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the avant-garde films, the Little Magazines. Nothing in Anglo-American
life can possibly approach the sense of liberation that came with the
sudden breaking apart of the chrysalis. And it was a necessary part of
the tension that the two existed side by side. Simone was still living at
home, still returning each night to that curtained, mothball-smelling
domesticity. The lives nearest to her were in many cases more cruelly
stifled than her own had been; her best friend, Zaza, was trapped in
such an impossible conflict of emotions by the demands of family
loyalty and religious devotion that-as the book touchingly describes–
she actually wilted and died.
Against this backcloth, the clever and original people with whom
Mlle. de Beauvoir finally came into contact seemed more than just
clever and original. They positively flared against the rusty black of the
curtain behind them. Because of it, they were provided with a generous
area to work in. They wasted no time balancing the life of the university
against the intellectual life in general. All art, all thought, all scholar–
ship, flowed together in a glorious sense of release from the stuffiness
that opposed them. Here, if we want it, is the explanation of why
France can produce figures like Cocteau, who bob up without explana–
tory self-consciousness in half-a-dozen different arts; why Sartre can be
thought no less a philosopher for having written plays; why French
civilization has that solidity which saves writers and artists from pour–
ing away their energy in explaining what they are up to. Whatever
quarrels may break out between individuals, everyone is playing by
the same rules. The types Mlle. de Beauvoir admired were exactly those
who would be fostered by such a world. Herbaud, for instance:
He spoke to me about his wife, who in his view was every feminine
paradox incarnate; about Rome, which they had visited on their honey–
moon, and the Forum, which had moved him to tears; about his system
of ethics and the book he wanted to write. He used to bring me maga–
zines like
Detective
and
The Autocar;
he would take a passionate in–
terest in a bicycle race or in a detective story; he made my head swim
with his anecdotes, with unexpected juxtapositions. He could handle
everything-bombast and dry wit, lyricism and cynicism, naivete and
insolence-with such happy ease that nothing he said ever seemed banal.
In
such a description we recognize the typical French man of ideas.
Against him, in a natural balance, stands his
alter ego,
that other great
typical French figure, the bourgeois father. M. de Beauvoir "thought
all teachers were ill-bred pedants"; worse, they "belonged to the danger–
ous sect that had stood in defence of Dreyfus: the intellectuals. Blinded
by their book learning, taking a stubborn pride in abstract knowledge
