America Day By Day

"It’s America Day by Day , which is a travelogue that Beauvoir wrote after she had shot to fame. In 1945 and 1946 she went to America to give a series of lectures on French literature and women writers in France. It was on that trip that she met one of her most famous contingent lovers, Nelson Algren, the American novelist. But she was shocked by America. Quite soon after arriving, people told her that whatever she did she shouldn’t write about race. And of course she couldn’t obey that imperative because she was too shocked by what she saw. This is an amazing travelogue. It shows the way she viewed the world when she travelled to other places. It captures that kind of in-betweenness that people feel when they’re not at home, but discovering something that they’ve longed to see for a long time. She loved American fiction and had excellent reading English. It’s this experience of going to a different culture and finding a lot to love about it, but also seeing injustice with all of the clarity of a foreigner’s eyes. People criticized Beauvoir’s fiction, especially, for being lessons and having too much philosophy. It’s an accusation she frequently faced and in reply she said that she couldn’t stop seeing the world philosophically. She was very much a philosopher who wanted to live her philosophy. That’s part of her disagreement with Sartre—that she didn’t think their concepts of freedom were equally liveable. So, yes, when she looks at the way people are treated in America she’s thinking about what it means to be reduced to a single aspect of your physically observable characteristics. She stood on the sidewalk with her mixed-race friends, Richard and Ellen Wright, and New York taxis passed her by. On the same day, she would go to parties in her honour with the great and the good of American intellectual life in New York. So she couldn’t stop, she couldn’t turn it off."