Becoming Beauvoir: A Life

"Yes, let’s start with what I think is a remarkable book, Becoming Beauvoir by Kate Kirkpatrick . French existentialism is an obvious topic for biographers, because many of the French existentialists were living public lives—in cafés, in bars, in nightclubs. They had their love lives and kept diaries about them. They were politically engaged: in ‘68, they were out there in the streets, speaking from podiums. Many of them were also novelists and playwrights—think of Albert Camus. They’re attractive, interesting, active figures. They’ve got more going on in their public life than the typical philosopher who spends most of his or her life in a room writing, attending conferences, or giving lectures to students. Simone de Beauvoir has been written about a lot, and this is certainly not the first biography of her. Her book, The Second Sex , is an important landmark in the history of feminism. But within a philosophical context, she’s written about mostly in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre. The usual focus is on the interplay between Sartre and Beauvoir, who had this very public, ongoing relationship. They began as lovers who decided to have an open relationship at a time, just before the Second World War, when that was considered deeply shocking. Sartre talks about their relationship being ‘essential’ and all the other ones around them as ‘contingent.’ “I find myself attracted to biography in philosophy when it’s done well” There’s also this story that Sartre was the real philosopher and Simone de Beauvoir merely his companion. Although she was a brilliant writer, novelist and intellectual, some people have thought that she simply applied Sartrean existentialism and Satrean ideas to different social and political contexts, like politics, and in particular to the position of women. That is a myth that Kate Kirkpatrick debunks in this book. What she reveals—based on thorough research, including diaries and early writings of Beauvoir that haven’t been much discussed in English prior to this book—is that she’d already started thinking about some of the existentialist themes that are usually thought Sartrean some time before she’d met Sartre. So it wasn’t that she was just picking up Sartre’s ideas and applying them. If Kirkpatrick is right, the simple story that Simone de Beauvoir was following in the wake of Sartre is just implausible and possibly partly due to sexist assumptions. What also emerges from the book is that the story of their relationship was more complex and less sexual than it’s generally portrayed to be. Physically it ended quite quickly, and they were not passionate lovers for their whole lifetime. They were great friends, but Simone de Beauvoir had other very intense love affairs that were extremely important to her. She lived with Claude Lanzmann, for example, and was in love with the American novelist Nelson Algren. The story of her life is quite a complex one and reading the book makes you realise how easy it is to caricature someone’s life when you don’t have enough detail. If you only have a few titbits about Sartre and de Beauvoir’s relationship, it’s easy just to repeat those. Becoming Beauvoir is a good corrective. It’s also a very skilfully written book: it operates at a level that is intellectually high, but Kirkpatrick wears her scholarship quite lightly. It’s still readable and enthralling. I found Simone de Beauvoir considerably more complex than she had seemed to be. Just to take one example: she personally replied to the thousands of letters that she received from women after writing The Second Sex . That’s not advertised. It’s not the kind of interaction with people you’d expect from a busy, famous intellectual. She was operating at a personal level as well as a public one. There was certainly sexism involved. To some extent, she played into it, because she helped boost Sartre by playing herself down. But she was a critic of Sartre’s existentialism. She wrote ‘Pyrrhus and Cinéas’ as an improvement on his existentialism. Oddly that book—or extended essay—has only recently been published in an English translation and was not widely known outside of France. In Becoming Beauvoir we get a more complete story of what she was doing philosophically, I think. Sartre was a genius but deeply flawed in many ways, morally and certainly as a writer. Although he was awarded—and turned down—the Nobel Prize for literature, the majority of his philosophy is on the cusp of being intelligible. It’s not because it’s not well thought out, but he wrote a lot of the later work literally on speed. He didn’t revise it sufficiently, and didn’t really care to make things more accessible to the reader. So you get these lucid passages that are almost novelistic, and then suddenly you’re immersed in neo-Hegelian prose that’s like treacle. Simone de Beauvoir was certainly a better writer than Sartre, but she wasn’t as systematic a thinker, constructing an edifice of thought. Sartre was building a big system. So they’re different, they were doing different things. Going back to the biography, this period in the 20th century—from the 1920s through to the 1980s—is a fascinating time in world history, particularly in France. That historical context also comes through in the book. But, for me, it’s primarily about relationships and their intricacies and problems. Simone de Beauvoir is not claiming to be perfect, you can very easily see her flaws. She’s a brilliant person thinking all the time about how she’s living, and the limits of her freedom, and it seems to be all there to sift through, because she kept such extensive notebooks and diaries. Many have been published, but there are more notebooks, which those published accounts were based on, which have further details. Kirkpatrick has researched those notebooks as well as the published ones. And so we get different levels of understanding. There’s a public persona, but there is more going on behind that public persona. Great! She was living her philosophy and rethinking her philosophy in the light of experience. It’s a particular classical model of a philosopher, as someone who is trying to live and to understand the nature of human existence. Beauvoir was designing her life while living it, making a work of art out of her life. That’s what she was trying to do. I’ve already mentioned Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein— Wittgenstein was another philosopher who lived his philosophy. He was very much in that mould of intellectual honesty, of living a pure existence—in his case never telling a lie. For Simone de Beauvoir, it was about having authentic relationships and exploring the nature of what it was for her to be a woman, what it was to be a free human being in a particular epoch. For some other philosophers, the way they live and what they think about philosophically can be quite separated. Take the example of a lesser-known philosopher, Gottlob Frege. He was a brilliant philosopher of logic and on the side he was a virulent anti-Semite and racist. There’s no obvious connection between the two parts of his life whatsoever. Whereas with Beauvoir and Wittgenstein there’s a coherence in what they’re doing. Their life stories fit in with their philosophy. That is, I think, one justification for writing a biography of this kind of philosopher. One of the ways of understanding the world for both Beauvoir and Sartre was to put it into words. They wrote a lot, wherever they were. Sartre even called his autobiography The Words . He saw himself above all as a writer, unrestricted by genres. That was his fundamental choice in life, above being a philosopher. There’s something of that too in Simone de Beauvoir. Her letters and autobiography alone amount to more than a million words. She’s all kinds of other things, but she’s a writer. That is the way in which she understands the world, by communicating it in written words, even if just to herself. That said, if you look online, there are a couple of interviews with her on Open Culture and YouTube and it’s clear she was a superb speaker as well as a writer. She was a formidable and brilliant interviewee. There’s a level of seriousness in her conversation that you don’t often see. She was clearly an extraordinary person. I would. There are people who will say, ‘Well she didn’t hold an academic post in philosophy beyond a schoolteacher. What’s her system?’ Some people would say, ‘She’s a novelist, she’s an intellectual, she’s a feminist writer, she’s a social historian, she’s diarist, she’s a playwright, even. She’s all kinds of things, but is she a philosopher?’ It doesn’t really matter, because her ideas are philosophically interesting for sure, particularly her critique of Sartre’s existentialism , and the more famous The Second Sex, which is obviously hugely important, but dated in some ways. She knew she was writing for her time. She didn’t ever think she was doing something universal. Her philosophical contribution is a refinement of Sartre’s existentialism. Existentialists are obsessed with freedom. Sartre wrote as if anything were possible: whatever position you found yourself in, you could always think yourself out of it. Beauvoir was far more subtle in her recognition of the pressures that constrain what people can do and be. She gets criticised today for not being sensitive to issues of intersectionality or that she wasn’t aware of race or poverty to the same degree as some writers now. But she was far more sensitive to the complexities of actual lives and how those shape the choices people make than Sartre ever was. She said Sartre didn’t read much and even when he did, he didn’t seem to get the positions right. There’s a sense that he was a bit slapdash with his scholarship and just got on with his original ideas. Beauvoir is much more scholarly. She reads avidly and the list of books she read in her life is amazing, many of them in the original languages. “She was living her philosophy and rethinking her philosophy in the light of experience” Becoming Beauvoir is not just an outstanding philosophy book, it’s one of the best books I’ve read for a while. It’s of interest far beyond the narrow area of philosophy. Whether you love her or hate her, Simone de Beauvoir was a really significant cultural figure and it’s great to have such an interesting new biography of her. There is another biography that came out this year that I wanted to mention in passing too. This was Clare Carlisle’s biography of Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart . It’s very different in style—more poetic and more experimental. In a sense, she was trying to be a Kierkegaardian as she wrote about Kierkegaard. That was another interesting philosophical biography about an important figure published this year."