in these situations, and confused that she did so when Simone gave the impression that she was still ‘almost betrothed’ to Jacques.

  The 18-year-old Simone was philosophically precocious, but her behaviour could be perilously reckless and rather prim. When Simone came to visit Stépha, who was soon to marry Fernando Gerassi, she was shocked to find him inside her room with the door shut: wasn’t Stépha worried about her reputation? When Fernando later painted Stépha nude Beauvoir was horrified and refused to look at the picture. Her friends found her prudery pompous: she told both Stépha and Gégé that their opinions and conduct were the sad consequences of their inferior upbringing.86 This Simone de Beauvoir was easily scandalized: she would have been shocked to see the scenes her later novels – and life – contained.

  In her diaries Simone continued to reflect on the question of the ‘equilibrium’ between self and other. She started to split her existence into two parts: one ‘for others’ and one ‘for myself’.87 This distinction importantly predates a famous one Sartre would make in Being and Nothingness (1943) – between ‘being for itself’ and ‘being for others’. Many have mistakenly seen Sartre’s distinction at work in Beauvoir’s novels and in The Second Sex, but Beauvoir arrived this way of seeing things early and independently.88

  In the 1927–28 academic year Beauvoir planned to do three more certificates in order to gain a double licence in classics and philosophy. She didn’t always enjoy the demands she made of herself, sometimes complaining that so much of her time was spent at home or in the library; she felt ‘like a rat on a treadmill’. In March 1928 she gained the remaining two qualifications in philosophy – ethics and psychology – but she found philology (the remaining requirement for classics) too dry and dull to deserve persistence. She decided she didn’t need the classics licence. Her father objected: if she was not going to be conventionally successful in marriage she might as well be as unconventionally successful as possible. But she stood her ground, and ditched classics.

  Her brilliance was unquestionable, and it was beginning to attract attention: Maurice Merleau-Ponty wanted to meet the young bourgeoise who had beat him in general philosophy. Of course, two women had beat him in general philosophy, but Simone Weil was Jewish so not a contender for the kind of intellectual friendship two Catholics could share – or so he thought.89 Neither Simone would become a ‘Catholic woman’ in any conventional sense, but Weil would be remembered as a woman of fervent faith, Beauvoir of avid atheism.

  3

  Lover of God or Lover of Men?

  On the eve of her nineteenth birthday Beauvoir’s diaries include reflections on a painful absence. As a child she believed that God governed her universe, and however questionable his governance looked in hindsight she was now left confronting different problems. If there was no one to call her to her vocation, could she have a vocation at all? If there was no God, what gave humans – or anything – their value? ‘Maybe I have value,’ she says; but then ‘values must exist.’1 She was not alone in asking these kinds of questions. Since the turn of the twentieth century, Paris’s philosophical elite had been debating the merits of religious belief and experience in the aftermath of Nietzsche’s famous declaration that ‘God is dead!’2

  In Simone’s life, the disappearance of God coincided with the courtship and death of her devout and beloved friend, Zaza. Both of these losses would leave lasting legacies. For the better part of three decades, Beauvoir would feel that her own freedom had come at the cost of Zaza’s life.

  By 1928 Beauvoir had discovered some of the alternative lives that Paris had to offer: bohemianism and revolt, surrealism, cinema, Ballet Russe.3 That year she began her studies at the Sorbonne in the company of an impressive cohort. The two Simones (Beauvoir and Weil) did not become friends – although this seems like a missed opportunity in hindsight. Beauvoir was intrigued by Weil’s reputation, not so much because of her intelligence but because of her passionate concern for others’ suffering. Beauvoir heard that Simone Weil wept when she heard about a famine breaking out in China, and was impressed that her heart was large enough to ache even for people on the other side of the world. She wanted to meet this woman, but their meeting took a disappointing turn when the conversation shifted to the question of which was more important: revolution (so said Weil) or finding the reason for our existence (so said Beauvoir). Weil ended their exchange with the words: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry.’ As Beauvoir saw it, Weil had looked her up and down and judged her ‘a high-minded little bourgeoise’.4 At the time Beauvoir found this irritating – after all, Weil didn’t know her circumstances and was making mistaken assumptions – but in later years she became sympathetic to this judgement of her young self.

  Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, was to become Beauvoir’s dear ‘Ponti’. He was a student at the École Normale Supérieure, from
a similar background to Beauvoir, and struggling with questions of faith. He sought Beauvoir out after the results of the general philosophy exam were published, and the two of them grew to be close friends – first exchanging heartfelt conversation and later reading each other’s work. Merleau-Ponty liked her so much he introduced her to his friend Maurice de Gandillac, who found her brilliant and fascinating – he was especially interested in the state of her faith. She liked Merleau-Ponty so much she introduced him to Zaza, and soon the foursome was playing tennis together every Sunday morning. Merleau-Ponty was the first intellectual Zaza had ever met, and before long she began to hope for something that hadn’t seemed possible: that she could fulfil her familial duty in marriage without relinquishing love or the life of her mind.

  At first Simone, too, was thrilled with her conversations with Merleau-Ponty. They did have a great deal in common: he was also raised in a devout home and, at least initially, considered himself a quiet unbeliever. At the École Normale Supérieure, Merleau-Ponty belonged to a group that had irreverently been christened the ‘Holy Willies’ on account of their piety and respect for priests. Beauvoir had few female friends at school, and in later life admitted that she often dismissed women whose intellects she found interesting on account of their religion or social background or both.5 Instead she became friends with other ‘Holy Willies’, including Jean Miquel, who was, like her, preparing a thesis under the noted scholar Jean Baruzi.