Quand prime le spirituel (review)

Reviews Note: With the publication of this review of Simone de Beauvoir's Quand prime le spirituel (Gallimard: Paris, 1980), Biography introduces the policy of reviewing significant works which are written in a foreign language and which are not yet available in English. (Review Editor) When All Said and Done was published in 1974, there was, among Simone de Beauvoir's followers, a sad feeling caused by the fear that nothing of major importance would come again from the Existentialist 's pen, that there was little she could add, both because of overexposure and advancing age. Born in 1908, Simone de Beauvoir had thought that a person in her sixties had nothing much to look forward to. In fact, almost at the very end of All Said and Done she wrote the following pathetic lines: "Nothing new has happened to me since 1962 . . . nothing important has happened and nothing important will take place in the future. From this point on I feel my finality. I no longer say: 'Thirty years from now.' The only things I wait for in life are disease and death." Disease came, after Sartre's death in 1980, when she was hospitalized for a long time, and the doctors had feared for her life. Such a setback was to be expected, however. Her spiritual and physical liaison with the chef d'école dated back to the 1920's. The two had disagreed only rarely, and had enjoyed a relationship so close and so renowned that her survival after Sartre's demise was logically questioned. But she REVIEWS 171 did survive, astonishing aficionados and literary historians with her persistence and endurance. Looking back now at her pessimism in All Said and Done, one may even wonder if her melancholy did not contain a certain amount of coquettishness. After all, it was eight years after 1962 that she published her monumental Old Age, that thoroughly-researched and beautifully -written treatise on senescence, a 604-page condemnation of the brutal manner in which most societies exploit and then dispose of the old. The study, undertaken in 1967, required so much labor, travel, visits to old-age homes, interviews and library investigation that she had had to use the services of a research assistant just to keep up with the notes taken. Moreover, it is known that for months she rose very early in the morning, leaving her comfortable duplex studio on Rue Schoecler in order to trek off to the Biblothèque Nationale where she worked continuously, without stopping for lunch, from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. "If you get there any later than nine," she said to a Newsweek reporter (9 February 1970, p. 54), "you can never get a seat." Yet, her research assistant let it be known later that, many times, the sexagenarian writer was unable to get a seat in spite of her early arrival at the library, and on those occasions she had to sit on the floor, holding piles of books and papers on her lap, her feet tucked under her, oblivious, always, of the glances that her unorthodox presence elicited. And the result of the effort was in fact a dissertation to end all dissertations on old age, with the added advantage of readability and poignancy. It was also considerably after 1962, actually very close to the 1970's and at the beginning ofthat decade, that Simone de Beauvoir modified publicly her views on socialism and on women's liberation movement. Socialism had been her ideal for the greatest part of her life. She viewed it as the only political attitude within the reach of the intellectual , for it was the only one that sought the abolition of classes. But in 1968 the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. That act of aggression, added to the earlier intervention in Hungary; the persecution of Sinyavsky and Daniel in Russia; the imprisonment of Solzhenitsyn; and her own disappointing visits to Cuba and China where, she realized, classes had been renamed rather than eliminated, persuaded her that her own personal adventure, or anyone else's for that matter, was infinitely more important than the adventure of mankind. To be sure, her deep commitment to internationalism...