Simone de Beauvoir: 'I've Seen Things' - Coronavirus Blues (VI)

  

I've never quite managed the whole of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. In fact, I've read only one of her works in its entirety, and that, slightly ashamedly, for rather sensational reasons. She Came To Stay, Beauvoir's first novel, functions as a fictional account of her and Jean Paul Sartre's ménage à trois (or ménage à quatre?) with two of their students. Despite the biographical drama, I didn't enjoy it. There is a creepy and exploitative aspect to it, one that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. That said, if your motivation to read a book is salacious, prudish complaints are absurd and probably disingenuous. 

He reads Simone de Beauvoir in his laid-back circumstance

What I do enjoy, though, is dipping in and out of Beauvoir's work. For me, she's best encountered via asides and diversions, or through telling anecdotes and pithy aphorisms, or in snatches of polemic that hint towards her genius. Indeed, with so much to read, and so little time, many incredible writers have to be encountered in this way. Again, it seems shameful to admit this. But surely it's a better approach than ignoring a writer in their entirety, instead taking passages that have been handpicked by others that are indicative of a writer's greatness?   

Art Shay's infamous photograph of Simone de Beauvoir in the bathroom

Joanna Biggs' superb article in the latest edition of  The London Review of Books returned me to one such passage that I first read in the late Nineties. Back then, I'd only taken notice of Beauvoir because of Lloyd Cole who had mentioned the French feminist in his song 'Rattlesnakes': 'She reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance'. At the time, I didn't have a clue what that meant - a reference to her flitting back and forth between her life in France and her life in the US with her American lover Nelson Algren - but it sounded pretty cool. Nevertheless, Lloyd caused me to take note whenever I saw her name. And one passage had clearly struck a chord, as Biggs reminded me today. She finishes her LRB essay with the words that the film director Claude Lanzmann - her last lover - read out at her funeral. They are the closing words of Force of Circumstance, the second volume of Beauvoir's autobiography. They are poignant, quietly inspiring, and extraordinarily beautiful: 

I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and all its randomness – the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahia, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken – there is no place where it will all live again.

Reading them again, in these days of lockdown and inertia, the hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up. What were they reminding me of? Something mirrored in Sartre or Camus? I didn't think so; as with Beauvoir, my knowledge of those two writers is incomplete. Something Proustian, perhaps? No. It's got some of the essence but not the style. It came to me in a flash and from the most unexpected of places. A rain-sopped roof in a dystopian vision of downtown Los Angeles. Roy Batty, the failing replicant in Blade Runner, utters words eerily similar to Beauvoir's just before his systems shut-down.      

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty

I shouldn't really be surprised. The film, and indeed Philip K Dick's original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are both magnificent essays on Twentieth century existentialism, posing the question 'What does it mean to be alive?' At the risk of sounding trite, the answer seems to be, 'make great memories'. And when the lockdown ends, we all need to take a leaf out of Beauvoir and Batty's book and make sure that, when our time has come, we can make the claim that 'we have seen things'.  

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Postscript: I was rather taken with the notion that Philip K Dick had been reading Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography, and that this had inspired Roy Batty's last words. After all, Force of Circumstance was written in 1964 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was written in 1968. However, my friend Mark has just told me that Roy Batty's 'tears in rain' lines were not the work of Dick but rather originally set down by the film's screenwriter David Peoples and then improvised over by Rutger Hauer just before they were shot. Of course, that doesn't mean that Peoples or Hauer weren't making a better fist of reading Simone de Beauvoir than I was.