Not read

This was an interesting biography, but it seemed like a response to previous scholarship on Beauvoir, and I don't know enough about her to understand that sort of commentary. But, that being said, it was still a decent intro to Beauvoir's life and work. ( )

I liked this biography of Simone de Beauvoir very much. It was my first in-depth search into who she was, and this was terrific. What a fascinating and accomplished person! ( )

Simone de Beauvoir produced a massive body of work. Not only did she do it while being one of the preeminent scholars of her youth (and later) but also while playing a major part in being the architect of existentialism and modern-day definers of feminism.

This book does not only play a key part in defining Beauvoir for who she was by delving into recent discoveries, e.g. her correspondence with Claude Lanzmann, but also by showing how media, in extremely anti-feminist and patriarchal senses, tried to display de Beauvoir as a kind of sidekick plaything for Jean-Paul Sartre.

The woman Beauvoir became was partly the result of her own choices. However, Beauvoir was acutely aware of the tension between being a cause of herself and a product of others’ making, of the conflict between her own desires and others’ expectations. For centuries French philosophers had debated the question of whether it is better to live life seen or unseen by others. Descartes claimed (borrowing Ovid’s words) that ‘to live well you must live unseen’.

Sartre would write reams about the objectifying ‘gaze’ of other people – which he thought imprisoned us in relations of subordination. Beauvoir disagreed: to live well human beings must be seen by others – but they must be seen in the right way.

This book weaves together what de Beauvoir stood for, believed in, constructed, changed, and championed, throughout her life. It’s a chronological book where Kirkpatrick has gone to lengths to excise de Beauvoir from the myths that have sadly followed her legacy around. Kirkpatrick shows, with clarity, how both magazines and translators have misconstrued and obscured what de Beauvoir created. Here is one example:

In spring 1953 the first English translation of The Second Sex was published. Blanche Knopf, the wife of the publisher Alfred Knopf, had heard people talking about it when she was in Paris. Her French wasn’t good enough to assess the work herself; she thought it was some kind of intellectual sex manual so she asked a professor of zoology to write a reader’s report. H. M. Parshley wrote back praising it as ‘intelligent, learned, and wellbalanced’; it was ‘not feminist in any doctrinaire sense’. The Knopfs wrote back: would he like to translate it? And please could he cut it down a bit? (Its author, Knopf said, suffered from ‘verbal diarrhea’.) In French, The Second Sex was 972 pages long. In correspondence with Knopf, Parshley said he was cutting or condensing 145 of them – deleting nearly 15 per cent of what Beauvoir said.

Parshley had no background in philosophy or French literature, and he missed many of the rich philosophical connotations and literary allusions of Beauvoir’s original French, making her look much less rigorously philosophical than she was. He also cut sections and translated material in less- than-innocent ways. The hardest hit section was the one on women’s history, where he deleted seventy- eight women’s names and almost every reference to socialist forms of feminism. He cut references to women’s anger and oppression but kept references to men’s feelings. He cut Beauvoir’s analysis of housework.

When she saw what Parshley had cut, Beauvoir wrote back that ‘so much of what seems important to me will have been omitted’. He wrote back saying that the book would be ‘too long’ if he didn’t cut it, so Beauvoir asked him to state outright in the preface that he had made omissions and condensed her work. But he was not as forthright as she hoped.

In America the book was not billed as an ‘existentialist’ work because Blanche Knopf thought existentialism was a ‘dead duck’; she had, in fact, asked Parshley to play it down in his preface. When Parshley’s preface appeared he said that since ‘Mlle de Beauvoir’s book is, after all on woman,not on philosophy’ he had ‘done some cutting and condensation here and there with a view to brevity’.‘ Practically all such modifications,’ he writes, ‘have been made with the author’s express permission.’

In a 1985 interview Beauvoir said that she begrudged Parshley ‘a great deal’. (A new English translation, with the missing pieces restored, would not be published until 2009 in Britain, 2010 in America.)

I recently reviewed Deirdre Bair’s Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir, that only to a limited extent works as commentary on Bair’s biography of de Beauvoir. Bair makes it clear that de Beauvoir wanted to present anything but a one-dimensional picture of herself; Kirkpatrick comments on the memoir by including correspondence and diary entries to flesh everything out, to paint a final picture.

I do not think Kirkpatrick claims to have painted a final version of de Beauvoir as she clearly recognises her subject to have been a multi-faceted being, as with most humans. This is how Kirkpatrick paints her: an extraordinary human who downplayed her own role in different areas of life, while constantly changing herself, á la Epicurus.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, unknown, Simone de Beauvoir
Kirkpatrick does not shy from displaying de Beauvoir’s mental riches, achievements, and critique.

When discussing that Sartre incorporated de Beauvoir’s ideas in his Being and Nothingness and criticising him for parts of his book and philosophical theory:

[…] claiming that Sartre ‘stole’ Beauvoir’s ideas is problematic, both historically and philosophically. Historically, it is problematic because their relationship was one of ‘constant conversation’ and mutual (if not exactly reciprocal) intellectual encouragement. And philosophically, it is problematic because both Beauvoir and Sartre were steeped in French philosophical sources that neither of them bothered to cite in their works, let alone claimed to own.

An additional difficulty arises because initially Beauvoir was the kind of philosopher who thought that what mattered about a philosophy was not who had the idea; what mattered was whether it was true or not. In the 1940s, she would be very critical of the concept of ‘possession’. But she was also very critical of Sartre. Later in life she would realize that the idea of possession plays an important role in the perpetuation of power, and who is remembered by posterity. Being and Nothingness contained a concept that Beauvoir and Sartre had discussed together throughout the 1930s. It was present in When Things of the Spirit Come First and went on to inform Beauvoir’s later work in powerful ways. But it was Sartre who would become famous for it: bad faith.

In her memoirs Beauvoir said that ‘we’ discussed bad faith when describing the emergence of this concept in their thinking in the 1930s. As Sartre described it in Being and Nothingness, bad faith was a way of fleeing from freedom, which consists in over- identifying with either ‘facticity’ or ‘transcendence’.

Facticity stands for all of the contingent and unchosen things about you such as the time or place in which you were born, the colour of your skin, your sex, your family, your education, your body. And ‘transcendence’ refers to the freedom to go beyond these features to values: this concerns what you choose to make of the facts, how you shape yourself through your actions. For Sartre, bad faith arises when facticity and transcendence are out of joint in a way that makes an individual think they are determined to be a certain way. He gave the famous example of a waiter: he is in bad faith if he thinks his facticity – i.e., the fact that he is a waiter – determines who he is. The waiter is always free to choose another path in life; to deny this is to deny his transcendence. On the other hand, if the waiter thinks it doesn’t matter that he is a waiter when he applies to be a CEO, then he is in bad faith for the opposite reason: he has failed to recognize the limits of his facticity.

This might sound trivial – but what if you replace the word ‘waiter’ with the word ‘Jew’ or ‘woman’ or ‘black’? Human history is full of examples of people reducing other people to a single dimension of their facticity and, in doing so, failing to recognize their full humanity. In 1943, it was crystal clear that that habit did not only belong to humanity’s past. But Sartre didn’t make this ethical move in Being and Nothingness. Nor did he give a satisfactory answer to the ethical problem of objectifying others there. Rather, he said that we must not take ourselves to be determined by our facticity – because whatever the conditions of our existence, we are free to make the most of them.

Already in the 1930s Beauvoir was convinced that this was wrong. Sartre thought human beings were free because whatever their situation they were free to ‘transcend’ facticity by choosing between different ways of responding to it. Her challenge was this: ‘What sort of transcendence could a woman shut up in a harem achieve?’ There is a difference between having freedom (in the sense of being theoretically able to make a choice) and having the power to choose in the actual situation where your choice has to be made. She would go on to articulate her philosophical criticisms in two philosophical essays in the 1940s, Pyrrhus and Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, but in the meantime she had to deal with the fallout from She Came to Stay in her personal life.

Simone de Beauvoir, photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Their relationship was interwoven, to and fro, throughout their lives:

In the memoirs Beauvoir said that the only thing that might have changed her mind about joining this bourgeois institution was children. And while in her teens she expected to be a mother she no longer foresaw this as a possible future: she had come to see childbearing as ‘a purposeless and unjustifiable increase of the world’s population’.58 Whether for rhetorical or genuine reasons, Beauvoir frames her decision not to have children in terms of her vocation: a Carmelite nun ‘having undertaken to pray for all mankind, also renounces the engendering of individual human beings’. She knew she needed time and freedom in order to write. So, as she saw it, ‘By remaining childless I was fulfilling my proper function’.

So, instead of marrying, Beauvoir and Sartre revised the terms of their pact: their relationship had become closer and more demanding than it had been when they first made it. Now they decided that although brief separations were permissible, long solitary sabbaticals were not. Their new promise was not life- long; they decided they would reconsider the question of separation when they entered their thirties. So although Marseille would separate them, Beauvoir left Paris on a firmer footing – with a clearer future – with Sartre.

Simone de Beauvoir with Claude Lanzmann, left, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Simone de Beauvoir with Claude Lanzmann, left, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
This book contains many elements of de Beuvoir’s life: love, academia, writing novels, critique, her extreme ups and downs with people, for example Nelson Ahlgren…

This book is very well constructed: its elements are in place and paint a full picture. de Beauvoir stands as a full human being in this book, which is both sobering and cleansing; this book is not a hagiography, thank Bog.

I recommend to read this book and also Sarah Bakewell’s brilliant At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. ( )

Becoming Beauvoir: A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick is an important and interesting update on Beauvoir's life and philosophical thought. Much like her belief that one is always becoming her life's story is also always becoming.

Although I have read all of her work that is in English translation as well as previous biographies, I think this biography would be fine for someone new to her life's story. I do think at least some general grasp of French existentialism of the period would be helpful but again I don't think it would be necessary. In bringing new material into contact with previous biographies, Kirkpatrick's book serves as a different type of biography from the rest while also serving as a bit of an addendum.

There is a lot less philosophical analysis here than I expected but I'm not sure that is entirely a bad thing. This is still a biography first even if part of its purpose is to correct previous impressions that her thought was derivative of and unilaterally influenced by Sartre. There is enough general discussion of ideas from her diaries along with dates that clearly show that many of what became known as Sartrean ideas were either hers first or concurrently but separately. Once they met and started their relationship, I think it is disingenuous to believe that she suddenly quit having original ideas. More likely is that they generated ideas together and, as much due to the times as her willingness to publicly anoint Sartre as the philosopher, left much of the philosophical writing (as in what the philosophical community would consider philosophical writing) to Sartre.

Some readers might want more of a gossipy book with more scenes about life in Paris, but there is enough of her life here to illustrate how she lived her theory, so to speak. I'm not sure what including more street life would do other than make it more palatable for the portion of the public that really looks for that rather than ideas. That said, I will agree a bit more would have been nice but I think Kirkpatrick included enough to make the points as she was making them.

One of the things that can make reading Beauvoir's works difficult in the sense of formulating some kind of unified thought is that she was always less concerned with some single monolithic static philosophy than with a dynamic and changing one. That is why what can seem contradictory between early writing (even in the diaries) and later writing isn't always so. Yes, sometimes she is likely guilty of being less than open in either or both instances one might look at, but more often she is being truthful in each case based on who she was and what she believed at each time. The parts of her thinking that stayed relatively consistent was attention to grappling with the ethics of the relationship between self and other, the ethics of existentialism. While she shifted on what might qualify as ethical she never lost sight of trying to understand and articulate that position.

I recommend this for anyone interested in de Beauvoir, Sartre, Existentialism, 20th century philosophy, and feminist thought. Depending on your avenue into her world, different parts of the book will likely speak more powerfully to you. I haven't touched on it but the use and integration of the personal and the philosophical in writing is throughout the book and reading it makes us appreciate her contribution to the relatively recent trend toward such writing being more accepted.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )