23FC 207.
24SS 330.
25SS 644.
26Claire Laubier (ed.), The Condition of Women in France, 1945–Present: A Documentary Anthology, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 1.
27SS 607.
28SS 641, 644.
29SS 645.
30Cited in SdB to Sartre, 19 January 1940, LS 262.
31SS 724–5.
32SS 310, 311.
33MDD 148.
34SS 442.
35Cited in PL 327.
36SS 816.
37SS 37. Beauvoir did not deny that women could authentically love men monogamously or children maternally. But the necessary condition for doing so wasn’t monogamy or motherhood per se, but the situation in which particular women live those vocations. However, many of her first readers were so shocked by her claims that they were blinded to their nuances.
38André Rousseaux, ‘Le Deuxième Sexe’, Le Figaro littéraire (1949), 12 November. Ibid. p. 210.
39Emmanuel Mounier, L’Esprit, December 1949.
40FC 200.
41See Ingrid Galster, ‘“The limits of the abject”: The Reception of The Second Sex in 1949’, in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer, Oxford: Wiley, 2017, p. 40.
42Cited in Galster, ‘“The limits of the abject”, p. 39.
43SS 127.
44This section is indebted to Manon Garcia’s excellent discussion of Beauvoir’s method in The Second Sex in, On ne naît pas femme, on le devient, Paris: Flammarion, 2018, p. 93.
45See Garcia, On ne naît pas femme, p. 109.
46George Eliot, Middlemarch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 159.
47On Beauvoir’s phenomenological method in The Second Sex, see Garcia, On ne naît pas femme, p. 124 ff.
48‘Simone de Beauvoir: Le Deuxième Sexe’, actualité du livre, Institut National de l’Audovisuel, France. https://www.ina.fr/audio/PH806055647/simone-de-beauvoir-le-deuxieme-sexe-audio.html
49This letter, dated 29 January 1958, is cited in Marine Rouch, ‘“Vous êtes descendue d’un piédestal”: une appropriation collective des Mémoires de Simone de Beauvoir par ses lectrices (1958–1964)’ Littérature 191 (September 2018): 72.
50Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women and Philosophy, trans. Trista Selous, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 34.
51See, for example, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, who argues that Beauvoir’s reliance on Hegel made her work ‘androcentric’, to the extent that it ‘sometimes verges on being misogynist’. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, trans. Linda Schenck, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
52C. B. Radford, ‘Simone de Beauvoir: Feminism’s Friend or Foe?’ Part II, Nottingham French Studies 7 (May 1968): 44. On ‘energetic anger’ see Margaret Crosland, Simone de Beauvoir: The Woman and Her Work, London: Heinemann, 1992, p. 359.
53Kathryn T. Gines, ‘Comparative and Competing Frameworks of Oppression in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35 (1–2) (2014): 251–73.
54Beauvoir, ‘Introduction to Women Insist’, trans. Marybeth Timmerman, in FW 250.
55Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, p. 28.
Chapter 13
1See ‘Chronologie’, MPI xcviii.
2‘It’s About Time Women Put a New Face on Love’, Flair 1(3), April 1950: 76–7. Included in FW.
3‘It’s About Time’, FW 76.
4‘It’s About Time’, FW 78.
5‘It’s About Time’, FW 79.
6SdB to Sartre, early July 1950, Lettres à Sartre, p. 370.
7SdB to Sartre, 2 September 1950.
8SdB to Sartre, 20 August 1950, LS 474.
9FC 245.
10TALA 434.
11SdB to NA, 30 October 1951 TALA 434, 435.
12SdB to NA, 30 October 1951, TALA 436.
13FC 267–8.
14SdB to NA, 9 November 1951, TALA 440.
15Sylvie Chaperon, ‘The reception of The Second Sex in Europe’, Encyclopédie pour une histoire nouvelle de l’Europe, 2016.
16SdB to NA, 3 December 1951, TALA 446.
17FC 170.
18FC 291.
19FC 268. On Sartre’s adoption of some of Beauvoir’s views by the time he published Saint Genet in 1952, see Webber, Rethinking Existentialism.
20FC 269.
21FC 296–7.
22FC 291.
23FC 291.
24Sartre, in ‘Sartre on Literature and Politics: A Conversation with Redmond O’Hanlon’, The Crane Bag 7(1), Socialism and Culture (1983): 83.
25Claude Lanzmann to SdB; Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir archives, cited in Rowley, Tête-à-tête, p. 214.
26FC 294.
27Gerassi interview with Sartre, 12 March 1971.
28See Josée Dayan and Malka Ribowska Simone de Beauvoir, text published by Gallimard: Paris, 1979; based on a film made in 1978.
29FC 297.
30FC 297–8.
31FC 298. See also Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, trans. Frank Wynne, London: Atlantic Books, 2012, p. 244 on becoming part of ‘the family’.
32Lanzmann, Patagonian, p. 265.
33Lanzmann, Patagonian, p. 259.
34The sale to Yale included 112 letters, however in 2008 Lanzmann referred to having 300. See Claude Lanzmann, ‘Le Sherpa du 11bis’, in Julia Kristeva, Pascale Fautrier, Pierre-Louis Fort, Anne Strasser (eds) (Re)Découvrir l’oeuvre de Simone de Beauvoir: Du Dexuième Sexe à La Cérémonie des Adieux, Paris: Le Bord de L’eau, 2008, p. 20.
35Cited in Franck Nouchi, ‘L’exil américain des lettres d’amour de Simone de Beauvoir à Claude Lanzmann’, Le Monde, 19 January 2018.
36See Introduction to SS 12.
37See Toril Moi, ‘While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex’, Signs 27(4): 1005–35 (2002).
38Blanche Knopf to Harold Parshley, 2 November 1951, cited in Rosie Germain, ‘Reading The Second Sex in 1950s America’, The Historical Journal 56(4) 2013: 1041–62.
39Parshley, ‘Introduction’, SSP vi.
40Parshley, ‘Introduction’, SSP x.
41Beauvoir, in SdB, Simons and Todd, ‘Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir’, p. 20.
42Clyde Kluckholm, ‘The Female of our Species’, New York Times Book Review, 22 February 1953, 3, 33.
43Charles J. Rolo, ‘Cherchez la femme’, The Atlantic, April 1953, 86.
44Margaret Mead, in ‘A SR Panel Takes Aim at The Second Sex’, Saturday Review, 21 February 1953.
45In the United States Beauvoir’s book appeared amidst a cluster of contemporary books about ‘woman’. Alfred Kinsey’s Sex and the Human Male was published in 1946 – and, just as Beauvoir had wished in her letters to Algren – books were beginning to appear about female sexuality. Ashley Montagu’s The Natural Superiority of Women was published in 1952; Kinsey’s Sex and the Human Female and Mirra Komaraovksy’s Women in the Modern World appeared in 1953.
46Carol Giardina, Freedom for Women: Forging the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1953–1979, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010, 79.
47For more on the reception of The Second Sex in 1950s America, see Rosie Germain’s excellent article ‘Reading The Second Sex in 1950s America’.
48SdB to NA, April 1953, TALA 479.
49Lanzmann, Patagonian, p. 235.
50SdB to Sartre, summer 1953 (n.d.), LS 493.
51SdB to NA, 15 February 1954, p. 492.
52FC 323.
53FC 326.
54FC 328.
55‘Les prix Goncourt et Renaudot’, Journal les actualités françaises, 10 December 1954, Institut National de l’Audovisuel, France, https://www.ina.fr/video/AFE85007180/les-prix-goncourt-et-renaudot-video.html
56SdB to NA, 9 January 1955, p. 512.
57Colette Audry, ‘Notes pour un portrait de Simone de Beauvoir’, Les Lettres françaises, 17–24 December, 1954, p. 5.
58Beauvoir, ‘A Story I Used to Tell Myself’ [
1963], UM 159.
59FC 328.
60FC 282.
61FC 283.
62FC 328.
63A. Blanchet, ‘Les Prix littéraires’, Études 284 (1955): 96–100, here p. 98.
64G. Charensol, ‘Quels enseignements peut-on tirer des chiffres de tirage de la production littéraire actuelle?’, Informations sociales (1957): 36–45.
65G. J. Joyaux, ‘Les problèmes de la gauche intellectuelle et Les Mandarins de Simone de Beauvoir’, Kentucky Foreign Language Quarterly 3 (1956): 121.
66FC 328.
67Doris Lessing, ‘Introduction’ to M 9.
68M 48
69M 107.
70M 203.
71TALA 511.
72Lanzmann, Patagonian, p. 257.
73FC 336.
74SdB to S, late May 1954 [undated], LS 505.
75FC 361.
76FC 332.
77PW 7.
78‘What is Existentialism?’ PW 324.
79‘What is Exisentialism?’ PW 324.
80FC 358–9.
81LM 32.
82FC 487.
83I am not at liberty to cite the Lanzmann letters directly, but the letters in question are from August and September 1956, available at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. The quotation from C. Wright Mills is from The Power Elite, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 3.
84See Sandrine Sanos, Simone de Beauvoir, p. 117. Margaret Simons, ‘Beauvoir’s Ironic Sacrifice; or Why Philosophy Is Missing from her Memoirs’, forthcoming.
85TLM 130.
86This information is taken from 1956 (tome I) and 1958 (tome II) NRF editions of Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard).
87TALA 526, 1 January 1957.
88FC 398.
89Unpublished journal, 25 May 1958, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir archives, cited in the ‘Introduction’ to MPI ix.
90FC 443.
91See ‘Notice’ to Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, in MPI 1226, on the absence of what Philippe Lejeune called ‘the autobiographical pact’, by which the author commits to telling the reader the truth about herself (see Le pacte autobiographique, Paris: Seuil, 1975).
92‘Texte de Présentation de l’Édition Originale’, Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangée’, MPI 352.
93‘essai sur l’écrivain’, cited in MPI, ‘Introduction’, xv.
94FC 448.
95Lanzmann, Patagonian, p. 329.
96Lanzmann, Patagonian, p. 330.
97FC 614.
98Letter from a reader, dated 20 June 1959; cited in Marine Rouch, ‘“Vous êtes descendue d’un piédestal”: une appropriation collective des Mémoires de Simone de Beauvoir par ses lectrices (1958–1964)’ Littérature 191 (September 2018): 68.
99See Marine Rouch, ‘Vous êtes descendue d’un piédestal’, p. 72.
100Letter from a reader, dated 15 November 1959; cited in Rouch, ‘Vous êtes descendue d’un piédestal’, p. 71.
101MDD 360.
102FC 456.
Chapter 14
1In her published collection of letters from Sartre, Beauvoir records that his letter from 25 July 1963 was the last he wrote to her because from that point on they used the telephone during their separations. QM 304.
2SdB to NA, September 1959, TALA 530.
3FC 466.
4Lanzmann, Patagonian, p. 330.
5Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, trans. Bernard Frechtman, London: Four Square, 1962. First published in Esquire in August 1959.
6BB 36.
7BB 30.
8TALA 528, SdB to NA, 2 January 1959.
9‘Chronologie’, MPII xiv; xvi. We know from Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir’s ‘Chronologie’ that there are several surviving (unpublished) journals, extracts from which were published in MPI and II in 2018.
10Simone de Beauvoir, Extraits du journal, May 1959, MPI 349.
11Simone de Beauvoir, Extraits du journal, May 1959, MPI 349.
12FC 479–80.
13October 1959, QM 295.
14Sartre to SdB, October 1959 [undated], QM 297.
15FC 480.
16FC 511.
17FC 487.
18‘Preface to The Great Fear of Loving’, FW 84.
19SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, MPII xvii.
20FC 503.
21Nelson Algren, ‘People’, Time, 2 July 1956, p. 33.
22SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, MPII xvii.
23SdB to NA, 1 January 1957, p. 526.
24FC 506.
25See SdB to S, August 1958 (n.d.), LS 514.
26Cohen-Solal, Sartre, p. 419 ff.
27Cohen-Solal, Sartre, p. 428.
28SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, MPII xx.
29SdB to NA, 16 November 1960, TALA 538.
30Lamblin, A Disgraceful Affair, p. 148.
31SdB, in interview with Madeleine Gobeil, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 35’, Paris Review 34 (Spring–Summer 1965).
32See ‘Introduction’ to MPI xxxviii.
33SdB to NA, 16 November 1960, TALA 538.
34SdB to NA, December 1960, TALA 539.
35PL 220.
36The French text reads: ‘il faudrait plutôt expliquer comment certains individus sont capables de mener à bein ce délire concerté qu’est un système et d’où leur vient l’entêtement qui donne à leurs aperçus la valeur des clés universelles. J’ai dit déjà que la condition féminine ne dispose pas à ce genre d’obstination’.
37PL 221.
38SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, MPII xxii.
39David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, London: Verso Books, 2012, pp. 455–6.
40FC 606–7.
41FC 611.
42SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, MPII xxiii. Some of the stolen material reappeared subsequently in private sales.
43He wouldn’t stay there for long – in December he moved to 222 boulevard Raspail.
44ASD 306.
45Cohen-Solal, Sartre, p. 406.
46See Gary Gutting, Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, chapter 4.
47Although Friedan only admitted this later: see Sandra Dijkstra, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission’, Feminist Studies 6(2) (Summer 1980): 293–4.
48Cited in Gonzague de Saint-Bris and Vladimir Fedorovksi in Les Egéries Russes, Paris: Lattès, 1994, p. 282.
49VED 29.
50SdB to NA, December 1963, p. 555.
51VED 31.
52‘Maladie de ma mère’, ff. 254, 287, 311. Cited in ‘Notice’ MPII 1276.
53VED 24.
54VED 19–20.
55VED 76.
56ASD 135.
57ASD 75.
58SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, dates the submission of the manuscript to 7 May 1963.
59FC 199.
60FC 202.
61FC 202.
62FC 203.
63FC 202.
64Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Une interview de Simone de Beauvoir par Madeleine Chapsal’, in Les écrivains en personne (Paris: Julliard, 1960, pp. 17–37), reprinted in Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claude Francis and Fernand Gontier, Paris: Gallimard, 1979, p. 396.
65FC 674.
66Françoise d’Eaubonne, Une femme nommée Castor, Paris: Harmattan, 2008, p. 253. See also MPII 1017ff on ‘j’ai été flouée’.
67SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, MPII xxvi.
68Simone de Beauvoir, in interview with Madeleine Gobeil, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 35’, Paris Review 34 (Spring–Summer 1965). See also SLBdB ‘Chronologie’, MPII xxviii for information about dating.
69Letter dated 29 October 1964, cited in Rouch, ‘Vous êtes descendue d’un piédestal’, p. 81.
70FC 133.
71FC 133–4.
72Jacques Ehrmann, ‘The French Review,’ The French Review 37(6) 1964: 698–9, 699.
73G. Ménie, ‘Le Prix d’une révolte,’ Esprit 326(3) 1964 (March): 488–96, 493.
74Francine Dumas, ‘Une response tragique
,’ Esprit 326(3) 1964 (March): 496–502.
75SdB to NA, December 1963, TALA 556.
76Nelson Algren, ‘I ain’t Abelard’, Newsweek, 28 December 1964, 58–9.
77Nelson Algren, ‘The Question of Simone de Beauvoir’, Harper’s, May 1965, 136.
78See note in TALA 559.
79http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-litterature/2007-01-18/simone-de-beauvoir-ces-lettres-qui-ebranlent-un-mythe/1038/0/45316
80Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s, New York: 2013, 60. Vonnegut’s claim is based on Bair’s biography of Beauvoir.
81‘Preface to The Sexually Responsive Woman’, first published in English in 1964; no surviving French version; FW 97.
82See Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Eliane Lecarme-Tabone, ‘Introduction’, MPI xliv.
83Sara Ahmed, ‘Feminist Killjoys (and Other Wilful Subjects)’, Scholar and Feminist Online 8(3), Summer 2010: 4.
84SLBdB ‘Chronologie’, MPII xxvi.
85‘What Love Is – And Isn’t’, McCall’s 71, August 1965, 133. (In FW 100.)
86‘Sartre Talks of Beauvoir’, Vogue, July 1965, p. 73.
87‘Notes’ autour de Tout compte fait, MPII 973.
88‘Notes’ autour de Tout compte fait, MPII 978.
89‘Notes’ autour de Tout compte fait, MPII 997–8.
90ASD 275.
91‘The Situation of Women Today’, FW 145.
92‘The Situation of Women Today’, FW 133, 134
93‘The Situation of Women Today’, FW 139.
94‘Women and Creativity’, FW 158.
95‘Les Belles Images (par Simone de Beauvoir, Gallimard)’, La Cité, May 1967, p. 14.
96SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, MPII xxxi.
97ASD 144.
98BI 151.
99SdB Interview with Jacqueline Piatier, Le Monde, 23 December 1966.
100BI 183.
101SLBdB, ‘Chronologie’, MPII xxxi.
102ASD 414.
103See ASD 369 for Beauvoir’s discussion.
104ASD 142.
105‘Preface to Through Women’s Eyes’, trans. Marybeth Timmermann, FW 253.
106TWD 13.
107TWD 70.
108TWD 80.
109TWD 107.
110Henri Clouard, ‘La Revue littéraire’, Revue des deux mondes, March 1968: 115–24, p. 118.
111Clouard ‘La Revue littéraire’, pp. 118–19.
112Jacqueline Piatier, ‘Le Démon du bien: “La Femme rompue” de Simone de Beauvoir’, Le Monde, 1968.
113ASD 144.
114ASD 143.
Becoming Beauvoir Page 43
