Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE MANDARINS”” by Simone de Beauvoir (Les Mandarins first published in 1954; English translation by Leonard M. Friedman first published in 1956)

            Recently, in what I can now only call a fit of literary masochism, I took off my shelves a hitherto unread copy of [an English translation of] Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, and ploughed my way through it – all 700 closely-printed pages of it. It took me about two weeks of evenings to read. It doesn't surprise me to discover that, because it is so long, the novel has often been issued in France in two volumes. My knowledge of the work of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) had been patchy. As university students doing French fifty years ago, we were directed to read de Beauvoir’s Memoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangee, the first volume of what would eventually become her four-volume autobiography. I’d also read her polemic The Second Sex, often touted as the first blast of second-wave feminism. But that was as much as I had read of de Beauvoir's work. I had encountered her mainly in articles and books concerning her long-time partner Jean-Paul Sartre. So here I was reading what is often regarded as de Beauvoir’s best novel.

            When it was first published in 1954, Les Mandarins was a sensation in France, selling in the tens of thousands and winning the Prix Goncourt. Simone de Beauvoir was only the second woman to win that gong since the Prix Goncourt was set up in 1905 (Elsa Triolet won it in 1945). Instantly, most readers in France understood that this was very much a roman a cle. For years, de Beauvoir angrily denied this, claiming that all the characters were purely fictitious; but over the years she relented a little and admitted that at least some of the characters were drawn from life.

I’ll get back to this roman a cle business later, and begin by taking the novel on its own terms.

 

The Mandarins opens very specifically at Christmas 1944. The war is still in progress, but France – particularly Paris -  has been liberated by the Allies and, among those who resisted Nazi occupation, or at least claimed to have resisted, there is a mood of elation – a sense that anything can now be achieved. Though no dates are given, it is clear that the novel takes us though four or five years, up to about 1949. In the progress there is a growing sense of disillusion. The “spirit of the Resistance” dissolves into partisan factionalism. The “mandarins” of the title are the intellectual class, the chattering class, and when they are not philosophising or bed-hopping, they are discussing politics, fiercely and intensely. There is in the development of the novel a subtext suggesting the tension between high-sounding words and real action. Whether or not it was de Beauvoir’s intention, much of this comes to suggest the impotence of intellectuals in the face of historical events.

Robert Dubreuilh is a novelist, polemicist and chief contributor to a political newsletter called Vigilance. His wife Anne is a psychoanalyst. Their daughter Nadine, 18-years old when the novel opens, is sexually promiscuous, sleeping with many men. Anne attributes this to the trauma Nadine felt during the war when her boyfriend Diego was killed by the Nazis. Or maybe not, because Robert and Anne Dubreuilh have an “open” marriage, which means they agree that they can stay together while also taking many sexual partners. Hard not to believe (whether Anne or the novelist admits it) that this is just as likely to have encouraged Nadine’s behaviour.

Their closest friend – at least apparently – is Henri Perron, also a novelist and a journalist. He edits and/or contributes to a newspaper called L’Espoir (Hope). He cohabits with a woman called Paula, a former cabaret singer; but he is souring on her and planning to leave her. As the plot unwinds, Paula has a nervous breakdown, is institutionalised for a while, and parts from Henri while still obsessing about him. Henri takes a number of lovers. Though in his mid-30s, one of them is teenaged Nadine, whom he takes to Portugal on a journalist assignment. [She revels in the rich food and chic clothes that are not available in France; he notes the extreme poverty of most of the population and his conscience is pricked.] Later, Henri writes, and has successfully produced, a play reflecting on French society during and after the war. He takes up with the aspiring and glamorous young actress Josette, whose family were clearly collaborators with the Nazis during the war, possibly having Gestapo connections. To protect Josette’s family, Henri, the left-wing idealist, perjures himself in court to get a notorious collaborator off the hook. [When you understand who Henri is modelled on, you will recognise the malice of Simone de Beauvoir]. By novel’s end (and most improbably, dare I say?), Henri has gone back to Nadine, now presumably in her early 20s, has married her, and they are having a baby which may or may not be his. Henri, the novel implies, has stood back from politics and is now embracing domesticity and settling into an apolitical way of writing. Incidentally, this of course now makes Henri Perron the son-in-law of Robert and Anne Dubreuilh.

That is a very skeleton outline of what happens in his novel, but the most insistent element of it is politics. Robert Dubreuilh and Henri Perron discuss again and again the political situation in France as they see it. Both are determinedly left-wing and very much opposed to what they see as the growing Americanisation of France and of Europe in general. They are wary of the Communists (whose influence in France was at its greatest in the late 1940s… before beginning to fade away in the 1950s after the time when this novel is set). But they are more worried by the Marshall Plan when it is launched. On the whole they admire the French Communist leader Thorez more than they admire General de Gaulle, whom they [wrongly of course] suspect of planning to become a dictator. What they want is an independent socialist party that will ally with the Communists but not be swallowed by them.

Robert Dubreuilh wants Henri Perron to turn L’Espoir into a newspaper championing such a socialist-but-not-Communist party. Henri is lukewarm about this, but then finds that other people – with money to fund him – might have different agendas. Some want to turn the newspaper to the Right. An American called Preston says he will provide (otherwise rationed) newsprint so long as L’Espoir includes no anti-American material. Some (like the Russian émigré Victor Scriassine) want the newspaper to forthrightly denounce the terrors being perpetrated by the Soviet Union. Some would simply like to make money out of the newspaper. Many, many pages of this novel deal with the complex negotiations to modify or take over the newspaper and many, many (wearisome) pages deal with Robert and Henri’s discussions about the case. The merdre hits the fan when all the evidence shows that the Soviet Union is running, with great cruelty, many forced labour camps (what we later came to know as the Gulag). Henri prints in L’Espoir a major article denouncing the camps… and immediately loses erstwhile Communist friends. The Communist paper L’Enclume (The Anvil) denounces him as a Fascist reactionary, a lackey of the Americans etc. And Robert Dubreuilh breaks with him, using the argument that it is not opportune to publicise such things when America and de Gaulle are the real enemies. Robert claims that such articles will only encourage right-wingers. [For this reader, Robert’s argument reminds me of George Orwell’s warning that telling the truth is often countered by people who say that the inconvenient truth will simply “play into the hands of” the wrong people.] Later there is a reconciliation between Robert and Henri – maybe Henri’s marrying Nadine has something to do with it – and Communist friends come to woo him once again when the party line has changed. But their approaches seem purely opportunist.

In the political element of the novel there are other matters that are discussed. After the Liberation, is it right for people to kill or harass, without legitimate trial, former notorious collaborators? One of Nadine’s many lovers, a guy called Vincent, takes it upon himself to drive long distances to assassinate known collaborators. At one point, Henri is appalled to learn from Vincent (on the staff of his newspaper) that L’Espoir is partly being funded by money blackmailed out of collaborators. Later in the novel, Nadine assists Vincent by, in effect, torturing and eventually killing a collaborator who has become a drug addict by depriving him of his drugs. Neither Robert nor Henri approve of such extra-judicial murders or blackmail.

If you have read The Mandarins, you will know that, despite the long discussions between  Robert Dubreuilh and Henri Perron, the characters who loom largest in this novel are Henri Perron and Anne Dubreuilh. In fact Robert Dubreuilh is a very flat character whom we mainly see only in his political discussions – almost a walking set of opinions. There is a reason for this. The Mandarins is told in two distinct narrative voices. In the third-person are narrated most of the activities and negotiations of Henri Perron and his circle, and we are privy to Henri’s thoughts and changing viewpoints. But in the first-person are narrated all the thoughts and experiences of Anne Dubreuilh – a psychoanalyst, remember, and therefore constantly questioning and dissecting her own motives and the motives of others. After the first chapter, which is divided into third-person and first-person narration, the following chapters alternate between these two voices.

And this brings us to what I see as a major flaw in the novel. It is almost schizophrenic, as it switches from one voice to the other. Not only that, but increasingly the first-person narrative of Anne Dubreuilh seems totally detached from the third-person narrative of the rest of the novel.

Bearing in mind that de Beauvoir’s feminist polemic The Second Sex was published in 1949, five years before The Mandarins came out, it is understandable that in Anne’s narration there is much feminist focus. Anne helps Henri’s discarded partner Paula when Paula has a breakdown and is under psychiatric care. She treats her with courtesy and gives her affirming advice – but basically she (and the novelist?) sees Paula as a weak woman who has allowed herself to be too attached to, and too dominated by, a man. For Anne, Paula’s obsession with Henri is a sign of weakness. Real women – real feminist women – should be made of sterner stuff. In chapters where Anne enters bourgeois high society, she encounters fashionable women whose lives revolve around chic clothing, wealth, male company and frivolous novels. Again, she (in what she thinks; not in what she says to them) gives them a polemical kick in their fashionable derrieres.

So far, so feminist. But then we have what overwhelms Anne’s narrative. This is Anne’s affair with the American novelist Lewis Brogan. Anne is invited to a conference of psychoanalysts in New York. After some dithering and hesitation she goes, obviously being bedazzled by New York after still-rationed Paris. Friends tell her that she should go and visit the left-wing novelist Lewis Brogan in Chicago. She goes. And on comes their affair. In this novel, Anne has already bedded Victor Seriassine, but that affair wasn’t satisfactory and, methodically, she puts it down to experience. With Lewis Brogan, however, she sees their love as the real thing. They bed harmoniously. They bed again and again. The prose becomes very much what would qualify for one of those “Bad Sex awards” which hip magazines used to feature. (Okay, I’ve used that jibe in another review on this blog, but what the hell – it’s still true.) She loves his rough, proletarian-raised, forthright opinions in contrast with the hyper-intellectual theorising of the Paris crowd. They travel to Central America. Their relationship is enchanting. They live for a while in a little hideaway on a lake. It is idyllic…. Then she returns to Paris, always missing Lewis Brogan. So she goes back to him a year or so later, still madly in love with him. He is nice to her. They sleep together. But she senses he has lost that old feeling. She begs with him, cries, wants their love to be rekindled. But it’s no-go. He’s had enough of her. So back she goes to Paris, still cradling her lamentations.

 When The Mandarins came out, the glossy French magazine Paris Match declared that it was “Bound to become one of the most famous love stories in all French literature”. [I have this from the blurb of the 1957 edition of the English-language version I’ve been reading]. “Um… really?” thinks I. At which point, with amusement, I recall reading an angry review of this novel by a feminist who had read with admiration The Second Sex and was therefore appalled to find the same author giving such a stereotypical account of a love story in which the woman was so submissive to, and obsessed by, a man. Though it is based on de Beauvoir’s own experience, it still reads as the complete denial of Anne’s (and implicitly the author’s) attitude to broken-hearted Paula. Or – me being the charitable chap I am – is this in fact de Beauvoir’s point? Is she showing us that emotions, feelings and attractions can run in directions totally different from the rational concepts we have embraced? Human nature is very contradictory.

Be all that as it may, the long narrative of Anne Dubreuilh and Lewis Brogan  would probably have worked better as a novel on its own.

After reading this novel, what does one take from it?

Despite the one-dimensional depiction of Robert Dubreuilh and the awkward structure of the novel, you have to give points to de Beauvoir for the clear characterisation of her cast, especially when there are so many minor characters whom I have not mentioned. Evocation of a certain time and place (post-war Paris) is vivid. On the whole, the conversations she creates are credible – even when they are political discussions – but the problem is that they do go on and on. Many points are made again and again, swelling the novel to tedium. The Mandarins is very interesting as an historical document and as an account of what French non-Communist left-wingers were thinking – but of course throughout we are aware that this is a time and place as seen from one side of the aisle only. Centre-right parties were as important to France as centre-left parties were in that era. They are dismissed in this novel as irrelevant or left-overs. In the process, there is what now seems a very naïve attitude towards Communism. It would take a more astute political commentator than either Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir to point out, in the 1950s, the nature of their naivete. I am referring to Raymond Aron - definitely anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi (he was Jewish) but also aware that Communism was just another form of totalitarianism. His polemic The Opium of the Intellectuals – much hated by Sartre - is still worth reading.

There are other matters that I take away from The Mandarins. One is that odd tension regarding the United States of America. Throughout, it is depicted as trying to take over and dominate Europe, and for Robert and Henri this is unthinkable. Much better a socialist or (perhaps) even Communist future. But in the whole story of Anne’s affair with Lewis Brogan we have what amounts to her envy of the USA, its abundance, its variety, its openness, its food, its jazz, its cabarets. Sure, the dark side is also seen in the slummy quarters Anne shares with Brogan in Chicago; but in the main, at least in Anne’s mind, this is almost the promised land. Isn’t this very much the expression of a nation that had been humiliated in war and occupation, and was now humiliated by the fact that it had to be liberated by another nation and was beginning to lose “great power” status. Even if this novel’s protagonists are opposed to France’s attempts to cling to its colonial empire (Algeria, Indo-China, Madagascar), the mood tends to be “We dislike Americans because they make us feel bad about ourselves.” There is a strong strain of envy mixed with the admiration.

As I said near the beginning of this review, this novel ultimately expresses the gradual disillusion that came after the original elation of the Liberation. France’s left intellectuals running around like headless chickens, often talking to no constructive purpose.

 

That is how I read this verbose and over-long novel. Now I go into the business of UNMASKING THE MASKS, and identifying which fictitious character is based upon which real person. Again quoting from the blurb of my 1957 edition of the novel, one American reviewer wrote “It reminds me of the tremendous joy I felt when reading Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point after World War 1.” Sure thing, because The Mandarins is like Point Counter Point (reviewed on this blog) in that it is very much a roman a cle, much as Simone de Beauvoir took a long time to partially admit it.

Robert and Anne Dubreuilh are very obviously Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir themselves. Of course their fictional selves are altered a bit. Robert and Anne are married and have a daughter. Sartre and de Beauvoir were sworn partners for over forty years, but they never married and never had children (although late in life both “adopted” grown women, largely to protect their assets and inheritance). Like Robert and Anne, Sartre and de Beauvoir had an “open” relationship, which allowed them to have affairs as they pleased without discontinuing their domestic arrangement. Robert’s news sheet Vigilance is obviously Les Temps Modernes, which Sartre didn’t own but for which he was often the leading writer. The Communist newspaper L’Enclume clearly stands in for the real Communist newspaper L’Humanite. The Socialist-but-not-Communist Party which Robert tries to promote is the Rassemblement Democratique Revolutionnaire (Democratic Revolutionary Organisation) which Sartre promoted, with very little success, in 1948.

Of course the novel does not make Anne bisexual, as de Beauvoir was. She slept with both men and women. Nor does the novel show how manipulative the sexual approaches of both Sartre and de Beauvoir were. Having to read de Beauvoir’s Memoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangee (Memoirs of a Well-behaved [or “Dutiful”] Daughter) as a student, I would sometimes dismiss it as Memoires d’une Jeune Fille Derangee (Memoirs of a Deranged Daughter).  I now discover that somebody else made use of this title. Bianca Lamlin wrote in her book Mémoires d'une Jeune Fille Dérangée (published in English under the title A Disgraceful Affair) that, while a young teenage student at high-school, she was sexually exploited by her teacher de Beauvoir, who was in her 30s. Many other such stories have since come out of the Sartre-de Beauvoir axis. The fact is that the couple’s open, free love approach was very destructive for many of the partners they used and discarded.

Which brings us to the character of Anne’s lover Lewis Brogan. He is very obviously the left-wing, often very sensationalist, American novelist Nelson Algren (to whom The Mandarins is dedicated). De Beauvoir had a long-ish, and publicly well-known, affair with Algren, and there is no need to add much comment on this because the factual parts of the affair of Anne and Brogan in The Mandarins follow closely de Beauvoir and Algren’s affair -  Chicago, Central American holiday, lakeside hideaway etc. In the end, Algren tired of de Beauvoir long before she tired of him. Some years after The Mandarins was published, Algren gave a very dismissive version of his dealings with Sartre and de Beauvoir, saying that the two of them used people sexually like a  prostitute and her pimp. These might have been the words of a jaded lover, but they square with many accounts that have emerged of the couple’s sexual behaviour. 

 

Then there is the novel’s other major character, Henri Perron. He is very obviously Albert Camus. And Perron’s newspaper L’Espoir stands in for the newspaper Combat which Camus had edited first when it was an underground newspaper connected with the Resistance in the years of Occupation. This one really opens a can of worms. In one sense, de Beauvoir’s version of Perron / Camus is fairly accurate. Like Perron, Camus was an incorrigible seducer of women, having numerous affairs. (Remember in the novel, Perron goes through Paula, Josette and Nadine, with intimations of others.) Having Perron settling down to domesticity at the end of the novel may have been wishful thinking on de Beauvoir’s part. Though he married, the real Camus remained a Casanova to his death in his 40s. But there may be another reason for de Beauvoir’s characterisation. Camus gradually became disenchanted with left-wing dogmatism, and therefore broke with Sartre on many matters, effectively ending what had hitherto been their friendship. By, at the end of her novel, having Perron become the Dubreuilhs’ son-in-law may have been the novelist’s way of putting Camus in his place,  showing his inferiority to, and discipleship of, Sartre.

There is more to this. You might recall that in my review of The Mandarins, I referred to the episode in which Perron lies in the interests of a collaborator. I noted “when you understand who Henri is modelled on, you will recognise the malice of Simone de Beauvoir”. Reason? It is clear that during the Occupation, Camus really was involved in the Resistance, even if only in writing and editing the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat. There is no evidence that he ever took up arms. Camus openly admitted that he had never been a fighter. By contrast, long after the war was over, Sartre acted and spoke as if he had been a Resister. But there is little evidence that he – or de Beauvoir – had been involved in Resistance. Like many people in France, they hated Nazi Occupation and wished it wasn’t there. Apart from talking about it in discussion groups with friends - such as the Socialisme et Liberte circle - they hardly ever took any action (Sartre wrote a couple of articles for Combat, but that was his lot.).  Some people have claimed that Sartre’s play Les Mouches, staged in Paris in 1943, was an “anti-Nazi” play, but it is hard to sustain this assertion. Les Mouches was an adaptation of a classical Greek play. As in very many films and plays in Occupied France (see on this blog my review of Cinema of Paradox, about French films made during the Occupation), there were some moments in Les Mouches where the word “Freedom” was applauded by French audiences and could have been taken as a sign of Resistance. But remember that the play had been licenced by the Nazi censors (as all French plays, films and books then were) and the censors were in no way troubled by the contents of the play. Some Resistance!

The case of de Beauvoir is a little more murky. Early in the Occupation, she wrote her novel Le Sang des Autres (The Blood of Others) , definitely siding with active and armed Resistance. But the novel wasn’t published until well after the war and Occupation were over. (Of course Nazi and Vichy censorship meant it couldn’t be published until then). So it had no influence on the Resistance. Worse, de Beauvoir agreed to do talks on the collaborationist Radio France, commonly known as Radio Vichy, in 1943. She correctly noted that the talks were inconsequential and non-political. Even so, she would have known that they were the kind of “filler” that kept people listening to the propaganda of this Vichy-controlled station. I make these comments having read Gilbert Joseph’s well-researched book Une si douce occupation (“Such a Pleasant Occupation”), published in 1991, which systematically debunked the idea that Sartre or de Beauvoir ever participated in the Resistance. Also worth reading is The Left Bank - Writers, Artists and Politics From the Popular Front to the Cold War by Herbert R. Lottman, wherein he points out the docility of nearly all the Left Bank intellectuals during the Occupation.

So how does all this suggest malice on de Beauvoir’s part? By making Perron / Camus a man who lies on behalf of a collaborator – an offence of which Camus was never guilty – de Beauvoir the non-Resister is smearing Camus, who at least did some Resisting, even if it wasn’t in the front line. As for the play Perron writes, it may perhaps be a smack at Camus' play Caligula, produced in 1945, which, though post-war, made a more forceful statement about dictators than Sartre ever made. (As all audiences understood, Camus' depiction of the mad Roman emperor, and the toadies who surrounded him, was clearly an analogue for Hitler and his regime.)

Closing, I note that there are some minor characters in The Mandarins who may have been based on real people. It is possible that Raymond Aron, who initially contributed to Les Temps Modernes along with Sartre, was one of the anti-Communists the novel ridicules. It is more strongly possible that Scriassine, who denounces the brutality of the Soviet regime, is based on Arthur Koestler.  But they are not as developed in the novel as the people I’ve already discussed.