Word: beauvoirs
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...wild man of U.S. letters, Chicago's seamy-side Novelist Nelson (A Walk on the Wild Side) Algren avidly snapped at some old-bone subjects dangled before him in Manhattan by a World-Telegram and Sunman. Of his erstwhile great and good friend, French Authoress Simone de Beauvoir, who unwarily dedicated her latest existentialist idyl, The Mandarins, to Algren: "A good female novelist ought to have enough to write about without digging up her own private garden. For me, it was just a routine relationship, and she's blown it up." Of the present "pretty bad" state...
Punch Out a Meaning. At 48, Simone de Beauvoir is a handsome woman. She has never married, and her years-long liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has brought to birth only a bleak philosophy which says that it is up to each man or woman to punch out a meaning to life in a meaningless world that none ever sought. A not uncommon game among Paris intellectuals consists in trying to answer the question: How did Simone get that way? Her Parisian parents were Roman Catholics, her father a bookish lawyer, her mother a reserved middle-class lady. Simone...
...camp in 1941, they settled down in an unheated Left Bank Paris hotel, made the heated Café de Flore and the Deux Magots their workrooms, talked and wrote and wrote and talked until French existentialism was born. With limited assists from Philosophers Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir decided that life had no purpose, no meaning except what each man could find for himself in his own existence. To the young, hungry intellectuals of a shamed and broken country, existentialism seemed a revelation. Overnight Sartre became its high priest, Simone its No. 1 priestess...
...life generally will find the answers here in abundance. Her setting is Paris just after the liberation, her characters writers and intellectuals who live to talk and make love as though they were being put through their paces by an observant Kinsey. They also say just what Author de Beauvoir wants them to say and so have no fictional life of their own. The heroine, Anne Dubreuilh, is a Simone-like woman of 39, a psychiatrist married to a much older, Sartre-like writer. Their love life has long since ceased, but Anne tries a fling with an anti-Communist...
...talking are food and drink. But Anne, not so easily nourished, comes close to suicide-not only because of her broken affair, but because she has that old existentialist idea that life is empty. It is just here, in the very last paragraph of The Mandarins, that Priestess de Beauvoir chooses to suggest that existentialism is not simply a philosophy of pessimism. Just because life is essentially meaningless, she seems to say, it does not follow that each man and woman must live without developing his or her own meaning. But that meaning must connect the individual to the events...