a Penguin Book
8/6
THE PRIME OF LIFE Simone de Beauvoir
The Prime of Life Simone de BeaU\•oir was born in Paris (abo...
67 downloads
942 Views
33MB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
a Penguin Book
8/6
THE PRIME OF LIFE Simone de Beauvoir
The Prime of Life Simone de BeaU\•oir was born in Paris (above the Cafe de Ia Rotonde in Montparnasse) in 1908. Her father was a lawyer of conservative views. She took a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 19:19 and was placed second to Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her firm friend. She taught in the lycies at Marseille and Rauen from 1931 to 1937, and from 1938 to 1943 was teaching in Paris. After the war she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movemenL Her first novel, L' Invitee, was published in 1943, and in an essay, Py"hus et Cinia.s, published in the following year, she developed some of the major themes of existentialism. Le Sang des s Romains- yes, it really was he, don't worry, and not just someone rather like him. In the first place he was as liable to turn up there as anywhere; and in the second, he told them his name. Just like that. A moment or so later, when everyone had forgotten about me, the telephone girl came out of her corner and asked one of the four chaps who were still there for a light. Not one of them could oblige her. She stood there and said, with coquettish impertinence: '\Vhat, four men and not a match between them?' I raised my head at this; she glanced in my direction and said hesitantly: 'Well, five.' Then she asked me what I was doing there. 'I want to sec M. Parent- I mean, Paulhan.' '\Vell go on up then,' she said.
296
I climbed two storeys and found myself facing a taU, swarthy man with a soft black moustache going discreetly grey. He was a somewhat large man, wearing a light-toned suit, and looked like a Brazilian to me. This was Paulhan. He took me into his private office, talking all the time in a refined, high-pitched, almost feminine voice: there was something caressing about it. I sat down gingerly on the very edge of a leather armchair. Without any preliminaries he said to me: 'What's all this misunder· standing about letters? I don't get it.' I told him: 'The misunderstanding originated with me in the first instance. I never anticipated appearing in your review at all.' He said: '\Veil, it was impossible- to begin with, what you sent us was far too long; it would have lasted us. fm· six months, and the reader would have been lost after the second instalment. But it's an admirable piece of work.' This was followed by several laudatory phrases of the sort you can imagine for yourself·- 'remarkably individual tone,' that kind of thing. I sat there, very ill at ease, thinking that after this he would find my stories poor stuff by comparison. You will tell me that Paulhan's judgement ls unimportant. But in so far as I was capable of being flattered by his good opinion of Melancholia, I found the prospect of his dismissing my stories decidedly unpalatable. Meanwhile he was saying to me: 'Do you know Kafka? Despite the differences between you, Kafka is the only modern writer who comes to mind when I consider this work of yours.' Then he got l.IP, gave me a copy of Mesure, and said: 'I'm going to give one of your stories to Me.rure, and keep one myself for the N.R.F.' I said: 'They're a bit ... er ... outspoken. I deal with what might be described as, hmm, sexual problems.' He smiled with an indulgent air. 'In matters of that sort Mesure is very strict,' he told me. 'But we at the N.R.F. are prepared to publish anything.' Then I revealed to him that I had two others. He seemed delighted. 'Fine, fine!' he said. 'Give them to me. Then I can pick and choose for something that'll suit the issue, eh?' So within eight days I am to take him my two remaining stories - if I'm not too busy commuting to finish The Room. Finally he said: 'Your manuscript is with Brice Parain at the moment. He doesn't see quite eye to eye with me about it: he finds parts of it dull and full of longueurs. But I disagree with him here: in my opinion such shadows are essential, in order to throw the brilliant passages into clearer relief.' I was caught like a rat in a trap. Then he added:' But your hook will certainly he accepted. Gallimard simply cannot fail to take it on. Anyway, I shall now take you along to see Parain yourself.'
So we went down one floor and found Parain, who nowadays looks as though he might be mistaken for Constant Remy, except that he's rather more hirsute. 'Here's Sartre,' said Paulhan. Parain was all cordiality. 'I thought it must be. There's only one Sartre, after all.' He addressed me in the familiar second person right from the start. Paulhan went back to his own office, and Parain took me through a smoking room full of leather armchairs and odd characters, out on to a sunlit garden terrace .. We sat down in white-enamelled chairs, by a polished wooden table, and he began to talk to me about Melancholia. It's hard to tell you his words in detail, but here is the gist of what he said. He read the first thirty pages, and thought: Here's a character drawn like something out of Dostoevsky. He'll have to go on as he begins, and undergo all sorts of extraordinary experiences, simply because he's outside the normal social pattern. But from page 30 onward disappointment and impatience set in: too much dull heavy stuff with a Populist slant. He found the night scene in the hotel (the bit involving the two servant girls) far too long-drawn-out, since, as he said, any modern writer can do that sort of thing standing on his head. The scene on the Boulevard Victor-Noir struck him as over-lengthy, too, though the argument between the man and the woman there he regarded as 'riptop.' He wasn't particularly impressed with the Autodidact, who he thinks is both dull and over-caricatured. One the other hand, he confesses himself most impressed with my nausea motif, and the lookingglass episode (when the fellow catches sight of himself in a mirror), and the intrigue itself, and the scene where all those solid respectable citizens are raising their hats to one another and making conversation in the brasserie. That's as tar as he's gone: he hasn't read any more yet. He thinks the form I've chosen (i.e., the diary) a mistake, and feels it would be less obtrusive if I were not so deternrined .to 'weld' chunks of Populism on to the sections he regards as 'fantasy.' He wants me to cut as much of the Populism as possible- the dull passages about town life, and phrases such as 'I've eaten too heavy a dinner at the Brasserie Vezelise'- and all the botched-up linking passages [soudages]. He is very impressed with M. de Rollebon. I told him that in any case there was no more soudage after Sunday's entry. (All that remains are the sections entitled 'Fear,' 'The Museum,' 'The Discovery of Existence,' 'Conversation with the Autodidact,' 'Contingency,' and so to the conclusion.) };le said: 'If we think a young author's book could profitably be changed in any respect, we usually return it to him- in his own best interests - so that he carr touch it up here and there. All the same, I know how difficult revising a book can be. You have a look and see what you can do. If it's impossible, well, we'll come to some sort of decision just the same.' He was a bit the benevolent patron and very much the jeune atne.
298
As he had things to do, I left him at this point, but he invited me to take a drink with him when he was through. So off I went and played a little joke on Little Bost. As I had inadvertently .walked out still clutching the manuscript of Melancholia, I entered the cafe and threw the book on the table without saying a word. He stared at me, and turned a little pale. 'Rejected,' I told him, in a pathetic voice, trying to sound as though I didn't care. 'Oh no!' he exlaimed. 'But why?' 'They found it dull and tiresome.' He was absolutely dumbfounded by this. Then I told him the whole story, and he showed vast delight. I filled up his glass and then went off for my drink with Brice Parain. We met in a little cafe down the Rue du Bac;-1'11 spare you an account of our conversation. B.P. is reasonably intelligent, but nothing more. He's the sort of chap who speculates about language, like Paulhan: that's their business. You know ' the old line: dialectic is only a battle of words, because the meaning of words is infinite and inexhaustible. Therefore everything is dialectic, and so on. He wants to write a thesis on the subject. At this point I left him. He's going to write to me in a week or so. As far as the alterations to Melancholia are concerned, I shall of course, wait till I see you, and we can then decide jointly what is feasible ... On my return to Paris Sartre gave me further details concerning the Melanclr.olia episode. Paulhan had merely refused to publish it in the N.R.F.; as regards possible publication in book form, the reader commissioned to report on it had felt himself finally baffled. Knowing that Sartre had been recommended by Pierre Bost, he noted on his report: 'Inquire of Pierre Bost if this author has talent.' Afterwards Gallimard read the book himself, and apparently liked it: the only criticism he had to make concerned its title. He suggested an alternative one, Nausea, which I was againstwrongly, as I realized afterwards; but I was afraid the public might take a book called Nausea for a naturalistic novel. It was agreed that the work should be published at some time during I9J8. In July i>aulhan published The Wall in the N.R.F., and this story by an unknown author proved a real sensation. Sartre received numerous letters about it. Over and above this, he had just been offered a post at the Lycee Pasteur, in Neuilly. I myself had just completed the revision of Primaute du spirituel, which my sister was typing, and which Sartre recommended to Brice Parain that October, just after the beginning of the term.
I had recovered all my normal gaiety and got the most I could out of Paris. I saw the Negro dancers from New York's Cotton Club, who stirred up fresh visions of America in my mind. The Exposition opened its doors to us; we spent hours contemplating masterpieces of French art, espe€ially in the salons devoted to Van Gogh. It was the first time we had seen a conspectus of his work, from the first grim youthful sketches to the irises and ravens of Auvers. The Spanish Pavilion was opened in mid-July, and it was in its brand-new surroundings that we received the initial shock of Picasso's 'Guemica'. Nizan was back from the Writers' Congress that had been held in Madrid during the bombardment. He gave us a most entertaining account of how the various participants had reacted to bombs and artillery fire- some were calm, and others scared, and one character in particular used to go on all fours under the table at the very slightest explosion outside. He told us that morale in the battered city was unwaveringly high. Yet the situation was critical. At the beginning of May there had been an Anarcho-Syndicalist insurrection, which caused bloody slaughter in Barcelona and came within an ace of letting Catalonia pass into Fascist hands. Negrin had formed a new Cabinet and undertaken to stamp out all these Anarchist and Trotskyite outbreaks that were disorganizing the struggle against Franco. The Communists denounced the P .0. U.M. as a nest of traitors, and the leaders of the organization were arrested. On the other hand, both the Anarchists and a Socialist splinter group accused Negrin and the St-