Days Three, Four, and Five: De Beauvoir and Camus; War and Plague

A restless night of wakefulness and sleep. Prof. Barnes did not have to watch me dance in her flat today. 

The nights pass more slowly than the days. Thus far my days begin at noon and end at midnight, which means there is an equitable division between time spent trying to sleep and time spent trying to wake up. 

It’s 7:49 pm, and Albert Ayer is playing Summertime on the sax, and Hazel Barnes is staring down from the bookcase, and London is decidedly not summery. 

I have been reading de Beauvoir’s War Memoirs. Their personal honesty is brutal. One minute de Beauvoir feels tenderness for a person, the next she’s irritated and wants to be by herself. The only constant in her affections is devotion to the mostly absent Sartre, who is wearing an officer’s uniform in Alsace and sulking because he wasn’t initially selected for the army air corps. (The sulking must have worked; later in the war he is serving in the “meteorological division” of the army air corps.)

The lesbianism in de Beauvoir’s wartime life is self-centered and pitiless. 

“We went to my room. In bed Vedrine (Bianca Lamblin) threw herself passionately into my arms. Her sensual swoons seemed terribly physical to me. But in a perverted kind of way I found the relationship more pleasurable than I normally do. By taking advantage at least of her body and being somewhat amused at feeling my sensuality deprived of any tenderness, I had the impression of being very boorish” (Thursday, November 9^th, 1939). 

No surprise then, when, the following night, de Beauvoir contemplates taking another lover.

“[Kos] (Olga Kosakiewicz) looks more and more like the forbidden fruit while Vedrine seems to me like an old mistress with her demands, her claims to entitlements, and implacable presence” (Friday, Nov. 10^th, 1939).

De Beauvoir expresses no interest in the emotional consequences of her fickle lovemaking for the women with whom she sleeps. She is a scrupulous self-reporter of mental operations that are sometimes callous and harsh, at other times (concerning Sartre) ravenously possessive, of his spirit if not his body. 

This uncensored honesty is something to be reckoned with. (Although perhaps it wasn’t so difficult for de Beauvoir to pull off, since there is enough of the libertine in her to override shame of her self-centeredness.) Either way, the diary entries cast a light as harsh as a surgery lamp on her errant, prickly thoughts. Simone on the operating table. Simone the Sadian modernist, giving herself license to roam libidinal landscapes without judgment. And Simone the existentialist, probing the truth of a morally unadorned human subject.

Is this de Beauvoir always, or only during the war? It is an important question, because it contains the issue of how war infiltrates the life of non-combatants. While she’s in Paris, the Saar offensive is 400 kilometers away, and closer to 900 kilometers when she visits Brittany. In the fall of 1939, combat has settled into something atmospheric and portentous. The French are hunkered down inert in the east, where they will remain until spring, in what is later called “the Phony War.” None of this -- nor the fact that “World War Two” is still looming, still mostly in the future -- nullifies de Beauvoir’s experience of living in the midst of war, truly inside of it: 

“War is again in me and around me, and an anguish that does not know where to alight” (Wednesday, October 4, 1939). 

This recalls what Camus writes about plague, through the character Tarrou:

“I’ve been ashamed ever since; I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace” (252). 

The echo between feeling oneself, a non-combatant, “in war,” and feeling oneself, a healthy person, “having plague,” could be too general to matter, or too important to ignore. 

On the one hand, the comparison between de Beauvoir’s and Camus’s statement is strengthened by history and intention. Camus wrote (or at least started) The Plague in 1943, while convalescing with tuberculosis in the Alps, and the plague of which he writes, while based on a nineteenth-century epidemic that decimated his hometown of Oran, has frequently been interpreted as a metaphor for fascism. Thus, in a sense, both are writing in and about the second world war. The feeling of being “in” something that one is technically outside is for both historically determined by the war, its anticipation, its anguish, and the ideological deformations which accompany it. 

On the other hand – and this is the important thing – the historical determinant of war does not stay within the temporal confines of 1939-1945. It casts a long shadow: for de Beauvoir, in that her post-war writings are at once some of her most important, and important in their extension of the memoiristic dissection of “ugly feelings” into fictional narrative; for Camus, along similar lines – as the legacy or curse of an intellectual need to comprehend what we owe to others in a world bereft of spiritual inspiration and hardened by the urgency of self-preservation. It is easy to argue that the existentialist preoccupation with love-hate relationships – love and hate within “the self” and between selves and others -- was formed in the crucible of wartime and post-war France. But even while World War Two nurtures 20^th c existentialism, it does so in the way that a flood rearranges a landscape. Not only did it cause the landscape to change, but it changed in a way that almost immediately seemed permanent, such that the before and after of war-made consciousness is impossible to fathom. 

In their inadequacies, the idea of being in war or outside of it, like the metaphorical identification of plague with fascism, perform a truth in their forms: the forms are too capacious in their meaning and power to allow for separation from each other, and thus for distinctions between in and outside. War and plague engulf all metaphors and make them meaningless. These experiences or facts are of an order that cannot be interpretively contained, nor organized according to cause and effect. Existentialism does battle with post-war nihilism, but there certainly was nihilism before the war; the rats of Oran bring up plague from some chthonic darkness to which they return and from which they will come again.

On Wednesday, day four, still symptom free, knock wood, I dance for Prof. Barnes (Bruno Mars, David Bowie, Daft Punk) and work some more on these notes. 

On Thursday, day five, I am lying on the sofa, finishing these notes, and wondering if I am imagining a fever or really have one. 

Sources: Simone de Beauvoir, War Memoirs; Albert Camus, The Plague.