A selection of Beauvoir’s letters to Leduc between 1945 to 1972.
Simone de Beauvoir's 'remarkable' letters to Violette Leduc sold at auction
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Sotheby’s, which sold the 297 letters, says they reveal ‘a complex and ambiguous relationship where unrequited passion and mistrust mingle’
Sian Cain Wedenesday 16 December 2022
Almost 300 letters, mostly unpublished, from the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir to the French novelist Violette Leduc, including The Second Sex author’s rejection of her friend’s romantic advances, have sold for €56,700 (£51,500).
An Exercise in Redemption: On Deirdre Bair’s “Parisian Lives”
November 14, 2019 • By Sophie Madeline Dess
AWARD-WINNING WRITER Deirdre Bair likes to call herself an “accidental biographer.” Apparently, she “had never read a biography before she decided that Samuel Beckett needed one and she was the person to write it.” One is inclined to call this a “happy” accident since the Beckett bio won the National Book Award in 1981 and started Bair on a prolific career. However, given the mortifying and fury-eliciting anecdotes laced throughout her new memoir, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me, happy is not the word that comes most readily to mind.
From Kant’s routines to Frantz Fanon’s astonishing wartime work and Simone de Beauvoir’s vexed position in history, these books thread together ideas and the lives that animated them
Peter Salmon Wednesday 18 November 2020
What is the relationship between the thinker and the thought? This is a question that all writers of intellectual biographies grapple with. One must relate the life to the thought without conflating them, without ascribing to every effect a cause, and every argument a reason. As Jacques Derrida warned, “You want me to say things like: ‘I-was-born-in-El-Biar-on-the-outskirts-of-Algiers-in-a-petty-bourgeois-family-of-assimilated-Jews-but …’ Is that really necessary? I can’t do it.”
And yet Derrida also argued that one of the great unacknowledged aspects of all philosophical writing is that it is a type of autobiography. Would Socrates have developed the gift of the gab if he wasn’t so ugly? Would Julia Kristeva have developed her ideas about the symbolic if she wasn’t an outsider by birth in her adopted France? Would Nietzsche have proclaimed the Overman if he was less shy at dinner parties?
The very best intellectual biographies enrich our understanding of great thinkers by situating them in a time and a place, and by exploring how they negotiate the difficult art of living through the products of their minds. Here are 10 wonderful books that thread together the lives and ideas of their thinkers in a way that intensifies our understanding of each.
1. St Augustine by Rebecca West “I write books,” noted Rebecca West, “to find out about things.” Here my stone-cold favourite writer of all time turns her combination of searing intellect and droll wit on one of the shapers of Christianity. She is particularly moving on Augustine’s final encounter with his mother, Monica: perhaps, writes West, “the most intense experience ever commemorated”. As bold and opinionated as you’d expect from the woman who wrote: “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk For anyone studying philosophy, reading Wittgenstein can feel like taking a draught of cool water. Suddenly the deepest problems seem easy, to be mere problems of language, easy to solve. And then, as you read more deeply, that all falls apart as every problem becomes knottier, every question deeper still. Ray Monk’s biography is the gold standard in the genre, revealing a man whose life was as simple and complicated as his work.
3. At Home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil Any thinker worth their salt needs to have a Simone Weil obsession at some point. No intellectual of the 20th century was as prepared to take their thinking to its logical conclusion, making her for many a secular saint. And yet sainthood is often better appreciated at a distance, as her niece Sylvie reveals. Sleeping on the floor next to a lovingly made bed at the house of your brother (the revered mathematician André Weil) is noble in the telling, irritating in the execution. A writer herself, Sylvie Weil presents a biography of three minds, working for and against each other.
Thorough … detail from Kant and His Comrades at the Table by Emil Doerstling, 1900. Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy
4. Kant: A Biography by Manfred Kuehn Very few people read Kant for pleasure. If you know anyone who has, I’d like to have a chat to them. Kuehn’s biography is always promoted as revelatory, in that it shows Kant was occasionally five minutes late in having his breakfast, and sometimes put his shoes on in the wrong order. In fact this biography is everything Kant was – thorough, witty (in the way philosophy lecturers are witty: that is, not very) and goes on just a bit too long. Even the title is suitably dull. But, like The Critique of Pure Reason, it is also magnificent and to read it is to enter into a glorious dialogue with one of the great minds.
5. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman by Toril Moi “To say that existence is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.” It’s hard to go past Deirdre Bair’s biography of De Beauvoir. But Moi’s telling is also brilliant and affecting. A powerful, critical investigation of De Beauvoir’s thinking, it situates her in a history of female thinkers and the way their thought has been marginalised, or treated reductively as fully explicable by their lives (and loves). In a challenging read, Moi forces you to argue with her, and to be damn sure of your position as you do so.
6. Frantz Fanon: A Biography by David Macey Derrida’s childhood in Algeria was crucial to his thinking, as he himself noted, and one cannot write about Algeria without reading Fanon’s political works. Macey explores them brilliantly, but it is Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist that is a revelation. During the war of independence, Fanon often attended to patients suffering mental trauma after being tortured, as well as to the mental traumas of the torturers. That he attended to both with equal care is astonishing, and that he did so while writing the tracts that would make him famous is even more so. Macey does him justice, which really is saying something.
7. Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos One good life option is to just read everything David Bellos has ever written (as well as his translations). His life of Jacques Tati is wonderful, but here he is in his element trying to pin the butterfly that is Perec. Perec is the sort of writer most writers want to be, brilliant, inventive and prolific, managing to combine huge erudition with the ability to tell a really good yarn. A novel without the letter “e” (or a novella that uses only that vowel)? Why not? A novel that does a knight’s tour of an apartment block and seems to cover every aspect of life as it skips around? Sure! We should all be grateful he found Bellos to write his story – no one else would have got it right.
8. At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell Along with Stuart Jeffries’ Grand Hotel Abyss, this has become the ne plus ultra of group biographies, to the point where any pitch for a book in this area these days has to say: “It’s like At Existentialist Cafe meets The Rest Is Noise.” There’s a reason for this. Bakewell’s ability to connect a thinker’s ideas to their life and personality is impressive. I particularly love her slow, minutely reasoned, takedown of Heidegger the man: displaying Paul Celan’s books in the window of his local bookshop is, she writes, “the single documented example I can find of him actually doing something nice”.
Angela Davis speaks at a street rally in Raleigh, 1974.
9. Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis Note this is “An” autobiography, not “The” – Davis is always in action, and this is just one moment on the way somewhere, politically and intellectually. Writing in her late 20s, Davis had already served time in jail and been instrumental in the civil rights movement, making this an intoxicating trip through an era of incendiary politics and intellectual ferment. That she has maintained the rage and continued to put both body and mind on the line is exhilarating – another autobiography would be no less thrilling.
10. War Diaries by Jean-Paul Sartre Sartre is a bad biographer. In forcing Flaubert and Genet through the sausage machine of existentialism he performs the astonishing feat of making you want to avoid reading them. As a man, philosopher and novelist he is also hard to love. And yet love him I do, because of these diaries. They are the story of a mind finding itself, groping about for the theoretical scaffolding on which he would erect his thought. They are also the moving chronicle of a mind recovering from depression, thrown into a world of senseless chaos, before there was a Sartre to theorise absurdity. Of his breakdown, he writes: “I suddenly realised that anyone could become anything.” What he became is astonishing.
Siri Hustvedt: ‘I loved Ann Petry’s biography, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad.’
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Siri Hustvedt: ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’
The US author on becoming a feminist, growing into Gertrude Stein, and the comfort of folk tales
Siri Hustvedt Friday 26 November 2021
My earliest reading memory At six I became fascinated with the Lonely Doll books by Dare Wright that I found in the public library of my small town, Northfield, Minnesota. They used photographs, not drawings, as illustrations; they gave me an uncanny feeling of secrets lurking behind the words and images. It is a feeling I have never forgotten.
My favourite book growing up I loved Ann Petry’s biography, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad. I found it in my school library in 1965, 10 years after it was first published. I was 10 years old and intensely aware of the civil rights movement, despite the fact that I lived in an all-white town and had seen black people only on forays to Minneapolis every Christmas. I was passionately attached to the story of this extraordinary, heroic woman.
The book that changed me as a teenager When I was 14 or 15 I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Despite my lack of philosophical sophistication, I responded viscerally to the book. Rereading it later, I wonder exactly what I understood at the time. It is not an easy book. I suspect that, despite my struggles with the text, I gleaned its essential message – that women were treated as outsiders to history as the eternal feminine, had always been other to man, and that these injustices ran deep. I became a feminist.
The writer who changed my mind I was in my early 30s when I first read the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose book Phenomenology of Perception reordered my thinking about the mind/body problem. His work changed my “mind” by bringing it into my body. He skewers the mind-body substance dualism in the philosophy of Descartes and his heirs. The philosopher’s interest in the science of the moment and its flawed assumptions, as well as his use of neurological case studies to illustrate his thought, have remained highly influential for my own thinking.
The book that made me want to be a writer David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I was 13. It was the summer of 1968, and I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, where my father was studying the Icelandic sagas. Political upheaval was dimly present in my consciousness, but I lived on and in novels. The sun never set, and my disturbed circadian rhythms kept me awake. I read and read, one novel after another, but it was that book that set my nerves on fire. One night, moved to tears by a particular passage, which I no longer remember, I walked to the window and made a vow – if this is what books could do, then this is what I wanted to do. I began writing. Years later, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Dickens. Although I sometimes tired of me and my insights while working on the thesis, I never lost a feeling of awe for the inimitable CD.
The book or author I came back to I didn’t “get” Gertrude Stein as a teenager. I had to grow into an adult to feel the music, humour and rigour of her work.
The book I reread I have read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights five times now. I read it first at 13 during the same Icelandic summer, and it scared me witless. The older I get, the more profound and radical the book has become. I have come to view it as an insurrectionist text that razes our assumptions about borders between this and that, I and you, life and death and grinds them into dust.
The book I could never read again I am ashamed about Gone With the Wind. I read it that same fateful Icelandic summer. I checked it out of Reykjavik public library, didn’t understand that the author was writing about the Ku Klux Klan, and I had to ask my mother what the word “rape” meant. This horrible, cheesy book advanced the disgusting “lost cause” narrative still dear to the American south and parts of the north.
The book I discovered later in life I did not read Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace until I was well into my 40s. I now think this was exactly the right moment for me because I was able to place the text in a broader context. At the same time, the lightning precision of Weil’s extraordinary mind would no doubt have bowled me over as a young person too.
The book I am currently reading A wonderful recently published book, In Defence of the Human Being by Thomas Fuchs. Fuchs is a professor of philosophy and psychiatry at Heidelberg University and is a lucid, brilliant defender of a new form of humanism.
My comfort read Fairy and folk tales – any kind from any country.
Episode 83: Simone de Beauvoir and ‘The Second Sex’
Host: Joan Neuberger, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin
Guest: Judith Coffin, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin
May 11, 2016
Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most important intellectuals, feminists, and writers of the 20th century. Her life and writings defied the expectations of her birth into a middle class French family, and her philosophies inspired others, including Betty Friedan. Her seminal work, The Second Sex, is a dense two volume work that can be intimidating at first glance, combining philosophy and psychology, and her own observations.
Fortunately, Judith Coffin from UT’s Department of History, is here to help contextualize and parse out the context, influences, and impact of one of the 20th century’s greatest feminist works.
Simone de Beauvoir was an incredibly important intellectual, feminist, writer, popular subject of adoration and attack. Let’s start talking about who she was. She lived from 1908-1986 that just about covers the whole twentieth century.
She came from a middle-class family. She was one of two girls. Girls did not have great things expected of them and she blew past everybody’s expectations. She became a philosopher and a writer. She wrote memoirs. She wrote novels. She wrote essays. She edited journals. She was linked very early to Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist. And her first and most important book was The Second Sex.
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