Word: beauvoir
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MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER (382 pp.)-Simone de Beauvoir-World...
Simone de Beauvoir was 20 when she indulged in her first ''orgy." She went to a bar with her cousin Jacques, to whom she was tacitly engaged, and had a dry martini, after which she smashed a few cocktail glasses. Arm in arm with Jacques ("I marveled at this physical intimacy''), she lived it up till 2 a.m. ("I found myself tossing off a créme de menthe") and then reeled home to mother. Mama was up, and in tears. She feared, says Simone, "that Jacques had dishonored me." Short years before. Mama de Beauvoir...
...amused incomprehension is likely to enfold U.S. readers trying to visualize the social climate in which Simone de Beauvoir rebelled against parental authority. As she depicts the French society of her girlhood, it was almost Oriental in its concern with losing face and in its rigid taboos. As a female emancipation proclamation, the Memoirs will also seem curiously dated to Americans, for Feminist de Beauvoir belongs uncompromisingly to the either-or camp on the marriage v. career question, and apparently consigns most of her sex to the vegetable bin of history. Nonetheless these graciously written memoirs carry distinct appeal...
...fact about Simone de Beauvoir that emerges most clearly from the Memoirs is that she lacks the classic French quality of mesure, or "nothing in excess." From the dutiful daughter she became the no-quarter feminist. From the total order of Catholicism, she moved to the universe of total absurdity embodied in atheist existentialism. Even travel, which ought to have broadened her mind, merely served to harden her. Thus, thinking Communism good, she went to Red China (The Long March) and found it a paradise; thinking the U.S. bad, she found America, Day by Day a demihell. The purity fetish...
...always a source of exasperation to me when I read about people like Simone de Beauvoir [I The Long March] who extol the virtues of Communism. It is remarkable that she returned to the "dirty" free world after her visit to Red China. Intellectuals of De Beauvoir's school of thought should return to the "lands of enchantment" where Marx is read instead of the Bible and love is superseded by a tractor...