LIONEL ABEL
467
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Though the author of
The Second Sex,
Simone de Beauvoir
was not so unlike Eve. Simone was a man's gal, and not "one of the
boys ," as so many of her feminist admirers are now trying to be. Her
man was Jean-Paul Sartre , and her relation to him and to his goals
was not unlike Eve's to Adam and his God, as described in Milton's
great line, which so infuriates our feminists: "He for God only, she
for God in him."
Unhappily, even before his death in 1980, the goals that Jean–
Paul Sartre had tried to achieve were generally seen to be void : Exis–
tentialism was finished as a philosophical enterprise; Sartre had re–
nounced it himself, substituting faith in Marxism. Then this, too, he
renounced; also, faith in Soviet communism, Maoism, and even
Castro's kind of tyranny . And Simone had followed him in his faiths,
and renunciations of faith, like him always striving to believe and
never disbelieving in him. In one of her excellent memoirs , she
summed up their experience thus: "It seems we were conned ." For
her talented enthusiasm - not reverence - for life, expressed in all
her actions and reactions - and let it not be forgotten in an always
readable prose style - we remember Simone as one of the leading
feminine figures of this age.
Lionel Abel
