Last week, we had a talk with Simone de Beauvoir, the French novelist, playwright, and No. 2 Existentialist, just before she left town on a coast-to-coast lecture tour. Aware that Mlle. de Beauvoir is regarded in Paris as the female intellectual counterpart of Jean-Paul Sartre, we were all set for a grim half hour. Well, surprise! Mlle. de B. is the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw; also eager, gentle, modest, and as pleased as a Midwesterner with the two weeks she spent in New York. Her English is rickety, so we sought to draw her out in our rickety French. “I’ve walked all around Manhattan and Brooklyn,” she told us. “I flew here on a Saturday. I left my hotel, the Lincoln, the next morning at nine o’clock and walked downtown to the Battery, through an abandoned city with empty canyons. Even the drugstores and cafeterias were closed. Paris never seems so empty on Sundays. Since then, I’ve walked three or four hours every morning the weather has been nice. I’ve walked all over Washington Heights, Greenwich Village, and for miles along the Hudson and East Rivers. I think I like Washington Square best. I’ve also admired the city from roofs, since you can’t really see it from the streets. I’ve been to the Blue Angel, Cafe Society Downtown, and Sammy’s Bowery Follies, which is wonderful. It’s absolutely dissolute [crapuleux]—all those old singers, whom nobody wants, with feathers on their heads. I’ve gone to the cinema, to see your ‘thrillings,’ and I’ve been amused by the children skiing in Central Park. We haven’t enough snow in Paris for this, as a rule, or enough slopes when we do.”
Sartre’s opposite number was born in Paris in 1908, the daughter of a lawyer. She met the Existentialist head man at the Sorbonne during her early twenties when both were studying philosophy there. She later taught Existentialism at girls’ lycées in Marseille, Rouen, and Paris. In 1942, she gave up teaching to write novels. She’s written three, including “L’Invitée,” which is to be translated and published here. It will also be published in England. She has just finished an essay on morals for Les Temps Modernes, the Existentialist monthly that Sartre edits. Next, she’s going to write a very serious book about women. “I’ve talked to a number of American women,” she said, “to get their point of view. I find this differs from that of most French women, but you’ll have to wait for my book to find out how, or how I think how. It can’t be explained in three words.” Mlle. de Beauvoir said that her conception of Existentialism couldn’t be explained in three words either but in general she strings along with Sartre. He dedicated his longest and most thoughtful book, “Being and Nothingness” (720 pp.), to her. She lives in a Left Bank hotel, gets up at eight, and repairs to either the Café des Deux Magots or the Flore and writes for four hours. She spends the rest of the day eating with or talking to such friends as Sartre and Michel Leiris, an Existentialist poet whom she thinks highly of. “We have intellectual conversations,” she said to us, with a sweet smile in which we detected no trace of pity.
Mlle. de Beauvoir is lecturing here, under the auspices of the French-government Cultural Service people, on the moral problems of the postwar writer, which seem to be taxing. Her favorite American magazines are the Partisan Review and Politics, and she has seen a good deal of their editors. She asked Dwight Macdonald, the editor of Politics and a disaffected Yale man who was voted the second most original member of his class (’28), what he could tell her about life in New York, and he told her he lives here as though he were in a concentration camp, as an unpleasant necessity. This depressed Mlle. de Beauvoir momentarily, but she took a long walk and brightened up. Politics is going to publish one of her Temps Modernes articles, “An Eye for an Eye”—all about how to treat collaborators—in a special French issue next spring. She will be in New York again in April, for another couple of peripatetic weeks, before returning to Paris. “I usually walk alone,” she said, “but Richard Wright has taken me walking in Harlem. I love Negro jazz. I used to walk in Paris, but I’ve seen everything there, so now I mostly sit.” ♦
