You learn as much about Simone de Beauvoir from the way she writes her memoir as you do from what she tells us about the first twenty years of her life (this is the first of four volumes of her autobiography). She was given the nickname Castor, French for beaver, by one of her friends at university, for two reasons: one, because Beauvoir sounds something like the English word beaver, but also because of her relentless diligence, her need to work work work. The nickname stuck. This book is a good demonstration of why: it’s a kind of snowplow of facts and information pushed ahead by her pen (typewriter, more likely): steady, workmanlike, and powerful. There are few if any jokes or digressions.
This suited me fine because I’m comfortable processing information in much the same way that de Beauvoir provides it. I like information intake. Writing that requires some additional mental processing (such as poetry or philosophy) isn’t quite as satisfying to my mind as direct accounts like de Beauvoir’s. I couldn’t always keep track of the many names and details, but I could appreciate the way she uses everyone she meets and everything she learns as fuel for her engine of a mind. That’s an awkward metaphor, but it captures the idea: she was furiously determined to make sense of the world and to make something of her self, and all her energies and resources were directed toward these ends.
Having made this point I suspect I’ve managed to make de Beauvoir sound robotic or joyless, but while I’m sure she was formidable and had no time for fools, she was also a passionate lively person with an enormous appetite for knowledge, experience, and, most especially, other people. Fortunately for those of us reading this book, she is a good enough student of human nature, and a good enough writer, to provide fascinating portraits of all the people who captured her imagination—I’ll quote liberally from one such portrait at the end of this piece.
In her youth, de Beauvoir was an academic star, claiming one prize after another until she found herself sharing classrooms at the Sorbonne with the likes of Claude Lévi-Strauss and John-Paul Sartre. Her family had started off rich but had then come down in the world, and her parents saw her education as an accomplishment that might appeal to a potential husband, like playing the piano. She was compliant with this view until she realized that the conventional rewards of a conventional life—children, a house, money—held no appeal for her. Education went from being a means to an end to being the key to her future.
It was never an easy path. De Beauvoir’s parents, like the parents of other young women of her class, managed their daughter’s life to an extent that seems outrageous to modern sensibilities. They screened her mail and ruled on what books she was allowed to read until she was 18. Her mother saw it as her ultimate duty to help her daughter find a suitable husband. De Beauvoir’s close friend Elizabeth Mabille (whom she knew affectionately as Zaza) waged a kind of war with her own mother. She was in love with a fellow student, but when he would not commit it left her with no recourse but to capitulate to her mother’s will in the matter. The struggle left her so exhausted that she succumbed to a fever and died; this episode comes at the very end of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. The implication is clear: for a woman of de Beauvoir's class in the 1920s, living life on one’s own terms required certain psychological and emotional resources, along with enormous strength.
The French title of the book is Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée. The word rangé translates as tidy, steady, or level-headed. This word captures a lot more of de Beauvoir’s personality than “dutiful,” especially since de Beauvoir becomes steadily less dutiful during the course of the book. But she never ceases to be steady and level-headed.
Though de Beauvoir was a serious and determined student who had the fortitude to spend entire days studying, her existence was far from monkish. She went to concerts, plays, and lectures and even developed a taste for drinking cocktails and flirting with men in cafés, though, during the period covered by this volume, she most emphatically remained chaste:
I frankly detested the Roman Catholic religion; watching Lisa and Zaza fighting for their lives against ‘this self-martyring religion,’ I was more and more thankful that I had escaped from its clutches; in fact, I was still contaminated by it; the sexual taboos still haunted me to such an extent that I longed to become a drug-addict or an alcoholic, but never for a moment did I contemplate sexual indulgence.
A reason to investigate subsequent volumes, perhaps, is to find out how and when she overcame this taboo.
But perhaps the finest thing in the book is de Beauvoir’s accounts of her numerous friendships. When de Beauvoir made a new friend it was as though she were taking the next step in her own evolution—she would catalog the person’s various qualities and traits, but she also had a way of adding their ideas and experiences to her own. She learned them, like books. I could cite many examples of this phenomenon, but my favorite was the one I was waiting for but wasn’t sure would be covered in this volume: her friendship with Sartre. I discovered it just 20 pages from the end—it was worth the wait. Here are some samples.
‘He never stops thinking,’ Herbaud had told me. This didn’t mean that he cogitated over formulas and theories all the time: he had a horror of pedantry. But his mind was always alert. Torpor, somnolence, escapism, intellectual dodges and truces, prudence, and respect were all unknown to him. He was interested in everything and never took anything for granted. Confronted with an object, he would look it straight in the face instead of trying to explain it away with a myth, a word, an impression, or a preconceived idea: he wouldn’t let it go until he had grasped all its ins and outs and all its multiple significations. He didn’t ask himself what he ought to think about it, or what it would have been amusing or intelligent to think about it: he simply thought about it.
= = = =
We used to talk about all kinds of things, but especially about a subject which interested me above all others: myself. Whenever other people made attempts to analyse me, they did so from the standpoint of their own little worlds, and this used to exasperate me. But Sartre always tried to see me as part of my own scheme of things, to understand me in the light of my own set of values and attitudes.
And finally:
He certainly had no intention of leading the life of a professional literary man; he detested formalities and literary hierarchies, literary ‘movements,’ careers, the rights and duties of the man of letters, and all the stuffy pompousness of life. He couldn’t reconcile himself to the idea of having a profession, colleagues, superiors, of having to observe and impose rules; he would never be a family man, and would never even marry. With all the romanticism of the age and of his twenty-three years, he dreamed of making tremendous journeys: in Constantinople, he would fraternize with the dock-workers; he would get blind drunk with pimps and white-slavers in sinks of iniquity; he would go right round the world, and neither the pariahs of India nor the monks of Mount Athos nor the fishermen of Newfoundland would have any secrets from him. He would never settle down anywhere, and would never encumber himself with possessions: not merely in order to keep his freedom of movement, but in order to prove how unnecessary possessions are. All his experiments were to benefit his writing, and he would sweep aside all experiences which would in any way detract from it.
No other passages in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter are as lyrical or as moving. I can’t claim to know that much about either de Beauvoir or Sartre, but it’s wonderful to think that two people could form such a mutually satisfying life partnership and at the same time enhance and amplify each other’s talents to such an extent.
