G.H. Lewes: A Life I

In case you were wondering, I have been distracted by family responsibilities over the last few days and have done little reading and no writing. This book, by Rosemary Ashton, seems to be an appropriate sequel to my investigation of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, because I have stumbled on a new topic: literary couples. I already knew a lot about George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), one of whose better biographies was written by the same Rosemary Ashton, and was interested in taking a closer look at the Eliot-Lewes relationship from a knowledgeable source in order to get a better perspective on the de Beauvoir-Sartre relationship. One doesn't hear much about collaborative literary relationships, but, in the case of George Eliot, her relationship with Lewes was critical: she may never have written fiction if it hadn't been for him. The de Beauvoir-Sartre relationship seems less symbiotic and more fraught with problems for a number of reasons. First, I don't think that de Beauvoir and Sartre were as talented as they saw themselves, and, second, although they consulted each other frequently, their interests and works hardly converged, and they probably could have done their writing individually. So far I am struck by how spoiled and arrogant de Beauvoir and Sartre seem; they started with superior educations and a distorted sense of self-importance. Eliot and Lewes represent a dramatic contrast, with inferior educations, years of struggle and extraordinarily hard work. Observing the couples, de Beauvoir and Sartre seem more imperious and tendentious, while Eliot and Lewes seem comparatively more curious and, in the end, more knowledgeable. One of my theses is that the best fiction requires, besides a certain amount of imagination and a high level of linguistic skill, a depth of understanding of human nature and society, and that understanding seemed somewhat lacking in de Beauvoir and Sartre.

George Henry Lewes was the grandson of Charles Lee Lewes, an irreverent actor in England at a time when acting was not a respectable profession. G.H. Lewes's father, John Lee Lewes, was a minor literary figure who had two families. His wife bore four children, and he abandoned the family in 1811 to start an illegitimate family with Elizabeth Ashweek, with whom he had three sons. The third son, G.H. Lewes, was born in 1817. John Lee Lewes abandoned his second family in 1819 and moved to Bermuda to work as a customs officer. Elizabeth Ashweek married in 1823, and her sons disliked their stepfather. Not much information on Lewes's childhood is available, but apparently his mother faced financial difficulties. They lived in Gloucestershire, Southampton, Jersey, Nantes and Boulogne, and presumably their moves were motivated by a search for lower living costs. Lewes became fluent in French and early on developed the outlook of a freethinker.

By 1837, at the age of twenty, Lewes had become a young bohemian in London. He sought to emulate Shelley and became acquainted with Shelley's irresponsible surviving friend, Leigh Hunt, the writer. He supported himself through a variety of literary and journalistic pursuits. Leigh Hunt's son, Thornton, became his closest friend. Lewes seems to have been well-suited, despite a spotty education, to a journalistic life. He was able to churn out reviews, articles on Shelley and Goethe and a popular introductory philosophy book. By the time he was in his early thirties he had established friendships with Leigh Hunt, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Auguste Comte, George Sand, William Makepeace Thackeray and Herbert Spencer, and later he corresponded with Charles Darwin. He seems to have had a gregarious personality, have been good at telling jokes, producing witticisms and doing imitations, but he also had omnivorous interests and critical acuity.

In 1841, at the age of 23, Lewes married Agnes Jervis. Apparently their first few years together were happy, and they produced four sons, one of whom died young. For reasons not entirely clear the marriage declined, and Agnes bore several children by Thornton Hunt. There are aspects to Lewes's bohemian proclivities that are not well understood, and I'll discuss them further if they come up later in the book, which I've barely started.

I apologize if this topic doesn't interest you, but it is important to me in that it provides the kind of sociological perspective on literary production that I find most meaningful. It is all too common to read proclamations that some author has produced a "work of genius," but my experience has shown me that nothing occurs in a vacuum, and, more precisely, a great work cannot come into existence if all the right pieces aren't already in place – pieces which predominantly have nothing to do with the particular talents of an author.

Diary

The last few days have been spent observing fall colors and politics, which don't require comment. I continue to ruminate over Simone de Beauvoir, who, unfortunately, has produced an unpleasant aftereffect in me. Whatever her good points, I am tending to notice a pattern of self-indulgence, a lack of self-criticism, and, on top of that, some delusional thinking about the nature of her existence. The self-indulgence pertains to her lengthy writing style. If I had adopted a similar style, this blog would now be several thousand pages long, you would have heard about everyone I ever met, and I would have familiarized you with the details of every vacation or trip that I ever took. I would have done this without providing much context and very little analysis of the character and motivations of the people I knew. In order to do this I would have had to think that my life was important enough to waste your time describing it ad nauseum without ever getting to the heart of anything.

The lack of self-criticism occurs to me in those instances where de Beauvoir may have had a harmful effect on those around her. Based on her own account, it appears that she placed a lot of pressure on her friend Zaza, forcing her to adopt a harsh intellectual outlook on life that didn't suit her personality and put her at odds with her family. De Beauvoir hints at her own culpability in Zaza's death but takes no responsibility and ends that section of her autobiography on that note. Similarly, though she does not discuss the details of her sex life, she conveys a cavalier attitude toward the psychological impact she may have had on people who were much younger than she was. In the case of Nelson Algren, I got the feeling that her relationship began and ended as an amusing experiment for her, and that, though she may have felt bad about the outcome, she had been unwilling to make any changes in her life on his account.

The delusional thinking aspect is what concerns me the most. Apparently she was exceptionally headstrong from an early age, and she had a tendency to define herself as whatever she wanted to be even if that meant denying physical reality. As I mentioned earlier, she thought that she could transcend her body and be a woman or a man or whatever she liked. Her version of feminism wasn't a simple one that emphasized equality, but one more akin to contemporary gender studies, which allows individuals to choose their gender based on how they happen to feel. As in modern gender studies, de Beauvoir tended to view gender as a social construct, and while I agree that it is to some extent, it is also partly the result of irreducible biological facts. Where she goes overboard is in her ridicule of women who enjoy childrearing, domesticity and social ritual. In what I've read of de Beauvoir, I have seen no sympathy for those women, whose behavior accords with obvious biological reality and their actual feelings. In this respect, she is displaying the most basic kind of ignorance, for which I can never forgive her. Ironically, though defying traditional gender roles, she adopted a distinctly subservient role to Sartre throughout their relationship and ascribed greater talent to him than she did to herself. Furthermore, the intellectual superiority which she credits to herself and Sartre looks suspect just thirty years after her death. Between the two of them there seems to have been a decided avoidance of science, and this permitted them to manufacture their own reality, even when that meant that they were guaranteeing their future obsolescence as thinkers.

Not long ago I thought that de Beauvoir was similar to George Eliot, but on closer examination that resemblance is illusory. Specifically, I have been thinking about how de Beauvoir was deeply moved by Eliot's The Mill on the Floss but doesn't even mention, as far as I know, Eliot's far better novel, Middlemarch. The former is an autobiographical tale about social circumstances that unfairly cause the ostracism of a precocious young woman, but to George Eliot it was also a lamentation on her break with her brother, Isaac Evans, with whom she had been close during childhood. De Beauvoir seems only to have read it as in indictment of social custom, which was not the only intention of the author: Eliot felt heartsick for Isaac, and the novel indicates that she would rather have died with him than remain estranged. Middlemarch, in contrast, is a magisterial work that examines society at all levels, and, unlike any work by de Beauvoir, accurately appraises everyone within their particular social niche. While George Eliot had the perceptiveness to notice the foibles of the intellectuals in her life, de Beauvoir seems never to have taken off her rose-tinted glasses for Sartre, who would probably make even better fodder for satire than anyone known by George Eliot. Moreover, there is a warmth to George Eliot's portrayals of ordinary people, which contrasts with de Beauvoir's simmering disdain for all things bourgeois.

I've started to read G.H. Lewes: A Life, by Rosemary Ashton, which is about George Eliot's partner. Although I'm tired of England and English literature, Lewes and Eliot represent a more productive and interesting intellectual time and place than the wrongheaded and unsavory one inhabited by de Beauvoir and Sartre.

Diary

The fall colors are at a peak again here and as usual reaffirm how good it is to live in Vermont. The mountaintops turn orange first, and the colors slowly flow downward to sea level until everything has turned brown. You can extend the experience by hiking at higher elevations when the change begins. Frost has finally struck the garden, ending the growing season. This winter will probably be snowier than last. I am at a lull between books and have a couple of new ones on hand for whenever I resume. At this point I'm a little overdosed on French writers and will be returning to Hungary, England and elsewhere. American fiction remains too painful for me to read.

William became an outdoor/indoor cat last month and is much happier as a result. At first he went on a spree catching goldfinches, moles, voles and chipmunks, but he has since calmed down and hasn't deposited many dead animals by the door recently. He had one serious fight with a feral cat, in which he could have lost an eye, but he has recovered except for missing patches of fur that have yet to grow back. He loves following us around the yard during the day. Because there are dangerous predators out there, we bring him in at night.

I don't particularly like to comment on current events, but thought I should say something about Donald Trump. His political ascent is one of the most bizarre events in American political history for a number of reasons. If you analyze it purely on a political level it is a predictable development in the sense that the Republican Party has gradually wandered into a remote ideological region and has left its door open to fringe candidates who have nothing coherent to offer. To me it is a sign that the party lacks a central idea. The more disturbing aspect of it is that there are people who actually vote for someone like Trump, whose shortcomings are obvious. He is one of the most overtly elitist candidates ever, yet he has managed to make himself appealing to the common man. Any critical analysis of him immediately reveals that he has no qualifications for the job: he clearly does not understand politics, government, economics, science or world affairs, and he has unusually low ethical standards at a time when they are more essential than ever for most political candidates. Trump is a blatant example of the pitfalls of the American democratic process. Voters need training in how to make rational voting decisions or else have their right to vote rescinded. Fortunately, it appears that Trump will lose by a landslide to Hillary Clinton, who, though by no means an ideal candidate, is a reliable person with an appropriate background.

The other news event, which seems to be exciting literary people, is the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. I have been avoiding reading people's reactions, because I don't care what they think. Nothing has changed in how I see Dylan, and this event is really about the Nobel Committee. The Swedes would have been wise to stay away from aesthetic judgments, because that is not one of their fortes, if they have any. As I've said, Dylan's talent emerged in the 1960's, but has been followed by a barren half-century. Like Richard Feynman, a fellow Ashkenazim, he started with an extraordinary talent. In his case he was able to assimilate vast amounts of music and oral tradition during a time of social upheaval to produce a unique synthesis – all without quite understanding what he was doing. Dylan was never disciplined enough to meet my definition of a great artist; he was a raw talent that fizzled. Since both Dylan and Feynman took up painting as a hobby, you can compare their works and use that as a neutral basis to decide which of them is the better artist. In my judgment, Feynman is the better artist, and that may be because he was more disciplined and a clearer thinker than Dylan. On close examination everything that Dylan ever had to say was derivative of what other people had said, thus he remains an enigma rather than an exemplar of artistic expression.

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 II

Much of the remainder of the book is devoted to painting a detailed sociological portrait of the time and place under discussion. This appeals to me in the sense that it clearly demonstrates how the behavior of the intellectuals in question was determined by the environment in which they lived, and that the actual merit of their ideas played little role in their public stature. However, this approach is also disappointing in that it tends to reduce the issues of the period to style and fashion and thereby grants Judt an authorial control in which the intellectuals in question are portrayed as flawed or ignorant to one degree or another without having any opportunity to defend themselves. On the whole I think Judt's analysis is correct, but obviously Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Mounier and many of the other intellectuals discussed would disagree with him if they were here to defend themselves.

Judt's objections to Sartre center on his silence on important issues, including the existence of Soviet labor camps, the show trials of Eastern Europe and Soviet anti-Semitism. Rather than presenting Sartre's positions as reasoned ones, he explains how attitudes that developed among intellectuals in France evolved over time and supported him. Sartre and his cohort had become suspicious of the U.S. and Britain when they had failed to prevent Hitler's victory in France, when the U.S. had bombed French cities, and, following the war, when the U.S. had become an occupying force.

Judt also describes how the roles of intellectuals differed from country to country. As a dominant cultural center in Europe, Paris had long been respected for its intelligentsia, and they had been highly active in national debates since the Dreyfus affair. I was amused by Judt's frank description of how intellectuals in France differ from those in the U.S.:

One of the distinctive and enduring differences between France and the United States has been the insignificance of the intelligentsia in the public life of the latter. In marked contrast to their French homologues, American intellectuals are marginal to their own culture. For a multitude of reasons, the intellectual in America has no purchase upon the public mind, not to mention public policy. Thus there was (and remains) about the United States something profoundly inimical and alien to the European and French conception of the intellectual and his or her role. If "America" represented the future, then it pointed to a society in which the role of the intellectual, real as well as self-ascribed, would be dramatically reduced.

If I had been more cognizant of this view when the book was published in 1992, I might have saved myself a lot of frustration and annoyance by not subscribing to the New York Review of Books; I didn't recognize until about 2014 the extent to which it is a marginal publication serving the narrow interests of a tiny, closed group. For reasons of mental health alone, steering clear of American intellectuals and their affiliates seems to be the best option, though it may result, as it has in my case, in retreating from the possibility of discussion.

Judt describes the legacy of the French intellectuals in question as follows:

More than their past errors or their occasional air of overbearing superiority, it was the ineffable solipsism of so many French intellectuals that finally broke their hold on the European imagination. Uniquely, they seemed unable to grasp the course of events. Despite their best intentions, Sartre, Mounier, Merleau-Ponty, and their spiritual heirs did not see themselves projected onto the stage of history but rather saw history reduced to the categories and dimensions of their own intellectual trajectories. Because of their neglectful uninterest in Europe's eastern half from 1957 until the later seventies, French intellectuals in recent years have found themselves discovering truths that had already been self-evident to others for three decades....

Since I read this book primarily to gain a better insight into Sartre and de Beauvoir, I'll comment on that. The main suspicions I had adopted while reading de Beauvoir were that her understanding of politics seemed limited in The Mandarins and that she tended to be inappropriately adulatory and uncritical towards her father, her cousin Jacques and Sartre in her memoirs. She also seemed oblivious to the significance of the cultural barriers separating her from Nelson Algren. Judt confirms to me that though she is a clear and honest writer, she is not particularly perceptive and is prone to adopting naïve ideas. Regarding Sartre, I never held him in high regard, and Judt confirms what I already thought. Sartre may have been interesting as a personality and in his range of interests, but from the present he does not in the least resemble a major philosopher, playwright or political theorist. Although I still think that de Beauvoir's writing is worthwhile, I feel that you have to sift through an awful lot of it to find what is best. If you look at all of her work as autobiographical, the most memorable passages for me have been her recollections of conversations that she held with other women. But to get to that you have to wade through thousands of pages of delusional thinking about the men in her life, a poor understanding of history and a shockingly myopic take on the world from a limited French intellectual point of view. At the moment she and Sartre seem to me like one-trick ponies: they resented their bourgeois upbringings, to which I say "So what!" I may resume reading her in the future, but for the time being I've had my fill of her.

Regarding Tony Judt's writing itself, I enjoyed his vigor and clarity as usual; these characteristics set him apart from nearly all academic writers. However, I think that his style is somewhat better suited to shorter essays, because in this full-length book I began to feel that his arguments were overkill, and that there wasn't much left of Sartre by the end. Judt reminds me of a cat that has caught and killed a bird and is carrying it around proudly in his mouth, and though having no intention of eating it he bites it periodically for good measure; before long the bird looks like an inert bundle of feathers, and you begin to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Chipmunks

One of the statements in my last post was unclear to a reader and requires further explanation. I have got into the habit of comparing people to chipmunks, and now "chipmunk" is a code word that refers to the conspicuous absence of scientific evidence, particularly biological evidence, when making prescriptive statements about people, society and organizations. For example, when Thomas Jefferson wrote of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" as "unalienable Rights," he was referring to humans in the abstract, primarily as legal entities, and ignoring the biological context of his ideas. This has become a private joke for me, and I imagine an eloquent chipmunk similarly composing a grand document which brings order and harmony to chipmunk society. My thinking is that the existence of both humans and chipmunks is guided by natural laws which have no relationship to most of the concepts that we invent. In a sense we resemble chipmunks in that we unselfconsciously go about our lives and do whatever we are inclined to do without relying on abstract concepts at all. Furthermore, the evidence is now overwhelming that humans are fundamentally irrational in many respects, and I believe that the humanistic models of government that came to dominate in the West were mistakenly based on the same incorrect "rational agent" hypothesis that has been implicitly employed by Jefferson and other political theoreticians since. The term "rational agent" comes from modern economics, but has an earlier history in the Enlightenment.

I like to use Jefferson and the American Revolution as examples of the limits of human cognition, and how we, as a culture, may, for example, rewrite history to suit our heroic conceptions of national identity. As I've said, if you look at the bare facts of the origin of the U.S., it was a case of white male landowners breaking with England in order to pursue their private business interests without being encumbered by the British government. At the time of the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, its beneficiaries were still white male landowners, and everyone else was subhuman in a strict legal sense. The saving grace of the Constitution was the allowance for its alteration, because the modern world bears little resemblance to the world of 1787. However, the U.S. government currently responds too inefficiently to collective needs, and it seems possible that political dysfunction could eventually lead to its collapse.

My theory, which I have attempted to articulate with varying degrees of success on this blog, is that something resembling a "zoo" or "wildlife management" model of governance is beginning to look more appropriate than the "rights of man" model now generally assumed by modern governments. There was a time – in the eighteenth century – when the "rights of man" model may have been plausible for use on a large scale if contemporary abuses such as slavery had been addressed, but since then overpopulation, increased cultural clashes, global warming, mass extinctions and more powerful weaponry may have made global problems too challenging for solution within the context of existing governments and international organizations. This is where I think AI enters the picture. I know that some of my readers may think I'm engaging in futuristic, antidemocratic nonsense, but to me AI is the obvious next step when you consider the documented limits of human capability. It takes no imagination to envision a large computer outperforming the human brain in a variety of processes, and such a computer could operate without the biases that are known to produce poor decisions in humans. Just as individuals often overrate their intelligence, so do governments and other institutions. Up to this point, human arrogance has been easy to defend, because we have been the smartest species on the planet, but I think that AI may soon change our outlook.

My reasons for taking this position on mankind are not based on any inherent pessimism or a deep dislike for the current state of affairs, but rather on my preference for order rather than disorder. I have had ample time to reflect on my own life, and it has been obvious to me that I made decisions at various points which were not optimal. The same is true for practically everyone, and I don't believe that one must accept life as inherently full of inadequate information, bad advice, stupidity, poor decisions, etc. If you reflect on your own life, the lives of your siblings, the lives of your parents, the lives of your grandparents, and so on, you will clearly see many haphazard choices that significantly affected the courses of your life and theirs. From a decision-making standpoint, much more information and information processing is available now than used to be the case, and I don't think it should be wasted. It is becoming technologically possible to live a better-informed life, thanks to information technology and the sciences. Until recently in human history, outcomes were often ascribed to fate, luck or God, and there are now better ways to produce desired outcomes that shouldn't be ignored. This entails seeing our place in the universe rather than making up stories that merely conceal our ignorance.

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 I

Because of my unease with Simone de Beauvoir's accounts of both historical events and personal matters, I decided to get a second opinion by reading this book by Tony Judt, which was published in 1992. Judt was one of the leading scholars of modern European history, and here he describes in great detail the intellectual environment in France immediately following World War II. In my reading of Simone de Beauvoir I began to detect hints of hagiography, and there is no one better equipped than Judt to unmask historical inaccuracies in this period. Judt was particularly interested in the effects that intellectuals have on history, and he himself became a significant public intellectual following 9/11, when he went public as an anti-Zionist and criticized the Bush administration for its actions in Iraq. He was a breath of fresh air when other so-called intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff were cheering on Bush. It is most unfortunate that he died prematurely from ALS in 2010 at the age of sixty-two. I feel lucky to have met him in 2003. As a humanist and an academic, Judt is still subject to the reservations I have about those camps, but I know that he had personal integrity and was not blinded by professional ambition, as is often the case.

The book discusses dozens of French intellectuals from the period and occasionally ventures as far back as the French Revolution for examples, but I am reading it mainly for his opinions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. So far, about halfway through, he isn't enthusiastic about them:

As a rule, philosophers found Sartre slippery; playwrights found him didactic. But each found him to be a genius at the other activity.

Regarding the second and third volumes of de Beauvoir's memoirs he says:

Although they sometimes lack psychological insight and show remarkable naiveté at times, they are honest and informative narratives of a high quality.

He also notes that in The Mandarins de Beauvoir attempted to clean up Sartre's record on remaining silent about the Gulag system:

Even Simone de Beauvoir, in Les Mandarins, was constrained to insert a series of anguished debates between Dubreuilh [Sartre] and Perron [Camus] over the news of Soviet camps, though she managed to make it appear that these debates had been taking place as early as 1946.

Judt describes France as in ideological tatters before World War II and continuing in that state afterwards. There was no clarity in how to punish German collaborators and members of the Vichy government, and there were mixed responses to events in Soviet East Europe. The communist party in France remained strong throughout the period, and most French intellectuals were reluctant to criticize the Soviets. Sartre and de Beauvoir became influential political thinkers through their journal, Modern Times, which was founded in 1945 and still exists. Sartre believed in a communist future, and this prevented him from criticizing its abuses in the present. De Beauvoir thought that Soviet communism was unrelated to French communism. Camus was the first in this group to criticize the Soviets, resulting in his break with Sartre described in The Mandarins. Judt also complains about Sartre's lack of a solid philosophical foundation for his political views. Because Sartre never wrote a book on existential ethics, as he had promised, the moral reasoning behind his ideas, if any, remained obscure.

To speculate a little, I think Tony Judt would have loved to have been a Parisian public intellectual in the manner of Jean-Paul Sartre or Raymond Aron, but he was turned off by the actual intellectual environment when he lived there and instead became a critic of public intellectuals. I wholeheartedly agree with him and only wish he had gone on the attack sooner when he moved to New York. However, in other respects I don't agree with him at all. He is writing in the tradition of an Enlightenment humanist, which I think has run its course. To me, concepts such as liberté, égalité, fraternité, socialism, communism, democracy and capitalism are obsolete, because humans have conclusively proven themselves to be ineffectual at collective self-governance on a large scale. Having a far lower opinion of mankind than Judt, it appears to me that modern political theory isn't much different from theories one might propose to bring order to chipmunk society. The absence of consideration of the biological limitations of humans in political thought precludes the possibility of a functional theory. In this regard, as I have said repeatedly, in the long run AI is more likely to produce tenable solutions.

I should also mention that, having lived in the U.S. for most of my life, discussion of European political history seems extraordinarily exotic. That is because, with the exception of the Civil War, which had little effect on the structure of government, there have been no major political upheavals here in 240 years, and the population is blindly faithful to longstanding ideas of democracy and capitalism. Efforts have been made periodically to inject socialism into the system during economic downturns, but those have always evaporated once the economy recovered. Although I don't see the present system in the U.S. as sustainable or desirable, Europe seems far more complex and chaotic in comparison.

I'll post again on this topic whenever I finish the book.

The Prime of Life V

I got so tired of the remainder of the book that I skimmed it. The period in this section includes the German invasion and occupation of northern France and Vichy France to the south, from 1940 to the end of the occupation in 1944. Sartre initially joined the army, was captured and was subsequently released. He wrote the philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness and the plays No Exit and The Flies. By the end of the war de Beauvoir and Sartre had begun to travel in wider artistic circles. They socialized with Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet and befriended Albert Camus. Sartre became more politically-minded than he had been previously and hoped to steer France in a socialistic direction after the war. This is the same territory covered at the beginning of The Mandarins.

Because de Beauvoir's descriptions in this volume seemed inadequate from the beginning, I looked briefly into other biographical sources in order to get a better sense of what actually went on. Although she makes veiled references to it, she has elided practically all of the considerable sexual activity that was taking place within her circle at the time. I can understand to some extent why she would do this. There is the element of privacy, and most of the people were still alive when she wrote the book. However, this is supposed to be a memoir, and I find it unacceptable that she glosses over facts that more clearly illustrate the nature of her relationship with Sartre than she succeeds in doing otherwise. She repeatedly states that the relationship was at the core of her life, yet in the book he comes across as some guy whom she sees – every once in a while – to discuss their writing. Fortunately, their literary executors have since released many of their letters, which reveal that Sartre had a tremendous sexual appetite for pretty young women, preferably virgins, and that de Beauvoir played a significant role in finding and grooming them for him. De Beauvoir herself had sexual contact with them but does not seem to have been a lesbian or bisexual, though one author speculates that she may have had erotic interactions far earlier with her childhood friend, Zaza. Apparently Sartre had as many as nine mistresses at a time, and some of them were unaware of the others. Sartre and de Beauvoir themselves stopped having sex early in their relationship, and it is possible to stretch things a little in order to portray them as advanced thinkers in this realm, but one must consider that de Beauvoir has deliberately covered up Sartre's activities and that some of the women who became sexually involved with him later said that they had been used and discarded. I have no interest in pursuing this vein further and am content to agree with Louis Menand's assessment in this article. The most plausible explanation for de Beauvoir's authorial choice in how to handle the activities in question is that she was playing the traditional role of supportive wife in a patriarchal society, which, though out of keeping for the author of The Second Sex, reflects who she was.

The sex part, per se, has little influence on my opinion of de Beauvoir, and I am more concerned that she chose to saddle herself with Sartre, whom I don't admire at all. I would have liked her more if she had attached herself to someone less seedy and manipulative. Beyond her academic abilities she may not have been as smart as you may think. Unfortunately, I am going to have to kick her out of my personal pantheon, where George Eliot still resides, because she reminds me too much of a Jackie Kennedy or a Nancy Reagan in her willingness to bolster a man of little merit: Kennedy was unfaithful and Reagan was not very bright. She demeaned herself by making sacrifices for Sartre, who, in my opinion, wasn't worth it. I have lost all enthusiasm for her writing and may not read any more of it. On the positive side, she is occasionally perceptive and always articulate, but on the negative side she is lacking in imagination, and, above all, the compromises that she made for Sartre found their way into her work, which diminishes her in my mind.

The Prime of Life IV

In 1938 both de Beauvoir and Sartre obtained new teaching positions in Paris. They continued to live separately while seeing each other frequently. That year Sartre published his first novel, Nausea, which met with critical and commercial success. De Beauvoir worked on She Came to Stay, which was not published until 1943. By 1939 the imminent war affected everyone in Paris, and de Beauvoir describes her daily life in some detail. I had thought that she must have been drawing from her diaries to write her memoirs up to that point, but apparently she did not keep a diary before then. The diary entries that she reproduces are slightly condensed compared to the preceding text but are otherwise little different. Now, three quarters of the way through the book, I am becoming overwhelmed by minutia that doesn't interest me much. To be sure, World War II was an important event and still has major repercussions over seventy years in its aftermath, and de Beauvoir's chronicles might be useful to a historian of the period, but that isn't why I chose to read this book and I am increasingly finding it boring. I am looking forward to finishing it and moving on to something else.

De Beauvoir's limitations as a writer and thinker are beginning to weigh on me in a manner that makes it difficult for me to continue reading this book and accept her at face value. I will soon finish reading it and make a final comment. My problem as a reader is that she does not provide enough breadth of perspective to leave me feeling that her portrayals are sufficiently accurate. I had somewhat the same feeling while I was reading The Mandarins, but in that book any deficiencies were made up for by some of the dialogue between the characters. Such dialogue is not present in The Prime of Life, leaving it, for me anyway, somewhat empty. The earlier Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter was also more readable, but in that case it was because it contained a sharper focus and the emotional energy was less opaque. In The Mandarins and the present book, Sartre is an important figure, but I don't see why he is important beyond the fact that de Beauvoir has assigned him that position.

None of my reading of de Beauvoir so far has included much philosophy, and the writing has essentially all been autobiographical. However, in the background of this writing is a credo that she adopted at an early age and mentions now and again. I am finding myself in philosophical disagreement with her, but because she evades the explicit statement of her views in favor of a literary approach I am left with a gnawing feeling that makes her writing seem avoidant. The impression I have is that both she and Sartre are extreme Cartesian dualists, which in their case prompts them to see themselves as free beings who happen to inhabit their particular bodies. She seems to think along the lines that she has a duty to be free from the social pressures associated with the fact that she happens to inhabit a female body. This is a significantly different view from standard American feminism, which focuses more on equal rights and can ultimately be resolved by legal means. For me, Cartesian dualism is conceptually incorrect: you are your body, and therefore both Sartre and de Beauvoir look like fools to me. This foolishness then becomes exacerbated by their insistence on spending their entire lives in Paris with the same closed circle of friends, which is a perfect way to form and maintain a delusional bubble.

Sartre and de Beauvoir are starting to look like naïve college students who never grew up. Specifically, they thought that they could read anything, master it and then write brilliantly on the subject. I first noticed this in The Mandarins. De Beauvoir thought she understood America very well because she had read a lot of American fiction, seen a lot of American films and listened to a lot of American music. In The Mandarins you can instantly recognize as a reader that there is a deep cultural incompatibility between Louis Brogan (Nelson Algren) and Anne Dubreuilh (de Beauvoir), but I am not at all sure that the author recognizes it as such. De Beauvoir strikes me as anthropologically and sociologically obtuse, perhaps because she came to these subjects via trendy, obsolete structuralism, and post-structuralism doesn't seem to me to have been an improvement. In retrospect, the intellectual movements that emanated from France during de Beauvoir's life, including existentialism, seem like fads to me. She did study psychology and seems handier there, but at that time the field was still under Freud's influence and it had not yet become a true science. Both de Beauvoir and Sartre seem to view science as having no bearing on their work, and I think this is a critical mistake which will relegate them to the status of minor historical figures rather than major thinkers of the period. De Beauvoir would have been an interesting person to know, but she is dead and I am beginning to think that all that is left is a flawed legacy.

Diary

I need to take a break from Simone de Beauvoir, because she simply writes too much. In her memoirs she is like a pre-Flaubert French novelist such as Victor Hugo who churns out page after page with little of substance to add compared to a postmodernist, whose meaning, if any, may be obscure, but who at least is concise. For my taste she is relying too much on a journalistic style, spending an inordinate amount of time on events and too little on analysis. I suspect that she is just transcribing her diaries and cleaning them up for public consumption, since both she and Sartre were famous by 1960. Her writing isn't as fluid or as evocative as Proust's, but, like him, she, in effect, withholds crucial information – such as that so-and-so is gay – for thousands of pages. Although there is precision to her writing, she, as a writer, seems to intentionally stop at a pre-defined level of depth as a matter of stylistic choice, when I would prefer it if she had dug further into the psyches of the people discussed. She spends far too much time describing her vacations in the manner of travel writing when I want to know what she really thinks about Sartre, Bost, Olga, etc. Her style makes her writing seem as if you are seeing everything through a filter that removes what is most intriguing in order to provide a predefined narrative flow that has been calculated to meet the needs of a hypothetical reader. In other words, unlike this blog, where I make a reasonable effort to tell you exactly what I think about something, de Beauvoir seems to consciously self-edit for reasons that she doesn't explain. For example, while she has firmly established that Sartre is a crucial element in her life, she has said nothing specifically about the strengths and weaknesses of their relationship, what she might have preferred, etc. She is holding back for some reason – Sartre was going to read it and she doesn't want to upset him, it might affect Sartre's public reputation, or, less likely, she didn't really understand Sartre. Similarly, as she describes the Sartre-Olga affair one might surmise that she and Olga were ultimately hurt, but it seems that Sartre has no accountability for his behavior. The impression I have is that she uses writing as a form of sublimation that whitewashes undesirable behavior among her intimates, which is a disservice to her readers. She may also be laboring under the "great man" delusion that is so popular in France. In my writing I try to be as clear as possible about people other than the ones whom I know are reading my blog. That way you get an unfiltered statement of my views, and in those instances where I think privacy is important you get almost no information, and I don't waste your time by dancing around facts or covering up with selected omissions.

In other news, it is starting to get cold here, and there may be a frost tonight. I am planning a very brief trip to Bar Harbor, Maine next month. As you can tell from the comments above, I am a little bogged down with The Prime of Life, but I will continue reading it and keep you posted. There are two more books in this memoir series plus three additional memoir-like books by de Beauvoir, but I'm not in a hurry to read them. I will eventually read the next two volumes, but definitely not in succession.

The Prime of Life III

De Beauvoir and Sartre saw each other frequently when they lived separately in Rouen and Le Havre. They developed friends and read a lot. De Beauvoir seems to have been interested in the latest styles in fiction and admired Faulkner and Kafka. They discussed why she didn't concern herself more with philosophy:

...I was well aware that the ease with which I penetrated to the heart of a text stemmed, precisely, from my lack of originality. In this field a genuinely creative talent is so rare that queries as to why I did not attempt to join the élite are surely otiose: it would be more useful to explain how certain individuals are capable of getting results from that conscious venture into lunacy known as a 'philosophical system', from which they derive that obsessional attitude which endows their tentative patterns with universal insight and applicability. As I have remarked before, women are not by nature prone to obsessions of this type....I wanted to communicate the element of originality in my own experience. In order to do this successfully I knew that it was literature towards which I must orientate myself. 

At this stage in my reading I am inclined to think that de Beauvoir was not original as a producer of literature either. She is good at clear and precise renderings of human interactions but adopted a style that reads more like nonfiction than fiction. She draws so directly from her life experiences that it's as if she simply changes "I" in her diary to "she" in her novels. There are close similarities between some of the people in this memoir to some of the characters in The Mandarins. Moreover, although I find her enjoyable to read, her writing is completely lacking in the kind of originality that one sees in writers such as Kafka or László Krasznahorkai. Her strategy as a writer seems to have been to sculpt her life so as to provide a sufficient stream of material for her fiction. There may even be an oddly calculated dimension to her choice of Sartre as a partner, because on close inspection they have little in common, and she may have seen him as a ticket to a colorful life. I notice that in her memoirs she is quick to compliment physically attractive men on their appearance, yet she leads us to believe that she also found Sartre attractive even though he was wall-eyed and practically a dwarf, features to which she never refers, perhaps to spare his feelings.

From 1933 to 1935 Sartre studied in Berlin, and he and de Beauvoir vacationed in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. Fascism was prominent in Europe by then, and the Spanish Civil War was to begin in 1936. As you might expect, they were appalled by Hitler and Mussolini.

When he returned to his job in Le Havre, Sartre became depressive. He was extremely ambitious and was concerned, at the age of 30, that he would spend the rest of his days as an obscure philosophy teacher. He didn't like teaching and at least once had called an entire class stupid to their faces. De Beauvoir, though only 27 in 1935, was more worried about her age. Sartre was interested in dreams, and a medical friend recommended that he take mescaline in a controlled setting. Most people had found the experience pleasant, but Sartre had a classic bad trip: "umbrellas had become vultures, shoes turned into skeletons, and faces acquired monstrous characteristics, while behind him, just past the corner of his eye, swarmed crabs and polyps and grimacing Things." Although the effects of the drug quickly wore off, Sartre continued to experience hallucinations for months. It became a joke with de Beauvoir that he thought that he was being followed by a lobster. However, this was a serious episode of depression that took time to dissipate.

At the time their friends included Marco, a gay teacher and earlier acquaintance of Sartre who wanted to be an opera singer, Olga, who had been a student of de Beauvoir, and Jacques Bost, who had been a student of Sartre. Marco would dream up elaborate deceptions for fun, and once even Sartre and de Beauvoir participated. Olga was the daughter of a White Russian émigré and was being pressured by her parents to study subjects in which she had no interest. Bost was a good-looking, intelligent young man who appealed to both Sartre and de Beauvoir. Before long, Sartre got into a relationship with Olga, which did not exclude de Beauvoir, and they tried for a while, unsuccessfully, to live as three. Marco fell in love with Bost, who was not gay and rejected him. De Beauvoir had an affair with Bost. In the end, Sartre and Olga broke up, and Olga later married Bost. Perhaps out of discretion, de Beauvoir leaves out most of the details of what transpired, but she made use of the triad for her first published novel, She Came to Stay.

There was considerable controversy in de Beauvoir's life, and some of it began with Olga. Olga was the first of several young women whom she introduced to Sartre, and, depending on what you read, she was either an emancipated thinker or a pedophile-enabler who procured girls for Sartre's sexual gratification. I am reluctant to dig into this because it is time-consuming enough to read de Beauvoir's version and I am fairly confident that she would not be completely callous in these matters. What concerns me more is the possibility that de Beauvoir intentionally staged her life events, including her relationships, in order to generate material for her fiction. That seemed to be the case in her relationship with Nelson Algren as portrayed in The Mandarins. If I don't tire of reading her memoirs, that topic should come up in the next volume, which covers that period. She obviously had a formidable intellect, but I could hardly approve of her as a person if she intentionally toyed with people's lives in the interest of her personal success.

An aspect of writing fiction that you don't hear much about is the difficulty that writers face in coming up with fresh material. That can't be taught in writing programs, and this explains why, in the present day, the vacuous students who attend creative writing programs tend to produce interesting word usage more often than astute observations of any kind. De Beauvoir, for her part, knew her limitations as a writer and was intelligent enough to find a solution that worked in her case.

The Prime of Life II

Sartre tried to line up a teaching position in Japan to follow his military service, but he failed to do so and ended up teaching in Le Havre instead. De Beauvoir got a job teaching at a lycée in Marseille. She impetuously set about exploring the region alone on foot and by hitchhiking. Once two men attempted to abduct her, and she managed to escape. At the lycée she was so young that many thought she was a student. One of her colleagues, a married woman, tried unsuccessfully to seduce her. Before long she took a new position in Rouen in order to be closer to Sartre and Paris.

During this period their interests were eclectic. Sartre had lively friends in the theatrical world, and they read widely, always discussing issues that they deemed important. Their reading and entertainment included more lowbrow than highbrow material. They watched films with Buster Keaton and Sartre particularly liked detective novels. They closely followed crime stories in the news. De Beauvoir especially liked the works of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They managed to travel on inexpensive vacations to Spain, Italy and London. The pattern that they were to follow for the rest of their lives began to emerge.

It is at this juncture that, for me, the reader, the picture becomes a little myopic. While de Beauvoir's writing seems honest and open and she seems to be relatively perceptive, I am beginning to become a little uneasy with her point of view and feel the need for a second opinion, which you never get in memoirs. I can accept de Beauvoir's perspective, in which her life with Sartre meets all of her expectations, and that he may have been the only person who could offer that to her, allowing her to live free from the social constraints that had been the bane of her youth, but I don't get a sense that I would analyze the situation exactly as she did if I had been there, because she seems to be overreacting to her past and possibly is placing more faith in Sartre than is justified. My problem is that Sartre was not a great thinker, and, for that matter, not a great writer. He was constantly generalizing, but his theories were often bad or even stupid. De Beauvoir obliquely hints at this, and the impression I get is that, to her, Sartre was sort of a lifestyle choice more than anything else, and that ultimately ideas were not all that important to her. Rather than take a systematic approach to this problem, I am simply going to read Tony Judt's Past Imperfect, in which the French intellectuals of that era, Sartre in particular, are eviscerated. I'm not sure that I'll agree with Judt on every position, since both he and Sartre have different points of view from mine, but you can always count on Judt for a well-written, rigorous analysis.

The good part of de Beauvoir's relationship with Sartre, as far as I'm concerned, was their willingness to discuss everything in great detail:

Sartre sometimes upbraided me for my insouciance, just as I became irritated when he spent too long buried in a paper. To justify my attitude I invoked the theory of the 'solitary man'. Sartre objected that the 'solitary man' does not lack any interest in the course of events: though his thought may not depend on external supporting opinion, this does not imply that he opts for ignorance. Sartre's counter-attack shook me, but I persevered in my attitude. I wanted people to despise the futile contingencies of daily life, as I thought Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Van Gogh had done. The position I had adopted suited me somewhat ill; there was nothing in me of the visionary, or the solitary, or indeed of the lyric poet. I was really indulging in escapism, putting myself into blinkers so as to safeguard my piece of mind. For a long while I stuck obstinately to this 'rejection of humanity', which was also the inspiration of my aesthetic views. I liked those landscapes in which there was no apparent sign of man's presence, or else the sort of camouflage – local color, picturesque background – which concealed such presence from me. In Rouen my favorite spot was the Rue Eau-de-Robec: its shapeless, rickety houses, lapped by filthy water, looked very much as though they might be destined for some wholly alien species of inhabitant. I was attracted by those people, such as madmen, prostitutes, or tramps, who had in one way or another denied their own humanity.  

Certainly neither Sartre nor de Beauvoir can be accused of mental laziness. I identify more with de Beauvoir, because it was Sartre's "save the world" mentality that got him into trouble, putting him in way over his head, where he badly tackled issues that he didn't even understand.

Diary

I had hoped that by now I would have read enough to make another book post, but I haven't, due to several distractions. We had a rare string of four nights in a row with good stargazing conditions – the best in nearly a year – and I wanted to take advantage of them. I've been looking at objects such as M2, M5, M13, M27, M31, NGC 6207, NGC 6960, Burnham 1, and lots of other multiple star systems. Although it would have been possible to see several planets this summer, I didn't bother with my large telescope, because it is hard to find a place in the yard with a good view to the south, and they are close to the horizon, which is hazy. I prefer to view planets on my smaller refractor on the rear deck, and it is difficult to situate the Dobsonian there. The season is moving along, and if you stay up late enough you can already see M42, one of the most interesting objects in the night sky.

Perhaps further explanation is needed for my interest in stargazing, since I seem to be the only person I know who likes it. I do it partly for aesthetics, because many of the objects are attractive natural phenomena, and partly for knowledge, because, after all, most of the universe is out there, not here. And I like operating precision equipment. Other stargazers have different motivations from mine. Some are more socially motivated, and star parties are popular throughout the world. Others are even more interested in tinkering than I am, and when they find out how hard it is to see things well they take up astrophotography, which can occupy a technically-oriented person indefinitely. With newer cameras, long exposure times and new software it is possible to produce images that show far more detail than one can see with the naked eye even under ideal viewing conditions. There is also a competitive aspect to stargazing, which often centers around – you guessed it – who has the largest telescope. In stargazing culture, all of these motivations get scrambled up by the commercial element, which emphasizes product over knowledge. Many stargazers seem to have a checklist mentality; they want the right equipment so that they can go down a list and check off what they've seen, whether or not they know what the objects are. I prefer to at least have some astronomical understanding of what I'm looking at. The universe is a large place, and even many of the known objects are not well understood.

In other news, William the cat is improving over time. He was a little wild at first and is gradually becoming better adjusted. This is an excellent house for a cat, since there is space to run around, an old basement with crickets, and chipmunks, birds and rabbits to watch outside. The chipmunks seem to enjoy taunting him by standing right in front of him, separated only by a screen. He has a high level of energy which we hope will gradually subside.

The tomato crop turned out well, and we are at the point of giving them away. I've done more watering than ever before due to the lack of rain, but the absence of rain also meant a reduction in fungus, which has left the plants healthier than they usually are by now.

We continue to follow politics, but I'd rather not think about it. My unavoidable conclusion is that presidents are never up to the task, and in fact the U.S. seems to have had a series of mediocre presidents following FDR. Even in FDR's case there was a certain amount of luck involved in the sense that he held office during real crises that obviously required strong actions. In my opinion, if you exclude climate change and mass extinctions, there has been no serious disaster facing the U.S. since World War II, and, if anything, the greatest disaster since then has been American foreign policy. Arguably, China has produced the best leaders in recent years: Deng Xiaoping and now Xi Jinping. It is unfortunate that the whole world has become trapped in a vicious cycle of economic competition. A better solution may lie in the communist regimes that are willing to play the game for a while, rather than Europe and the U.S., where the current system originated. If you could take the corruption out of communism and improve the decision-making of its leaders, it might well provide a system of governance far more appropriate for mankind than the one in which we live today.

On my next post I'll be back to de Beauvoir.

The Prime of Life I

Because I'm far from entering my winter mode I haven't been doing much reading. However, I have made some progress in this central portion of Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs and am finding it quite rich. She describes her life after college in great detail, and there is so much to ponder here that in writing a few comments about it I can only hope to give you an impression of the things that interest me the most.

When she finished at the Sorbonne she got her first apartment and began to see Sartre regularly. They would meet in public and talk for hours in the sight of others, and word got back to her father. Since their relationship was obviously sexual, he went over to have a word with Sartre to prevent embarrassment to his family. Sartre was tough-minded even then and didn't back down, but thereafter they met in more private locations. She made money working as a private tutor and in temporary teaching positions and Sartre lived off a small inheritance. He soon had eighteen months of compulsory military service that allowed him to stay close enough to Paris that they could see each other often.

De Beauvoir was giddy with her newly-found freedom and luxuriated in her free time. Although she didn't have much money she didn't care at all:

Our puritanical education and the firmness of our intellectual commitment ensured that we remained immune to dukes, millionaires, owners of Hispanos, women in mink, and all such denizens of high society. We actually stigmatized this beau monde as the very dregs of the earth, on the grounds that it sucked profit from a régime which we condemned.

During this period they decided that they would not marry, but that their relationship would be their primary one, with "essential love," and that they would each be free to pursue "contingent" relationships. They also agreed to keep no secrets from each other. Their long-term plan was to travel and live as writers. Their worldview was still in a formative stage:

Sartre built his theories, fundamentally, upon certain positions which we both adhered to with some passion. Our love of freedom, our opposition to the established order of things, our individualism, and our respect for the working classes – all these brought us close to the anarchist position. But to be quite frank, our incoherence defied any sort of label. We were anti-capitalist, yet not Marxists, we glorified the powers of pure mind and perfect freedom, yet we rejected the spiritual approach; though our interpretation of man and the universe was strictly materialistic, we despised science and technology. Sartre was not bothered by these inconsistencies, and refused so much as to formulate them. 'When you think in terms of problems,' he told me, 'you aren't thinking at all.' He himself skipped from one conviction to the next, without rhyme or reason.

Her teaching jobs didn't always go well, as she recounts in this humorous anecdote:

To earn my living I gave private lessons and also taught Latin at the Lycée Victor-Duruy. Previously I had taught psychology to thoughtful, well-behaved secondary-school girls in Neuilly; and this new junior class of mine caught me somewhat off guard. Learning the rudiments of Latin is a grim business for ten-year-old girls, and I thought I would soften the grimness with a few smiles. My pupils smiled back; then they came clambering up on the dais to get a closer look at my necklace, and began pulling at the lace collar of my dress. The first time I sent them back to their places they sat more or less quiet; but in a very short while they were wriggling and whispering to each other incessantly. I tried to make my voice sound stern, and to instill a fierce gleam into my eye; but they still chattered and played up to me as much as ever. I decided to take a tough line, and gave the worst offender a black mark. She flung herself head first against the nearest wall, screaming: 'My father will beat me!' The whole class took this cry up, in reproachful tones. 'Her father will beat her!' they chorused. Could I, I asked, condemn her to parental execution in this way! But if I let her off, how could I then punish her classmates? I found only one solution, and that was to talk so loud that my voice drowned the row they were making. The result was that those who wanted to listen could at least hear me; and I fancy my class learned about as much Latin as any other. But I more than once was summoned before an irate headmistress, and my assignment was not renewed.

An early attempt at writing a novel didn't go well either:

I became vaguely aware that the magic wasn't working in my case, though this didn't prevent me from chasing it stubbornly, and for a long time....My work lacked all real conviction. Sometimes I felt I was doing a school assignment, sometimes that I had lapsed into parody.

I am finding it tempting to compare de Beauvoir at this age to George Eliot at the same age. They both started out deeply religious and evolved into powerful intellectuals. Despite their similarities, de Beauvoir's advantages are striking. She had led a privileged life and had consciously rejected it and worked out an alternative by the time she was twenty-one. George Eliot, in contrast, came from a considerably lower social rank, without a higher education; she had no choice but to live with her conservative, uneducated father until he died, and her writing career didn't take off until she was in her late thirties. Her pickings among men were also restricted, with her dowdy looks and humble origin. Instead of finding a Sartre she found G.H. Lewes, who, though admirable in many ways, also came from a modest family and was ridiculed by some of the intellectual elites in London for his physical appearance. Moreover, living in London during the Victorian era had to be more stifling than living in Paris in the late 1920's and early 1930's. In sum, there is no question that George Eliot led a more challenging life. De Beauvoir fits a more contemporary bohemian model, and elements of her worldview at that age are reminiscent of the beatniks and the hippies, though her puritanical side provided her with far more self-discipline than ever existed in either of those groups. George Eliot's circumstances preempted the possibility of an adventurous life in the manner of de Beauvoir, and in this sense de Beauvoir seems to have been quite lucky.

If de Beauvoir is a little less saintly than George Eliot, she still looks much better to me than my contemporaries among American women. Many of the ones I've known have been upper-middle-class, or roughly comparable to de Beauvoir in social background. Their educations did nothing more than enable them to continue living bourgeois lives, perhaps showing slightly greater sensitivity to social issues than their parents did, but never deeply questioning the desirability of this stifling capitalist system. Their take on women's rights was that they deserved more than they had been getting, even if they had nothing to offer in return. That in itself isn't surprising among ordinary people, and particularly among Americans, who tend to be conformists, but it becomes more telling with respect to intellectuals, a group that I once mistakenly thought might have something important to say.

I'm only a tenth of the way through the book, so you can be sure that you'll be hearing more about this.

Diary

A languorous summer seems to be drawing to a close with the arrival of cooler temperatures and rain. Occasionally we retreated to the basement, where the temperature peaks at seventy degrees, to cool off. I have had a greater sense of lethargy this summer than most. All I did was grow tomatoes and go on a couple of trips. The most recent trip was a road trip to Valatie, New York to see the garden of the author of a blog that provides some of the recipes that we use. I especially liked the sprawling, dilapidated old mansion that survives from the early mill days of the region. I also liked having the opportunity to drive at one hundred miles per hour, which awakens me from my torpor. The third annual world meeting of Doubt the Experts took place on August 16, and it may be the last one, because John's parents are selling their summer house in Weybridge and he may not be back. Actually, the meeting consists of two guys sitting at a bar drinking beer and talking.

I continue to think about why I like the writing of Simone de Beauvoir. It is no coincidence that I also like the writing of George Eliot. The emerging idea is that I find slightly masculine women more aesthetically appealing than masculine men or feminine women. My theory is that motivations that are biological in origin infiltrate people's conscious or unconscious goals, and that much of what men do, regardless of their age or vocation, boils down to attracting women (or men, if they're gay). They are competing and making ostentatious displays in order to get attention and win devotees rather than seeking truth or beauty as ends in themselves. You can see this everywhere, from Joseph Smith to Hugh Hefner to Wilt Chamberlain to Charles Manson to Jimi Hendrix to Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. The concept of the "rock star" is quintessentially male, and it can also be found in a slightly more subdued form in academia and the arts. In practice, what this means is that, even among male intellectuals and scientists, attracting bimbos may sometimes take precedence over seeking truth. Clear examples are harder to find among the intelligentsia, but think of Saul Bellow or Richard Feynman.

This idea came to me not on a theoretical basis but directly from noticing that there is a qualitative difference in the writing of George Eliot and Simone de Beauvoir that other writers are unable to match. Specifically, I perceive that they are trying to express truths, and that for them this takes precedence over entertaining their readers, increasing their incomes or becoming famous, though they may retain a peripheral interest in those aspects. Notably to me, they lack what I think of as male competitiveness: they are not trying to win. I think that cooperation is more present in women than in men, and that, particularly in literary and artistic pursuits, the desire to win tends to compromise the quality of a work. The emphasis is different in most female writing; there is less competition and the emotional takes precedence over the rational. If you've read much of this blog, you will have noticed by now that I'm not a big fan of emotional outpourings.

It is possible that a feminized male writer would also appeal to me, but I haven't found one yet. At first I thought Proust had potential, but I have since decided that he is missing a crucial ingredient: intelligence. So, when I read literature that is supposed to be good, the men usually seem to be showing off and exaggerating their knowledge and insight, and the women usually seem unduly emotional and unrealistic. Unfortunately, George Eliot did not write a memoir, but there is no doubt in my mind that if she had it would have been just as engrossing as Simone de Beauvoir's. Both George Eliot and de Beauvoir were more masculine than most women writers, and, ironically, they even attracted female groupies.

I've started de Beauvoir's The Prime of Life and will be commenting on that. My readers may not share my enthusiasm for de Beauvoir, but if they continue to read this blog they will just have to put up with it, because she has become my imaginary friend.

The Sixth Extinction II

The remainder of the book covers several additional topics, including forest ecology in the Amazon, bats with white-nose syndrome, the Sumatran rhino and the Neanderthals. The number of species per acre near the equator is much higher than anywhere else, and the extinction rate there is correspondingly higher. Many species are adapted to narrow temperature ranges at certain elevations in the tropical mountains, and global warming forces both animals and plants to migrate uphill over time. In more temperate regions without mountains, the migration is towards the poles. A chapter is devoted to the effects that humans have had on ecosystems by exposing them to organisms from which they had previously been isolated.

The discussion of invasive species interested me. Ordinarily we hear news about Asian carp or zebra mussels or Asian long-horned beetles, but these make up only a tiny fraction of them. It turns out that earthworms were extinct in New England following the last Ice Age and were reintroduced by colonists. If you look at your yard here, the grass isn't native and the dandelions came from Europe. Even Queen Anne's lace is European. The fact is that invasive species are ubiquitous, and not much attention is paid to them unless they are found to conflict with our preferences in one way or another.

The Anthropocene epoch, as Kolbert describes it, came about both directly and indirectly from the migrations of humans out of Africa that began about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago. The most obvious directly-caused extinctions were the result of hunting by humans of large animals that had slow rates of reproduction. Because of those slow rates, even without excessive hunting a species might become extinct over thousands of years. Other large species such as deer are able to reproduce fast enough to maintain a robust population. The indirect causes of extinction include the introduction of foreign species and the alteration of the atmosphere through the addition of greenhouse gasses. Kolbert says very little about greenhouse gasses or pollution and a lot about introduced species. Both frogs and bats are being killed by fungi that were inadvertently transported from one part of the world to another.

Kolbert discusses our relationship to the Neanderthals in some detail. Although we interbred with them, the evidence points to our causing their extinction. We also seem to have caused the extinctions of several other Homo species since we left Africa. Here Kolbert emphasizes the human resourcefulness that is not evident in any of our close relatives despite having almost identical genetic makeups. It appears that a few small mutations made all the difference.

Right up to the end of the book, Kolbert remains resolutely unphilosophical about the current extinctions. She goes as far as to quote Richard Leaky, who said "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the Sixth Extinction, but also risks being one of its victims," and Paul Ehrlich, who said "In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches." Kolbert herself says this:

Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human – some of my best friends are humans! – I will say that it is not, in the end, what's most worth attending to. Right now, in the amazing moment that counts to us as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. 

That is as close as she comes to taking a position, and I would have preferred it if she had gone on to suggest altering some of our current practices: what about controlling our population growth and reducing further destruction to the Earth's ecosystems? Kolbert has made a contribution to the discussion of our environment, but this is hardly a call to action.

The Sixth Extinction I

I'm slowly making my way through The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, and will break my comments up into two parts. The title refers to the fact that there have been five major mass extinctions over the last half-billion years and that we are in the early stages of a sixth, which is entirely man-made. The text jumps around between early scientific inquiries into the Earth's history and present studies. The chapters I've read so far cover current frog extinctions in Panama related to the spread of a fungus by humans, the disappearance of the American mastodon about thirteen thousand years ago, which presumably was caused by Native Americans, the hunting to extinction of the great auk in the nineteenth century, the asteroid that caused the fifth extinction and the acidification of the oceans resulting from the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Most of this material will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to maintain a basic level of scientific literacy, but, unfortunately, that group is in a minority and books like this are a necessary public service.

Although Kolbert is a clear writer with a precise literary style, I am not finding the book engaging. This is because she follows contemporary journalistic practices that eschew linear exposition and bold theorizing in favor of anecdotal reportage sprinkled with hard facts. She efficiently describes the appearance, offices, musical choices and speech habits of scientists and the exotic locations where they conduct their research, but to me this is merely a contrived technique taught to journalists that is meant to draw the reader into a story. I find that it makes the writing disjointed – it is harder to connect the main ideas, if there are any. I prefer to read scientists like E.O. Wilson who tell you what they think and why they think it instead of beating around the bush like this. At times Kolbert seems more interested in literary travel writing than in science. And if scientists are interesting people, you would never know it from reading this book.

Even so, Kolbert does manage to pack a lot of information into the book, which she has researched thoroughly. In fact, this extinction language is far more appropriate than the global warming language that has captivated the media, because global warming is really just one aspect of the ongoing environmental disaster caused by humans, and the enormity of the situation is better captured in the context of the major biological events that have occurred on the planet since the Cambrian period. Extinction language captures the full impact of human destructiveness, and this kind of long-term thinking underlies some of the positions that I have taken on this blog: as a species our self-conceptions are often radically at odds with the reality of what we are collectively doing at this moment.

Diary

Ruminating over Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, I've been considering why I prefer writers like de Beauvoir to others and am concluding that it's the seriousness that they offer. Most writing, even ostensibly serious nonfiction such as philosophy, is often little more than entertainment and amusement, as Professor Laporte noted. As I've mentioned previously, there are commercial and vocational aspects to writing which encourage publishers and authors to attract as many readers as possible, or, in the case of professionals, to advance their careers. Among voluntary readers, the tendency to prefer writing that makes you feel good is always going to be stronger than the tendency to prefer writing that startles or unsettles you. There isn't much of a market for disturbing books, because most people don't want to spend money on something that makes them feel bad. Even so, hardly anyone would be completely happy knowing that they live in a bubble, and if an author can provide just enough truth to leave his or her readers feeling in the know, but without causing them to drastically rethink their worldviews, everyone can be happy.

It is a little difficult to reframe what de Beauvoir does in an American context. She is criticizing her class, and the class structure in America is less defined than it was in France in the last century. Moreover, the language of social criticism in the U.S. has been channeled into narratives such as rich versus poor, white versus black or Native American versus colonist that hardly mention the internal shortcomings of the middle class. Generally, the middle class is held up as a model that provides a life without either poverty or the corruption associated with excessive wealth. Because of the popularity of religion here, there isn't much room for a narrative about an atheist who escapes the oppression of the religious bourgeoisie, which unfortunately constitutes a large percentage of the American population. There doesn't seem to be a de Beauvoir equivalent who trashed the middle-class establishment for trying to force her to live an intellectually bankrupt life: the closest the U.S. came to that was the equal rights movement, which never suggested that life in the middle class was stupid and merely asserted the right of every individual to live in a manner comparable to middle-class white males. From the point of view of someone like de Beauvoir, there isn't much depth to the emphasis on equal rights in the U.S., because it assumes without question that, not only is a bourgeois life desirable in itself, but that religion ought to play an important role in it.

To be sure, over the years in the U.S. there have been minor episodes in which American orthodoxy was questioned. During the 1960's and early 1970's, there were elements of anti-materialism in the hippie movement. However, in that case, the short-lived movement was led by the children of the privileged. More recently, the Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, made atheism a popular topic for public consumption, but they haven't made a dent in American culture as of yet. Even the best-known American radical, Noam Chomsky, finds it easier to rail against American imperialism than to critique the American consumer, whom he treats as a victim of corporate greed rather than an intellectually deficient conformist.

A country without a cadre of serious thinkers who are recognized as such by the public will predictably elect presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama and nominate candidates like Donald Trump; the literature will be second-rate, and the national heroes will be professional athletes.

Enough of that. I've started to read The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, which will probably be the topic of my next post.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter II

I've just finished reading the book and have to say, in the feeling of the moment, that it's the best memoir I've read so far. The ending, in context, with the tragic death of de Beauvoir's childhood friend, Zaza, is truly moving and perhaps crystallizes the outlook that de Beauvoir developed and held for the remainder of her life. Although there is some girlishness in the book that I don't care for, de Beauvoir's portrayal of the struggles she faced growing up in a bourgeois French family early in the last century is illuminating to me. Some aspects of her path to maturity are bizarrely reminiscent of the machinations in Jane Austen's novels of the previous century.

The atmosphere in de Beauvoir's household had deteriorated significantly by the time she began her undergraduate work at the Institut Sainte-Marie and the Institut Catholique, where she studied literature, languages and mathematics. She had already declared herself an atheist to her mother, and her father would have preferred a suitable marriage to her planned career of teaching at a lycée. His conservative bourgeois background became evident as soon as Simone began to buck the system. The conflict was exacerbated by the fact that she continued to live at home, even during the academic year, and was completely dependent on her parents financially. They disapproved of much of her curriculum and intrusively monitored her by reading all of her mail, while providing her with a small allowance. She was not permitted to dress fashionably or wear makeup. She fell into despair and desperately sought a meaning to her life.

In college she developed a temporary crush on her literature instructor, Robert Garric, and began a quasi-romantic relationship with her cousin, Jacques Laiguillon. Here is how she describes herself at the time:

Since my infancy I had always been headstrong, self-willed, a creature of extremes, and proud of it. Others might stop half-way in their quest for faith or in the expression of their scepticism, their desires, their plans: I despised their half-heartedness. I always carried my emotions, my ideas, my enterprises to the bitter end; I didn't undertake anything lightly; and now, as in my earliest childhood, I wanted everything in my life to be justified by a kind of absolute necessity. This stubbornness, I realized, deprived me of certain qualities; but there was never any question of departing from my fixed intention; my 'serious side' was the whole of me, and I very much wanted to remain a whole person.

Jacques was far less serious, less intellectual and less reliable than Simone, and he misled her repeatedly. It is difficult to see why she put up with him at all, and I surmise that she was still immature and wanted to leave the door open to a marriage that would satisfy her parents. Jacques and Simone carried on for several years without so much as a kiss, and finally, without telling Simone in advance, he arranged to marry a completely uninteresting woman who had a large dowry. It was all downhill for Jacques from there; his wife eventually kicked him out; he was penniless and died of malnutrition at the age of forty-six. De Beauvoir seems to have loved him: she bends over backwards in this memoir to highlight his positive attributes – which I don't find convincing in the least.

Zaza, encouraged by Simone, also attended the Institute Sainte-Marie and faced pressures from her mother, who pointedly wanted her to marry properly and disapproved of Simone's influence, which she thought had put Zaza on the wrong track. Zaza was far more volatile emotionally than Simone, and when she had a potential husband lined up, Jeanne Padrelle (a pseudonym for Maurice Merleau-Ponty), whom she had met through Simone, he evaded commitment, and this, in conjunction with pressures from her mother, was too much for her to take: she became ill and abruptly died. At the close of this volume, with Zaza's death, the feeling is that bourgeois life puts ridiculous pressures on women, and that they should fight back.

The doctors called it meningitis, encephalitis; no one was quite sure. Had it been a contagious disease, or an accident? Or had Zaza succumbed to exhaustion or anxiety? She has often appeared to me at night, her face all yellow under a pink sun-bonnet, and seeming to gaze reproachfully at me. We had fought together against the revolting fate that had lain ahead of us, and for a long time I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death. 

After the publication of this memoir, de Beauvoir was told that Zaza's parents had hired a detective to check Merleau-Ponty's background. They had learned that he was illegitimate and had forced him to back out of the marriage by threatening to scandalize his family.

Regarding de Beauvoir's take on the intrusiveness of bourgeois society, it is worth mentioning that for her the problem was not men per se:

Their friendliness prevented me from ever taking up that 'challenging' attitude which was later to cause me so much dismay when I encountered it in American women: from the start, men were my comrades, not my enemies. Far from envying them, I felt that my own position, from the very fact that it was an unusual one, was one of privilege.

De Beauvoir's life began to improve when she moved on to the Sorbonne and excelled academically, becoming, at the age of twenty-one, the youngest person ever to qualify to teach philosophy in France. More importantly, she had exposure to some genuinely interesting people for the first time in her life.

I was finishing for a professor called Laporte a dissertation for my diploma on Hume and Kant; from nine in the morning to six in the evening I was glued to my desk at the Nationale [library]: I hardly took half an hour off for a sandwich; sometimes I would half-doze in the afternoons, and sometimes I even fell sound asleep. In the evenings, at home, I tried to read: Goethe, Cervantes, Chekhov, Strindberg. But I had headaches. I sometimes wanted to weep for weariness. And philosophy, at least as it was taught at the Sorbonne, was not at all comforting. Bréhier gave excellent lectures on the Stoics; but Brunschvig kept repeating himself; Laporte pulled every system except Hume's to pieces. He was the youngest of our professors; he had a little mustache, wore white spats, and followed women in the streets: once he had accosted one of his own students by mistake. He handed me back my dissertation with a fairly good mark and some ironical comments: I had made the mistake of preferring Kant to Hume. He invited me to his home, in a fine apartment on Avenue Bosquet, to talk to me about my work. 'Great qualities; but very antipathetic. Style obscure; a false profundity: when one thinks of what one has to say in philosophy!' He considered all of his colleagues one by one, particularly Brunschvig, then all the old masters. The philosophers of antiquity? They were stupid fools. Spinoza? A monster. Kant? An impostor. That left only Hume. I objected that Hume didn't solve any of the practical problems: he shrugged his shoulders: 'There are no practical problems.' No. One must simply look upon philosophy as an amusement, and one had the right to prefer other forms of entertainment. 'So that after all it's all a matter of convention!' I suggested. 'I know,' he added, 'that scepticism isn't fashionable. All right: go and find yourself a more optimistic doctrine than mine.'  He accompanied me to the door: 'Delighted you came! You're bound to get through the examination,' he concluded, with an air of distaste. His attitude was probably healthier but less comforting than the vaticanations of Jean Baruzi.

I tend to agree with Laporte on Hume, but this anecdote is also interesting in that it shows that some Sorbonne professors were described as at least a little depraved well before Michel Houellebecq depicted one that way.

I was surprised that while at the Sorbonne de Beauvoir got into the habit of patronizing some real dives: she went, usually with Poupette, to bars and nightclubs, got drunk on gin fizzes and danced with whoever asked her. On occasion she put herself at risk, but apparently she always arrived home intact.

Eventually she came into contact with Sartre and his inner circle; they had the reputation of elitists and bad boys. They disdained most of the other philosophy students and avoided them like the plague. Of the three (Andre Herbaud, a pseudonym for René Maheu, Paul Nizan and Jean-Paul Sartre), she first got to know Herbaud quite well. However, Sartre was the most impressive to her: besides genuinely hating the bourgeoisie, he was the most intellectually energetic person she'd ever met and was not an academic type at all; he liked literature, the arts and contemporary American music as much as philosophy, just as she did.

How was it that I managed to fit in with them so quickly? Herbaud had taken care not to shock me, but when they were all together the three 'comrades' didn't pull their punches. Their language was aggressive, their thoughts categorical, their judgements merciless. They made fun of bourgeois law and order; they had refused to sit the examination in religious knowledge: I had no difficulty in agreeing with them on that score. But I was still, in many respects, the dupe of bourgeois humbug; they jabbed a pin in every inflated idealism, laughed high-minded souls to scorn – in fact, every kind of soulfulness, the inner life, the marvelous, the mysterious, and the precious all fell under their lashing contempt; on every possible occasion – in their speech, their attitudes, their gestures, their jokes – they set out to prove that men were not rarefied spirits but bodies of flesh and bone, racked by physical needs and crudely engaged in a brutal adventure that was life. A year before, they would have scared me; but I had made much progress since the beginning of the academic year and I very often felt the need for stronger meat than that to which I was accustomed. I soon understood that if the world these new friends opened up to me seemed crude, it was because they didn't try to disguise its realities; in the end, all they asked of me was that I should dare to do what I had always longed to do: to look reality in the face. It did not take me long to make up my mind to do so.

She soon recognized that "Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream-companion" that she had longed for since she was fifteen: "he was the double in whom I found my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence."

Thus the postwar generation of French intellectuals was born, for better or for worse. I have not been impressed much by what little I know of their serious oeuvres and don't consider Sartre or de Beauvoir to be major thinkers. Their lasting legacy is probably de Beauvoir's influence on the feminist movement of the 1970's. To me, existentialism isn't really a comprehensive philosophical position, and I feel no need to explore it further. Unfortunately, as boring as the practice of it may be, science continues to produce the most important ideas for mankind, and the type of thinking done by Sartre and de Beauvoir and intellectuals everywhere ever since is mainly a relic of the past. It must also be noted that de Beauvoir, by her own admission, is not a particularly imaginative writer. However, these caveats only slightly detract from her value to me, and I think that she is as intelligent a confidante as one could hope to find. I have yet to come across any American writer with de Beauvoir's perspicacity. On the contrary, Americans seem wedded to the idea that the bourgeois lifestyle should be made available to all, a belief that would make her cringe. Hence I plan in due course to work my way through the remainder of her memoirs no matter how long it takes.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter I

This book is the first installment in Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs and covers her earliest period. The going has been a little slow for me in part because the concerns of childhood don't interest me that much. I find the details of her recollections astonishing, because I know that I don't remember nearly as much of my early life; perhaps she kept a journal as a child. De Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908, and her family was relatively well-off until World War I, at which time her father's fortunes declined. He was a lawyer whose true interest was in acting. He was witty and good at impersonations and became Simone's main role model. Her mother was several years younger than her father and less-educated; she was a devout Roman Catholic and raised her children in that manner.

The harmony that bound my parents to one another strengthened the respect I felt for both of them. It allowed me to skirt one difficulty which might have embarrassed me considerably: Papa didn't go to Mass, he smiled when Aunt Marguerite enthused over the miracles at Lourdes: he was an unbeliever. This skepticism did not affect me, so deeply did I feel myself penetrated by the presence of God; yet Papa was always right: how could he be mistaken about the most obvious of all truths? Nevertheless, since my mother, who was so pious, seemed to find Papa's attitude quite natural, I accepted it calmly. The consequence was that I grew accustomed to the idea that my intellectual life – embodied by my father – and my spiritual life – expressed by my mother – were two radically heterogeneous fields of experience which had absolutely nothing in common. Sanctity and intelligence belonged to two quite different spheres; and human things – culture, politics, business, manners, and customs – had nothing to do with religion. So I set God apart from life and the world, and that attitude was to have a profound influence in my future development.

As the eldest child, Simone had many of those characteristics, which, as is common, sensitized her to her parents to a greater degree than it did her sibling. She had a sister who was two years younger, nicknamed Poupette, and during their childhood she took on a pedagogic role. Her parents had wanted a son, and this also may have inadvertently affected her identity in the family. Without the competition of a male sibling or the overt parental enforcement of gender roles, her self-conception was not confined to the prevailing norms of the period. She was a voracious reader and writer from an early age, though she was only allowed to read things that had been approved by her parents. She was not good at everything and was quite conscious of it at the time:

...in the pianoforte examinations I was always near the bottom. In solfeggio and musical theory I was hopeless: I sang either sharp or flat, and was a miserable failure in musical dictation. My handwriting was so shapeless that I had to have private lessons, which did not make any great improvement. If I had to trace the course of a river or the outline of a country, I was so clumsy that I was absolved of all blame for the messes I made. This characteristic was to remain with me all my life. I bungled all practical jobs and I was never any good at work requiring finicky precision. 

It was not without some vexation that I became aware of my deficiencies; I should have liked to excel at everything. But they were too deeply rooted in my nature to be amenable to ephemeral spurts of will-power. As soon as I was able to think for myself, I found myself possessed with infinite power, and yet circumscribed by absurd limitations.

I'm only about a third of the way through the book and will comment more later. I am looking forward to the sections on her young adulthood, when she went to college and met Sartre. For me, de Beauvoir's writing is a model in clarity, and she excels at observing people. Her writing is a little uncanny to me, because she tends to focus on the same things that interest me: the thinking and motivations of herself and others. Although that is how I also occupy much of my time, the activity seems so uncommon in the environments where I've lived that de Beauvoir stands out to me as a rare kindred spirit. When I complain about writers it is usually because they lack this most basic and essential skill.