Back in November the New York Review of Books published an article entitled "A Woman's Work" about a new biography of the French icon Simone de Beauvoir, which positioned Beauvoir as a woman of great intellectual stature who had been overshadowed by her long-time companion and philosopher superstar Jean-Paul Sartre, although by all accounts she was a better philosopher than he was - Beauvoir, an early victim of sexist attitudes toward women and women's own self-imposed limitations, a neat way of making her fit in with the preoccupations of today's time. The problem with this convenient story is that it leaves unsaid the appalling truth about Beauvoir -- that she was a sexual predator of the worst kind, grooming some of her female high school students in Rennes for threesomes with her and Sartre, as documented in her own letters to Sartre and in the book Tête à Tête by Hazel Rowley – and instead perpetuates the legend that she carefully constructed for herself, hiding the complete disregard Beauvoir had for just about anyone who was not Sartre or herself. Beauvoir was certainly a great intellectual, but the analysis of her intellectual contributions should not come at the expense of concealing the great moral depravity of certain facets of her personal life.
She is not a precursor of the women’s movement rather than an advocate of the Simone-first movement. In Rennes the parents of a student named Natalie Sorokine complained that she had seduced their daughter and Beauvoir lost her teaching license for debauching a minor. Her best-known victim remains Bianca Lamblin, who later wrote a book about the affair and the psychological wound this inflicted on her. If Beauvoir did today what she did to those high school students, she would end up in jail for years.
Male monsters like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein were allowed to commit their crimes for so long precisely because the aura of such extraordinarily powerful people mesmerized and awed their entourage. Beauvoir is their female equivalent – the prestige of intellectuals in France, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, should not be overlooked. I find it a great blow to the MeToo movement that someone like Beauvoir, who documents her dalliances in her own journals and whose behavior was exposed by Hazel Rowley as early as 2005 in her biography Tête à Tête, is portrayed in any positive light in this day and age. About ten years ago Rowley’s book fell victim to the still strong Beauvoir mystique in France when a judge ordered the publisher Grasset, which was due to publish the French translation, to pulp almost all copies after a complaint by former Beauvoir lover Claude Lanzmann, taking advantage of stringent privacy laws in France. (Lanzmann having died in 2018, perhaps the time will come for France to explore Beauvoir’s life more carefully.) The MeToo movement hints that much is changing, but this article, most likely out of lack of knowledge of certain facts rather than a deliberate attempt at concealment, suggests that much yet has to change before we can see clearly some of the most famous figures of our time.
It is convenient amidst the rise of the MeToo movement to view Beauvoir as a champion of women’s rights and perhaps she was on an intellectual plane, although in reality Beauvoir chose a life with as few attachments as possible, which women caring for young children or aging parents and taking care of a home will not relate to. But this positioning of Beauvoir fits right in the mood of the times. It will help convince women to buy copies of Beauvoir’s new biography by Kate Kirkpatrick (which provided the motivation for the article and may well document the more horrifying side of Beauvoir’s personality). Yet the casual observer might frown at the retinue of students and former students that gravitated around Beauvoir and Sartre and the way they ostracized former friends like Albert Camus after a well-publicized fallout on French Algeria. In fact their behavior does not seem unlike that of cult leaders. Sartre and Beauvoir, all extraordinarily talented that they were (and their talent is not in doubt), dominated weaker souls who looked up to them and they used those admirers for their sexual gratification.
Yet Beauvoir does display an uncanny ability to place interlocutors under her spell in her interviews, and in many of the documents she left after her death in 1986. I was reminded of that when I came across her interview in a volume of the Paris Review interviews called Women Writers at Work. She made some very unusual life choices to avoid commitment - always renting, living separately from Sartre, not having children - so that she could focus on her craft. In her Paris Review interview she dropped a few tidbits that ensured most readers browsing through the interview would feel a certain kinship with her at one point (in my case it was her answer when she asked if she was a good teacher, of course there was no mention of the scandal one of her students' parents had created when they had discovered the involvement of their daughter with a female teacher: "I don't think [that I was a good teacher], because I was interested only in the bright students and not at all in the others, whereas a good teacher should be interested in everyone.") She also came across as a hard worker, because she wrote every day except for a few months of vacation every year. She strongly opposed torture by the French in Algeria during the conflict of independence between Algeria and France, including at a time when it was not fashionable.
She took unpopular stances because they were the right thing to do (in particular, which is not said in the interview, to support an inquiry into the disappearance of a young French mathematician who was helping the anticolonialist side, Maurice Audin, and the brutal sexual torture and rape of a young Algerian woman named Djamila Boupacha, a scathing indictment of the practices of the French Army toward Algerians at the time.) In public, Beauvoir proudly stood on the right side of history. But she also displayed reprehensible behavior toward some of the young lost women that gravitated toward her and Sartre, and it is high time people stopped associating her with feminism. Beauvoir was for herself and her own posterity far more than for the women's cause. I don't think one can treat - almost destroy - young women the way she treated - almost destroyed - Bianca Lamblin and Natalie Sorokine without having a profound, deep-seated contempt for people who were not as intellectually gifted as she was, people that she clearly only viewed in the context of her own personal gratification so that she could have a circle of younger people fawning over her and Sartre, and Beauvoir definitely should be held accountable for that, even if only posthumously, even if Sartre bears some of the responsibility.
Beauvoir's positive contributions certainly deserve to be told, but that the NYRB perpetuates the Beauvoir mystique instead of also shining light onto the far less savory parts of her personality is a regrettable error from a serious literary publication that has accustomed its readers to greater thoughtfulness.
