A SCREENED LIFE

...de Beauvoir lived through the Thirties in the most profound ignorance of the political realities of the time, an ignorance all the more appalling in a woman who prided herself on her mastery of reality and on her up-to-date vision of the world...

...Certainly Mile...

...This untroubled ignorance of politics in the prewar years left them with a burden of guilt and a sense of frustration that do much to explain their later espousal of "commitment" as a moral imperative...

...Above all, The Prime of Life dwells on the literary and intellectual fashions that absorbed the French writers of Mile, de Beauvoir's generation, and they provide one of the principal interests of the book...

...She remarks quite seriously that one of the bleakest aspects of the Occupation was the absence of American films, and it was apparently a great treat when, on a visit to the unoccupied zone, she and Sartre were able to sit through a round of their old favorites...

...It recounts vacation trips to Spain and Greece and Italy and travels in the French provinces, most of them walking trips and bicycle journeys undertaken with an ease and audacity that evoke a world forever lost to a later era of affluent and overcrowded tourism...

...The focus of the two books is quite different, however, and they really deal with two separate worlds...

...The war and its aftermath tore some large holes in that mental screen, but the damage was quickly repaired, the adjustment was made with relative ease, and the question of examining events without the benefit of intellectual instruments guaranteed to distort them never came up...

...It tells for the most part a story of ambitious, provincial schoolteachers, which both Sartre and Mile, de Beauvoir were during the Thirties, and of meetings and friends in Paris, which remained the focus of their social and intellectual lives even in the years they were obliged to live elsewhere...

...It was only with the coming of the war and the Occupation that the real issues of politics and power made any dent in her consciousness, and it remains a question whether even these extreme events, shattering as they were to so many pet philosophical assumptions and much as they induced personal suffering and privation, really penetrated to the core of her outlook on life...

...By her own account, Mile...

...The world depicted in The Prime of Life is one that is still largely taken for granted by the author herself, and no comparable distance or detachment is possible...

...de Beauvoir has not really given us as clear an account of these years as she had of her earlier life in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she herself provides the reason...

...One is left with the impression that everything in Mile...

...It closed on her meeting with the man who became her mentor and lover and lifelong companion—Jean-Paul Sartre, later to emerge as one of the leaders of the postwar literary scene in Paris in his multiple role as Existential philosopher, novelist, playwright, journalist, and editor...

...She writes in detail about food and lodgings during that period and gives a vivid account of the intellectual life, especially in the theater and the cafes, that was sustained in the face of the German victory...

...This, together with her diary recounting the first days of the war and the glimpses she gives of meetings with Giacomet-ti, Picasso, Camus, Cocteau, and other luminaries of the Parisian intellectual world, give the book a permanent historical interest...

...The Prime of Life covers the period of 1929 to 1944, and thus deals with the years of the depression and World War II, when neither Sartre nor Mile, de Beauvoir had attained their postwar fame as writers and intellectual celebrities...

...In the Memoirs we were given a memorable portrait of a girlhood completely enclosed in the comfortable (if somewhat airless and unimaginative) milieu of the French bourgeoisie...

...But the discussion of public events is completely unreal...

...de Beauvoir's adult experience, from the most intimate or trivial personal involvements to the large issues of politics and society, reaches her through so fine a screen of dialectical analysis that no unwieldy or unforeseeable lump of reality has ever been able to upset her mental equilibrium for long...

...In any case, it is essential for any understanding of the subsequent ideological twists and turns in which Sartre and Mile...

...The analysis of her own work that Mile...

...de Beauvoir gives a detailed account of the impact that the works of Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Hemingway made on their first encounter and of the addiction she and her friends developed for Hollywood films—not only for the classic comedies of Chaplin and W. C. Fields, but for all the slickest and most superficial products that Hollywood turned out in the first decade of the talkies...

...In order to write . . . the first essential condition," she declares, "is that reality should no longer be taken for granted" (her italics...

...Far more interesting is her account of life in Paris during the Occupation...

...It was already clear from their published works that American novels and movies had played an enormous role in the literary development of Sartre and his fellow writers, and Mile...

...de Beauvoir indulged after the war to see the enormous mental gap that separated them from political affairs in the Thirties...

...That volume reached its logical conclusion when its heroine had emancipated herself from the values and conventions which governed bourgeois life in the Twenties even more firmly than they do today, and committed herself to an independent, if still rather vague, life of the mind...

...A good deal of The Prime of Life is also given over to the author's early literary efforts, which led finally to the publication of her first novel, She Came to Stay...

...The darkening political scene of the Thirties, with the rise of Hitler and the growing paralysis of Leon Blum's socialist government in France, the defeat of the Spanish Republic and the threat of a fascist regime at home—these and related developments in the international political sphere are also given a good deal of attention throughout the book...

...Much of this discussion is murky and dull in the extreme, dwelling as it does on the transformation of incidents and personalities, already described at length as they originally occurred, into literary strategies that do not always enhance their meaning or interest...

...de Beauvoir provides in this book confirms one's suspicion that neither people nor events are quite real for her until she has translated them into ideas...

...If one feels in the end that Mile...

...de Beauvoir's own books on America and China and the position of Sartre's magazine, Les Temps Modernes, on Algeria and the French Communist Party cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of the fool's paradise in which they passed the prewar years...

...de Beauvoir's autobiography, of which Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter was the first...

...Having broken with the values and assumptions of the middle class, she could write about her upbringing in that world with a refreshing and creative detachment...