Biographer Deirdre Bair wanted to write about a famous woman whose life would be an inspiration and guide for contemporary women.
After much consideration, she thought of someone who had ”had it all”-
Simone de Beauvoir, writer, 20th Century feminist icon and longtime companion to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. De Beauvoir, Bair thought, had balanced successfully a life of the mind, a career as a writer and a
”relationship of equals” with a brilliant man.
To research ”Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography” (Summit, $24.95), Bair employed a tactic she had used in writing her first biography, of Samuel Beckett: She interviewed her subject. Bair met with De Beauvoir repeatedly in Paris during the 1980s, before De Beauvoir`s death in 1986.
The meetings were informative and unnerving for Bair, a plain-spoken New Yorker, wife, mother and former university literature professor who came of age with the Vietnam generation.
”She was a no-nonsense person, and she had a ritual,” Bair said. ”She would pull out this great, big, funky Mexican glass and pour a jigger of Scotch, which I never really needed at 4 o`clock in the afternoon. And we couldn`t start working until I drank the Scotch.”
Bair also interviewed De Beauvoir`s family, friends and acquaintances, and studied French history to understand De Beauvoir`s conservative Roman Catholic roots.
Bair initially believed that De Beauvoir`s life story would be a model for women in her own generation.
”Here we all were, having read `The Second Sex` and `The Feminine Mystique` and having benefitted from the women`s movement, and yet all our lives were so confused.”
A dismaying discovery
Halfway through her research, Bair, was dismayed to realize that her subject and heroine had led a life quite different from what Bair had expected.
Instead of finding her the liberated woman hailed by De Beauvoir in ”The Second Sex,” Bair found a woman whose opinions and lifestyle had been dictated to her by a man who not only did not inspire passion in her, but also took mistresses throughout their nearly life-long relationship.
De Beauvoir`s most famous book, then and now, ”The Second Sex” was published in the United States in 1952. American women found it had a lot to say to them, and it quickly became a big seller. It gained a following that poured into the fledgling women`s movement of the 1960s, equal to that of Betty Friedan`s ”The Feminine Mystique.”
The effect of the scholarly, impassioned book was such that macho writer Norman Mailer even gave it a nod of sorts. He told Bair that although he never had read ”The Second Sex,” his first wife divorced him ”at once” after reading it.
De Beauvoir`s book analyzes male-female relations and the traditions of femininity. Beginning with a recitation of statistics, ideas, practices and remarks from recorded history, she reminds us of the disdain that Aristotle and other classical philosophers had for women, the lowly place women hold in the great religions and how men of letters almost universally scoffed at women throughout the ages.
All this forms a logical basis for her theory, which she expands on in the book, that in society a weight of historical tradition and male-oriented language binds and limits women within a definition as ”the other.”
The book is filled with poetic observations about the traditions of pregnancy, child-bearing, motherhood, marriage, prostitution, lesbianism and friendship between women. De Beauvoir also took strong and still unpopular stands, warning women against marriage and describing the child-bearing function as ”slavery to the species.”
Despite the effect her book had on the women`s movement in the U.S. and France, De Beauvoir did not associate actively with such causes until late in life. Always the icily logical former philosophy student, she said she took up the task of writing ”The Second Sex” only to examine herself.
”She was not a crusader; she was a crusader after the fact,” Bair said. A late feminist
De Beauvoir first associated herself with women`s causes in the late 1970s, motivated by a desire to get away from Sartre, who at the time was dying of cirrhosis of the liver and needed constant nursing care, Bair said.
”She took up feminism not in and for itself, but to get away from Sartre`s dying,” Bair said. ”She had a lifelong fear of sickness and dying.”
But after Sartre`s death in 1980, De Beauvoir never turned her back on any woman`s request, and she donated money to causes and publicly supported abortion in France, where it then was illegal, Bair said.
De Beauvoir said she wrote ”The Second Sex” seeking to ”explain myself to myself,” Bair said.
Bair`s biography gives ample reason why De Beauvoir would want to do that. Raised in a down-on-their-luck family by a conservative father and rigid, class-obsessed mother to find a husband, De Beauvoir flouted convention by studying philosophy, taking Sartre as a lover and then living with, but not marrying, him. She also took up socialism and existentialism and, always at Sartre`s side, met with communist leaders including Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung and Nikita Khrushchev.
De Beauvoir told Bair that she did not realize until years after those meetings with world figures how much her presence there depended on Sartre.
”She wouldn`t have been invited had it not been for him,” Bair said.
”At one point in our conversations, she said, `I never suffered discrimination, I never noticed it, until I realized: Of course not, I was with him.` ”
Bair said that was a rare admission from De Beauvoir, who persisted in believing that she and Sartre had had a relationship of equals, even while describing to Bair the ways that she unilaterally adapted herself to Sartre`s needs.
At one point, De Beauvoir abruptly ended an interview because ”she didn`t like my questions about Sartre,” Bair recalled.
”She would get angry when I couldn`t accept her view or her version” of the relationship, Bair said.
”It wasn`t until I started to write the book that I realized a pattern emerged, and it was a pattern of constantly putting herself second to him,”
Bair said. ”She was constantly saying, `Well, I didn`t believe in such-and-such, but Sartre persuaded me of the rightness of it,` or `I didn`t want to go there, but Sartre persuaded me to` or `It was too much for Sartre to make arrangements during the war, so I made them for him.`
Life of inequality
”It was distressing,” Bair said. ”I finally realized I wasn`t going to find the life of equality. They (Sartre and De Beauvoir) were equals in money because they shared everything. But in terms of their lives and in terms of their emotional relationship, I think one of the reasons it survived was she always knew when to pull back, when to stop. She gave everything.”
Bair got so angry about the situation that at first she couldn`t write, she said.
”I would find myself hunched over the computer, writing, and I would get so rigid with anger over Sartre and her (De Beauvoir`s) decisions regarding him that I could hardly straighten up. And I`d look at what I`d written, and it was so angry.”
Eventually, Bair took the advice of a friend and took up exercise-tap dancing-to relieve the stress.
”Whenever I felt that rage, I`d just put on the shoes and dance,” Bair said.
”I was feeling rage because I wanted her to be perfect. I started out thinking of her as the woman who`d made a success of everything. Finally I had to force myself to accept her decisions and her idea of herself.”
Bair, 55, decided to write the book without imposing any psychological observations or pointing out any patterns in De Beauvoir`s life.
”I feel it`s not up to me to superimpose a pattern on somebody`s life, but to let the pattern emerge on its own,” Bair said.
However, Bair did have some observations on De Beauvoir`s psyche that she did not insert in the book.
”What psychological terms would I use? I`d say her whole life was one of control, denial and sublimation from day one,” Bair said.
Budding intellectual
In her biography, Bair meticulously details De Beauvoir`s young life. As a girl, she was not attractive, but she was intense and a good student, and her parents determined to push her in school toward a teaching degree-at that time the refuge of unmarriageable women.
De Beauvoir went beyond her parents` expectations, and to their dismay, became a budding intellectual. By gritty force of will, she persuaded them to let her attend the university, where she studied philosophy, not then a field for women. There she met Sartre and other students who were destined to become part of a 20th Century intellectual and political movement known as existentialism.
At the university, De Beauvoir was such an intense student that Sartre and his friends nicknamed her Castor-beaver in French-for her busy ways. She kept lists of books to read and went through them rapidly, marking off those she found ”helpful.”
Intellectual ambition initially attracted her to Sartre, who was short and ugly but acknowledged as a genius by his peers.
Throughout her life, this ambition bound her to Sartre, even to the exclusion of her one passion, Bair said.
A true passion
The true passion of De Beauvoir`s life was streetwise Chicago writer Nelson Algren, whom she met during her first trip to the United States, at age 39. Their affair lasted for several years, during which De Beauvoir later said she experienced her first orgasm. But her intellectual link to Sartre was such that she ultimately left Algren, and, Algren believed, even betrayed him by publishing his letters to her.
”She always wanted to be with the best,” Bair said, ”and Sartre and his friends were the best. She was a woman of rigid behavior. Once she made up her mind that something was a certain way, she never changed her thinking.
”The idea of herself and Sartre became so important in her mind that when she had the opportunity finally to have a relationship as two equals, she backed out,” Bair said.
”Algren gave her intellectual stimulation and respect and physical satisfaction. . . . There was this possibility for the ideal relationship that she herself wrote about, and she let it go to hold onto the idea of herself and Sartre. That was more important to her than the actuality, than real life.”
After ”The Second Sex” was published, De Beauvoir was assailed by feminists who criticized her for writing about women as ”they” instead of
”we.” They also complained that while she set forth all kinds of advice about how women might lead liberated lives, she was not following her own advice.
”When women complained about the book`s language, she pointed out that our pronouns are patriarchal and that the whole language is patriarchal and can only be used as it exists today,” Bair said.
”She also said, `Listen, I made my feminist statement, and I am living my life the way I want to live it.`
”You have to respect her for that,” Bair said.
According to Bair, De Beauvoir`s lifestyle was a curious mix of scholarly severity and boozy revelry, which is one of the reasons De Beauvoir was not a more active feminist: She didn`t have time.
”She loved to go out with Sartre; she loved going to cafes and they loved to gossip. Through the 1950s and 1960s she got great pleasure out of that. . . . (They) liked to sit around . . . being intoxicated.” De Beauvoir, like Sartre, died of cirrhosis of the liver.
Despite that side of her, De Beauvoir could be quite rigid and never lost the cautious, middle-class sensibility instilled in her by her mother and aunts, Bair said. She truly believed in Sartre`s superiority and ungrudgingly assumed a second-string position when he took on lovers. She also was his vigilant bodyguard and proof-read and commented on all his writing, even while she was doing her own work.
Unfaithful love
Sartre did not return her devotion in the same measure and deeply hurt De Beauvoir more than once, though she never admitted it, Bair said. The worst blow Sartre dealt her was legally to adopt one of his young lovers, essentially making the lover his literary executor, without even telling De Beauvoir of his plans, Bair said.
”(De Beauvior) found out about the adoption the day it was to occur,”
Bair said. ”She found out about it through one of their friends, and immediately put on a smile and asked to be one of the witnesses, and later went out with them to toast the new adopted daughter with champagne.”
Bair was quick to say that her discoveries about De Beauvoir`s second-string personal status do not lessen the value of De Beauvoir`s ideas in
”The Second Sex.” Bair noted that upon reading the biography, New York writer Anna Quindlen said the lesson to be learned from Simone de Beauvoir`s life is ”Do as I say, not as I do.”
Bair said she finds De Beauvoir`s work and ideas as valid now as they seemed before she began her research. ”When I think of her life, I always think with respect,” Bair said. ”Here is a person who came from a background that was so repressed, and to think she could make the decisions she made. You have to marvel at the strength of character, the strength of will.”
Bair hopes her biography ignites new interest in ”The Second Sex” and in the ideals of feminism in general.
”It distresses me to hear young women say, `I`m not a feminist; we don`t need that anymore; it`s been won; Simone de Beauvoir is very old now,` because some of these same young women will get out in the work world and realize there is a glass ceiling and realize they are not getting the same pay, the same opportunities.
”If anything, I`d like this book to generate interest in the situation of women today.”
