Memoirs of a Female Mandarin

...Sartre and Camus...

...We are told of the suffering her precocious disillusion with religion set off, one of the early important crises of her life—told of it...

...The elder of two daughters, she grew up under the firm authority of a family sti-flingly...

...and I would always remain, my own master...

...It is as though the book had only a villain — and an abstract villain at that, the middle class of modern France—but neither heroine nor hero...

...was she really able to come into her own, free at last of guilt, unequivocally certain that from then on her true anthem would always be "Onward Feminist Soldiers," sung at a high pitch of crusading indignation...

...whom Simone tried to convert from conformity to revolt against the stranglehold of middle-class strictness unsuccessfully, and who therefore came to a bad end...

...for all her lack of rebellious stamina, seems a more charming, amusing, complex and interesting human being than the Univac apparatus of all the right answers to all the right questions, which Mlle, de Beauvoir makes herself out to have been—and hot self-critically, by a long shot—the telling influence in her formative years was her cousin Jacques, a heartening scorner of convention and sower of wild oats, a dissolute and rather feckless rake, who introduced her to the heady wonders of contemporary French writing—Alain-Fournier, Gide, Cocteau, Claudel, de Montherlant...

...It is a potentially fascinating story, however — that of a Frenchwoman born, in the 1900s, into a typically strait-laced and mean-spirited Parisian family, who remarkably managed to free herself from that stifling incubus of the French bourgeoisie, and attain intellectual and personal freedom only by dint of guts and a lively, supple, receptive mind...

...her account of it has so little individuality that it fails entirely to become a moving or touching saga...

...Nonetheless, this advance report seemed to promise an intriguing chance to walk arm in arm with the formidable remembering of an equally formidable bourgeois Paris upbringing, necessarily more interesting than her leaden-weight and pedestrian novels, and I felt that here, at last...

...From the earliest sections of the book...

...Aside from Zaza Mabille, who...

...Reviewed by Pearl Kazin Contributor, "Commentary," "The New Yorker" THE INFLATED REPUTATION of Simone de Beauvoir—as a novelist, not as the fearsomely erudite, fiercely embattled feminist philosopher of The Second Sex, or as a latter-day exegete of the Marquis de Sade, or as a once-over-lightly and catch-ascatch-can journalist dispensing high-minded misinformation on postwar America or Mao's China—has puzzled me more deeply with each new novel of hers that has appeared in this country...

...mindlessly dedicated to bourgeois respectability, thrift, conventionality, demanding of her a holier-than-thou obedience to all the desiccated forms of social and personal propriety so typical of this diehard milieu...

...Mlle, de Beauvoir has achieved nothing at all in their place...

...We are told with the utmost solemnity that from her earliest years, "I kept on growing and I realized that my fate was sealed: I was condemned to be an outcast from childhood...

...In an attempt to make the young Simone credible to the reader, she admits how obediently she toed the virtuous line defined for her by her parents, but hastens to add, "In reality I refused to submit to anybody: I was...

...but not made to respond, for Mlle, de Beauvoir writes of such spiritual turmoil as though she were preparing for a university seminar on the "Critique of Pure Reason": Nothing is trusted to metaphor, to dramatic suggestion, to emotion...

...Although she grants Jean-Paul Sartre a certain heroic stature, he appears only in the last 50 or so pages of this long book, and hardly has much room to move around, heroically or otherwise...

...By gainsaying both goals...

...by Simone de Beauvoir...

...Yet, ironically, all the fervor, excitement, ardor, wit of The Second Sex are absent here—only the challenge of a pyrotechnical display of scholarship and polemic seems to bring out the best in Mlle, de Beauvoir as a writer...

...Her undeniable ability to write with dramatic, intense originality, in other words, fails her completely where she needs it most—in novels, and in that literary form so close to fiction, the autobiography...

...It was therefore with a wary and incredulous eye that I read late last year, in a literary communique from Paris, about her "remarkable new volume . . . Memoires d'une Jeune Fille Rangee . . . which leads like a novel but is an autobiography, based on her private diary, of the conformist first 21 years of her life...

...We are spared no details in a hopelessly amorphous and disconnected portrait of her closest school friend, Zaza Mabille...

...Surely an honestly personal and passionate account of her childhood, adolescence and early maturity had to mean a livelier piece of work than that half-heartedly "fictionalized" roman a clef, The Mandarins, so much more clef than roman that without a gloss explanation of which name meant "Sartre," which "Camus," which "Koestler," it was impossible to know or care about the story she was telling...

...It is, of course, one of the most challenging, if familiar, stories of modern literature, but Mlle, de Beauvoir has told it so ineffectually, has made it so top-heavy with banality, so clogged with cliche discontents and predictable yearning, so totally devoid of even the slightest leavening touch of irony or humor about herself or anyone else, that, although one must of course admire the hard battle she fought and won...

...He was the first man she loved, though at an agonizingly platonic distance, and his decline and fall made for a sad period in her life...

...Her grasp of the concrete and the sensuous . . . is weak, her conception of character . . . static, her sense of drama . . . abstract...

...The curious contradiction in her talent has never been more evident—in a scholarly volume like The Second Sex she displayed a fiery, limber, shrewdly analytical style in the cause of woman's freedom, the kind of prose that in the case of other writers one would expect to find only in their novels, but which Mlle, de Beauvoir has never shown in hers...

...After losing every struggle to get through volumes like The Blood of Others, All Men Are Mortal and The Mandarins—the latter, her longest, least readable novel—I found my chronic Sunday-morning astonishment at American reviewing, as I slog through the Times Book Review, to be greater than ever...

...As Norman Podhoretz trenchantly put it some years ago, in a review of The Mandarins, "Mlle, de Beauvoir's . . . real talent is for the manipulation of abstract ideas, not the exploration of human relationships and the nuances of feeling...

...It is a surprising lapse for a philosopher—surely one reason for writing an autobiography is the opportunity, given by the enriching distance of years and experience, to comment from the vantage point of maturity on the disappointments and absurdities and petty tragedies and mountain-like molehills of youth—to comment, and to evoke as well...

...Mlle, de Beauvoir marshals page after page of evidence to prove how difficult it was to free herself from this deadly clutch, and how only her sense of personal superiority time and again gave her the will to rebel...

...Books were her only means of escape for a long time, particularly those her mother, scandalized, would snatch away because they were "too old" for Simone to be exposed to...

...And I could account for some of the reverential respect paid Mlle, de Beauvoir's lame excursions into fiction only by the cynical thought that the reviewers had confused the lady's own novelistic achievements with that of her much-publicized and infinitely more gifted colleagues...

...None of this is due to omission on Mlle, de Beauvoir's part—she leaves out none of the essential facts or, for that matter, the inessentials ("I was born at four o'clock in the morning on the ninth of January, 1908," the book starts out) about her fledgling and schoolgirl and jeune-fille and chrysalis-philosopher years...

...But so humdrum is her account of this tragic young man, of his ruinous self-sabotage and intellectual adventurousness, that he remains an insubstantial wraith for all the space she devotes to him...

...Only when she came under Sartre's aegis, when they were fellow-students in philosophy at the Sorbonne...

...Perhaps one reason why the Memoirs seem so tedious, lifeless, bloated with fatally humorless self-importance, is that she has stuck far too close to the record of everything exactly as it was...

...Now the Memoires have been translated, and the unfortunate truth is that the report from Paris was a bit too accurate —"Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter," to use the English title, does indeed read like a novel—like a novel, that is...

...I"d find some clue to the reputation whose raison d'etre has escaped me so far...