The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir

First published:La Force de l’âge, 1960 (English translation, 1962)

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1929-1944

Locale: France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Greece

Principal Personages:

• Simone de Beauvoir, a novelist, philosopher, and political activist
• Jean-Paul Sartre, her lifelong companion, the founder of modern existentialism

Form and Content

The first volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, Memoires d’une jeune fille rangee (1958; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1959), traces her successful revolt against French Catholicism and bourgeois idealism. Significantly, this second installment begins with this observation: “The most intoxicating aspect of my return to Paris in September, 1929, was the freedom I now possessed.” The Prime of Life describes how de Beauvoir guarded and used that freedom for the succeeding fifteen years.

Her life during this period, like the historical events that impinge upon her despite her best efforts to escape their effects, divides into two parts, and so does the book. The first, and longer, section treats her experiences during the 1930’s, as she establishes her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and gropes her way toward becoming a writer. For her this is a decade of splendid isolation and introspection, brought to a jarring end by the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II.

Quoting diary entries to help portray the years between 1939 and the liberation of Paris in 1944, de Beauvoir in the second part traces her growing realization that the personal freedom she treasures must not be pursued, indeed cannot be maintained, without concern for others. During the war years she matures into the engaged intellectual that she remained until her death. As she becomes more conscious of the relevance of world affairs to her own life, they assume a larger role in her book, so that The Prime of Life presents a sensitive, firsthand account of life in occupied France.

Because Sartre was in many ways her second self, The Prime of Life offers a dual autobiography. It describes the development of Sartre’s existential philosophy, as well as his hobbies (such as playing with a yo-yo), his aversions (to tomatoes, for example), and his pleasures. One sees de Beauvoir and Sartre traveling, eating, arguing, reading, enjoying films and plays, walking across mountainous landscapes and through museum corridors. De Beauvoir treats their lives, individually and together, with careful attention to detail; yet, as she warns her readers in the preface, she has “no intention of telling them everything. . . . There are many things which I firmly intend to leave in obscurity.” As is so often true of authors, a full picture of her life and thoughts emerges only in her fiction.

For a dozen years, from 1931 to 1943, de Beauvoir taught philosophy, first in Marseille and later in Rouen and Paris. Her intention was to train her students to think as she did, and her didacticism is evident in The Prime of Life. At the end of each part she presents a brief summary of the lessons she has learned, the ways in which her life was changed, and the distance she has yet to travel between the young woman who is the subject of the book and the middle-aged woman writing it. She adheres to her determination “to set out the facts in as frank a way as possible, neither simplifying their ambiguities nor swaddling them in false syntheses,” and she acknowledges that “self-knowledge is impossible.” Yet the older de Beauvoir cannot escape becoming a character in the account and serves as a chorus to guide the reader’s interpretation.

Critical Context

In his Essais (1580-1595; Essayes, 1603), Michel Eyquem de Montaigne wrote, “I am eager to make myself known.” The self that de Beauvoir reveals is one with a great capacity and desire for happiness, one who pursues that goal and attains it. The movement of The Prime of Life is comic, tracing de Beauvoir’s odyssey from isolation to commitment. It is also a work suffused with hope. Sartre’s existentialism concentrates on the problem of confronting evil in a world that does not allow for redemption from the divine. De Beauvoir shares Sartre’s philosophy but emphasizes another aspect, the working out of one’s salvation in a godless universe. Though she would probably not find the comparison flattering, her autobiography retells John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-1684) in a modern idiom, with intelligence as grace, freedom as the New Jerusalem, and herself as the secular pilgrim seeking that shining but elusive end.

What she might observe of all of her other works she may say with Montaigne here: “I am myself the matter of my book.” Yet her discretion (or reserve) makes the autobiography less revealing than her novels. Anyone wishing to trace the development of her fiction must read the memoirs, but anyone seeking to understand the author must turn to the fiction. She Came to Stay, for example, describes a menage a trois that parallels the experience of de Beauvoir, Sartre, and one of their students. In The Prime of Life, de Beauvoir confesses to some irritation with Sartre’s infatuation. In She Came to Stay, de Beauvoir’s surrogate, Francoise, reacts more strongly: She murders the character based on Olga. Clearly, the feelings that de Beauvoir conceals in her autobiography surface in the novels.

Nevertheless, the memoirs capture what Henry James urged all writers to record, “the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, . . . the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle.” The fiction is psychological, the autobiography realistic, but both exhibit the same qualities of mind that make de Beauvoir an important figure in twentieth century life and letters.

Bibliography

Brée, Germaine. Women Writers in France. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973. Professor Bree, a leading authority on contemporary French literature, discusses Beauvoir’s writings with sensitive understanding.

Leighton, Jean. Simone de Beauvoir on Woman. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975. This is a luminous interpretation of feminism in Beauvoir’s work.

Marks, Elaine, ed. Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. An assemblage of nearly thirty articles, essays, and reviews by such scholars and critics as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Rene Girard, Francis Jeanson, and Terry Keefe.

Marks, Elaine. Simone de Beauvoir: Encounters with Death. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973. By far the leading book-length interpretation of Beauvoir’s career, this work is both learned and lucidly written.

Winegarten, Renée. Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical View. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Winegarten’s study is compact, incisive, and often sharply skeptical of Beauvoir’s behavior, such as her slow awakening to political responsibility. A ten-page chronology of Beauvoir’s life is included.