In Our Time - Simone de Beauvoir

Episode Date: October 22, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," she wrote in her best known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immediate success with the thousands of women who bought it. Many male critics felt men came out of it rather badly. Beauvoir was born in 1908 to a high bourgeois family and it was perhaps her good fortune that her father lost his money when she was a girl. With no dowry, she pursued her education in Paris to get work and in a key exam to allow her to teach philosophy, came second only to Jean Paul Sartre. He was retaking. They became lovers and, for the rest of their lives together, intellectual sparring partners. Sartre concentrated on existentialist philosophy; Beauvoir explored that, and existentialist ethics, plus the novel and, increasingly in the decades up to her death in 1986, the situation of women in the world. With Christina Howells Professor of French and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of OxfordMargaret Atack Professor of French at the University of LeedsAnd Ursula Tidd Professor of Modern French Literature and Thought at the University of ManchesterProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, quote, one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, end of quote. So wrote Simone de Beauvoir in her best-known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immediate success with thousands of women who bought it, much less so with some of the male critics. Beauvoir was born in France in 1908 to a high bourgeois family

and some commentators say that it was her good fortune that her father lost his fortune when she was a girl. With no diary, she pursued her education to get work and in a key exam to allow her to teach philosophy came second only to Jean-Paul Sartre. He was retaking it. They became lovers and for the rest of their lives together intellectual sparring partners.

Sartre concentrated on existentialist philosophy. Bovois explored that and existential Essex, plus she wrote the novel, the most successful was the mandarins, and increasingly in the decades up to her death in 1986, she wrote about the situation of women in the world. With me to discuss Simone de Beauvoir are

Christina Howells, Professor of French and Fellow of Wardham College at the University of Oxford, Margaret Aetak, Professor of French at the University of Leeds, and Ursula Tidd, Professor of Modern French Literature and Thought, at the University of Manchester. Christina Howells, can you give us, something of Bobois's family background?

Yes, well as you say, she had a bourgeois background, quite a conventional family, younger sister, who she was extremely fond of, Poupette. Her mother was apparently a religious woman and seems to have

dominated in that sense because Beauvoir went to a religious school. She discovered, she says Catholic school, yes indeed, Catholic school, Cordesire, she calls it. She says in her autobiography that when she was 14, she discovered that she was, in fact, an atheist. That seems to me very French, because in England we're not so fuss about whether we're atheists or not, with our general Church of England backgrounds, that in France it's very important.

So it's quite conflictual to be a non-believer with a religious mother. She was obviously an extremely clever child, and she was very successful in her exam. she studied at school, she studied in particular literature and mathematics. So, although of course all the French do philosophy for quite a while, right through to leaving. But she moved into philosophy when she went to university. And we're talking about a time when women couldn't get to the top university. They couldn't get to her called normal. They couldn't do all sorts of things.

Which university did she get to and how successful was she there? Yes, well it's an interesting story really. She went to the Sorbonne, but she seems to have managed to follow classes at the Ecole Normale. Which was the top place? Yes. Men only. Men only, yes, men only,

where students were prepared for the Egregation, this very competitive French exam, after which one was allowed to teach in school or if one was more lucky in university, if you pursued further. and she didn't go to the preparatory classes called Kanya. She didn't go to the two or three years of preparation for getting into the Ecole Normale.

She wasn't allowed to go there officially. She went there unofficially. And she had a really stupendous academic record, I would say. As you said yourself, she came second to search when she took the Aglegiavich. This is in the whole country. That's right. She was 21.

He was 21. and he'd sat it before, although why he failed first time round is probably for another programme. And indeed, I read the, I read recently the report that one of the examiners had written on that year's intake for the aggregation. And he doesn't name Beauvoir and Sarch, but he says two students stood out were extraordinary. He said the rest were really rather mediocre. So he was fascinated by her, this young, very attractive woman, 20, 21, as brilliant as that, and she was slightly in awe of him and they got cracking then and there, really, didn't they? I think that's right, yes.

She has various accounts of it. It seems that he was fascinated by, I mean, he was a very ugly man, and she was very lovely, so it's not surprising. And they were both so intelligent. I know she always claimed that Saut was superior, but I think that was very modest of her. In fact, bizarrely modest, given what she's done later. But she made a retrospectively, I think, but still a statement,

I knew that my life would be part of his life for the rest of my life. Yes, she did. It's hard to know, isn't it? Because we probably all feel a bit like that. Move on rather quickly here. Margaret. Margaret. How did Beauvoir's romantic relationship with Sartre develop, and what did it bring in its train in terms of philosophy?

Well, it was certainly a lifelong emotional, commitment, a very unconventional one in many ways. It was an open relationship. They had lots of other relationships. They didn't set up in a kind of domestic unit. They never married. They never married. So this is very, very unconventional for its time and for her background. But I think he was as dazzled by her intellect as he was by her looks. When she was invited to come and join in the for the preparation of the oral for the aggregation. And she had studied Leibniz. She'd done a little thing on Leibniz,

so she came and gave them a little lesson, well, probably a big lesson, on Leibniz. So they started within philosophy and within ideas, and they both wanted to be writers. So I think it was a huge meeting of minds, as well as a very loving, as one sees from the letters and from her autobiography, a very loving and affectionate and intimate relationship.

So she certainly wasn't interested in becoming a creator of philosophical systems in the way that he was. But I don't, I mean, she was always within philosophy. But she said, I don't have to invent a philosophical system to feel myself such as equal or independent. It's very attractive, isn't it? These two people of supreme intelligence meeting each other.

And you'd just imagine them sitting in the Dermagau or cafe floor across the... Because of the soul of science you mind talking philosophy all the time. It's terrific, isn't it? Was it like that? Well, I think there was a lot of philosophy, yes. And there was a lot of gossip. They loved gossip. They had open relationships.

So they had a little group of people, and they talked a lot about each other. And so her letters are often full of kind of what's the gossip in, what's the gossip going and catching up. And so they were very interested in people. In fact, Sartre always used to say. that men were less interested in people in his entourage than women. So I think they had a very kind of strong philosophical, psychological. Yeah, we know, but the gossip's great. We might get more like it.

But actually, tell us about the philosophy. They really did talk about philosophy in these places. So they did talk about. We want to know that. So they did talk about philosophy. And so she certainly was working within the importance of his apprehension of being in the world, of the existentialist framework, of freedom, of choice, of commitment, and all their works were jointly kind of almost edited.

She used to send him her manuscripts, he used to send him his. So her elaboration of the nature of self and other, interaction with other people, interaction with the world, interaction with the major social issues of the day, they were both very involved in that. There was a feeling around, I mean, from teenagers around the time, myself, somehow that was a centre of the world thought

where you talked your way to thinking and like it was happening nowhere else. Now this is nonsense, but there was a feeling that there was some truth in it. That you talked to your way to thinking? Yes. She worked her way to thinking as well. She was somebody who spent a long time in libraries

who had a fantastic ability to assimilate detail on a vast scale. She was very erudite, actually, as well as talking her way through and down all those exchanges, yeah. Ursula, she saw herself primarily as a writer. Is that correct? I mean, we're talking about her and Sarton. We'll talk more about their philosophy,

but she began with a wartime book she came to stay and then another and of the blood of others. Can you tell us about that? She came to stay, first of all. Yes, of course. Okay. So she came to stay, or L'Envite, as it's known in French, was published in 1943.

It's Beauvoir's first published novel. And in this novel, it's been described, I think Mère Lopente described it as a metaphysical novel. So it's a novel which explores, in a sense, one of the grand themes of Beauvoir's intellectual life, which was really the whole theme of the other. So it's a metaphysical novel which explores the problem, the problem of the other.

Can you say what you meant by the other? Yes, okay. So it's really looking at what happens when we realise that there are other people in the world and how we respond to other people in the world and how I cannot know who I am in the world unless I fully engage with others in the world and understand what it is to be with others in the world. I mean, one of Beauvoir's philosophical

concepts that she will go on to discuss later is the notion of the existential situation. And the other, or other people, are part of our existential situation. So we might adopt all sorts of attitudes towards other people, but they are still part of our lives. So Beauvoir in this novel is exploring what it is to really begin to take into account the presence of the other. And she explores it through a triadic relationship, which is loosely based on some of the relationships that she was having. On her and Sartre and one of such. That's right, with Olga Kosekiewicz, which was a triadic relationship that had in the 1930s.

One can read it as a novel around of personal relationships and how Francoise gradually comes to interrelationship with Xavier. But it's really about the terror of the other, really. And of course, the metaphysical problem of the other is not solved. she came to stay because, and here's a spoiler for anybody who hasn't read it yet, because of course Francoise kills Xavier, the young woman who she and Pierre invite into their life at the end of the novel. So in a sense, Beauvoir is broaching the problem of the other in this first metaphysical novel.

And then killing it off. And killing it off, yes, indeed. That's a bit flip of me. But let's talk about the second one, the blood of others at the end of the two, three years later. That's right. The next novel. Yes. What kind of war did Beauvoir have?

Okay, so the Blood of Others is very much a product of Beauvoir's wartime experience. It's published in 1945. It was hailed by Kermu on publication as a fraternal novel and the first resistance novel. And in this novel, Beauvoir is exploring again the presence of the other, but in the context of situated action. So it's centered on essentially two main characters, Jean Blomart, who's a resistance leader, and much of the action takes place

in the context of World War II. And one of the kind of main decisions that opens the novel is Jean Blomart trying to decide whether or not to sanction actions of sabotage against the Nazis during, you know, inoccupied Paris. And really, it's a whole novel

about the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of action, the epigraphy to the novel, the little pithy phrase that opens it, is taken from, Dostoevsky's brothers, Karamazov, and the quote is, and it kind of sums the novel up a little bit, which is why I'm citing it here. And the quote is, each of us is responsible to everyone and for everything, okay, which is, of course, a terribly tall order, okay, but in a sense, Beauvoir is

working this out, and she's working it out through the 1940s, that is to say the parameters of our individual freedom and our collective freedom. Is she in any way part of the resistance that we can take account of? Beauvoir and Sartre are not formally part of the kind of constituted resistance. They travel down south during World War II to try and set up a resistance group called Socialism and Libertes, socialism and freedom. It didn't come to very much.

They were certainly acting in accordance with the code that was established for writers who were refusing to collaborate with the Vichy regime. But no, not in the sense of being actively involved in resistant cells and, you know, blowing bridges up and that kind of thing. Christina Howells, Sartre and Bois were existentialists and, as she has mentioned, the word term, quite a bit. She published the ethics of ambiguity in just two years after the second novel. Now, ambiguity and existentialism are not easy bedfellers, are there? Can you tell us why?

Yes, I think it's, in a sense, ambiguity and existentialism. might be okay together. It's ethics and existentialism, which is problematic. Ambiguity, I think, is a very strange word in this context. I was thinking about it before the program. It hadn't really struck me before how odd it was. And I think that it's almost misleading in that ambiguity in the popular sense suggests perhaps something a little bit vague that we're not certain of. Well, we're not certain of the ethics of existentialism, that's for sure. But I think it's more paradoxical, more complex, the ethics of complexity or the ethics of existentialism. And the problem really is that for an existentialist trying to compose an ethics, the problem really is that

for existentialism, there are no pre-given values, just as there are no pre-given characters. You construct your character, you construct your gender indeed, as we'll see a bit later. You also construct your morality. Now, in common sense... This is the existentialist creed. Yes, yes. So you make yourself as you become. You make yourself, but you'll also make your ethics. So in common sense, we might think that we know roughly what's good and what's bad.

We mustn't steal. We mustn't hit people. Mustn't kill people. That's common sense. Also, if you are more rigorous philosopher, say a Kantian philosopher, then there are also categorical imperatives, things which definitely are always wrong, such as lying or killing. Now for the existentialist, it's situational.

What are the consequences of this behaviour? So in a certain situation, you can lie and it's okay? Yes, you can lie and it's okay, you can kill and it's okay. If ultimately something important is being achieved, it's the question of means and ends. And of course, for them, for Assange and Beauvoir too, for Beauvoir, it's a very big question means and ends. It's not simply that the end justifies the means.

That could lead to anything. The means can contaminate the end. end. So I think that it's an ethics of complexity. It's an attempt to work through issues such as those that Ursula was describing in the novels, issues about how to deal with other people, what to do in a wartime situation where if you kill, for example, if you kill one of the occupiers, there may be reprisals. Lots of people may be killed because of that. So how you make your decisions is at the heart of existential ethics. And I think that's why Sarch doesn't compose one or publish one, that Beauvoir does.

Yes, I'd also like to say something about violence as well, because it's certainly true that there are no universal moral precepts in existentialism, but I think also Beauvoir does make it quite clear that resort to violence, either sort of psychological or physical violence, is always a moral failure, okay? And I think this is why in her existentialist ethics, she's very concerned to tease out all sorts of complex situations, because the devil is in the detail, and it's looking at the precise context of action

that is really important. The problem might be that the idea of existentialism is total liberty and the idea of ethics is constraints. Existentialism is total liberty. I think maybe not. I think existentialism... Yes, I think existentialism is about choosing and you are free to make your choices,

but it's not unconstrained. It's constrained by its consequences. And its consequences are the kind of person you become and the kind of world that you create through your behaviour. I would add also that it's also the complexity of never having a good conscience. You can never within an existentialist perspective, sit back and tick it off and say, well, then I'm a good, authentic person.

Because of the nature that they construct action as a result of freedom, You can never get off the treadmill of choosing, of making choices. And it is the choices which obviously are bringing your values into the world. The choices are eloquent of your values. So you're always on this treadmill. You can never stop. So the ambiguity is also that yes, you go for action, but you can never go with a quiet conscience.

You can never think, oh, well, that's it and I've ticked it and I've done it, because you're always going to be doing damage in some parts of the world. You can never have clean hands. So it puts in a huge responsibility on you to work out consequences, which is Christina said could go on and on and on people who react to what you do and they react to the action of what you do. And so there's a stage in which you can't do anything at all. You're scared stiff.

No, because you're free. And if you decide to kind of sit yourself on being scared stiff and stopping, well, that is a choice that you are freely making. so that you can always, as long as you are alive, your life is always a life of freedom and choice and you can reorientate it. It's only when the final curtain goes down that it becomes... Can I stay with you to talk about the second sex? What's the big idea in that book?

So the second sex is often boiled down to two big ideas. You quoted one of them that gender is constructed, the identity is constructed, and the other big idea is really dismantling the operation and the dynamic of woman as other. Can we just start about gender as constructive? What do you mean by that? It's constructed. What did Bobo mean by that? She meant that existentialism, we have no nature, we have no human nature, we are free, we are totally not determined.

So that there is a kind of philosophical rejection from the outset, gut rejection, of the idea that there might be an eternal feminine, as the French call it, and, you know, just like a woman and a female identity. So that we do not have gendered natures in the same, we don't have any kind of nature. So we have no nature at all, nothing from our parents, nothing from the environment, nothing from the work situation, nothing from the imperatives of our life,

there's nothing there at all. Not in terms of something that you can say, this is why I act as I do. It's because of my background. it's because of my gender, it's because of my nationality. I'm acting in accordance with a pre-given script. And for Beauvoir and Sartre, there are no pre-given scripts. They are, it was once, existential was once described as taking all logical consequences from atheism.

So if there's no God, humanity, we are just born and we are there, and it is our being, the nature of consciousness, and action that means that we will construct our path through the world. But sorry to be lump in about this. That's okay for de Beauvoir and Sartre sitting in the Dermagau in Paris with a nice job doing philosophers and so on. But somebody born into a family where they have to earn a living and they have to as well, let's say, let's take it to a bit of an extreme,

go down to the minds. That's the only work they can do. There's a lot prescribed for them. And for women brought up, but they have to go into domestic service, earn a living. There's a lot prescribed, isn't it? Absolutely. And so those are the kind of givens of one's situations. As you said, it's always in situation. Being is not a free-floating autonomous thing. So it's what you do with the cards that you've been dealt. Oh, sure, do you want to take this on? Yes. I mean, it is about the situation. I think also, I think your point is really well made, Melbourne. I think, of course, if one's basic needs haven't been met in life, you're not going to be starting to think about the meaning of existence. That's quite. true. But Bovarez is encouraging women in the second sex to throw themselves into the world,

to use a slightly Hidergarian phrase, and to seize their lives and to make their essence. So in a sense, when she's talking about becoming woman and not being born a woman, her point really is an anti-naturalist one, that there is no inherent nature that decrees that men are like this and women are like that. I completely understand that. It's not having the choices. It's that the people can make all the choices. I don't go along with it. So you're born and it is society,

patriarchy which says you have to be like that because you're a female. That's right. It's patriarchal ideology. Yes. So patriarchal ideology has certain what Beauvoir would call, the French would call, myths about women. There are also myths about men,

but Bovour was interested in women. And those myths are act as determined, women in the world which constrain them to behave in certain ways. Well, for example, the myth of motherhood, that motherhood is a natural situation that all women are destined to fulfil. Vovois argues controversially in the second sex that there is no maternal instinct and that the experience of real mothers on the ground, if I can put it in that way, is terribly variable in the same way that one could argue,

the experience of paternity is terribly variable as well. And this has to be learnt rather than... Exactly. And this is something that in the second volume of the second sex, which is subtitled lived experience, indicating the phenomenological emphasis of the second volume, Beauvoir is at pains to show the micro-politics of gender relations and the ways in which girls and women learn very quickly, both at unconscious, at unconscious levels, how to become women who conform to patriarchal ideology. So they become the second sex, the moon to the sun, the sun, the sun.

and the dark of the life. They become relative to the masculine, universal subject. That's right. That's what the second sex is. So that determines their lives, the sexuality, everything about them. Well, it doesn't necessarily. So Beauvoir's task is to dismantle some of these myths in the second sex. And in the second volume, she's saying, well, if we look at women's real experience,

women are not predetermined in that way, okay? That women do have choices. And it's also up to women to seize those choices. because, and this is another kind of controversial area of the second sex, Bovoire doesn't let women off the hook either. She looks at various ways that women respond to that situation. And sometimes women are complicit with patriarchal ideology. How does this receive, Christina, Christina Howells?

Ah, well, it has a very mixed reception, and I just wanted to add something to what Ursula just said, because I think the Beauvoir herself reinterprets the second sex later. So, for example, she says, there was an outcry because people said I denied the maternal instinct. Of course I didn't, she said. But indeed, she does appear to be doing so

when she's writing. Later on, she says that she would have written things in a more Marxist way later. I think that... What did she mean by that? I think she would have looked more at structures. She would have looked perhaps not at such individual psychology of women

incorporating and internalising male values, but seeing it in a more structural way rather than an individual way. So the French have an idea that equality and difference between, there can be equality men and women and a sort of substantial and livable with difference. But she was for equality. She was for equality.

You asked me how it was received. Well, it was received differently in different countries, differently, obviously, by different people. It was very popular. It seems to have been seen to be rather rude, in fact. And Beauvoir says that Moriac actually was very indignant, and said that he didn't wish to know about the workings of the author's vagina, which caused quite a scandalous reaction. I think that Beauvoir's quite explicit about bodily functions.

So she talks about menstruation, for example, and abortion. And what she writes is quite distasteful, I think, to... Well, maybe it doesn't... Maybe my colleagues don't find it detainable. But she says, you know, that women smell and women get constipated, all to do with menstruation. It's quite extraordinary. It seems very old-fashioned now. But at the time, it was really

rather revolutionary to be talking about it at all. Similarly, I think that something else that wasn't liked in this book was the way in which she talks about women without really talking about femininity. So she,

particularly the Americans, found this difficult to deal with. They thought that you could be a feminist and feminine. But whereas Beauvoir's equality, feminism, I would say, to move away from femininity. Can you take this on, Margaret? Sorry, can you take this on, Margaret? Her idea of feminism and herself as a feminist? Well, certainly the work in the writing for the second sex was a huge feminist statement. Whether she would have said in the 30s that she was a feminist would be very unlikely.

she like South were not very interested in politics. They were very much more interested in themselves. But after the war, after the transition they went through in the war, she became much more interested in the rootedness of experience. And so the rootedness of women's experience and the discovery of the disparagement and the oppression and the inequality and the systematic denigration of the female in this gender relationship between the sexes,

I think, so that's hugely feminist. Personally, I find her works are never hostile to women, but that's not a widely shared in some circles. But I certainly don't find her at all hostile to women and women hating. I find she explores. So her work I would certainly describe as women-centered in the way it explores in depth, dilemmas of characters in all sorts of lived experiences,

including motherhood, marriage, writers, intellectuals, but not only. And clearly, after 68, when the women's movement exploded across Europe and the states, she was a major figurehead, and she took that on with great energy and enthusiasm. She worked with the Minister for Women's Rights in the 80s, defending her laws, when Yvette Houdi tried to bring in a law restricting, denigrating images of women in public, she was held down. She received a vitriolic reaction for that measure, and Beauvoir was very marked in her defence.

But even earlier, I think she was very comfortable with defending women in the Algerian war. She supported a well-known lawyer, Giselle Alimi, who was working for, for Algerians who were being imprisoned and tortured, and she also co-authored books to support Algerian women during the Algerian war. So I think feminism and women-centeredness is politically and intellectually, very central to her work. Is there more to add, Ursula Tidd, to how far she influenced feminist ideas, particularly this second breath, as it were, in the 60s, when it got tremendously underway in America and here,

and can you just take that on? Yes, absolutely, yes. So Beauvoir was approached in the kind of flurry of radical activity around May 68. Boiswa was approached by young feminists, young Marxist feminists such as Christine Delphi and others. And they wanted Beauvoir. Bois was, of course, now in her 60s, and they wanted Beauvoir to lend her support, as Margaret has said,

to this new second wave of feminist activity in France. and Beauvoir, I think in many ways, was very humble as an intellectual. She could have played the grand d' grande of French letters, but she didn't do that. And she lent her support in a very discreet way. She financed political campaigns. She lent her support to the campaign for legalizing abortion in France, which was passed in 1975. So she was very hands-on, but I think in a very discreet way. And I think that was very much appreciated by, you.

young feminists who needed that kind of support to get some of these campaigns off the ground. Christina Howells, you mentioned very early on that she often, one of you did, that she slightly resisted the idea of being thought of as a philosopher, certainly not an equal of Satre in that area of her life. Does that matter? How do you react to that?

I think she certainly was a philosopher. She didn't really write many philosophical treaties. I suppose the ethics of ambiguity was a philosophy. philosophical treaties. Otherwise, it was primarily through novels and her autobiography, of course. But these are very philosophical works, deeply philosophical works. And because existentialism is based on human existence and the problems all come back to the human rather than anything to do with perhaps logic or analysis of a more abstract kind, novels and plays might well be, and worth such as well, the best way

of expressing the existential philosophy. So you can analyse it or you can show it. And I think the Beauvoir showed it and the discussions that you find within the novels, within the fiction, are

profoundly philosophical. I think that they would not be any more clear or any more probing if they'd been written analytically. So I think she was a philosopher. Does that take us to the Mandarin, a novel in 1954, it won the pre-gancourt, Margaret Atec?

It was hugely successful and hugely significant. I think there was a kind of perfect storm around this novel which projected it forward. She was extremely notorious, as Christina's been saying, from the Second Sex. She was very well known. Existentialism had been flavour of the month. They were celebrities.

They really were. intellectual celebrities. So Gallimau promoted this as a novel about people. Publisher. So the publisher. So I think there was a great interest in kind of getting the inside story of all the debates between them. But it's also taking on the relationships between France and America, the increasing domination and power of America, the relationships between the Communist Party and the intellectual left and the Soviet Union. So it's got hugely ambitious international themes and how they're playing out in France. It's got a whole group of intellectuals who are writers and it's set just in 44-45 as they're coming out of the war. So it's set

10 years earlier as they're grappling with the ambiguities of being committed politically in a world where it no longer seems so black and white as it had been in the resistance. Did it help or hinder it that there's quite a lot of people's points? went on. That's him, that's her, that's him, that's her. Well, she hated that. She really hated that. But I think, I mean, I'm sure it increased the reception of it. Can you give us a flavour of that briskly? You, Margaret, or anyone? Well, it's a car. I would, when I teach it, I tell the students it's a Romant-A-Clae. So perhaps that's very bad of me. But I think you can very clearly see who's who. There's Camus in it,

Beauvoir in it, Sartre in it. Camus was very upset by it because the character Henri drives his wife insane in the book. And of course, Camus' first wife, sadly did go to a mental asylum. Henri is very promiscuous in the book. That's also true of Camus. So I think that there is a big correspondence. If Beauvoir didn't like it,

then I think she'd put too thin a skin, really, on the... I think she's quite eloquent as to how different they are in terms of Camus' politics was very different from Henri's politics and the kind of alliance with communism is very different. Of course. I think she does.

I don't think it was her idea. Clearly she's drawing on her experience. She says there's a lot of her and her relationship with the American writer, Nelson Algren, is part of the relationship between... He wasn't too keen on being portrayed there either, was he? No, but their correspondence did continue after that for a long time. So they did remain in contact.

And he was clearly a kind of very touching individual as well, but it really founded when she published her autobiography about their relationship, that was what he certainly couldn't take at all. I think with Beauvoir, it's also about her life was also the stuff of literature. So in a sense, you know, she lived to write and she wrote to live. And everything does, you know, get witnessed in her writing. I think also just a quick word about the mandarin as well that I'd like to add is that it's also about the politics of truth-telling in the immediate Cold War period in France.

and one of the kind of central ethical dilemmas in that novel is whether to expose the existence of the Soviet gulags to the French left. And that particular question is something that the character Henri Perrin, who's this editor of L'Espore, this sort of independent left-wing journal, has to agonise this over in terms of whether to, you know, how to manage this information. Which is, like letting down the communist side by telling the truth. Exactly. It's also a problem. But it's also letting down the workers. It's letting down because of the importance of communism broadly.

It was the biggest party in the elections after the Second World War. So it had huge legitimacy on the left generally. So it's a bit like the issues we were talking earlier, you can't have a clean conscience. Whatever you do, you're going to do damage. Christina, can I come towards it? We've got a good handful of time. The autobiography, which you rate extremely highly,

and also the letters which rather slightly muddy the waters between. I think we oughtn't to stall at that. So can you tell us about what you find is the literary and philosophical virtues of the letters and also the rather unsavory things that you find in them? I see. Well, the autobiography in the letters are really very different. Before I talk about the letter, if I may, I'd like to say that you could see the autobiography

as perhaps the pendant of the mandarin. So whereas the mandarin is a fiction in which there's a lot of her life, similarly, the autobiography is an account of her life in which there is a lot of fiction. Necessarily, the moulding, the stylising, the omissions and the transformations. And I think that with an autobiography,

it's very hard for her to get it absolutely. Well, it's hard for anyone to get anything absolutely right, but it's hard for her to get it right because she's criticized both for having put two personal things into the autobiography by other people, such as Nelson Algren, didn't want their relationship to be described in such detail. But actually, if you're reading it, you may find if you have a kind of slightly scurrilous interest in it,

that you're constantly disappointed because she doesn't give you as much detail as you'd like about her relationships. Now, the letters are another... Can you just stay with the autobiography for one more? more secondly, because you can you tell us why you think so particularly highly of them? Of the autobiography, of the three volumes of them. Yes. I think it seems to me her most success,

none of these works of Beauvoir fit into very clear categories. So the novels are philosophical, the philosophy involves a lot of examples, the autobiography itself is a literary work, not simply a recounting. And for me, it's probably the most, successful. It's always a compromise, so it's not a good word compromise, synthesis, that's a better word,

of the literary, the philosophical, and the personal. Margaret Aetak, how did you change, Suburbia, since it does, particularly in view of the letters, letters which we discovered between her and such. Well, I certainly think they've given a much more complex public... Without being why, can you give the listeners a taste of What's worrying you? Of the from the letters?

Of what's worrying me? Well, maybe not worrying you. It was worrying Christina in her. Well, it's very... Beauvoir was very much treated as the little woman in a public discourse that was hostile to her, to Sartre, until the letters. And suddenly the letters, one realizes

that everything she'd said about them exchanging views and was perfectly true about their lives. So they write to each other, at great length about their relationships with other people, about the nights they pass with them. It's very intimate and it's very detailed. And I think there was a level of shock. Suddenly they became the kind of heroes of Lilius en Dangeros,

dangerous liaisons manipulating at a centre of a web of intrigue. Of those specific things like they wrote in their letters, according to notes that they took the virginity of young girls, they passed girls one to another, and so on, which is, there you are. So, so people were definitely shocked and felt that the kind of intimate details that they were writing about

was inappropriate. Well, what they're doing it was inappropriate, writing about it was a secondary activity, wasn't it? Yes, I suppose so. I just wanted to add that they weren't taking people's virginity and passing them around all the time. No, no, I just don't say all the time. No, no, but that's one example of that.

There's one example. It's your notes, I'm telling you. I know, but that's one example. Otherwise, they were quite serious relationships, but they were multiple. Yeah. I think I'd also add that, you know, Beauvoir and Sartre, probably the first sort of intellectuals

in the kind of floodlights, really, and their lives have been heavily, heavily scrutinised by all sides of the political spectrum and very harshly judged. You could go over harshly judged? I think so. And I also think that, you know, celebrities of all sorts,

Stripes attract all sorts of people towards them for all sorts of really spurious motives. So I think Beauvoir recognised at the end of her life they had certainly made some, you know, serious mistakes in terms of the relationships they'd had with younger adults. But also, it was younger adults, it was younger adults. It wasn't young girls. But also I think that they drew people to them. Good. We'll continue that sometime, probably after the... That's it. Thank you very much to Margaret Etaxerlut and Christina Howell. Next week we'll be talking about the Empire of Mali in the 14th century. One of its empires, Manza Moussa was the richest man in the world has ever known. Thank you. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So you're now, you're broadcasting in a different way now.

It went very fast, didn't it? You did. It seems to get tired. Yes, there you are. I had to decide about old age and then. No, there wasn't time. Because I was confused, I confused. The question was confused. You picked her very nicely for me, between autobiography and letters.

Yes, I know, I tried. I just, I wanted to jump old age, but I was thinking that. You did want autobiography, though, didn't you? I did, yeah. I did, yeah. I thought you did. Otherwise, I absolutely did. I think it's really good that you mentioned it,

because, you know, that whole project of witnessing her life and witnessing the century is really important. It's why a lot of people read Beauvoir and still do read Beauvoir. You know, how did this great intellectual icon, a feminist icon, how did she actually live? and that's what Peter turns people towards her letters and autobiographies. I didn't really get to the legacy island which was annoyed me. Yes, because a big chronicler.

She's a fantastic chronicler of the 20th century. And you go back and you reread what she was writing about Algeria or her essays, her journalism. I was just fantastically sharp. But she's also a magnificent writer. I think that's why she's still read. You can pick up what she wrote for Rourdi. You can pick up her,

the letter in Le Monde in 1960 announcing the torture of this girl on trial. I mean, she really is very young, isn't she? And it's an extraordinary letter. Her command of polemic and rhetoric is just magnificent, and I think that's why one get straight back into it. Yeah, she's a huge public intellectual in the 20th century,

so it's very good that we've done this programme. What about your students, any of you? How do they take to her? Oh, they love her? They love it. Yes, they love it. They enjoy comparing the life and the fiction. They love the feminism, of course.

Some of the Second Sex is actually on our first year syllabus. It's very nice having Beauvoir on it. And so they might want to do her later on. And I think they find it quite in big way. The male students also enjoy it when they've chosen it. And I think the funny thing about that book, Second Sex, is that all that's written so long ago over 50 years, ago, it's still an eye-opener, really.

Some of the things in there are things that we still don't talk about. And the whole idea of, it's quite delicately balanced, really, about construction. I was thinking this very difficult question, you know, how free are we and so on, how much we construct ourselves and applying that existential question to the question of gender. I mean, that's her main contribution for me. She applies existentialism to questions that, Sarch certainly hadn't reflected on, although she gets him to reflect on them later.

So in late interviews, she actually makes Saatch say that the feminist struggle is more important than the work and glass struggle. I don't think whether he really thought it, I don't know. For so long, you know, including at the end of the second text, Beauvoir puts her hope in socialism, of course, and then she realizes that socialism isn't going to change women's situation very much. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you think we, I think I sort of didn't, I didn't, I didn't, not that I could nail it, but did you think we got across clearly enough about existentialism what it meant to her? Because I felt that I rushed her at all. I think some of the concepts, you know, I mean, it's really difficult because it's terribly complicated

and you could do a whole program. I felt like, puddingly. And so it's, so I think we did take, you know, some of the concepts like the other and being in the world and freedom and no nature. And I think those are just such essential building blocks. But you could do a whole programme. I do.

I recognise. It's a huge life and the kind of concept shift and change and morph, don't they, over the arc of the life. Yeah. Who'd like tea, who'd like coffee? This is the announcement of the morning. That is the announcement. We have it on the tables outside on the street.

Okay, that's thank very much. There are many more philosophy and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com. Radio 4.