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Spring 2008
Volume 07, Number 2

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

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Simone de Beauvoir: Diary of a Philosophy Student, vol. 1, 1926-27
Edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret Simons, with Marybeth Timmermann (Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 374 pages. $40.00. ISBN-13:978-0-252-03142-7.

Reviewed by Sally J. Scholz
Villanova University, sally.scholz@villanova.edu

The second volume in the Beauvoir Series published by the University of Illinois Press, Simone de Beauvoir: Diary of a Philosophy Student, vol. 1, 1926-27, is an admirable example of careful translating and editing. The footnotes alone tell a story of arduous research and painstaking attention to detail that is rare even in academic circles. Every name Beauvoir mentions, every book she reads, each painter she critiques is explained and placed in context. Barbara Klaw and her associates paint a vivid picture of the social and historical context within which the young student Beauvoir reflected on her life. The two introductions, one by Klaw and one by Margaret Simons, connect the diary to Beauvoir’s later works. They see some of the seeds of her more famous ideas taking root in these early writings, but they also notice those places where the ideas in her novels or her philosophical treatises depart significantly from the diary notes.

The diary itself is just what might be expected of an eighteen-year-old girl writing in the early part of the twentieth century. Although there are only a few passages that contain anything that is strictly philosophical in a traditional sense and even fewer signs of the woman who would later write The Second Sex, the text is not without interest.

The diary opens with a threatening exhortation from Beauvoir: “Nothing is more cowardly than to violate a secret when nobody is there to defend it. I have always suffered horribly from every indiscretion, but if someone, anyone, reads these pages, I will never forgive him. He will thus be doing a bad and ugly deed” (53). Needless to say, I read on but I could not help but feel a little guilty for doing so. The eighteen-year-old Beauvoir tried to work out some of her most private anxieties in these diaries. As a reader, I was full of both curiosity and hesitancy; I wanted to respect her privacy but, like so many others, I wondered how different I would find the Beauvoir at eighteen than the woman I knew through reading her other texts.

Although they clearly bear the mark of the early twentieth century in their timidity, there are a handful of intriguing elements in the diary. Most of the prose deals with one of two things: her love for her cousin and its numerous vicissitudes, and what she was reading, studying, or attending in her late teen years.

It is widely known that Beauvoir had anticipated marrying her cousin Jacques and these diaries chronicle that time period. What is more interesting is how she seems to characterize love. Page after page, we read of conversations between Beauvoir and Jacques wherein they seemed to share an “understanding” or “intimacy” which isolated them from so many others around them. Jacques read to her and introduced her to new books, new authors. The salacious details that characterized many of Beauvoir’s later letters are entirely absent from this diary, no doubt because they were absent from her existence. Beauvoir’s relationship with Jacques unfolded under the watchful eyes of her parents, especially her mother who is likely the target of that opening exhortation against reading the diary.

Later in the diaries, toward the end of the second of two notebooks, Beauvoir develops a close friendship with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She briefly contemplates him as a replacement for Jacques. Whereas Jacques inspires suffering and anxiety, Merleau-Ponty inspires joy and lightness. Beauvoir interprets this as simplicity, even immaturity, on Merleau-Ponty’s part, while Jacques is portrayed as complex and sophisticated. An entry on September 6, 1927, offers her conclusion regarding the comparison between the two men: “I am strong enough forever; no fear of losing myself. M-P would be peace, simple, and sure affection; Jacques; the difficult steps towards the other; work that is never completed and always to do; anxiety. Thus, it is Jacques who must definitively be chosen; confident enough to rest my happiness in his hands…” (311). This somewhat counter-intuitive decision is interestingly read through her work in the Second Sex on the woman in love. Indeed, the introduction by Klaw discusses the Jacques relationship in this light and Beauvoir’s subsequent written reactions to it.

Like most teenage diaries perhaps, Beauvoir comments at length on her boredom. Often, these spring from long periods of Jacques’ absence from her life. One of my favorite such passages is in the November 24, 1926, entry, which begins “Boredom! Boredom!”:

It’s horrible not to have any desire for perfection or use anymore, horrible to try to sleep my life away until he makes life possible for me because I no longer expect anything except from him, whom I don’t currently like, for whom I have no tenderness. And will I see him again? And when?

I am bored! Such emptiness that does not even make me dizzy…such grayness, such drabness, all these hours that I am not living, that I try to evade. (186-87)

There is a subtle recognition there—Beauvoir seems both to know that she cannot look to another for her life but yet desperately resigned to do so. There are also pages and pages of her crying and almost as many entries on her happiness—often accounts of boredom or despair are followed by entries on her supreme happiness. Her teenage angst reveals her relative privilege just as her social reality reveals the limitations imposed on her gender in the early twentieth century.

One of the most striking features of the diary is the extent to which Beauvoir discusses the soul—hers and others. The soul is described as the truth, nature, the real person, and, most prominently, the inner life. In the early part of the diary, she describes two selves, an interior self and an exterior self. As she says in September 1926, she spent long hours trying “to focus on [her] soul, filled with wonder at the discovery of inner life” (85). This inner life is the lens through which she processes literature, music, and painting. It is also the life that ties her to Jacques. In many ways, one gets the impression that Beauvoir was wrestling with some perennial philosophical problems: the nature of the self, the duality of existence, the relation to the absolute, and the nature of love. Though, of course, some caution is in order here too lest we try to read too much into her private thoughts regarding her life and relationships.

Reading the diary, one is struck by how frequently Beauvoir read and reread and reread again her own notebooks. The footnotes make ample mention of her marginal comments written at a later time (for the second notebook, these comments appear to be written in 1929 and even refer to Sartre in response to diary entries). But even beyond the marginalia, Beauvoir frequently mentions that she has gone back and reread what she has written in the notebook, often noting how right she was or how much she loves herself as she reveals herself in the notebooks. Knowing this and knowing that she also read her diaries again in the writing of her autobiographies, one cannot help but be struck by the sort of self-reflective, or perhaps self-referential, life she led. Read next to the Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, as Klaw suggests, one might find some insight in Beauvoir’s reinterpretation of her relationship with Jacques and early friendship with Merleau-Ponty. Similarly, alongside her short story collection, When Things of the Spirit Come First, one can see Beauvoir grappling with themes that inspired her early fiction.

This volume provides an additional tool for scholars. The diary presents an opportunity for opening an avenue of Beauvoirian scholarship in aesthetics. She renders judgment on a great deal of art, literature, and music. Little has been written on her aesthetic judgment and this volume of her diaries might invite scholars to explore that aspect of her thought more systematically.

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