Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me – a Memoir

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I was very close to her for 26 years and she trusted me; despite the age difference we were friends, equal friends. There was love, a very strong love, and obviously for my part there was also huge admiration for her.” Le Bon de Beauvoir, however, disagrees. “It’s absurd to speak about a lesbian relationship [in the novel] when desire and the body are not involved. It was love. We can say that Simone loved Zaza but it is what we call a flamme, an ardour, the sort of sentiment in childhood that is so terribly important and marks the entry into adulthood,” she says. “Simone’s love for Zaza was nothing to do with sex. Nothing at all. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t intense.”

They have set the standard around world rugby for the last couple of years so we knew the challenge that we had here tonight. the best (or worse) thing about my writing is that I never tell readers what to think but expect them to form their own opinions. And the individual writing that draws this divided response most of all is the chapter on The Second Sex… Instead of being apologetic, Sylvie becomes rebellious. Andrée asks Sylvie: “If you don’t believe in God, how can you bear to be alive?” Sylvie is bored and intellectually lonely, so meeting this clever, irreverent girl changes her life. Sylvie tells us: “Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me. It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.”Earlier this year, Michael Peppiatt’s The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists was published; the book displays namedropping and some Parisian familières, and ended up as quite the end note of what can be written about celebrities, and Paris. It is the kind of book that most people will forget about when asked of their favourite autobiographies, six months after having read it. Bair penned stunning, intimate biographies of these two famously reticent literary giants, both of whom lived on the same Parisian street and studiously avoided each other. Here the author recalls her encounters with the pair – prepare to be transported. Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner ( W&N) The second section focusing on Bair’s relationship with Simone de Beauvoir was also fascinating. Both charming and accessible, getting the unfiltered truth out of Beauvoir proved more difficult. The one supreme failure was in regards to Bianca Bienenfeld. But we know the gist already and the confession wasn’t necessary. An explanation might have been helpful. But connecting the dots isn’t difficult.

Now The Inseparables , an autobiographical De Beauvoir novel written in 1954 but just published for the first time in English, has thrown light on two relationships with women that bookended the writer’s life: the first, her intense coming-of-age friendship with classmate Elisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin; the last, with Le Bon de Beauvoir, who was her companion for more than 25 years and whom De Beauvoir adopted to pass on her literary legacy. The relationship clearly haunted De Beauvoir, who attempted to resurrect Zaza in her writing, returning to her story on four occasions, most notably in the first volume of her four-part autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. But it is in The Inseparables that we see the full intensity and passion. I stammered something about how I did not wish to impose upon what I was sure would be a festive evening, so I had not brought any work materials with me. She snorted in derision. There was to be no celebration, she told me; her friend Sylvie would be coming later with something for dinner, but until then we should probably get started. I fished in my bag for something to write on and could find only my date book, so I pretended it was a notebook.It was going to be rounded to a 3, but I do like intelligent people and - Deidre Bair, I see what you did there. I see how, by the end of the book I have decided to finally read Murphy that has been languishing for years on my bookshelf and also some of SDB. Always putting the subjects first. It would appear a biographer is the closest thing to a selfless martyr in the literary world. Our relationship was not at all mother and daughter,” she says. “She adopted me so I could manage her work after she died but this and the fact she was so much older prompted people to talk of her as my ‘mother’. At the beginning that annoyed me, but now I accept it. It’s not that important. Police in Paris have opened fire today on a woman who allegedly made threatening remarks and shouted "Allahu akbar" on a train. Earlier this month, a knifeman shouting "Allahu akbar" at Gambetta High School in the city of Arras left one teacher dead and several other people injured as former Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal called for a Day of Jihad. That girl said you’re the best student in the class,’ she said, tilting her head a little at Lisette. ‘Is that true?’

Police said officers opened fire after the 38-year-old woman didn't respond to their warnings on the service near Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand station. It is believed she sustained stomach wounds. Armed officers arrived at the station soon after 8.30am, and the woman – who was dressed in an Islamic veil – "threatened to blow herself up," said a source. She is also said to have shouted "Allahu akbar" – Arabic for "God is the Greatest".Behind the mythical persona was a philosopher who wanted women to be “free to choose themselves”. Human beings were “the sum of their actions”, and she believed it would be reassuring to think that we each have a foreordained destiny, a unique raison d’etre that justifies our existence. But it would also be false. For Beauvoir, each human being is a becoming without a blueprint. She started developing this view in the late 1920s, before she met Sartre, and began to publish her philosophical disagreements with him in the 1940s – but by then they were both become famous in France and her ideas were often credited to him. (And outside France, important texts by Beauvoir were untranslated.) This juicy account of celebrity romps through 300 years of stardom – touching on the coveted earlobes of a 19th-century ballerina and a three-year old who upstaged Liszt on his UK tour – as well as examining the economic cogs that drive celebrity and our hunger for it. Broken Greek by Pete Paphides ( Quercus) As a person, Simone was warm and happy, it was instantly clear she was someone who loved life and was enormously interested in other people. This wasn’t at all a pretext to talk about herself. She was genuinely interested in you and this was very stimulating and creative. She really was the most open, adorable, radiant person and to listen to her, to be with her, was a source of inspiration.” Coffin said that people saw De Beauvoir as both a brilliant intellectual and an agony aunt with “hypersensitivity of the purest kind”, as one letter-writer put it. This was why they were prepared to pour out private thoughts to a stranger, she surmised. I also loved what Bair wrote about writing a biography and trying to stay level-headed in some way:

When I was a little girl I was very badly dressed. My parents were very correct and dressed plentifully, but for convention and without taste of their own. At about twelve or fourteen I was terrible – yellow and covered with acne.A memoir of the time an American Woman wrote biographies of 2 French people that have influenced the literary and philosophical world. Lots of people wrote to her, especially young women and especially philosophy students like me, and she always replied,” she says.