Ambiguities of a Mental Marriage

...And de Beauvoir, when we turn back to her finest books—to her novel, The Mandarins, and her splendid book of memoirs, The Prime of Life—remains one of the better writers of her generation, seen across the devastating flow of La Nouvelle Vague...

...They were the nucleus of the group that became known as "the Sartrians" or "The Family," centered around what truly was almost a family magazine, Les Temps Modernes...

...In the end one is torn between a feeling of sad admiration for de Beauvoir as a woman of extraordinary loyalty, who endured so much so patiently with love, and a feeling of pity for someone who in public gallantly waved the banner of women's liberation yet could not preserve herself from the domination of a flawed genius...

...Her novels were on the whole better than Sartre's, and her polemical writings were ultimately far less prolix and more comprehensible than his...

...She does not spare us the details of the final physical burning out of Sartre and de Beauvoir, who both died of the excess of drugs and booze seemingly demanded by obsessional work patterns...

...There was always about it the touch of a "marriage of true minds," right from the time Sartre and de Beauvoir were competing at the Sorbonne as the most brilliant students in philosophy of their day...

...Nor does she fail to show us how the selfabasement of Simone's relationship with Sartre was repeated in her pathetic infatuation for Nelson Algren, who reeked with the self-protective machismo of a weak man...

...The question, of course, derives from the strange history of the relationship between this principal protagonist of women's freedom and a man whose behavior—taken apart from his statements— revealed him, even in terms of the French literary world, as a male chauvinist of exceptionally obnoxious egocentricity...

...The group was unstableinmany respects...

...It engages us in the intricate ambiguities surrounding the life of the woman who has often been regarded as the world's greatest, or certainly most influential, feminist...

...Indeed, theconcept is so rarely evoked among us that when American and British literary people talk of the Master, they invariably are referring to Henry James, although James never had the circle of disciples or the court of groupies that have attended the panjandrums of the French literary world...

...Bair has the necessary relentlessness of agoodbiographer...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that on one level Deirdre Bair's searching, compassionate book is a kind of oblique biography of Jean-Paul Sartre, and an examination of the peculiarly French phenomenon of the cher maître, the beloved master surrounded by disciples who become not merely intellectual echoes but also willing servants in many respects...

...Deirdre Bair has given us the best book to date on Simone de Beauvoir...

...In its own glancing way, it is also one of the most interesting books on Sartre, though it will win him few new admirers...

...In all the confusion of daily living, in all the agonies of physical decay, a hard gem-like flame burned on in Simone de Beauvoir as it did in, say, Wilde and Baudelaire through their last days of agonized confusion and decrepitude...

...Like Victor Hugo in the past, Sartre elevated himself into the role of master in a way no English-speaking writer has ever done successfully...

...But there was the other Family—or perhaps one should call it the Harem—in which Simone de Beauvoir, rather like a Moslem First Wife and never with decisive reluctance, presided over the female followers serving as Sartre's lesser wives and concubines until, in his decrepit closing years, their functions became more questionable and increasingly predatory...

...Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer—they all seem small fry beside Simone de Beauvoir, whose The Second Sex, if not the movement's Bible, is at least its Book of Mormon...

...Surely it is too simplistic, as Bair demonstrates in this careful, massive study, to portray the relationship of the two leading figures of French existentialism entirely in terms of personal or intellectual subordination...

...At the same time, Bair performs what has always seemed to me the most difficult feat of biography: to show the true nobility of a person, her essential greatness, shining through the wreck of a life...

...And de Beauvoir did in fact develop her own place as a writer...

...The gradations of their relationship, though, were complex...

...Yet one is always perplexed when confronting the legend of Simone de Beauvoir and the reality of her life: How far can we regard her as speaking with the universalizing force of an original and commanding mind, and how far should we see her as the priestess of that conventicleof the 1940s and '50s known as existentialism, with its headquarters on Saint-Germain-des-Prés...

...its more brilliant members kept peeling off, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Albert Camus did, to follow their own meteoric courses...