Author: Sarah Bakewell
Source: The ExistentialIst Cafe
For Simone de Beauvoir, it was only after a struggle that independence finally came. Born in Paris on January 9, 1908, although she basically grew up in the city, she lived in a somewhat conservative social environment, surrounded by some feminine and civilized standard concepts. Her mother, Fran? oise de Beauvoir, stood by these guidelines; Her father was much more accommodating.
Simone's rebellion began in childhood, became more intense in adolescence, and seems to continue into adulthood. Her lifelong dedication to her work, her love of travel, her decision not to have children, and her choice of partner in an unconventional sense all demonstrate her dedication to freedom. In the first volume of her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Beauvoir presents her life through these angles and further reflects on her middle-class background in A Very Easy Death, which recalls her mother's last illness.
When I met Merleau-Ponty through a friend, Beauvoir began her independent student life. She wrote down her impressions of him in her diary, thinking his name was "Merloponti". He's attractive in personality and looks, she says, though she worries he's a little too conceited about his looks. In her autobiography (she gave him a pseudonym: Pradelle), she described his "clear, handsome face, thick black eyelashes, and the joyful, hearty laughter of a male student." She fell in love with him instantly, but that was no surprise, she added. Everyone who saw Merleau-Ponty always fell in love with him immediately, even her mother.
Born on March 14, 1908, Merleau-Ponty was only two months younger than Beauvoir, but at heart she was more relaxed. He was calm and at ease in social situations, probably because (as he himself believed) was that his childhood was very happy. He felt a lot of love and encouragement as a child, and he said that he never needed to work hard to get praise, so his temperament was happy all his life. He was also impatient at times, but as he talked about in a radio interview in 1959, his heart was almost always at peace. In other words, he is probably the only person in the whole story who feels this way; A precious talent.
Sartre later wrote about Flaubert's lack of love in his childhood that when love "appears, the dough of emotions floats up, and when love is missing, it sinks." Merleau-Ponty's childhood has always been well floated. Things certainly didn't come as easy as he suggested, though, because he, his brother, and sister were brought up by his mother after his father died of liver disease in 1913. In contrast to beauvoir's relationship with her mother, Merlot-Ponty devoted herself to serving her until her death.
Everyone who knows Merleau-Ponty feels that he radiates a happy glow. Simone de Beauvoir also felt its warmth at first. She had been waiting for someone to make her admire, and now it seemed as if he could. And she once thought he was boyfriend material. But his calm attitude made her, whose temperament was more inclined to fight, a little uneasy. She wrote in her notebook that his great problem was that "his character is not fierce, and the kingdom of God is for the fierce." He insisted on being kind to others. "I feel so different!" She shouted. She is a person with strong likes and dislikes, but he will consider it from many aspects in any situation. He considered man to be a mixture of qualities and was willing to think of people as good, but when she was young, she saw human beings as "a large number of worthless people and a small group of chosen people by God."
What really annoyed Beauvoir was that Melo-Ponty seemed to be "perfectly suited to his class and its way of life, and accepted middle-class society with an open mind". Sometimes she would complain loudly to him about the stupidity and cruelty of middle-class morality, but he would calmly disagree. He "got along well with his mom and sister and didn't share my dislike of family life," she wrote, "and he didn't resent going to party and occasionally dancing: why not?" He asked me with an innocent look, which calmed my anger. ”
In the first summer after becoming friends, since the other students had left Paris on vacation, they basically had to spend time with each other. They would go out for a walk, first in the Jardin des Beauvoir in Paris— a "place of admiration" for Beauvoir— and later in the Jardin du Luxembourg, sitting "next to a sculpture by some queen or someone else," discussing philosophy. Although she overtook him on the exam, she found that when she was next to him, she would naturally take over the role of a novice in philosophy. In fact, although she sometimes wins the argument by chance, more often, at the end of the discussion, she will only shout happily: "I know nothing, I don't know anything." Not only was I powerless to respond, I hadn't even found the right way to ask questions. ”
She liked his character: "I don't know from whom else I can learn the art of joy." He can easily take on the weight of the whole world, so it no longer weighs heavily on me; In the Jardin du Luxembourg, the early morning blue skies, turquoise lawns and sun sparkle as they did on those days when the weather was always nice and I was happiest. But one day, after walking with him around the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, admiring the swans and boats, she exclaimed, "Oh, he is so painless!" His calm offended me. "What is already obvious at this point is that he will not become a suitable lover. He is more suitable to be a brother; She has only one sister, so the role of brother is vacant and perfectly suited to him.
But he had a different influence on her best friend, Elisabeth Le Coyne (known as Zaza in Beauvoir's memoirs). Elizabeth was equally annoyed by Merleau-Ponty's "invulnerable" qualities and lack of pain, but she was still passionately obsessed with him. In contrast to invulnerability, she tends to fall into extreme affection and excessive enthusiasm, which made Beauvoir feel intoxicated in their girlhood friendship. Now, Elizabeth wants to marry Merleau-Ponty, and he seems to have that desire too—until he abruptly breaks the relationship.
It was only later that Beauvoir learned why. It turned out that Elizabeth's mother thought Merleau-Ponty and her daughter were inappropriate, so she warned him to give up, or she would reveal one of his mother's so-called secrets: she had cheated on her, and at least one of the children was not her husband's flesh and blood. To prevent the scandal from affecting his mother and soon-to-be-married sister, Merleau-Ponty withdrew from the relationship.
Beauvoir became even more disgusted when she learned the truth. That's what the dirty middle class is! Elizabeth's mother typically demonstrated middle-class morality, cruelty, and cowardice. Moreover, Beauvoir believed that the consequences were really fatal. Elizabeth was very depressed and contracted a serious illness during the emotional crisis, possibly meningitis. Eventually, she died of illness at the age of twenty-one.
There was no causal link between the two misfortunes, but Beauvoir had always believed that it was middle-class hypocrisy that had killed her friend. She forgave Melo-Ponty for his role, but always felt that he was too at ease and too respectful of traditional values. In her opinion, it was a flaw in him—she vowed that she would never allow it to appear in her life.
Shortly after that, Beauvoir's "fierce" and opinionated side finally paid off – she met Jean-Paul Sartre.
Born on June 21, 1905, Sartre was two and a half years older than Beauvoir, and as a beloved only son, sartre also had a middle-class childhood. And like Merleau-Ponty, he grew up without a father. Jean-Baptiste Sartre was a naval officer who died of tuberculosis when Jean-Paul was one year old. From an early age, Sartre was doted on by his mother, Anne-Marie Sartre, and his grandparents, who lived with them. Everyone loved his girlish curly hair and delicate face. But an infection when he was two or three years old made something wrong with his eyes.
Under the cover of thick curly hair, it was barely noticeable—until one day Grandpa took him to a short haircut, and his injured eye was exposed, along with his fish-like lips and other embarrassing features. Sartre describes all this with great sarcasm in his memoir, "Literary Career," which tells of his early life. His relaxed tone, which became more relaxed and lively in describing his own appearance, did hurt by the change in people's attitudes toward him. He was always obsessed with the subject of his ugliness—he always used the blunt word ugly when he mentioned it. For a while, it made him feel ashamed to see people, but then he decided that he couldn't let it ruin his life. He will not sacrifice his freedom for this.
After his mother remarried—married to a man Sartre didn't like—they moved to La Rochelle, where he was often bullied by strong and rough boys. It was a great crisis in his childhood: he later said that everything he needed to know about "chance, violence, and the way things existed" was taught in la Rochelle's solitary life. This time, however, he also refused to give in. After his family moved to Paris, he was sent to a series of excellent schools, became lively and cheerful again, and finally entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He went from being a marginal man to being the leader of the most popular, wild, and powerful circles in the school. For the rest of his life, he was a sociable leader, with concerns but never hesitated to dominate a circle.
Sartre's small group of anti-traditionalists and demagogues, centered around him and his best friend Paul Nizan, would sit in a café and pass the time, shouting at anyone who ventured near them, loudly attacking the insurmountable ideas in philosophy, literature, and middle-class behavior, and attacking any topic that displayed delicate feelings, "inner life," or the soul; They had provoked outrage for refusing to take the school's examination of religious knowledge, because talking about man as a collection of carnal desires, not noble souls, shocked everyone. Beneath their arrogant exterior, they have the kind of calm self-confidence that someone who has received an impeccable education has.
It was at this time, in 1929, that De Beauvoir came into contact with Sartre's group through a friend named Maheu. She found them both exciting and intimidating. She was ridiculed by them for taking her studies very seriously— but of course she had to take it seriously, because studying at the Sorbonne represented everything she had tried to achieve. Education meant freedom and autonomy to her, and boys took it for granted. However, the group accepted her, and she and Sartre became friends. He and others called her Castor or the Beaver, presumably referring to the fact that she was always busy, but also a pun on her last name and similar English words. Sartre didn't have the infuriating calmness of Merleau-Ponty: he was a loud-talking extremist who wouldn't budge. He would not condescend to be her brother, so he became her lover, and soon they began to become even more important to each other than lovers.
Sartre gradually regarded Beauvoir as his ally, his favorite interlocutor, the first and best reader of any of his works. He gave her the role raymond Aaron had played in his early years as a student: the "drinking philosopher" with whom he explored any ideas (symphilosopher).
They had considered getting married, but neither wanted a middle-class marriage — or children — because Beauvoir was determined not to repeat her unhappy relationship with her mother. Sitting on a stone bench in the garden of Tuileries one evening, she and Sartre reached an agreement. Next, they do two years as a couple, and then decide whether to renew, break up, or change their relationship in some way. In her memoirs, De Beauvoir confessed that she was initially intimidated by this ad hoc engagement. Her account of the conversation is filled with details that are etched in her heart with strong emotions:
There is a kind of railing used as a backrest, slightly away from the wall; In the cage-like space in the back, there was a cat meowing. This poor guy is too big and stuck; But how did it get in? A woman came over and fed the cat some meat. Then Sartre said, "Let's sign a two-year contract." ”
Claustrophobic, traps, embarrassment, the coldness of feeding the residue of good deeds: for a story about freedom, such imagery is terrible, it sounds like an ominous dream. Is that really the case, or is she enriching the memory with symbolic details?
In short, the panic subsided and the agreement worked well. They survived those two years safely, and then became partners in a long but not exclusive emotional relationship that lasted for the rest of their lives. This relationship may have survived, perhaps because after the late 1930s, there was no longer sex in their relationship. (She wrote to Nelson Argren, saying, "We've been doing it for about eight or ten years, but we've been quite unsuccessful in that regard, so we don't do it.") They also agreed on two long-term conditions. One is that they must inform each other about their sexual relationships with others: they must be honest. Of course, they did not fully adhere to this rule. The second is that the emotional relationship between them must always come first: in their words, they are "inevitable" between them, while other relationships can only be "accidental". They persevered, but they also drove away many long-term lovers, because they slowly got tired of being seen as accidental. But that's the agreement, and everyone involved knows it from the start.
Now, there are often concerns about Beauvoir's happiness in the relationship as if it were her (typical woman!). Allow yourself to be forced to do something she doesn't want to do. Scenes from the Tuileries Palace Gardens do suggest that this may not have been her first choice when she was younger, and that she would feel panicked and jealous from time to time. But then again, a traditional middle-class marriage doesn't necessarily insulate her from that feeling.
My guess is that what the relationship gave her was exactly what she wanted. If they had married like the average person, she and Sartre might have gone their separate ways or parted ways in the frustration of sex. But the truth is, she had a great sex life—better than Sartre, apparently because he was always nervous. De Beauvoir's memoirs confirm that in her youth, she was emotionally "excited" and "felt rather lacking in intensity," while her subsequent relationships brought physical satisfaction. As for Sartre, if we can infer from the vivid descriptions in his book, we think that sex is a nightmare that tries not to sink into mud and slime. (Before we laugh at him about this, don't forget that we know it because he told us frankly.) Oh, okay, then laugh at him a little. ）
For Beauvoir, the sweetness of real life was never a threat: she never got tired of it. As a child, she wanted to enjoy everything she saw. She stared greedily at the window of the candy store—the shimmering light of the preserves, the vague luster of the jelly, the kaleidoscopic colors of the sweet and sour fruits—green, red, orange, purple—and I coveted their colors as much as the pleasure they promised me." She wanted the whole universe to be edible, just as Hansel and Gretel had eaten from the gingerbread house, eating the universe all. Even as an adult, she wrote: "I want to chew up the blossoming almond trees and bite the rainbow nougat of the setting sun." On a trip to New York in 1947, she felt desperate to eat the neon signs that lined up the night sky.
Her hobbies also extended to collecting a variety of items, including many gifts and travel souvenirs. In 1955, when she finally moved from her hotel room to a decent apartment, the apartment was quickly filled with "Guatemalan jackets and skirts, Mexican shirts... The Ostrich eggs of the Sahara, the various tambourines, some of Sartre's drums that came back from the sea, the glass swords and Venetian mirrors he bought on Bonaparte Street, the plastic hand molds of his hands, the lamps of Giacometti.". Her diary and memoir writing also reflected an urge to get and enjoy everything she was clutching.
She explored the world with the same passion, traveling and walking frenetically. As a young man, she worked as a teacher in Marseille, and living alone, she would pack some bread and bananas during the holidays, put on a skirt and a pair of canvas hiking boots, and set off at dawn for an expedition to the mountainous countryside. Once, with only bread, a candle and a bottle full of red wine, she climbed Mont Mézenc and spent the night in a stone hut at the top of the hill. When she woke up, she found herself looking down at the sea of clouds, so she ran down the rocky path, only to see the sun rise, the rocks were very hot, and the shoes she was wearing were not suitable for climbing, so the rocks burned her feet through the soles of her shoes. On another hike, she was trapped in a canyon and barely climbed out. Later, in 1936, while traveling alone in the Alps, she fell off a steep rock wall, but fortunately there was no major problem, just a few bruises.
Sartre was different. Beauvoir would convince him to go hiking with him, but he never enjoyed that fatigue. Being and Nothingness is a brilliant account of climbing a mountain with an unnamed companion who is imagined as Beauvoir (though the scene seems to be more like Petrarch's famous Vondo climb). Although his companions seemed to have a good time, Sartre's experience was that the activity was annoying, something that violated his freedom. He quickly gave up, threw down his backpack, and collapsed on the side of the road. The other was also tired, but thought it was a pleasure to persevere, to feel the red heat of the sunburn on the back of his neck, to enjoy the ruggedness of the mountain road with each heavy step. For the two of them, everything in front of them was very different.
Sartre prefers skiing, and this experience is also written into Existence and Nothingness. He points out that walking on snow is a chore, but skiing is a pleasure. Phenomenologically, the snow itself changes under your feet, not showing itself as something sticky and attached, but becoming hard and smooth. The snow holds you up, and you glide smoothly over it, as relaxed as the notes of that jazz song in Disgusting. He adds that he was curious about the water ski, a new invention he had heard of but hadn't tried. Even on the snow, you will leave a slip mark behind you; But on the water, you can't leave any traces. It was the purest pleasure Sartre could imagine.
His dream was to walk in this world without any burden. The possessions that brought beauvoir pleasure made Sartre creepy. He also loves to travel but doesn't bring anything home with him on his travels. He would send it away when he had finished reading it. There were only two things he kept with him, his pipe and his pen, but even these two were not carried with him because he liked them, and he often lost them, he once wrote: "They are exiles in my hands." ”
But for people, his generosity is almost to the point of obsession. He would give his money as soon as it arrived, in order to keep it away from him, as if it were a grenade. Even when money is spent on himself, he doesn't like to buy things, preferring to "spend it on nighttime entertainment: going to a dance hall, spending a lot of money, taking a taxi around, etc. – in short, in the position of money, there is nothing but memories, sometimes not even memories." He was very generous when tipping the waiter, and would take out a large stack of cash he carried with him and draw a few bills. He was also unsparing in his rhetoric, sending papers, speeches or prefaces to anyone who asked. Even the words don't have to cling to it or give it away with care.
De Beauvoir was also generous, but her generosity went both ways: she liked to collect and distribute. Perhaps in their very different styles one can see two aspects of phenomenological existentialism: on the one hand, observing, collecting, and delving into phenomena, and on the other hand, discarding accumulated preconceptions in Husserl-esque suspended judgments in order to attain freedom.
Despite these differences, there is a tacit understanding between them that is difficult for outsiders to shake. When Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir's biographer, spoke to her friends, Colette Audry concluded: "The relationship between them is a new type of relationship that I have never seen before. I can't describe what it looked like when I was with these two people. Their relationship is so intense that sometimes it makes people who witness it regret that they can't have it. ”
It was also an extremely long-lasting relationship that lasted from 1929 until Sartre's death in 1980. For fifty years, the relationship was a philosophical deduction of existentialism in reality, defined by the two principles of freedom and friendship. As solemn as it sounds, as in any long marriage, their shared memories, observations, and jokes bind them together. Soon after they met, they had a typical joke about them: when they visited the zoo, they saw a particularly fat and miserable-looking walrus, and the walrus sighed and looked up at the sky as if pleading, while asking the keeper to put the fish in its mouth. Since then, every time Sartre was sullen, De Beauvoir would remind him to think of the walrus. He rolled his eyes and let out a funny sigh, and they would both feel better.
Later, Sartre gradually alienated their private duo because of his work, but he remained Beauvoir's constant point of reference, someone to indulge in when she needed it. She knew she always tended to do it: as a student, it had happened to Elisabeth Le Coine, and she had tried it with Merleau-Ponty, but had always been frustrated because his smile and sarcastic demeanor would distract her. And with Sartre, she can easily indulge herself in him without actually losing her freedom as a woman or writer in reality.
This is the most important element of this: their relationship is one between writers. Neither Sartre nor Beauvoir could control their desire to communicate. They keep diaries, they write letters, they tell each other every detail of every day. During the 50 years of the 20th century, the amount of written and spoken words circulating between them would be overwhelming to think about. Sartre was always the first to read Beauvoir's writings, and his criticism won her trust, and he urged her to write more. If he caught her being a little lazy, he would rebuke her: "But, beaver, why do you stop thinking, why don't you work?" I thought you wanted to write? You don't want to be a housewife, do you? ”
The ups and downs of emotions came and went, and the work was as usual. Job! Work in cafes, work while traveling, work from home. Anytime they're in the same city, they work together, no matter what else happens in life. After Sartre (and his mother) moved into a decent apartment at 42 Bonaparte Avenue in 1946, De Beauvoir would meet him there every day so they could sit side by side at two tables throughout the morning or afternoon. In a 1967 documentary for Canadian television, you can see them gulping down cigarettes and being very quiet except for the sound of pens and books. De Beauvoir was writing in an exercise book, and Sartre was reviewing a page of manuscript. I felt like it was some kind of memorial image that was constantly looping, maybe it could be played on their joint tomb at Montparnasse Cemetery. While imagining them writing all day and all night, whether it's when the cemetery is closed at night or when tourists are shuttling around during the day, it's weird enough—but it's better for them than a white grave or any still image.
Editor: Xiao Ye
Typography: Mo Yi
Audit: Yongfang
Artist/VI: Little Week
Pictured: Roman Holiday