SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

I first became aware that Simone de Beauvoir was an exceptional writer when, as a youth, I purchased a paperback copy of Must we Burn Sade, and avidly read both her own biography-cum-exegesis of the notorious Marquis and the extracts from various of his writings that followed. Not only was the long introductory essay on de Sade of exceptional quality, it was all the more significant because the work of a woman, and no ordinary one at that, but a genius in her own right, ranking with the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

Certainly, subsequent perusal of her extensive autobiographies, including The Prime of Life and Force of Circumstance, confirmed me in this opinion; for few more intriguing and brilliantly-conceived autobiographies have ever been written, treating, as they do, of a myriad experiences, impressions, reminiscences, convictions, beliefs, portraits, contentions, and expositions - whether with regard to her own literary works or to various of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, on whom she lavishes much biographical attention. Only Stephen Spender's autobiography comes anywhere near, in my opinion, to evoking a similar wealth of manifold dimensions, albeit on a smaller scale.

Yet if Simone de Beauvoir is her own witness and critic, she is also very much a woman living for a man, and few men can have been blessed with the constant companionship of such a spiritual alter ego as Sartre, whose relationship with de Beauvoir lasted from youth to the grave and was, along with Dali's love for Gala, one of the great romances of the age, all the more significant for lying beyond the bonds of matrimony in a kind of petty-bourgeois concubinage of sexual liberation. So closely were these two lives intertwined, that it is impossible to think of Sartre without evoking thoughts of de Beauvoir, and vice versa. Birds of a feather flock together, and, certainly, these two philosophical writers of communistic leaning had much in common, so much, in fact, that they seem intellectual twins. In all their walks of life, from students to teachers, from novel-writing to play-writing, philosophy to autobiography, socialism to feminism, Marxism to Existentialism, France to the world, they complement and reflect each other, as inseparable as Siamese twins. Impossible not to be slightly envious of Sartre's luck!

And yet, whenever I read de Beauvoir, I remained conscious of the ideological gap that opened-up between us and, inevitably, I became contemptuous, in spite of my admiration for her literary abilities and temperamental resilience, of her deeply-entrenched left-wing allegiance. Not a communist, no; for, like Sartre, she values truth and intellectual liberty too highly to risk ever having to toe a party line. But again, like Sartre, a fellow-traveller and communist sympathiser nonetheless, and therefore at quite a remove from my own ideological position.

Force of circumstance ... you could argue? And, to be sure, one can hardly begrudge her these left-wing sympathies, earned, as they were, through historical expedience, and complementing her temperament. Is not the proliferation of autobiographical/philosophical writings, this century, a reflection of left-wing sympathies, a kind of petty-bourgeois opposition and/or alternative to bourgeois literature, a symptom of literary decadence? It is to me, at any rate, and I can well believe the sincerity of Simone de Beauvoir's sympathies, in light of her extensive autobiographical/philosophical commitments. Not for her the road of experimental or transcendental poetry that leads toward God. She prefers descent into the hell of anti-literature, though not, it has to be admitted, too far. For she stays well short of the Devil and his overtly communist allegiance, preferring, like Sartre, to cling to what freedom remains available to one in a liberal society ... in the interests of truth.

So basically one of my sort, only ... living under different conditions and with a very different historicity which seemingly precludes the development of a Centrist identity. Beyond Social Democratic allegiance, yes; but not capable of a Social Transcendentalist one, and all because of fate! Socialism with freedom, the freedom to develop culturally and spiritually - an ideal of both de Beauvoir and Sartre, impossible to realize except in the ideological guise of Social Transcendentalism, which is necessarily anti-Marxist, scorning dialectical materialism in the interests of dialectical or, rather, post-dialectical idealism, aligned not with the Antichrist but with the Second Coming, beyond all bourgeois realism in an 'above' rather than a 'beneath' sense, exactly what Sartre and de Beauvoir unofficially upheld in their heart of hearts while officially proclaiming, through force of circumstance, the exact opposite ... for the benefit of ideological credibility in the wake of Nazi occupation. Being spiritual in materialist terms, the extremist paradox of this highly paradoxical couple!

Doubtless, history will judge them as petty-bourgeois intellectuals who, together with Camus, Malraux, Koestler, and other such politically-conscious writers, clung to idealism in the face of ongoing materialism. I shall not condemn them for that, nor use de Beauvoir's extreme left-wing sympathies as a cudgel with which to attack her intellectual integrity and standing, along with the likes of Simone Weil, Agnes Heller, and Iris Murdoch, as arguably one of the greatest female intellectuals of the twentieth century.