Becoming Beauvoir Read online

  In her memoirs Beauvoir wrote that she ‘went to hear Jean Baruzi, the author of a thesis that was very well thought of on St John of the Cross’.6 But in fact Beauvoir did more than go to hear Baruzi; she wrote a thesis of her own under his guidance. In her diaries Beauvoir wrote that she liked Baruzi because he took her seriously and would criticize her.7 But in the memoirs Beauvoir is curiously silent about the philosophical content of her thesis, saying only that it treated ‘the personality’8 and that Baruzi returned it to her with ‘copious praise’, telling her that it was ‘the basis of a serious work’.9 The diaries show that her work for Baruzi included discussions of love and ethics.10 The discrepancy between accounts raises the recurrent question: why does her story lack consistency? Beauvoir’s thesis itself has not survived, so we can’t turn to it for possible answers.11 But on the basis of what Beauvoir was writing about it in her diaries at the same time, it seems likely that her discussions of love here prepared the ground for what she would go on to write in the 1940s about ethics, when her ideas were assumed to be indebted to Sartre’s. So did she hide her early work from readers because she was concerned that it would somehow jeopardize Sartre’s reputation? Or was it because she didn’t think her 1950s readers would believe – let alone identify with – a female protagonist whose philosophy went on to shape Jean-Paul Sartre’s?

  In the 1920s, Beauvoir had found few women who shared her intellectual passions. She recognized that she was beginning to turn to the company of men more and more for connections of the mind; she enjoyed men’s conversation and friendship. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter she wrote that she found it dismaying when women took up a challenging attitude towards men: ‘from the start men were my comrades, not my enemies. Far from envying them, I felt that my own position, from the very fact that it was an unusual one, was a privilege’.12 In hindsight she recognized that she was a token woman, but it was only later that she began to see this tokenism as problematic. In her student days, the friendly relations between Beauvoir and her male contemporaries were eased by the fact that they did not see her as a rival because the French education system did not treat them as equals. Simone, and all other female students, were accepted as ‘supernumeraries’ and were not competing for the same jobs. (The women were expected to teach in girls’ lycées; the French state was providing education for girls, but it was still a widely held view that men should not educate them.)

  As Deirdre Bair tells the story, Beauvoir lost some of her initial enthusiasm for Merleau-Ponty when it became clear that he was not an atheist;13 she was disappointed that he thought the truth was to be found within the religious boundaries of their upbringing. But once again, the details of Beauvoir’s diaries tell a different, and much less dispassionate story about her loss of faith than the bold lines of her memoirs suggest. As soon as she ‘saw the light’ about God, she wrote in the memoirs, ‘I made a clean break.’14 After that, Beauvoir told her readers conclusively, her ‘incredulity never once wavered’.15 In language reminiscent of Saint Augustine and Blaise Pascal, she described the experience of losing God as accompanied by the abrupt discovery that everything had ‘fallen silent’. For the first time she felt the ‘terrible significance’ of the word ‘alone’.16

  But the story in the student diaries is less sudden and once-and-for-all. As late as 1928, at the age of 20, she was ‘tempted by Catholicism’.17 Although she later dismissed her childhood faith as enculturated and ingenuous, when she started university she suddenly found herself in the company of intellectual believers whose commitments coexisted with doubts and a willingness to question. She was a budding philosopher, and when she encountered a new argument she did not dig in her heels and remain unaffected in the name of consistency: she considered its merits.

  But let us retrace the account she gave in the memoirs before looking at the diaries themselves. In the version of events published in 1958 Beauvoir acknowledged that as a child she developed a passionate faith in God – the kind of faith a pious mother couldn’t fake. Simone attended mass three times a week and regularly undertook retreats for days at a time. She meditated and kept a notebook for recording her thoughts and ‘saintly resolutions’. She ‘desired to grow closer to God, but […] didn’t know how to go about it’.18 She decided that the best life this world could offer was a life spent contemplating God, and resolved to be a Carmelite nun.

  In later life Beauvoir would be converted to politics, but as a young woman she found social questions remote – in part because she felt so powerless to change the world around her. Instead she focused on what she could control: the world within. She had heard that in addition to the morality-infused religion of duty there was a mystical kind: because she had read stories of saints whose passionate lives reached fulfilment in mysterious unions with God that brought them joy and peace, she ‘invented mortifications’ for herself, scrubbing her skin with a pumice stone until it bled and fustigating herself with a necklace chain. There is a long tradition of odium corporis in Christian history, and of bodily asceticism producing mystical experiences in many world religions. But Simone’s efforts did not deliver the enlightened states she sought.

  In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Beauvoir described her desire to be a nun as ‘a convenient alibi’. But she did not see it that way at the time. During her childhood summers in the countryside, she would wake early in order to watch nature awaken, enjoying the ‘beauty of the earth and the glory of God’. Several times in her memoirs she describes this association of the presence of God and the beauty of nature: but in Paris, she wrote, ‘He was hidden from me by people and their top-heavy preoccupations.’19

  She began to be more troubled by the hiddenness of God, concluding that God ‘was a total stranger to the restless world of men’. Her mother and teachers alike took the Pope to have been elected by the Holy Spirit; both parents agreed that it was not his place to interfere in worldly matters. When Pope Leo XIII devoted encyclicals to ‘social questions’, therefore, her mother took him to have betrayed his saintly mission and her father took him to have betrayed the nation. So Simone had to ‘swallow the paradox that the man chosen by God to be his representative on earth had not to concern himself with earthly things’.20

  She also had to face so-called ‘Christians’ who handled earthly inhabitants – herself included – in objectionable ways. At school she felt her confessor betrayed her confidence. And when she was 16, in a religious bookshop near Saint Sulpice, she asked the shop assistant for an article. He walked towards the back of the shop and beckoned for her to follow. When she reached his side he revealed not the item she sought, but his erect penis. She fled, but took with her the feeling that ‘the oddest things could happen to [her] without any warning’.21

  Hélène also described their childhood as weighed down by God, and noted that the weight of God was not felt equally by everyone.22 None of the men in her family – either in Paris or Limousin – went to mass. This gave Hélène reason to comment that ‘men – a superior race – were exempt from God’.23 It is not difficult to see why Beauvoir objected to the Catholicism of her childhood: its values were taken to affirm double standards of colossal proportions – profligate husbands expected saintly wives, while ideals of self-sacrifice consecrated women’s suffering.

  In the Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Beauvoir describes her unbeliever Papa and her devout Mama as representing two extremes within herself: her father represented the intellectual, and her mother the spiritual. And these two ‘radically heterogeneous fields of experience’ had nothing in common: she began to think that human things – ‘culture, politics, business, manners, and customs – had nothing to do with religion. So I set God apart from life and the world, and this attitude was to have a profound influence on my future development’.24

  In the end, faced with philosophical gaps and religious hypocrisy, she concluded that ‘it was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world’
.25 After she rejected God for the first time, she confided to Zaza that she wanted to be a writer. But Zaza shocked her by replying that having nine children, like her mama had, was just as good as writing books. Beauvoir could not see anything in common in these two modes of existence. ‘To have children, who in turn would have more children, was simply to go on playing the same old tune ad infinitum.’26

  As is often the case with Beauvoir’s ‘life’ and ‘work’, her life provided questions that her work sought to answer; she would return to religious questions in several books, including The Second Sex. But during the period of her studies she had to wrestle with her own faith, first for academic reasons and then because one of the most significant losses of her life brought her face to face with death and injustice.

  During the period from 1926–27, she recorded in her diaries that despite her intellectual reservations she wanted to believe in God. She wanted to believe in something that would ‘justify her life’, something absolute, and throughout her life she would be revisited by this yearning for meaning, if not salvation. In May 1927 she wrote, ‘I would want God.’27 And again in July: she wanted ‘God or nothing’. But philosophically speaking, she couldn’t find a satisfactory answer to the question: ‘Why the Christian God?’28 She had several conversations about faith with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but she thought that he put too much confidence in both Catholic faith and reason. On 19 July 1927 she wrote in her diary that ‘Ponti supports his [philosophy] with faith in reason, I on the powerlessness of reason. Who proves that Descartes prevails over Kant? I am maintaining what I wrote for the Sorbonne – use your reason, you will end up with remainders and irrational elements.’

  More and more, Beauvoir’s diaries show that she found a certain kind of philosophy alienating on account of its requirement to ‘reason coldly’: she said that ‘young girls’ such as herself ‘have not only a reason to satisfy, but a heavy heart to subdue – and in this way I want to remain a woman, still more masculine by her brain, more feminine by her sensibility’.29 She kept trying to find a philosophy she could live by, and became interested in Jules Lagneau, a philosopher who wrote about freedom and desire as well as reason.30 Beauvoir agreed with Lagneau that her own desire was a powerful impulse to believe: ‘Oh! My God, my God, is this being whom we would like to love and to whom we would give all, does this being truly not exist? I know nothing, and I am weary, weary. Why, if he is, does he make seeking him so difficult?’31

  Her heart felt achingly empty; she wrote that ‘the one who would fulfil everything doesn’t exist’.32 If these words had occurred a few pages earlier in her diaries it would be clear that they were penned for God, for a divine beloved. But in the margins a later annotation is found: later on Beauvoir underlined the words in this sentence in ink and wrote and underlined in the margin, ‘Sartre – 1929’. Could a man occupy the place her heart had previously held for God? After Sartre died in 1980, Beauvoir entitled a volume of his letters to her Witness to My Life. The French word temoin (‘witness’) was used by centuries of French Christians to describe the gaze of a God who saw everything.

  Beauvoir’s path to atheism unwound in the midst of significant personal events as well as philosophical explorations. Personally, she found much to admire in the faiths of Zaza and Merleau-Ponty. While the bodily exploits of Stépha and Gégé met with her disgust, the chaste courtship of Zaza and Merleau-Ponty brought the teenage Simone much joy.33 She hoped, for Zaza, that marriage would not end up making a prostitute of her body and a mausoleum of her mind. Things had been blossoming promisingly, but suddenly it all came to a halt. Madame Lacoin decided not to allow her to return to the Sorbonne for a second year because her elder daughter was now married: it was Zaza’s turn. She was to be kept at the family estates in the Landes so she could prepare to be presented to eligible men. This year, Simone was not invited to stay for weeks as she had done in the past, but only for a few days in July. Merleau-Ponty’s family was from Bordeaux, so he and Simone decided to meet there while she was en route to Zaza’s. One of their favourite authors, François Mauriac, was from the region and they wanted to make a literary pilgrimage – happily, this would give Simone an opportunity to bring Zaza fresh news of her beloved.

  When Simone arrived, she found her friend agonizing over what were clearly becoming torturously divided allegiances. Zaza felt sure that she loved Merleau-Ponty, but she also wanted to obey her mother – who had decided that the match was unsuitable without giving any indication why. No one could understand this about-face on her mother’s part: he was from a good Catholic family and her mother never said a bad word about him. But if the conversation ever turned in his direction she moved it onto another subject. Beauvoir was perplexed by Madame Lacoin’s behaviour at first, but her perplexity gave way to anxiety and anger. Why on earth would she object? Did she not see the importance of her own daughter’s freedom, her own daughter’s dreams?

  The previous year had been intense but emotionally high, and now Simone felt herself on an equally intense downward trajectory. She tried to cope as she always had: writing, and reading, voraciously. In August she wrote out a daily regime in her journal:

  9.00–11.00 letters and journal

  11.00–1.00 philosophy (in her journal she added ‘meditation’ in parentheses)

  3.00–5.00 philosophy, reading

  5.00–8.00 writing

  That summer she set herself the goal of reading Stendhal, and Plato, as well as recent and contemporary writers whose books treated religion and mysticism: Henri Frederic Amiel, Henri Delacroix, Jean Baruzi.34 Her diary contains reflections on her reading and correspondence and long passages professing love for Jacques and confusion about his intentions.

  In September, having read back her diary, Simone thought 1927 had been a year of ‘oscillation between the discouragement brought to me by love, the only great human thing in which I felt the nothingness of the entirety of what’s human, and the desire to seek’.35 Later that month she made herself a new programme of study: she was working on two assignments for her supervisor, Jean Baruzi, and writing a book. She wanted to finish the first part of her book by January, so she would need to be disciplined:

  8.00 wake up

  9.00–noon personal work in her room

  2.00–6.00 serious study

  6.00–8.00 conversations, painting, reading ‘without vain strolls to which I have no right’

  9.00–11.00 preparation for classes, for the club

  11.00–midnight journal

  She read novels by Paul Claudel, François Mauriac and many others, as well as books on mystics, philosophers and the lives of novelists.36 She wrote notes for a novel that would chart the discovery of a woman’s realization that she was ‘free to choose herself’.37 Her notes are fragmentary, but they explore the relationship between who we are and what we do (what philosophers would call the relationship between being and action).

  At 19, she was already experimenting with ideas that would become famous in the 1940s for being ‘existentialist’ (in other words, Sartre’s): ‘The act is the affirmation ourselves,’ Beauvoir wrote. But if that’s the case, she asked, then ‘did this “ourselves” then not exist before the act? Or were we just unsure that it existed?’ The philosopher Maurice Blondel had written a book on Action not long before – which explored big questions like whether or not human lives were meaningful, and whether or not individuals have destinies. Blondel wrote that ‘The substance of man is action; he is what he makes of himself.’38 Beauvoir’s notes for the novel seem to reply to Blondel as well as Nietzsche. She wanted to know whether our actions acquaint us with ourselves – whether we were there all along – or whether they create us. Blondel said that the latter was the case: we are what we make of ourselves. But Nietzsche’s command was to become who you are. But how could you become who you are if you don’t know yourself? Beauvoir’s notes are full of questions: ‘Become who you are? Do you know yourself? Do you see yourself?’39

  Her days w
ere so regimented now that when she wasn’t working she began to worry about ‘scattering herself’ too much in ‘charming friendships’.40 But even so, it was a blow when Zaza came back to Paris in November and told Beauvoir that she was being sent to Berlin. Ostensibly it was to perfect her already excellent German; really it was to try to make her forget Merleau-Ponty. She was anguished by her parents’ opposition to him: what could they possibly object to? Beauvoir’s bewilderment was exacerbated by conversations with Merleau-Ponty, who said little except that he put his trust in prayer and believed in the kindness and justness of God. His professions of faith made Beauvoir increasingly bitter; how could he be satisfied with the mere possibility of justice in the hereafter? Whether God was just or not, in her experience Madame Lacoin was not.

  Zaza returned to Paris in the winter of 1929, looking well and even more convinced of her love for Merleau-Ponty. Her mother presented more and more obstacles to her meeting with Simone, but she could hardly forbid her daughter to read at the Bibliothèque Nationale; here Zaza and Simone found small pockets of space and time to drink coffee together illicitly and discuss life.

  In January 1929 Beauvoir became the first woman to teach philosophy in a boys’ school, the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. Her fellow teachers there included Merleau-Ponty and another soon-to-be household name of twentieth-century French intellectual life: Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. The lycée was full of just the type of boy Beauvoir used to envy. They didn’t care much about philosophy – they took education for granted. But she did not take it for granted that she was now a guardian of the French intellectual élite. She felt like she was on the ‘road to final liberation’; she described feeling that ‘there was nothing in the world she couldn’t attain now’. Her decision to reject classics had been the right one: she was now writing a dissertation on the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz under the supervision of Léon Brunschvicg, a leading light of Parisian philosophy.