BOO KS
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enough for her father to envisage a smart marriage for her, the book–
ishness was an additional charm, making her well-informed, a fit mate
for an important man. Once that dream crumbled, the same studious
bent was simply a matter of dowdy examination-passing; furthermore,
like all Frenchmen, M. de Beauvoir detested Civil Servants, and here
was his own daughter turning into one; "At any rate, you'll have a pen–
sion," he used to growl at her, as
if
already envying the money she
was going to cost him as a taxpayer. Meanwhile her mother raised
streaming eyes to heaven because the adolescent girl had lost her re–
ligious faith. It was the perfect upbringing for a novelist, but-like
most upbringings-very unpleasant at the time.
And, of course, it was hugely, unrelentingly,
ordinary.
Through
hundreds of pages we follow Mlle. de Beauvoir through her school les–
sons, her home life, her games with her sister and their dolls, her
changing attitude towards her parents. There were holidays in the
country, so different from Paris; there was the return to Paris, so dif–
ferent from the country; there was the clever and precocious school–
fellow on whom little Simone had a crush; there was the brilliant and
public-spirited philosophy lecturer on whom slightly bigger Simone had
a crush; there was the engaging male cousin with whom almost com–
pletely big Simone fell in and out of love.
It
was exactly the life of
every middle-class girl since the middle-class world began. Then again,
having no means of escaping from the dailiness of her life except
through books, Simone, at all stages, read far too many of them and
so fell victim to the spiritually toxic condition that excessive reading
produces in the adolescent; this is faithfully described. She went for
walks along the quais at night, and wept, and sobbed out lines of
poetry to herself. She formed judgments on her fellow students. She
wrote dialogues between the two halves of her being, and journals, and
word-portraits of herself, and novels. In other words, she was the ex–
actly typical bookish adolescent girl.
There are, I think, two motives for reading such a book. One, as
I have suggested, is its universality. It is valuable to be forced to recog–
nize the essential sameness of human life even under diverse circum–
stances, and even as lived by very exceptional people like Mlle. de Beau–
voir. The other is that it provokes reflections about France, and what
it is like for a writer to grow up there.
France, in spite of all the horrible things that have been done to
her, has remained a great literary country for century after century.
Why is this? Without wasting time pursuing the
ignis fatuus
of national
temperament, I can think of two reasons straight away, and they are
