When Beauvoir wrote her New Year’s greetings to Algren in 1957 she told him that she’d finished the book about China (saying with characteristic self-deprecation that it was ‘not too good’), and that now she was beginning something different: ‘memoirs of childhood and youth, trying not only to tell a tale but to explain who I was, how it came to make me who I am, in connection with the way the whole world in which I lived was and is’.87
Like The Second Sex, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter flowed out of her, taking eighteen months to write. She read through old diaries; checked old newspapers at the Bibliothèque Nationale. And she thought about what to do about people. She was happy to share her life – or her persona, at any rate – with the public; but would the others she wrote about be content for her to share theirs? She gave pseudonyms to Merleau-Ponty (for the part of the book where he was Zaza’s beau, but not for the part of the book where he was her fellow philosopher) and to Maheu, and to Zaza’s family. But she worried about what her mother would think.
In January of 1958 Beauvoir turned 50 and hated it – with much greater force than her usual discomfort at the thought of life ending. The Algerian War had intensified and Beauvoir became so obsessed with it, so disgusted to be French, that she couldn’t sleep and even literature felt ‘insignificant’; she worked on Les Temps Modernes to publish the testimony of Algerians and soldiers. Sartre, too, was intensely disturbed about politics, although not for the same reasons. On 4 November 1956, Soviet tanks had entered Budapest, killing over 4,000 Hungarians. He had wanted so much to believe in the Soviet Union, but there was no way to overlook this. Sartre denounced the Russians’ action in an interview in L’Express, but between the USSR and the worsening situation in Algeria, he was using so much corydrane that by evening his speech was affected and he had to drink to relax. Beauvoir wanted him to stop, and told him it was enough – sometimes angrily breaking glasses for emphasis.88 He almost always took her advice about literature but on this she couldn’t make herself heard: he didn’t want to listen.
In May, Pierre Pflimlin became Prime Minister of France. He was a Christian-Democrat known to be in favour of negotiating a settlement with the Algerian nationalists. On 13 May riots broke out in Algiers; right-wing members of the French army, led by General Massu, seized power in order to defend ‘French Algeria’. The next day, General Massu demanded that Charles de Gaulle should be returned to power, threatening to attack Paris if he was not. The government reorganized with Charles de Gaulle at its head and de Gaulle developed a new constitution. A few centre-left politicians and the communists opposed this coup – Sartre included – but the constitution would be put to a vote in September.
On 25 May, Claude Lanzmann was in North Korea, and Beauvoir, after taking refuge in Virginia Woolf – ‘read as an antidote, to return to myself’ – started to conduct another ‘appraisal’ of her life. She had finished the memoirs of her childhood; what should she write now? More fiction? Essays in the vein of Privileges (1955) and The Long March (1957)? She wanted to write a book that would be ‘more than the rest of [her] work’, that would compare ‘the confused “vocation” of her childhood with what she had achieved, by the age of 50’.89
Beauvoir and Sartre went to Italy earlier than usual in 1958, in June. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter was due to be published in October, and she was already starting to feel nervous about how people would react.90 From the very first volume of her life writing Beauvoir had been explicit that she was not making the usual autobiographical ‘pact’ with her reader.91 In the publicity blurb for the book she said that ‘one could perhaps say that I have reconstructed my past in the light of what I have become; but it is my past that made me, so by interpreting it today I bear witness to it’.92 In a piece in France Observateur on 4 June 1958, she overtly said that she used the style of a narration or story (récit in French) in order to avoid using theoretical terms from philosophy and psychoanalysis, but that she didn’t want to falsify it. She wanted to take the theme of becoming a woman, so central to The Second Sex, and write about how she became herself. Although she didn’t come out and say it in France Observateur, by 1956 she knew very well that her life was interesting to her readers (whether they agreed with how she lived it or not). Given her past history of writing philosophical texts and then ‘imaginary experiences’ in different literary forms, it is hardly a wild speculation to consider the possibility that she explicitly chose to write the philosophy of The Second Sex in a different literary form – about her own life.
While volume one of the memoirs was receiving a warm reception, the as yet untitled next volume was resisting a definite shape in her mind. She knew that the next period of her life would require a different literary form and treatment from that of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. It raised dissimilar questions, questions that were difficult intellectually and personally. Intellectually, she realized that she had always revered novels above other literary forms. ‘But now,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘I’m asking myself why.’ ‘With the benefit of hindsight,’ she wrote, ‘I must also speak about philosophy: why I didn’t do it.’ Personally, she wanted to write about ageing, loneliness and Sartre. How much should she say about him? Or, for that matter, about Bost, Olga, Bianca and Nathalie? Throughout May and June she hesitated between two options: fiction or a continuation of the autobiographical project that would take the form of an ‘essay about the writer’. In an interview in France Observateur she called it an ‘essay about herself’.93
Beauvoir returned to Paris in the middle of August, travelling with Sartre to Pisa and then driving back alone. She found it harder to say goodbye to him and wondered if her age was to blame; separations were becoming more difficult. Soon she was back in the Bibliothèque Nationale working on her memoirs, but her mind was already wandering on to another project. She wrote in her diary on 24 August that more and more she wanted ‘to write about old age’.94
While Beauvoir wrote and spent time with Lanzmann, back in Italy Sartre discovered that for ten years Michelle Vian had been having an affair with another man, André Rewliotty – she was leaving Sartre for him. Despite his own history of two- or even three-timing, he was distraught. He preferred playing the liar to being deceived. Lanzmann had also met someone else, and tried to hide it: she was an aristocratic woman, younger than Beauvoir. One night he returned to the rue Schoelcher later than usual. He crept up to their bedroom and found Beauvoir sitting upright in bed, her face sullen: ‘I want to know,’ she said.95
Lanzmann told her everything. She was immediately relieved, and he was surprised by her acceptance. Beauvoir proposed an ‘arrangement’: three nights with her one week, four with the other woman, and then the reverse on alternate weeks. Lanzmann thought his aristocrat would find this an appealing prospect – no more sneaking around, no more curtailed nights. But the aristocrat would have none of it: she wanted Lanzmann to herself.96
On the evening of 14 September Lanzmann took Beauvoir to dinner; the next morning she went to meet Sartre at the station. They spent the day talking; she already knew Sartre was exhausted because she’d seen his most recent newspaper article – it was clearly uninspired. The referendum – which would pass or reject de Gaulle’s constitutional changes – was just around the corner and Sartre was eager to get back to work but within days he came down with a liver infection. He worked himself for a 28-hour stretch even so: he had promised an article to the newspaper L’Express on Thursday 25 September and didn’t want to miss his filing deadline.
He collapsed and she edited his piece, re-writing parts to prepare it for publication. In the run-up to the election the police and North Africans regularly exchanged machine gun fire in the streets of Paris. In Algeria, ‘ten thousand Algerians had been herded into the Vel’ D’Hiv’, like the Jews at Drancy once before’. Beauvoir was exhausted: her neck was constantly tense and she struggled to sleep and to concentrate. One night she was visited by her ‘old horror’, despair, feeling that ‘only evil in this world is bott
omless’.97 But she kept trying to fight it.
On 27 September, the night before the referendum vote, Beauvoir addressed a crowd of 2,400 people at the Sorbonne. But the next day, it was defeat. On 28 September the new Constitution was approved by 79.25 per cent, and France entered the Fifth Republic. The new constitution expanded the executive powers of the presidency. Algeria was still French, but Algerians were given some of the political rights that they had been promised for over a century. Algerian workers were also given a curfew.
It was a rejection of everything they believed in, but it was the kind of defeat that spurred them into further action. However, it was also a serious blow to Sartre’s health. When Beauvoir finally persuaded him to see a doctor, the doctor said that Sartre had just avoided a heart attack. While they were in Rome Sartre was popping corydrane nonstop to work on a play. And now he still wanted to work on it, despite the fact that his body was sending him multiple warning signs: vertigo, headaches, verbal dyspraxia.
The doctor prescribed some medicine – prohibited drinking and smoking – and told him to rest. Beauvoir sat and watched him across her table in the rue Bonaparte: he didn’t know how to stop. She told him to rest, and occasionally he would accede. But the play, he protested – he had promised it by October, it needed to be done. So Beauvoir went to the doctor again, concerned that Sartre was going to kill himself right before her eyes. He spoke frankly with her, saying that Sartre was an emotional man who needed moral calm, and that if he didn’t slow down he wouldn’t last six months.
Calm! In the Fifth Republic? Beauvoir left the doctor and went straight to see the woman to whom Sartre owed his play: she agreed to postpone it – The Condemned of Altona – to the following year. Then she went home and told him what the doctor – and director – had said. He was not to overwork himself. She expected him to be incensed that she’d done all of this without consulting him; instead he took the news with unnerving passivity. The hardest thing about watching Sartre’s decline, she was beginning to realize, was that she was losing her thought’s ‘incomparable friend’; she couldn’t discuss her worries with Sartre because he was their subject.
Once Sartre was out of danger she let herself enjoy the reception of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, which was published on 6 October – it affected her more personally than her previous books had. Some critics complained that her recounting of daily life included too much tedious minutiae (who wants to hear the other side of silence?). Others compared her to Rousseau and George Sand – like her, writers who had taken to autobiography in their fifties.
Beauvoir had received letters following the publication of her other works, but this was different. Research by Marine Rouch has shown, based on the archive of over 20,000 letters Beauvoir received, that the publication of the memoirs dramatically changed Beauvoir’s readership and her relationship with her readers. From now on she would receive much more correspondence from ‘ordinary Frenchwomen’, who wrote effusive and sometimes intimate letters because they felt that the Simone of the memoirs was close to them: ‘You have descended from a pedestal […] you have become more human and your intellectual and cultural superiority no longer makes you so distant.’98
From these letters we learn that Beauvoir’s readers were surprised to imagine her cooking, hungry or cold, that her books were more expensive than those of her male contemporaries, and that it took longer for them to appear in inexpensive paperback formats than it took Sartre’s.99 Hundreds of readers wrote to her about how they, too, longed for a ‘justification’ of their existence or felt emptiness in their lives despite their ‘success’ as comfortably off wives and mothers. One reader even wrote about her attempt to kill herself.
Beauvoir’s memoirs also prompted women to return to The Second Sex, and to write to her about their experiences of reading and recommending it:
There are two kinds of women who read The Second Sex, and in lending it I have always been a little afraid: those who wake up, feel afraid and … go back to sleep and those who wake up, feel afraid, and can’t go back to sleep! The latter read all of your books and try to understand.100
Over time, the letters from Beauvoir’s readers also reveal that her care for women extended to replying to her readers individually. In some cases, she corresponded with individual readers for ten years or more, encouraging them to see the world through their own eyes, to find projects for their lives; some of these letters led to her supporting women’s literary careers, and meeting them in person. Her daily schedule was as rigorously disciplined as ever, but it included an hour a day for this correspondence.
Beauvoir had concluded Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter with the story of Zaza’s death, writing that together they had fought the ‘revolting fate’ that awaited them and that, for a long time, she ‘believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death’.101 And it was now – only now – that she learned the real reason behind Merleau-Ponty’s fall from grace.102
After publication, one of Zaza’s sisters, Françoise Bichon, wrote to Simone to explain the reasons behind the Lacoins’ refusal. They met in November, and Zaza’s sister showed Simone certain letters that she had received from Zaza. The truth of the matter was that the family had hired a detective to investigate their potential son-in-law – after all, in addition to their daughter’s life a dowry of a quarter of a million francs was involved – and the detective discovered that Merleau-Ponty was illegitimate. From the Lacoins’ Catholic perspective adultery was a mortal sin, and any alliance between their daughter and Merleau-Ponty was therefore untenable.
Merleau-Ponty promised to withdraw his suit if the Lacoins would keep their discovery discreet – his sister was engaged and he did not want a scandal to prevent her marriage. Zaza, however, was unaware of the investigation and its consequences. It was only when she was upset and confused by Merleau-Ponty’s sudden disinterest that her mother finally told her the reasons why. Zaza had tried to reconcile herself to her parents’ wishes. But by the time they realized how disastrous this decision was for their daughter, it was too late.
Nothing could rewrite Zaza’s story with a happy ending – but finally Beauvoir knew the truth. She wanted her writing to appeal to the freedoms of her readers, opening up new possibilities in their imaginations and paths in their lives. Who would have guessed that readers, too, could shine liberating light on her own?
14
Feeling Gypped
At the end of 1958, and the beginning of Beauvoir’s sixth decade, Claude Lanzmann left her. There is little material to draw from about the end of the relationship from her point of view; in Beauvoir’s published Letters to Sartre there is only one letter after 1958, dating from 1963; and there is a gap in letters from Sartre in the published collections as well, although we know that they didn’t switch to using the telephone during times apart until 1963.1 Her letters to Algren from this period only mention that she ‘felt the need of living like a bachelor again’.2 In the public account in Force of Circumstance her remarks are brief; she comments that they ‘drifted apart’, and that ‘the business of separation was difficult’.3 We know from Lanzmann that they allowed some space between them after separating, and then began the work of rebuilding a different kind of friendship. Lanzmann recalled that ‘there was never the least trace of bitterness or resentment between Castor and me, we ran the publication just as we always had, we worked together, campaigned together’.4
They went to see Josephine Baker and again Beauvoir was overcome by the effects of age: she could see in Baker’s face the wrinkled reflection of her own. That year she published an essay on ‘Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome’ in Esquire.5 She had recently read Nabokov’s Lolita and she was struck by how differently Brigitte Bardot was treated in America and in France. Bardot’s film And God Created Woman made a pittance in French cinemas, and a fortune on the other side of the Atlantic. She was convinced that it wasn’t just prudery that put off the French (since, she said, it wasn’t particular to them to ‘ide
ntify the flesh with sin’).
It wasn’t the real Brigitte Bardot that mattered, she said, but the imaginary creature she was on screen. Beauvoir thought that the director Roger Vadim had recreated the ‘eternal female’, by introducing a new eroticism that helped the myth survive the challenges of the time. Over the 1930s and 1940s the social differences between the sexes decreased. Adult women now lived in the same world as men, working and voting. So the ‘dream merchants’ of cinema had to improvise: they created a new Eve, she said, by mixing the ‘green fruit’ with ‘femme fatale’. Men could see that full-grown women were subjects in the world, so their fantasies adapted, shifting focus to younger women who did not challenge their object-state. It had not escaped her notice that Nabokov’s Lolita was 12 years old; one of Vadim’s films focused on a girl of 14. Beauvoir attributed the success of the sexualization of younger and younger women to men’s unwillingness to give up their role as ‘lord and master’. They still wanted to see women as things – ‘to do with as he pleases without worrying about what goes on in her mind and heart and body’.
Becoming Beauvoir Page 30
