The Mandarins - Book Review.


From my Amazon review on Simone de Beauvior's The Mandarins:

As someone with an antipathy to existentialism, feminism, the French and soap operas, I came to Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins expecting to find myself loathing the experience. My attitude turned around quite rapidly because of the writing, the plotting and the fascination of watching the internal debates of French leftists who were coming to terms with the recent impotence of their nation and, consequently, their own irrelevance in the face of the upstart, gauche Americans. (See p. 516 ["Admitting that you belong to a fifth rate nation and an outmoded era is not something that you can do overnight."].)


I thought that De Beauvior's writing - or at least this translation - was excellent. The sentences were fairly simple and direct, and there were frequent instances where de Beauvior's observations were charming. For example, after Nadine, the daughter of Anne Dubrieulh - the first person narrator/de Beauvior figure - joins the Communist Party, Anne observes that "[Nadine] soon began examining all my acts and words in the light of historical materialism." (p. 197.)

Kids will do that.

The plotting is first-rate. De Beauvior uses a technique where she employs two perspectival characters -Henri Perron and Anne Dubrieulh. When Henri Perron - the Albert Camus figure - is the central character, the story is narrated in the third person; when Anne Dubrieulh is the central character, the story moves to a first person narrative. The change in writing perspective is interesting because de Beauvior will sometimes "loop back" to cover scenes and times that Henri had previously narrated, and we see the same scene told from Anne's perspective.

The soap opera of the book focuses on Henri and Anne's interactions with other people. Henri is the editor/publisher/co-owner of a newspaper started under the Resistance named L'Espoir (the "Hope.") Henri is married to Paula, who he seems to be fond of but finds her cloying love for him to be stifling him. Henri has to work through the question of whether he will keep L'Espoir an independent Leftist newspaper or be sucked into the plans of Robert Dubrieulh ("Dubrieulh") - the Jean Paul Sartre analog - to turn L'Espoir into the house propaganda organ of Dubrieulh's political party/movement, the S.R.L, which Dubrieulh conceives as a broad leftist front aligned with the Communist Party, but not Communist. Henri succumbs to the force of Dubrieulh's personality and his apparent submissiveness to Dubrielh, and then regrets that decision when the issue of whether to print an expose about the Soviet death camps splits Dubrieulh and Henri, with Dubrieulh judging that it would be far worse to give aid and comfort to Anti-Communists than to allow the death camps to continue, and Henri having some residual adherence to an idea of a commitment to truth that transcends politics.


Through the long political ratiocinations, we see Henri philander. First, he has an affair with the Dubrieulh's eighteen year old daughter, Nadine, then he takes up with a Quisling wanna-be actress - which results in him perjuring himself for a Nazi collaborator - and then he returns to Nadine, who connives at trapping Henri in a marriage by getting pregnant. Nadine goes from Henri to Henri's younger friend Lambert. Lambert goes from a leftist journalist to a right wing newspaperman. Paula, Henri's wife, goes from being a woman in the grips of obsessive compulsion about her husband, to out and out insanity on the same subject, but, fortunately, she is saved by psycho-analysis before the book ends.

And:

A large part of the book is taken up by the problem of the Communist Party. The problem is that Henri's coterie of intellectuals wanted to be Communists but they didn't want to make a full commitment to Communism, much less anything else. They want to have their cake and eat it, too, but the Communists won't permit a left that is not under their control or which refuses to permit itself to be used as patsies. The big issue for non-Communist intellectuals seems to have been whether they should support the United States or the Soviet Union. It seems that for most, there never was a question about supporting the Soviet Union over the United States - of course, they were going to support the Soviet Union (p. 584) - but this allegiance seems to have been more a matter of conformity to class expectation. What we get from reading The Mandarins seems to be that the French Left made most of its decisions based on projecting their attitudes on their enemies. Thus, on a number of different occasions, Henri and his friend describe their fear and loathing about becoming a colony of the United States. This fear and loathing is never expressed in terms of what the Americans will do - except that Americans are somehow uncivilized and uncultured (they will never be able to control themselves with their Atom bomb (p. 241) - but there are descriptions about what it means to be a colonized power, specifically a colony of the French during the Malagasy Uprising. Being a colony of France is not an attractive option. I got the sense that the French intellectuals were basically saying something like, "gosh, we know how we act when we are the colonizers, so why should those Americans act any better?"


Similarly, the only explanation given for the pro-Communist/pro-Soviet attitude is a salve on a guilty conscience, specifically guilt because Henri and his class of intellectuals are rather well-off. We know that they are well-off because they are drinking champagne, going out on the town, living in houses, and not going hungry. When Henri contemplates supporting the Soviet Union - or when he feels guilt or doubt about pointing out that the Soviets have death camps - he explains to himself that only the Soviet Union is likely to feed millions of starving Chinese. According to Henri, "American domination meant the perpetual oppression and undernourishment of all Oriental countries." (p. 242.) Of course, the Communists did have a pesky habit of treating people as things. (p. 241 - 242), Henri ratiocinates his way to supporting Communism by asking "but what does that mean compared to feeding the hungry?" (p. 242.) Nadine, likewise, explains her brief foray into the Communist Party by explaining that if she had been a member of the Communist Party she would not have had to feel guilty about the hungry kids she saw in Portugal during her trip there with Henri. (p. 171.) Likewise, there is a revealing scene where Anne is talking to some Americans about American support for Henry Wallace - FDR's former vice president until he was dumped in favor Harry S Truman because of Wallace's Leftist/Communist sympathies. Anne receives the explanation that "[t]hat man will never create a real leftist party. He's just an alibi for people who want to buy themselves a clear conscience cheaply." (p. 553.) A few pages later, Anne is shocked at finding Americans who don't agree that America will become fascist, and she drops the conversation because she realized that they "wanted to continue leading their comfortable, carefree, esthetes' life; no argument would dent their genteel egotism" (p. 563), which seems like a strange critique coming from a woman flits over to America at whim to have an affair and seems to want nothing more than to continue her comfortable, carefree, esthete's life.

Go here for the rest of my Amazon review.

And don't forget to give me a helpful vote to offset the votes of the Commie-symps.

The Secret Life of French Marxist Intellectuals - Existentialist Division.

These pretenders think they can tell us anything about how to live?

The relationship between Simone de Beauvior and Jean Paul Sartre was simply perverse, and it was a perversity that hurt other people.  According to the Daily Mail:

Left behind in Paris, Simone continued to seduce both men and women, writing titillating descriptions of her activities to Sartre behind the Maginot Line, which reveal her heartlessness and the vulnerability of her conquests.


Today, she would be behind bars for her sexual activities with her young pupils, but in those days she got away with it.

Tragically, the lives of these girls, who were pathologically jealous of each other over their teacher's attentions, were permanently blighted.

One took to self-harming, another committed suicide. Most remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her 'family'.

Yet Simone had no maternal feelings for them at all. She showed no empathy even when one of them, a Jewish girl whom she seduced when she was 16, nearly lost her life at the hands of the Nazis who were advancing on Paris.

Simone's lack of scruples extended to her war record.

She took no part in the Resistance, like other writers of the time, concentrating on her sex life.

Indeed, the only thing that aroused her to action was the pregnancy of one of her entourage.

She found the condition of pregnancy 'insulting' because it was an impediment to woman's self-fulfilment in the wider world, and Simone arranged an illegal backstreet abortion which nearly ended the girl's life.

Sartre's war record was equally dubious. Captured by the Germans, he got on so well with his guards that he managed to engineer his release in 1941.

But he did not rush straight into Simone's arms. He had been in Paris with another woman for two weeks before he told her he was free.

In 1940, when the Germans occupied Paris, Sartre's first reaction was to preach resistance, yet he soon lost interest and, instead, accepted the teaching post a Jewish professor had been forced to leave by the Nazis.

Sartre even fraternised with the German censor when he wanted his work published.

Since the couple were free to come and go as they pleased, the war proved one of the most exciting periods of their lives and the one which has gone down in history.

Writing in the pavement cafes of St Germain, with Picasso and his mistress at the next table, and going to nightclubs with the black-clad singer Juliette Greco, they enjoyed themselves to the hilt, fully expecting the Germans would remain in Paris for at least 20 years.

They now had at least five lovers between them - men and girls - all sleeping with each other.

It was too much for the mother of one pupil who brought an official complaint in 1943 against de Beauvoir, accusing her of corrupting a minor and acting as procurer in handing her daughter over to Sartre.

The charges failed to stick because de Beauvoir's little 'family' closed ranks and lied.

And though Simone lost her teaching job, she compensated for it by publishing her first novel.

Born from her real life experiences, it was about a menage a trois. Sartre's weighty philosophical tome Being And Nothingness was also published that year.

This was the rallying cry of existentialism, the creed that preaches there is no God and that man and woman are, therefore, free to do as they will.

It would become the bible of our licentious times, taken up by liberals everywhere in the West, and yet it was practically ignored at first.

Sartre drowned his sorrows at its lack of success with rampant womanising, this time in the company of the writer of the moment - the handsome, tall, dark Algerian Albert Camus, who joined in most of the couple's sex games.

Camus slept with all their impressionable young girls, but he could not bring himself to sleep with Simone herself whom he found 'a chatterbox, a blue stocking, unbearable'.


As an Allied victory became inevitable, Sartre began to paint himself once again as a Resistance fighter and, as such, was lionised when he visited America in 1945.

I've just finished reading de Beauvior's "The Mandarins" - my review should be up momentarily - and I found it to describe the empty, posturing, comfortable, buying cheap grace lifestyle described in this article to a "T."  It's a well-written book, but it has left me confused as to whether de Beauvior intended to write a book memorializing the fact that she and her fellow intellectuals were worthless human beings.

Of course, there's this:

The Americans did not take to Simone as they had to Sartre. They disliked her drinking, they mocked her clothes and they noticed her faint whiff of body odour.

And:

For many years he had kept himself going with amphetamines, black coffee and cigarettes, followed by sleeping pills and red wine. Now he was incontinent, lame and blind.


On the brink of his death in 1980, Sartre was also flirting with Judaism and Simone was appalled - to embrace God would have been to reverse their entire lives' work.

After he died, Simone was left alone with his body in the hospital, and she crawled under the sheet to spend one last night with him. Now that his restless mind was stilled she at last had him where she wanted him.

And so she wrote her nihilistic epitaph for the tomb they would ultimately share, ensuring their bleak and Godless creed would go down in history. 'His death separates us, my death will not reunite us,' it read.

Finally, she'd had her own way - but in her heart she must have known it was only because she had managed to outlive him.