by Sue Corbett
She studied philosophy in Paris together with Simone Weil with whom she might be thought to have much in common, but friendship did not ripen between the two women, and the reason may perhaps be seen in a remark of Simone de Beauvoir’s that while Simone Weil was wholly concerned with problems of social justice, she herself was absorbed with the problem of the meaning of existence.
Simone de Beauvoir herself was to come in time to be absorbed with problems of social justice, but in her younger days metaphysics was her chief concern.
Preparing for the agrégation, she specialized in Leibniz and was nominally the pupil of Brunschvig, but in practice she was coached by two fellow students with whom she had liaisons, first René Maheu and then Sartre.
She passed the competition successfully when she was 21, the youngest agrégée in philosophy in France. Maheu, a future director-general of Unesco, soon proved too much a discreet establishment personality for her liking (she had to refer to him in her memoirs in his lifetime under a pseudonym, André Herbaut); by contrast, the uncompromising, unconventional Sartre thrilled her; meeting him she felt she “could share everything with him always”.
Sartre, three years older than she, became in effect her guru. They formed a union which, though painstakingly distinguished from “bourgeois marriage”, remained a settled partnership until his death in 1980. In both her philosophical and her political thinking, she follows his lead, and like him she tried to express her ideas in a variety of literary forms — novels, stories and plays as well as straight theoretical essays.
Her best philosophical work, of an academic kind, was her earliest, Pour une morale de l’ambiguité (1947) and L’Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (1948) in which she attempted to revise the conventional existentialist notion that life is “absurd” by defining it instead as “ambiguous”.
The meaning of life, she suggested, is what each one of us can discover or create for himself. Similarly, she argued that there can be moral values insofar as men construct them for themselves.
Simone de Beauvoir’s most successful novel was Les Mandarins (1954) a roman à clef about Sartre, Camus, herself and other luminaries of the French left-wing after the Libération. The book won the Prix Goncourt, and was a bestseller, but precisely because it was so “realist”, it was also her least characteristic and distinctive work.
In an essay on Littérature et métaphysique (1946) she explained that her aim was to write a “metaphysical novel”, and the two books that came closest to realising this ambition were written at about the same time: Le Sang des Autres (1945) about a young girl who thirsts for the Absolute and then solves the problem of life by dying a noble death, and Tous les Hommes sont Mortels (1946) about a woman who dreads death and then discovers that life is an even heavier burden.
Death was a constant theme in Simone de Beauvoir’s writing and became more prominent with the passage of time. Une Mort Très Douce (1964) is about the painful death of her mother; La Vieillesse (1970) is as much concerned with dying as with ageing; La Céremonie des Adieux (1981) is about Sartre’s death — it ends with these words: “Sa mort nous sépare. Ma mort ne nous reunira pas. C’est ainsi: il est déjà beau que nos vies aient pu si longtemps s’accorder”.
Simone de Beauvoir reached a wide audience with her journalism. She also wrote a number of travel books, one about the United States, which was bitterly hostile, and others about China and Cuba, which were correspondingly eulogistic.
In some respects her most substantial literary achievement was her autobiography. In the first volume, Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangée (1958), she describes the family and the world in which she grew up. In La Force des Choses (1963) she wrote about her reaction against that background, and about her life with Sartre.
She recalled that, after their agrégation, they were separated by their teaching duties, which kept Sartre in Le Havre while she was in Marseilles, and Sartre suggested that they should marry so as to be appointed to the same town. De Beauvoir firmly resisted such a compromise with her principles; if they intended to have children, she would have agreed, but as they did not, she stuck to her “radical freedom”. Sartre himself seems to have been relieved, continuing to live with his mother until her death many years later, and pursuing on the side his various sexual adventures.
In her efforts to keep pace with him, and enact the role of the fully liberated woman, she threw herself, according to her memoirs, into affairs with such unlikely people as Nelson Algren, a Chicago novelist, and Claude Lanzmann, a Marxist journalist 16 years her junior. In the end, she always returned to Sartre.
It was Sartre’s financial success which enabled her, after 12 years of teaching, to quit the lycée as he had done; and soon she was earning her own living. Her tastes were frugal; Sartre and she always met, in her words, “as equals”. The chief difference that de Beauvoir noted between Sartre and herself was that he “was shaped by books” whereas she was affected by “immediate experience”. Sartre himself, in his memoirs, Les Mots, confirmed that diagnosis. Simone de Beauvoir was also more robust than Sartre. As a young teacher in Marseilles she would hike for 20 miles a day in espadrilles; on visits to Greece, she would try to drag Sartre on long walks in the midday sun.
In the third volume of her autobiography, La Force de l‘âge (1960), she wrote about the years in which she had become rich and famous. Fame she wore gracefully enough, but riches posed problems for her. She could rarely bring herself to spend money on clothes; with an effort of will she bought herself a small car and a modest flat near the cemetery of Montparnasse.
After L’Age de Discrétion, which came out in 1968, she forsook the novel as a literary medium. A book entitled Quand Prime le Spirituel appeared in 1979, but it turned out to be an experiment in fiction from the pre-war years, the title an ironical reference to the “spiritual” philosophy of Jacques Maritain which the book was designed to refute from a perspective of atheist existentialism.
Simone de Beauvoir did not participate in Sartre’s later enterprise of “integrating existentialism with Marxism”, although she had to some extent to nurse him through the ordeal of composing his later mammoth works, and in the last years of his life, when he grew progressively more blind, she spent more and more time in his company, reading aloud to him, and helping to manage his money, which he was apt to lose or give away with reckless generosity. Sartre once compared his life with her to that of George Henry Lewes with George Eliot and indeed, however unlike Lewes Sartre may have been, Simone de Beauvoir did have a lot in common with George Eliot.
She certainly took more seriously than Sartre some of the ideas they shared. A streak of Voltairean impishness in Sartre prompted him to proclaim himself a Marxist, for example, without the least willingness to submit to any authority, even that of Marx himself.
Simone de Beauvoir made more earnest efforts to be a good Marxist. Her most conspicuous endeavour was to work out a Marxist theory of women’s liberation, and she undoubtedly succeeded in giving feminism a new look. This was a field in which she reached her widest public.
Her long study of the predicament of women, Le Deuxième Sexe, came out as early as 1949, and although its impact was not immediate, it did much to make the demand for women’s rights a key factor of the radicalism which emerged in Europe and America in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminism was one thing she did not learn from Sartre. Indeed in an interview she once reproached Sartre for being a “phallocrat”, and he denied the charge with only a mock indignation. In 1972, she helped found a society called Choisir, to promote the cause of abortion and contraception on demand. Two years later she was elected President of the Ligue du Droit des Femmes. She refused, however, to have anything to do with the UN Women’s Year in 1976, claiming that the Mexico Women’s Conference was designed “only to integrate women in a masculine society”. She supported the alternative “revolutionary feminist” congress in Brussels.
As an active editorial director of the review Les Temps Modernes, Simon
e de Beauvoir made “revolutionary feminism” one of its favoured causes, and she devoted most of her articles, interviews and television appearances to this subject in the later years. Although she remained on the far left all her life, she became with time more critical of the Soviet Union because of its persecution of dissenters and of the French Communist Party because it stood for “population not contraception”. Simone de Beauvoir was always a very readable writer, and a very likeable person. Her honesty, her sincerity, her almost Victorian high seriousness, commanded widespread respect, even from those who disagreed with her somewhat extreme opinions.
Simone de Beauvoir, French writer and philosopher, was born on January 9, 1908. She died on April 14, 1986, aged 78
BERYL MARKHAM
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THE FIRST WOMAN AVIATOR TO FLY THE ATLANTIC SOLO FROM EAST TO WEST
AUGUST 5, 1986
Beryl Markham, who in 1936 was the first person* to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west and whose book describing the flight recently became a best-seller when it was republished after 40 years, died in Nairobi on August 3. She was 83.
She was born on October 26, 1902, at Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire, but most of her life was spent in Africa. In 1906 she was taken to Kenya by her father, Captain Charles Clutterbuck. Her parents were already divorced and her mother, who remained in England, played no part in her upbringing.
As a child she had little schooling, but acquired from her father the love of horses which was to dominate much of her life. She was eager for adventure and early cultivated the sporting pursuits of male settlers in the White Highlands, spending her time, as she put it, “hunting barefooted in the Rongai Valley or in the cedar forests of the Mau Escarpment.” On one occasion she survived mauling by a lion.
When she was 17 her father was ruined and went off to repair his fortune in Peru, leaving Beryl with a horse significantly (in view of her future) called Pegasus. She began her career as a trainer, and the following year one of her horses won the Kenya St Leger. In the 1920s she learnt to fly, and before long was a professional pilot flying around Kenya and into neighbouring territories, sometimes carrying mail or medical supplies. She pioneered the scouting of elephant and other wild game from the air.
Tall, blonde and attractive in a tomboyish way, she made a number of male conquests at this time, including probably — to the extent that he could ever be conquered — Denys Finch Hatton, whom she had the chance (luckily turned down) to accompany on his fatal flight in 1931. Her first marriage, to a Scottish international rugby player, Jock Purves, ended in divorce after two years. In 1927 she married Mansfield Markham, rich younger son of a Liberal MP and coal magnate.
While she was married to him, Henry Duke of Gloucester, as yet unmarried, visited Kenya with his brother the Prince of Wales, and became besotted by her. Her husband, much aggrieved by this romance, threatened to sue, and the matter was only settled when a substantial sum was privately paid over. But she and Markham were soon separated, though not formally divorced until 1942.
In September, 1936, she made her famous transatlantic flight, without radio, and in appalling weather. In her De Havilland Gipsy she took off from Abingdon and landed 24 hours and 25 minutes later with the nose of her aircraft in a Nova Scotia bog. She was slightly injured, but her reputation was made. Immediately she was treated as a heroine, receiving, like Lindbergh, a tickertape welcome in New York. Her looks also contributed to her success in America, since they were compared with Garbo’s.
After the flight she went to live in California, where she met the man who was to become her third husband, Raoul Schumacher. With his assistance (for she would have been quite incapable of writing a book on her own) she produced the selective account of her early life, culminating in the great flight, which appeared in 1942 entitled West With the Night. Schumacher was a professional editor and ghost-writer, to whom she was able to give the best story he ever handled. Later, he wrote several other stories under her name.
West With the Night was not a success at the time, and was soon forgotten amid all the excitement of a World War in which the United States had just become involved. But it caught the eye of Ernest Hemingway, who described it as “bloody wonderful” in a private letter to Maxwell Perkins. Discovery of this letter inspired the triumphant republication of the book in 1983. Later this year a television documentary on her life will be shown nationwide in the United States, to mark the 50th anniversary of her flight.
In 1947 she and Schumacher were divorced and in the early 1950s she was back in Kenya where she resumed her career as a trainer of race horses, winning the top trainer’s award five times and the Kenya Derby six times. Later she trained for a time in South Africa and in Southern Rhodesia (as it then was), but in the early 1970s she returned to Kenya for good. During the last phase of her life her home was a bungalow on the edge of Nairobi racecourse, and she continued to live dangerously, being robbed, beaten up, and on one occasion shot at while driving in her car during an attempted coup.
She had one son by Mansfield Markham. He was killed in the 1970s, but she is survived by two grandchildren.
Beryl Markham, aviator, was born on October 26, 1902. She died on August 3, 1986, aged 83
* Editor’s note: Beryl Markham’s obituarist was overlooking Scots aviator Jim Mollison’s prior achievement, in 1932, when he flew from Portmarnock Strand in Ireland to New Brunswick in Canada.
JACQUELINE DU PRÉ
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IMPASSIONED CELLIST WHO EARNED HER TOWERING REPUTATION THROUGH INTERPRETATIONS OF ELGAR
OCTOBER 21, 1987
Miss Jacqueline du Pré, OBE, who died on October 19, at the age of 42, was regarded as one of the cello’s most brilliant exponents when her playing career was tragically cut short by multiple sclerosis at the age of 26.
Though she had her critics among the sterner sort of purist, her wealth of natural talent, which expressed itself in a warm-blooded, romantic approach to her material, made her a favourite on the concert platform, and made the sound of the cello popular with lay audiences. Over the last few years she had established an enviable reputation as an interpreter of the solo cello repertory. Her name was particularly linked with the Elgar cello concerto, which she had played on many occasions all over the country and abroad.
Jacqueline du Pré was born on January 26, 1945. After being inspired by her mother, who, she once said, “guided my first steps, wrote tunes for me to play, and drew pictorial descriptions of the melodies”, she went to the London Cello School at the age of six. When she was 10, she went to William Pleeth, whom she always described as “my cello Daddy”. She felt that she owed almost everything to him.
Her first public success came when she gave a Wigmore Hall recital at the aged of 16. Then she went to study with Tortelier in Paris and Rostropovich in Moscow. At the same time she began a concert career which took her all over the world.
At the end of 1966 she met the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, and they were married in the following year. He exerted a strong influence on her (as Barbirolli previously had done), particularly in the realm of chamber music. She became one of several players, soloists in their own right, who came together at fairly frequent intervals to tackle the chamber-music repertory. The most common combination was Zukerman, Barenboim and du Pré.
Du Pré’s style could, perhaps, be most aptly described as impassioned and grainy. She threw herself into the classical and more modern repertory with her whole body and soul. Some even found her wholehearted approach too subjective, too emotional. If that was a fault, it was one on the right side.
In any case, it is inconceivable that one of her natural gifts would not, as she grew older, have developed a riper, more rounded approach to the cello’s repertory. But it was not to be. During a performance of the Brahms Double Concerto at the Lincoln Centre, New York, in 1971, she began to experience extreme difficulty fingering and bowing her cello. She was found to have contracted multiple sclerosis, and her
concert career was over. The rest of her life was a brave battle against the ravages of the disease, and she was an example and inspiration to other sufferers.
With her husband she set up the Jacqueline du Pré MS Society Research Fund, which has been administered by the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain since 1977.
She was appointed OBE in 1976, and had honorary doctorates from numerous universities.
Besides the memory of her concert performances Miss du Pré also leaves a considerable legacy of recordings to console her admirers for her cruelly early death. Among these, her playing of the Elgar will inevitably take first place, but her interpretations of the Delius and Dvorák concertos and of various sonatas are equally rewarding memorials. Alexander Goehr wrote his evocative Romanze for her.
As a person, she was as outgoing and lively as she was as an artist, and her friends in the musical world were legion.
Jacqueline du Pré, OBE, cellist, was born on January 26, 1945. She died on October 19, 1987, aged 42
BETTE DAVIS
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STAR WHOSE SCREEN PORTRAYALS OF SCHEMING WOMEN AMPLY LIVED UP TO THE STUDIO SLOGAN, “NOBODY’S AS GOOD AS BETTE WHEN SHE’S BAD”
OCTOBER 9, 1989
Bette Davis, who died in a Paris hospital on October 6, at the age of 81, was one of the most durable of all Hollywood film stars, and what does not necessarily follow: one of those most unmistakably gifted with an acting talent. She was an actress of striking presence, rather than conventional beauty, whose main physical asset was her large eyes. She first made her reputation as the suffering heroine of melodrama, in a genre popularly known as the “woman’s picture”. Later, as she matured towards middle age, she played a gallery of steely, wilful and scheming women, who knew exactly what they wanted and were usually able to get it. In a third, though less distinguished phase of her career, she became a mistress of the grotesque in a series of horror films.
