the prime of life – the first 100 pages

Its not hard, after the first 100 pages of the Prime of Life, to see reasons why Simone de Beauvoir’s  autobiographical writing might be so well regarded. We witness the personal and intellectual development of a woman with a finely tuned self-awareness, a development marked by an inclination both to question and to oppose (the latter sometimes at odds with the former, as the older and wiser author implies from time to time about her younger self) and with a roughly focussed, and optimistic,  appetite for knowledge and experience. Places, people, books and films are celebrated for themselves but also for their impact on her seriously undertaken mission to think out her considered understanding of the world.

One dynamic is of her and Sartre developing their ideas, their persona and their personalities, and their being as a couple. She has strong sympathy, but not full agreement, with his unfolding project to explore  the meaning of freedom and contingency; she is here less explicit about her own nascent intellectual projects. The account of the development of one major thinker’s ideas and his means of expression from the point of view of an equally talented intellectual with who he has an almost daily interaction is surely unique.

An example: (p30) “Sartre’s originality lay in the fact that while he granted the conscious mind a splendid measure of independence, he came down very heavily on the side of reality. … He would not accept the proposition that the human element in him could be duped by appearances, and he was too passionately attached to this world to write it off as mere illusion. …[he went to] unheard-of extremes in his total rejection of universals. To him general laws and concepts and all such abstraction were nothing but hot air: people, he maintained, all agreed to accept them because they effectively masked a reality which men found alarming.” [emph added]

But leaving aside her regular commentary on Sartre’s work and their unfolding more or less joint understanding of the world, the book moves from pleasure to pleasure.

Here she gently lampoons their younger selves (p18): “I too must write , in order to snatch that vision from obliteration by time. The self evident obviousness of our respective vocations seemed to us to guarantee their eventual fulfillment. Though we did not formulate it in such terms we were approaching a condition of Kantian optimism where you ought implies you can … so we put our trust in the world, and in ourselves. Society as then constituted we opposed. But there was nothing sour about this enmity; it carried an implication of robust optimism. Man was to be remolded, and the process would be partly our doing. We did not envisage contributing to this change except by way of books: public affairs bored us. We counted on events turning out according to our wishes without any need for us to mix in them personally.

On independence within a relationship (p54). “When I first met Sartre I felt I had everything, that in his company I could not fail to fulfill myself completely. Now I reflected that to adapt one’s outlook to another person’s salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.” This idea she took up in her first attempt at a novel, which she describes at p 87: “[the character Genevieve] did, however come to realize that no one could release her from the burden of supporting the weight of her own life and to this token of freedom she gave her consent.”

On travel & tourism (p71) “How zealously we pursued this idea of “Spain”! Like most tourists of our generation, we imagined that every place and town possessed a secret soul, some unchanging essential element that it was the traveler’s business to reveal. … we knew that the key to Toledo or Venice was not to be found by searching exclusively in the museums and monuments  to the past, but in the here-and-now of light and shade, the crowds and characteristic smells of the place, its special dishes. This is what we had learned from Valery, Larbaud, Gide, Morand and Drieu La Rochelle .. Gide declared that to drink a cup of hot Spanish chocolate was to hold all Spain in one’s mouth.”

On using material from life in one’s fiction p 88: “The art of fiction sanctions transposition of the truth precisely in order to avoid mere reportage, and to highlight some significant point which is not an abstraction but indissolubly rooted in actuality.” And on a related idea from Dos Passoss (p 113) “Dos Passos offered us, on the aesthetic plane, a compromise solution that struck as as quite admirable. He had worked out a bifocal perspective for the presentation of his main characters, which meant that they could be, at one and the same time, drawn as detailed individuals and as purely social phenomena.”

On freedom as discovery (p110): “[The success of a local teacher who promoted student initiative as opposed to mere obedience] bore out our most passionately held conviction: that freedom is an inexhaustible source of discovery, and every time we give it room to develop, mankind is enriched as a result.”

And a curio: “I have been faithful to thee Cynara, in my fashion.” which I and some Leonard Cohen reviewers link with the Bird on a Wire lyric although the connecdtion is indirect…