Beauvoir transgressed this hierarchy in practice and in theory: her ideas had the power to disrupt the lives of both men and women and she tried to live her own life according to them. In this sense, Beauvoir’s story – on her own and with Sartre – raises questions not only about what is true about this woman and this man, but about what we can claim is true about men and women more generally. In today’s intellectual landscape, increasingly little is held to be universally true of the broad categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and the categories themselves have come into question. In part, this has been possible because of Beauvoir’s thoughts. But, as we shall see, Beauvoir was often penalized for having the audacity to think them.
Beauvoir’s own philosophy – from her student diaries to her last theoretical work on Old Age – distinguished between two aspects of becoming a self: the view ‘from within’ and the view ‘from without’. To get close to Beauvoir’s view ‘from within’, for some parts of her life we are almost entirely reliant on her memoirs. There are reasons to doubt what she tells us in them, so where new material provides evidence of omissions or contradictions between accounts I have highlighted this as much as possible.
I have also drawn attention to the way that Beauvoir’s understanding of her own becoming changed as she aged. We know that human beings’ views of themselves change over time; psychological studies have shown repeatedly that self-concepts shift and our memories are selected to correspond to them.48 We also know that humans present themselves in a variety of ways depending on their audience. For some parts of Beauvoir’s life we have private letters and diaries – but letters are always written for a particular reader, and even diaries can be written with one eye on posterity. Voltaire wrote that all we owe to the dead is truth:49 but between the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others, and the stories they tell about us, where is the truth?
This question has no easy answer, and it is made even more difficult when the biographer’s subject is a woman. As Carolyn Heilbrun notes, ‘biographies of women, if they have been written at all, have been written under the constraints of acceptable discussion, of agreement about what can be left out’.50 Beauvoir’s life defied convention – quite apart from considerations for others’ privacy and the legality of what she wrote, it would have been even more scandalous for her and alienating for her readers if she had been completely honest about her life. So she excluded much of her philosophy and her personal relationships; she left out much of the ‘view from within’. There are many reasons why she might have done this, and we will explore them as they arise in the context of her life. But before we do, because Beauvoir was a philosopher, there is a final question to address about why biography matters in the case of her particular life and work.
Some philosophers think it is irrelevant to read the lives of great thinkers because their ideas can be found in the pages of their works. However interesting or boring the life in question, it belongs in a separate compartment to the philosophy. By contrast, others believe that a person’s work cannot be understood without the life, and that learning about a philosopher’s life is necessary to understand the true meaning of the work. The first, compartmentalizing, approach has the potential pitfall that its ahistoricity can lead to misunderstandings: for example, this way of reading philosophy has led to the misunderstanding that Sartre developed existentialist ethics (even though Beauvoir’s work on this subject was written and published first, and Sartre never published his during his lifetime).
The second approach has the potential pitfall that it can result in reducing human beings to effects of external causes. ‘Reductivist’ biographies are frequently guided by a particular agenda that reads into a person’s life rather than letting that life speak for itself. These approaches can be very illuminating, but they can also overshadow the agency of their subjects, portraying them as products of their childhood or class rather than selves they have decided to become.51
Beauvoir herself would have resisted a crude distinction between ‘life’ and ‘work’ – as if ‘work’ isn’t living, and ‘life’ doesn’t require work! One of her key philosophical insights is that every human being is situated in a particular context, in a particular body in a particular place and time and nexus of relationships. This situation shapes each individual’s ability to imagine his or her place in the world, and shifts over the course of a lifetime. Moreover, in the case of women this situation has been shaped by centuries of sexism.
Writing about Beauvoir’s life therefore presents the challenge of another kind of reductionism: for in addition to looking at her life on the basis of formative childhood experiences and other psychoanalytic lenses, or economic, class and other social considerations, there are structures of sexism to consider. We now know that her work has been cut, mistranslated or untranslated into English, and that in some cases the cuts and mistranslations altered her work’s philosophical rigour and political message. But the very fact that this has happened to her work provokes the question: why? In the twenty-first century ‘feminism’ remains a contested concept with multiple meanings. One woman’s ‘free choice’ is another’s ‘oppression’. One man’s satire is another man’s sexism. And this is precisely the kind of ambiguity that Beauvoir’s mature philosophy explored.
Beauvoir’s philosophical and autobiographical writings made the tension between freedom and constraint central to becoming an ethical self. Her literature also explored these themes, although its relation to Beauvoir’s own life experience is contested. In Beauvoir’s 1945 novel The Blood of Others, her character Hélène objects to having her thoughts or behaviour reduced to the fact that she is lower class: ‘It’s ridiculous, always explaining people’s behaviour by exterior circumstances; it is as if what we think, what we are, doesn’t depend on ourselves.’52 And her philosophy explored this tension too: In her essay The Ethics of Ambiguity Beauvoir wrote that ‘the very notion of action would lose all meaning if history were a mechanical unrolling in which man appears only as a passive conductor of outside forces’.53
This biography does not claim with finality to see the ‘real’ Beauvoir, because no biographer can attain a God’s-eye point of view on a human life. Rather, this book is motivated by a desire to navigate the treacherous terrain between compartmentalizing Beauvoir’s life and work and reducing the work to the life. It aims to give credit to the notion that what Beauvoir did depended on herself, and to acknowledge – with Beauvoir – that part of becoming a woman is not to be in control of all aspects of who you become. In The Second Sex she wrote that women are ‘condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, it was never she who chose her lot’.54 Later in life, she realized that her public persona required her to be ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ – and that the persona had public power – but her philosophy committed her to the view that all she could ever do was keep becoming herself.
From the age of 15 Beauvoir felt a strong vocation to be a writer, but she did not always enjoy what she became. In an early philosophical essay entitled Pyrrhus and Cinéas Beauvoir wrote that no human being wills the same thing during an entire lifetime. ‘There is no instant in a life where all instants are reconciled.’55 Sometimes, Simone de Beauvoir felt that her life was a wellspring from which others would drink. Sometimes she felt overwhelmed by doubt or deeply regretted the way she treated herself and others. She changed her mind and she changed others’ minds. She struggled with depression. She loved life; she was afraid of ageing, terrified of death.
When Beauvoir was near the end of her life she agreed to be interviewed by Deirdre Bair for a biography in part because Bair wanted to write about all of her life, not just her feminism.56 Beauvoir did not like being reduced to a single dimension. Bair’s book – the first posthumous biography (1990), to which many still refer to learn about her life – had the benefit of many interviews with her subject. But in several respects it retold the story Beauvoir had already made public.
This is the first biography t
o draw on the story she did not make public: showing the formation of the intellectual woman before she met Sartre, how she developed and defended her own philosophy of freedom, how she wrote novels because she wanted to appeal to the freedoms of her readers, how writing The Second Sex changed her life, and how she turned to life writing and feminist activism because she wanted to be an intellectual whose works left an impact not only on readers’ imaginations, but on the concrete conditions of their lives.
Writing this book has been intensely intimidating – at times even terrifying. Beauvoir was a human person, whose memory I do not want to distort – whether at its most confusing, awe-inspiring, or unsettling. No matter how well documented a life is, the documentation of a life is not the life itself. I have been selective, knowing that I am guided by the interests of my own situation and reliant on information that has already been subject to the selection of Beauvoir. I have tried to show the full spectrum of her humanity: her confidence and her doubt, her energy and her despair, her intellectual appetites and her bodily passions. I have not included every lecture, every friend, or every lover. I have, however, included her philosophy, because I could not be truthful to her contradictions or her contributions without it.
Beauvoir lived an epic life: she was a globetrotter who crossed paths with Picasso and Giacometti, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, not to mention a monumental number of the twentieth century’s literary, philosophical and feminist icons. Charlie Chaplin and Le Corbusier came to New York parties in her honour and she once claimed to have smoked six joints without getting high.57 But without philosophy Simone de Beauvoir would not have become ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, and this is important for two very important reasons: because the myth that Beauvoir was Sartre’s disciple has been perpetuated for long enough, and because their disagreements, their constant conversations, are a crucial part of the way she became herself.
But they are only one part. In 1963 Beauvoir wrote that
the public dimension of an author’s life is precisely nothing more than one single dimension, and I think that everything having a relation to my literary career is but one aspect of my private life. And that is exactly why I was trying to figure out, for myself as well as for the readers, what having a certain public existence means from a private point of view.58
Beauvoir was critical of Sartre’s philosophy and of his love – and yet he remained for her, as he quickly became in the weeks after she first met him – ‘the incomparable friend of her thought’. Her thoughts were deeply challenging to her contemporaries, and they would be silenced, ridiculed and scorned. She chose a life that would allow her to think and write them because she valued her own mind and was convinced of its fertility. At the age of 19, Beauvoir wrote in her diary that ‘the most profound part of my life is my thoughts’.59 And despite everything else that she had become in life, 59 years later the 78-year-old Beauvoir still agreed: ‘to me the most important thing was my mind’.60
Virginia Woolf wrote that there are ‘some stories that have to be told by each generation’.61 But in the case of Beauvoir much of her story has been too invisible to be told. The account we read in Beauvoir’s diaries and letters – about her love of philosophy and her desire to love in unprecedented ways – changes the shape of the life that came after it.
Figure 1 Simone de Beauvoir surrounded by her paternal family at Meyrignac, Summer 1908. From left to right: Georges, Ernest (Simone’s grandfather), Françoise, Marguerite (Simone’s aunt) and her husband Gaston (Georges’ brother).
1
Growing Like a Girl
At 4.30 a.m. on the morning of 9 January 1908 Simonne Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born into the sixth arrondissement of Paris and stifling social conventions.1 The first air she breathed came through second-storey windows overlooking the boulevard Raspail, and by the age of 4 she had mastered the art of extracting her engraved calling cards from the velvet bag she carried when making visits with her mother.2 Beauvoir would live in the same chic zone of Paris for nearly all of her life, but at the time of her birth the family’s fortunes were waning.
The Bertrand de Beauvoirs were high bourgeoisie, originally from Bourgogne. One of their ancestors was given an aristocratic title in 1786 only to lose his head, after the Revolution, in 1790. Despite occurring over a century before her birth, this incident has divided biographers of Beauvoir, who diverge in their estimation of her family’s social standing: Bair makes a great deal of Beauvoir’s pedigree, but Simone’s sister Hélène assigned it much less importance. After the decapitation of their esteemed ancestor the family did not make much of their aristocratic pretensions.3
They did, however, still own land with a château in Limousin. But Simone’s father, Georges de Beauvoir, was not firstborn so would not inherit it. He was intellectually gifted and charming, but his aspirations did not align with his parents’ – he wanted to be an actor. His father encouraged him to pursue a more respectable profession and propriety prevailed: Georges studied law and worked in the office of a well-known Parisian lawyer. He was not ambitious: neither his father nor his brother needed to work to earn a living, and although his mother had attempted to instil the value of work in him it never took root. He did want to be married, however, so eventually he left his secretarial role to practise law in his own right, in the hope that it might improve his prospects.
Through the brokerage of his father a suitable contender was found: Françoise Brasseur, a young woman from a northern family with a sizeable dowry. Although their name did not have an aristocratic particle (like the ‘de’ in Bertrand de Beauvoir), the Brasseurs were much wealthier than the Bertrand de Beauvoirs. Gustave Brasseur, the father of the bride, was a very successful Verdun banker. Françoise was his first born but least loved child: her birth had disappointed his hopes for an heir. She was educated in a convent and her parents took little interest in her until they encountered financial challenges, which reminded them that she was well into marriageable age. This wasn’t the only time that the Brasseurs would exhibit disappointment at a female birth: after encountering it as a daughter, Françoise faced it as a mother, and throughout her life she suffered from her parents’ coldness.4
When the two families met for met for the first time in 1905 it was on the neutral terrain of a Houlgate resort, in Normandy. Françoise was unenthusiastic about the meeting, but she was also nervous on account of the artificial ritual that was expected of her: according to custom her suitor’s first sight of her was carefully prearranged. In the hotel she was surrounded by her classmates from the convent in a scenario that displayed her beauty and social bearing, so that he could assess the aptitude of his potential companion as she presided over conversation and tea. Within a few weeks of meeting, Georges proposed. And although the marriage was arranged, by the time of their wedding on 26 December 1906 they were also united by love.5
In its early years Simone remembered her parents’ relationship as a passionate one, emotionally and physically.6 Just after their first anniversary, Simone was born. Although happy, her 21-year-old mother and 31-year-old father were still negotiating the combination of their lives and the competition of their expectations. Their address – 103 boulevard du Montparnasse – reflected Georges’ status, but its furnishings did not. Georges wanted to recreate the splendour of his father’s house; Françoise was young, provincial, and bewildered by the society in which she found herself.
Despite their differences (or perhaps because circumstances let them lay dormant), for a few blissful months the family fell into a harmonious rhythm: It was the role of their servant, Louise, to bathe and feed Simone as well as to cook and undertake other household chores. Georges went to work at the Courts of Appeal each morning, often returning in the evening with Françoise’s favourite flowers. They played with their baby before Louise took her to bed, ate dinner together when Louise had returned to serve it, and passed the evening in reading aloud and needlepoint. Georges took it to be his respons
ibility to provide his wife with the culture befitting her class; Françoise took it to be her responsibility to ensure that her learning never exceeded the quantity or kind befitting her sex.
Two and a half years after Georges’ and Françoise’s marriage, in 1909 they had still not yet received Françoise’s dowry when her father fled Verdun in disgrace. Gustave Brasseur’s bank was ordered into liquidation in July 1909, and everything was seized for sale, including the personal possessions of the Brasseur family. To add insult to ignominious injury, he was sent to jail, where he spent thirteen months before he was tried and condemned to a further fifteen-month sentence. His former influence still exerted some of its power, however; he was released early. So he moved to Paris, with his wife and youngest daughter, to live near Françoise and start over.
This turn of events meant that Françoise’s dowry would never be paid, but at first the family remained harmonious and hopeful even so. They were happy and their fortune seemed secure: Georges had a reasonable income from his work, and his own inheritance (although modest) had been invested in a way they thought wise. Georges’ attention to Françoise was tender, and she blossomed into a laughing and lively woman.7
Becoming Beauvoir Page 3
