Chapter 11 The Will to Live (1) Simone de Beauvoir

Natalie, one of Simone's young lovers, said that Simone was like a watch in a refrigerator.Nathalie despaired that Simone de Beauvoir hadn't given her all the love she wanted, but even so it could be said that she used the metaphor correctly.Simone, the "beaver," the giant Simone who influenced generations of women by her unmistakable example of strength and self-reliance, seems to be doing the same in her private life: industrious, laconic, indifferent; She is harsh and ruthless in her relationships with others. Simone was born in Paris in 1908 in an upper-class bourgeois family with an air of aristocratic stale conceit.Like many other writers, she also tasted the taste of family breakdown in her childhood.Her family's downfall had been sensational and literary—when the banker's grandfather declared a fraudulent bankruptcy, for which he spent fifteen months in prison, he turned his back on the family in bourgeois terms.Simone and her parents move into a modest apartment without running water, where, to make matters worse, they have to quit their servants.The father, a frustrated rightist, instilled in his two daughters a ridiculous sense of superiority, the pathetic contempt for human beings of an aristocrat poorer than a mouse.Over time, Simone begins to rebel against the bourgeois values ​​around her, yet retains that elitist sense of life.

Simone was haughty and considered superior to almost everyone, certainly not Sartre, whom she probably admired far more than he deserved.When the 21-year-old she took the philosophy final exam with the 24-year-old him, Sartre came first and Simone came second, but the judges were convinced that "she is the real philosopher". Sartre has always been more creative, Simone more rigorous.She should probably write more in prose than in fiction (her novels are poor), but in one of the few traditionally feminine weaknesses she has, she has always believed that the greatness of thought belongs to Sartre, and she only occupy a secondary position.

Once, Simone was in the climax of passionate love with American writer Nelson Algren, her middle-aged lover, but suddenly left him and returned to France-Sartre wanted her to help him revise one of his philosophy books manuscript.Simone then said to the stunned Algren, "Neither you, nor my life, nor my own work, is above Sartre's work." She returned to Paris, where she met Sartre Has gone on vacation with his rotating lover.In her devotion, in her acceptance of her chosen man as the main character (men as suns, women as planets), Simone carries on her cultural heritage—the ancient rules of gender.But there is something special about her example that makes her a new symbol of femininity, and that is her ability to construct herself as a human being.The archaic female sacrifice—a ritual of self-destruction like that performed by Zenovia, the wife of Juan Ramon Ximenez (like Sartre, a Nobel laureate)—is over.Simone pointed out that a woman can depend on others and survive on herself.

No doubt, thanks to her great ambition, her self-discipline and hard work, Beauvoir made that leap (her nickname "the beaver"—a hardworking little creature that works and builds—was Hence), but also thanks to the conditions of her time.Simone's teenager lives in the twenties, after the First World War—the war that ended nineteenth-century society—in Russia, where the Bolsheviks seem to be inventing the future of humanity, and the world is a dizzying one. In other parts of the world, the technological revolution is like a fire in the wind changing the face of the earth.Amidst all that change emerged a new kind of woman—the emancipated and free woman, two buzzwords.The days of corsets and ankle-length velvet petticoats are over; girls with boyish haircuts and bare legs are muscular and athletic; they play tennis, drive convertibles, and drive dangerous small cars. airplane.It was the frenetic and magical twenties, the fierce and tense thirties, an era of innovation.Society thinks about itself, and people are finding new ways of being human.The traditional bourgeois morality must be put to an end, all the excesses practiced in the enthusiasm of those years.Then, in the sixties, these seemingly new behaviors were rehearsed: free love, drugs, counterculture.

① Modigliani (1884-1920): An important painter of the Paris School of Painting in the first half of the 20th century—annotation. In the Montparnasse district of Paris, where Simone lived all her life, the pulse of the times was expressed with all its intensity: Trotsky, Lenin, Modigliani ① passed there; Cubist painters headed by Picasso and Surrealism There are savages and laughing troops (Breton, Aragon) who roam there, booing theatrical premieres, ramming the orthodox at dinners and public events—they do a kind of urban terrorism.Cocaine abounded in the bars, as well as experimental hallucinations (in 1935 Sartre injected himself with prickly ash, and for two years he was half-crazed—he said a locust tracked him down the street), amphetamines, and heavy drinking.In fact, Sartre's precipitous decline should have had a lot to do with his indulgent behavior - he had been drinking amphetamines and sedatives with good wine from a very young age.Simone also took excessive stimulant pills, especially excessive drinking, and died of liver cirrhosis at the age of seventy-eight.

Still, amidst so much turmoil, the world is naive.For example, Beauvoir and Sartre's desire to be famous ("I am as consciously young Sartre as one is young Berlioz or young Goethe") and the desire to "save the world through literature" has always been very clear.Who today would reasonably believe that literature can help save the world, or that the world can be saved in any way?The childishness of this effort is only matched by the degree of megalomania it implies.Because Sartre and Simone are indeed twin souls in this respect: narcissistic, self-centered, elitist, and unbearably cocky.In her novel The Lady Guest, Simone says that her two protagonists "shared the center of a world, and that they must explore and reveal that world as the first task of their lives", a pair of characters that is a reflection of her and An exact copy of Sartre (Beauvoir is surprisingly devoid of any imagination, and even in her novels she always talks about her own life).

That mission is fulfilled through words.Rarely have I seen people so dependent on language, so constructed by it and for it, as Simone and Sartre.From very young they have been writing and speaking a never-ending stream of syllables.Words uttered in a Montparnasse bar, or in an academy class for two, or in exhausting evenings with countless lovers, the boys and girls long to hear them speak, and equally long to be with each other. They make love.Words written in endless books, essays, articles, and endless eccentric correspondence.Great and magical discourse with which to build the world (Bauvoir's best work is her multi-volume memoirs, books on death and aging and, of course, that major feminist essay), and the mean, banal, Lying words; cruel and indecent words made public after their deaths with the publication of their letters and private diaries.

Because there are two Simones, two Sartres—two interpretations of that unusual couple.The first version fits the public eye and the image they want to present, especially because Simone is an obsessed letter writer who has been writing and thinking about the single topic of her own inner experience, and it is she who tries to construct own identity (and that of Sartre in addition), as a literary and historical achievement.She tells about herself, or translates herself.