The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Meet de Beauvoir’s brilliant friend
This ‘lost’ novel by a giant of 20th-century letters reads surprisingly like a French Elena Ferrante
176pp, Vintage, T £10.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £12.99, ebook £9.99
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The first of Simone de Beauvoir’s four volumes of memoirs, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, told in compelling detail the story of her friend Elisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin. Charismatic and full of promise, she died young, in 1929, when she and de Beauvoir were in their early 20s. The doctors suspected viral encephalitis, but de Beauvoir paints her death as something more metaphorically weighted: the consequence of a young woman’s failure to reconcile the demands placed on her by her haute-bourgeoisie mother with her own talents for music, literature and life.
In The Inseparables, a short novel about the friendship that de Beauvoir decided, for obscure reasons, against publishing in her lifetime, Zaza is “Andrée” and Simone is “Sylvie”. But the story has only the thinnest façade of fictionality overlaid on it. The most striking difference between the fiction and the memoir is the feat of self-effacement that has gone into turning “Sylvie” into a mousy figure lacking de Beauvoir’s own considerable character and charisma. But the transformation allows the story of a youthful friendship to breathe, uncluttered by the grown-up dramas of Beauvoir’s much-chronicled love life.
The publication of a “lost” work by a major intellectual figure of the 20th century is of some interest just in virtue of that fact. The book’s publisher and translator make a decent case for thinking it is of interest in its own right. The Inseparables, they propose, forms part of a retrospective canon of literature on female friendship – the sort of book that (had it been published earlier) might have influenced Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.
Readers of Ferrante will find much that is familiar. The Paris bourgeoisie of the 1920s are not the working class of 1950s Naples, but the constraints placed by both societies against women of spirit and intelligence, constraints enforced as much by other women as by men, are similar in their effects.
One thing de Beauvoir leaves ambiguous is the place of sexual desire in the friendship she depicts. Learning that Andrée is on kissing terms with a weedy teenage boy, she experiences something that seems more like bafflement than jealousy: “her unhappiness was foreign to me; the kind of love where you kiss had no truth for me”. What is “the kind of love where you kiss”? Is it the idea of kissing boys that is foreign to her, or that of kissing as
such? Is this innocence, or denial?
But another reading is possible: that Sylvie’s love for Andrée is not taking the place of a more socially acceptable heterosexual romance, but of the love of God that so dominates the childhoods of both girls. In its convincing portrayal of the passionate piety of the Catholic schoolgirl, The Inseparables is reminiscent of another, unjustly neglected, precursor to Ferrante, Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment in Love, with its working class Catholic women coming up against very similar constraints. The love of Andrée is not, then, the beginning of lesbianism, but of the secularism and humanism that marked de Beauvoir’s adult philosophy.
Lauren Elkin’s translation is undistractingly smooth. Regrettably, in a book aimed at British readers (the spelling is British), it is
jarring to come up so frequently against Americanisms. Some are at least intelligible: “Monsieur Blondel was grading”. Others are simply ungrammatical (“I… laid down on the ground”, “she didn’t turn religion into too cruel of an idea”), or manglings of idiom (“the civilians were holding down the fort”).
Against these editorial lapses must be set the well-judged apparatus of explanatory footnotes, and the faultless rendering of Sylvie’s
lyrical responsiveness to the natural and social world. Take her quietly acerbic remarks about Andrée’s family kitchen: “Does every kind of spoon, ladle, fork and knife really have its own particular purpose? Do we really have so many different needs to satisfy?”
Sylvie concludes that Andrée died of “suffocation in all this whiteness”. “Whiteness” stands in her mind for the deadening of passion, the smothering of human aspiration. The passages of lyrical romanticism whenever Sylvie and Andrée get to be by themselves – the descriptions of “a tuft of autumn crocuses”, the “gemstone-like pebbles… like boiled sweets”, “the still ponds among the heather” – come to stand for another life, free and many-coloured. The allure of this other life, as de Beauvoir describes it, remains as powerful in Elkin’s translation.
‘The kind of love where you kiss had no truth for me,’ says Simone’s alter ego