Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  For the next few months’ Sundays the campaign was organized on her sofas. It was a triumph: they gathered 343 signatures and the ‘Manifesto of the 343’ was published on 5 April 1971 in Le Nouvel Observateur. Its message was simple:

  One million women get abortions each year in France. They do it under dangerous conditions because of the secrecy to which they are condemned, although the procedure, when carried out by medical professionals, is extremely simple. These millions of women are silenced. I declare that I am one of them. I declare that I’ve had an abortion.

  The signatories said that they had each aborted (although we don’t know for sure whether Beauvoir did and many other signatories had not120); they signed because they wanted women to have the right to do so freely and safely.

  The word abortion had never before been pronounced on French radio or TV. But now Colette Audry, Dominique Desanti, Marguerite Duras, Gisèle Halimi, Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau all claimed to have done the unspeakable. In addition to Beauvoir, many members of ‘the family’ signed too: Olga, Arlette, Michelle and Hélène all supported the cause. Unsurprisingly, the signatories were slurred as the ‘343 sluts’.

  15

  Old Age Revealed

  When Sartre and Beauvoir returned from Rome in September of 1970 Beauvoir was waiting for Old Age to come out and thinking about what should come next. Sartre’s health had not worried for her a while, but one Saturday evening in October when Sartre was at her flat with Sylvie – his Saturday nights were spent with them – he drank a lot of vodka and then fell asleep. The next morning he went back to his own apartment. But when Sylvie and Beauvoir took him for Sunday lunch (a weekly date at La Coupole) he was bumping into furniture. He’d had very little to drink at that point, so why couldn’t he walk well?

  When Beauvoir got back to her place she felt despair: she had had feelings of foreboding since the scare in Moscow in 1954, and Sartre was still smoking two packs of Boyards per day and drinking heavily. The next day Sartre seemed to have recovered his balance and he went to see his doctor, who recommended tests. The encephalogram came back normal. But he was on medication for vertigo, which made him dizzy, and their side effect was sleepiness. She tried not to fear the worst, but what if this was it?

  When Force of Circumstance was published in 1963 Beauvoir was 55 years old, and many readers were offended that she had not censored her discomfort with old age. She thought she understood why: people turned her into an image because they wanted to identify with the Simone de Beauvoir of their imagination, an icon unworried by mortality, untroubled by decline. They preferred not to face the reality of ageing and death; how dare she admit that she was afraid of it?1

  Figure 12 Beauvoir with Sylvie Le Bon and Sartre in the Piazza Navonna, Rome, August 1970.

  She had felt ‘Other’ as a woman, which contributed to her analysis in The Second Sex. But in the 1960s she began to feel ‘Other’ in another way: she began to feel old. Once again, her own experience made her wonder about the experiences of others. But it was taboo to talk about ageing and the old. The novelist André Gide, too, had wondered about this question, and asked (through his character La Pérouse) why books had so little to say about the elderly. His answer was that ‘it is because the old can no longer write them and because when one is young one does not bother’.2

  So Beauvoir decided to bother while she could. She started working on this question in the middle of 1967, going back to the Bibliothèque Nationale to study. She read biological and ethnological and historical accounts for the first half of the book, and in the second half – just like she had done in The Second Sex – she wanted to include lived experience. She went to retirement homes, she read memoirs written by people of advanced years and, as always, she read literature. The finished product drew on sources ranging from Alain’s philosophy to Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries, including Louis Aragon, Samuel Beckett, Charles Baudelaire, the Buddha, Chateaubriand, Confucius, Winston Churchill, Dickens, Diderot, Dostoevksy, Marguerite Durand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Erasmus, James Fraser, Judith Gautier, Gide, Mme de Grafigny, Hegel, Kant, Mme de Maintenon, Nietzsche, Proust, George Sand, Schopenhauer, Mme de Sévigné, George Bernard Shaw, Valéry, Voltaire – and Virginia Woolf.

  When Virgina Woolf was 58 she wrote in her diary:

  I loathe the hardness of old age. I feel it coming. I creak. I am embittered.

  The foot less quick to tread the dew

  The heart less feeling to emotions new

  Crushed the hope less quick to rise again

  I have just opened Matthew Arnold and I have copied out these lines.3

  In Old Age Beauvoir argued that not all ageing is equally hard, creaking or bitter because ‘old age’ does not refer to a single universal experience. Like becoming a woman, becoming old varies a great deal depending on the physical, psychological, economic, historical, social, cultural, geographical and family context of the individual in question. The situation of ageing dramatically affects the experience of it.

  Like being female or being pregnant, old age has an obvious biological component. But Beauvoir argued that it is also a cultural phenomenon. She was perplexed by the way society ignored age. In the case of women, she said, only half of the species have to live the secondary status they are assigned by sexism. But age is a fate that affects everyone, so long as they live a long life. Age as a biological fact is a universal human destiny – for those whose lives last long enough. But age as marginalization and loneliness is not.

  She used philosophy borne out of actual, lived experience to make her argument, as she did in the The Second Sex. She also demonstrated how ageism and sexism frequently work in tandem. The aged of both sexes are often barred from new projects and possibilities. But for men, age does not seem to have the same diminishing effect on erotic prospects.

  Her analysis in this work differed from The Second Sex in that it focused on economic scarcity much more than the first book had. It is not by chance, Beauvoir said, that people speak of both children and old men as extraordinary for their age: ‘the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men’. The child, however, represents the future, whereas the aged person is ‘no more than a corpse under suspended sentence’.4

  When seen in this way from without, it is little wonder that ageing can feel like incarceration from within. Beauvoir wanted to show the reader how the experience of becoming shifts with the passage of time. The past, Beauvoir said, became ‘heavier’ with age; it became more difficult to break free from past choices and make new projects. In youth we are full of dreams and possibility; with age, she wrote, we realize that some of the dreams we dreamt are ‘infinitely remote from the dream made real’.5 But we also realize that what gives life meaning – even at its bittersweet end – is ‘reciprocal relationships’.6

  Old Age was published in January of 1970, and quickly climbed the bestseller list. Once again, Beauvoir had tackled a taboo, drawing on a diverse range of experience that ‘old age’ can entail. She cited people who had experienced and reflected on growing old in writing, which meant her research drew mainly from privileged people’s experiences of ageing. But she thought she was justified in including literary sources because that enabled her to emphasize the role of subjective experience in her discussions of age as a social and political category. Age is such a category when viewed from without. But it must be lived from within, in situations that can be made better or worse.

  Again Beauvoir was accused of being unoriginal, writing a ‘second-hand’ book, a ‘compilation’7 that said nothing new, a ‘grandiose attempt at devising a thoroughly sophisticated philosophy of the aged individual based on the principles of Sartre’s existentialism’.8 One reviewer went so far as to claim that ‘Beauvoir does not have a subtle or original mind. […] She has apparently devoured whole libraries, but has digested them incompletely. […] she has swallowed the work of three men in particular (Marx, Freud and Sartre) uncritically.
’9

  She had, as a matter of fact, been publishing philosophical criticisms of all three since the 1940s. It is little surprise, then, that in her fourth volume of memoirs, All Said and Done (1972), she defended her originality in Old Age: In part I, ‘The analysis of this material, the reflections it aroused, and the conclusions I drew – all this was work that no one had done before me.’10 And part II, was ‘an entirely personal piece of work’, guided by her own questions: ‘what is the relationship between the aged person and his image, his body, his past and his undertakings?’ She read letters, diaries and memoirs, she interrogated herself; but, she said, ‘drawing the conclusions was entirely original work’.11

  Once again, she had drawn attention to behaviour that she thought was unethical. And once again, she was called unoriginal, derivative of Sartre, and incapable of understanding great men. So she defended herself in print, and decided to try to raise her ideas through other media, too. In 1974 she agreed to participate in a documentary film on old age. She rarely agreed to do anything on radio or TV, but she made an exception to discuss society’s treatment of the old and her own experience of ageing. In scenes in nursing homes she left viewers in no doubt that she considered this way of ending life inhumane. Sterile institutional settings were juxtaposed with scenes in her own flat in Paris, where she was surrounded by the material remains of her illustrious life – books, artefacts from around the world, photos of friends. The worst thing about death, she said, was that the future was closing before her eyes. In the final scene she is walking around a cemetery: death, she says, no longer horrifies her like it did when she was young. At 30 she could not imagine disappearing from the earth without horror. Approaching 80, she found herself more disgusted by the unknown life before her than the thought of it coming to an end.12

  In the early 1970s Beauvoir drew a tremendous amount of attention from ‘without’, and she had begun to draw criticism from some feminists for being ‘Sartre-fixated’ and for writing for a male periodical (Les Temps Modernes).13 She found these conclusions hasty and irritating, and it’s not hard to imagine why. Professionally, despite the fact that her work took different philosophical positions from those of Sartre she was still cast as his puppet, shadow or accomplice. Personally, the public knew little about her relationship with Bost, a fraction of the story with Algren, and next to nothing about her relationships with Lanzmann and Sylvie (not to mention her relationships with women during the war). She was dismayed by the ease with which people jumped to conclusions. And although this may come across as disingenuous given the way she presented their lives, the way that many readers and reviewers tended to define and dismiss Beauvoir looks not so much bothersome as punishing. When she called out the hypocrisy of her society, she was called sad, unoriginal and worse.

  Figure 13 Beauvoir at home.

  In 1971 Sartre had to have his teeth replaced with dentures, which he struggled with symbolically and practically: would he be able to continue his public speaking or would his own mouth be the end of it?14 For Beauvoir, it was an unavoidable reminder of his decline. By May, Sartre was staying with her more than usual because her flat was on the ground floor and the elevator in his building was out of order – he found it too tiring to climb ten flights of stairs. He turned up on the evening of Tuesday 18 May with the feeling that his legs were giving out. His words were not distinct and his mouth did not settle in its usual way. It was obviously a stroke, but she tried not to panic, reminding herself that she had seen friends make a full recovery. He agreed to see the doctor on Wednesday morning, but insisted on having his nightly whiskey. By midnight he struggled to take himself to bed; Beauvoir struggled to hold herself together.

  When they were finally seen by the doctor he said it was worse than October, and worrying to see these symptoms again so soon. Sylvie drove them back to Beauvoir’s flat that evening, and Sartre had fruit juice instead of whiskey. He was shocked and still not in control of his body: his Boyard cigarette kept tumbling from his mouth. Sylvie retrieved it and handed it back to him. But then he dropped it again. So the same cycle recurred, with wrenching repetition, throughout the evening. The next day his prescription was changed and the doctor advised rest and company; he shouldn’t be left alone. If he followed the doctor’s instructions, they said, he could recover within three weeks.

  By the following Wednesday he was walking and talking normally, but he still couldn’t play the piano or write. Beauvoir made it her mission to keep him off alcohol, caffeine and stimulants. He reacted to his decline with detached indifference, morbidly making light of his condition because he knew it wouldn’t last that long. Beauvoir took no solace from this. Her dread of her own death may have abated, but her dread of his had not.

  That summer he was due to spend five weeks travelling – three with Arlette and two with Wanda – while Beauvoir was with Sylvie. Beauvoir loved her travels with Sylvie, but leaving Sartre in this condition was difficult: each night in Italy she cried herself to sleep.

  But she remained politically active. She continued her feminist advocacy, becoming president of the movement ‘Choisir’ (Choose) in July 1971. She had co-founded it with Gisèle Halimi, Jean Rostand (an academic), Christiane Rochefort (a novelist) and Jacques Monod (a Nobel-prize winning doctor). The group had three objectives: to educate women about sex and contraception; change the French law on abortion, which had been in place since 1920; and to provide women who had had abortions with free legal defence.

  The same month, while in Switzerland, Sartre had a relapse – but forbade Arlette to tell Beauvoir. When Simone met him at the Termini station in Rome, his face was swollen because of an abscessed tooth but he seemed full of life; they stayed up until 1 a.m. talking. He had energy again and enjoyed Rome. He was taking his medicines and had restricted his alcohol intake to a glass of wine with lunch, beer with dinner and two whiskey digestifs. He was working on his biography of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, and talking about life as if there were decades left to live. Back in Paris he regained his interest in people and world events. He read and criticized the manuscript of Beauvoir’s fourth volume of memoirs, All Said and Done. By mid-November she had almost stopped worrying. The timing was good, from the point of view of her activism – the MLF was growing at a fast pace, and on 11 November 1971 she marched through Paris with thousands of women demanding the legal right to abortion.

  Proving Beauvoir’s point in Old Age that age affects men’s and women’s erotic possibilities differently, in 1972 Sartre started his last romance: with Hélène Lassithiotakis, a woman in her twenties. The same year Old Age was published in English. It had a scathing review in the Los Angeles Times, which dismissed it as careless and overly general – the reviewer was Nelson Algren.

  Now that Beauvoir was campaigning for abortion rights, she began to receive letters from women who claimed that they were fulfilled by motherhood and housework. Some were written in tones of aggressive rebuke; others encouraged her to see motherhood as more than servitude. So on 6 March 1972 Beauvoir published an article in Le Nouvel Observateur entitled ‘Response to Some Women and a Man’, writing that she was aware that motherhood could be chosen deliberately, and that she was ‘aware of the joy that children can bring when they are wanted’. She did not want to impose her way of life on all women, she said, since she was ‘actively fighting for their freedom: freedom to choose motherhood, contraception, or abortion’.15

  But she also thought that the respect motherhood was afforded was suspect, and that the reality was still beset by myths that damaged both women and children. Beauvoir pointed out that it was difficult in France, in 1972, to be an unwed mother. Many women chose to marry because they thought it the safe option; but ‘a child without a father is often happier than one whose parents don’t get along’.16

  Beauvoir declared boldly that she was for the dissociation of motherhood and marriage: ‘I am for the abolition of the family.’ This is the kind of sentence that, out of context, played well into the hands o
f Beauvoir’s conservative and ad feminam readers, who dismissed her as anti-maternal, unfeminine and even unfeminist. But in the same paragraph she defines the term ‘family’ in the following way: ‘the family is the intermediary by which this patriarchal world exploits women, extorting billions of hours of “invisible work” from them each year. In France, in 1955, forty-three billion hours were devoted to paid work, compared to forty-five billion hours devoted to unpaid work in the home’.17

  Beauvoir thought that women must be conditioned to accept this work as their lot. Since it does not come naturally to accept that one’s vocation in life is to wash dishes and do laundry, she said, something better must be found:

  Maternity is exalted because maternity is the way to keep women at home and make them do housework. Instead of telling a little two-, three-, or four-year-old girl, ‘You will be destined to wash dishes’, she is told, ‘You will be destined to be a mommy.’ She is given dolls, and maternity is exalted so that when she becomes a young woman she thinks of one thing: to get married and have children. She has been convinced that she will not be a complete woman if she does not have children.