Force Majeure

A 'pre-owned' copy of Force of Circumstance - the third volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography - arrived today (a genuine 70's Penguin, but sadly without a Matisse blue-figure cover illustration). I was severely tempted to start reading it at once, but as I am approximately one third of the way through a long-intended re-read of her Prime of Life (volume 2), I restrained myself. I am throroughly enjoying the latter, especially as the last book I read on de Beauvoir was Deirdre Bair's less than flattering biography of her. There is no doubt that de Beauvoir glossed over much of her past, particularly her manipulative relationships with her pupils and her over-dependency on the good opinion of the toad-like Sartre. Still, I find her apparent ability to both enjoy and analyse her experiences (the ones she lets us in on) most captivating.
It came to mind that I had bought my first copy of her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter whilst staying with my aunt and uncle in Devon. I'd been sent down there to give my long-suffering parents a break from my teenage stubborness and rebellion. I clearly remember the sense of freedom I felt as my (very tolerant) relatives let me do more-or-less as I wanted or gently steered me to places like Buckfast Abbey and Exeter. I think I'd taken to wearing some bizarre floor-length outfits and affected a world weary air of langour. O how bohemian I felt! Suffice to say I was not improved by my sojourn and returned just as insufferable - if not distinctly worse - having found a similarly headstrong role-model and a taste for Disque Bleu!

Decadence and la nostalgie de la boue

Part way through 'The Liar' by Stephen Fry and am starting to lose interest slightly: the bits where he writes of his protagonist's youth are excellent, and thus I am assuming that it is mostly himself that he is writing about, but the episodes dealing with his later life are much less amusing or convincing. Time to start on something fresh: Huysmans' 'Against Nature', or 'A Rebours' as it is in the original. The prose is gorgeous, in the same sumptuous and slightly over-rich vein as Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' (which I never finished, having had a surfeit of gorgeousness and the same feeling as if I had gorged a box of Belgian chocolates in one sitting). I rather like the 'hero' and his neurasthaenic extreme aestheticism. I am reminded of my late teenage years when I immersed myself in Gauloises, Pernod, Baudelaire and a nostalgie de la boue which lead me to mistakenly marry a complete idiot thus bringing my young self back to earth with a nasty bump! Fortunately, that is all far in the past and having extracted myself from la boue I became a wiser and more cynical person. One lasting influence from that bout of teenage Francophilism was an abiding interest in the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. I ascribe a lot of my determination to her and her refusal to allow her sex to interfere with her intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately she harnessed herself to the toad-like Sartre and lived for much of her life in his shadow, despite the fact that she was the one whom Sartre trusted to critique his work, and whose ideas he often purloined and passed off as his own. Their relationship was lifelong, hardly exclusive and they often conspired to seduce and manipulate those who should have been able to trust them. I've not read the book detailing their correspondence: I fear that I would lose any faith that I had in 'Castor' (Sartre's nickname for de Beauvoir) left by Deirdre Bair's uncompromising biography. Suffice to say that two of my favourite comfort books are still de Beauvoir's 'Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter' and the follow-up volume of her autobiography 'The Prime of Life'. Obviously it is written from her point of view, and leaves out that which is inconvenient for her to remember or write about, but her spirit shines through - the spirit that motivated a younger self to Get The Hell Out.