America with Preconceptions

AMERICA DAY BY .DAY (337 pp.)--Sim one de Beauvoir--Grove Press ($4).

Simone de Beauvoir had not seen so many stars since Jean-Paul Sartre crowned her Queen of Existentialism with the canopy of a bed one bibulous night in Paris (TIME, Jan. 28, 1946). Now her plane from Paris was over New York, whose myriad lights were so brilliant that it was as if "all the stars in the sky were rolled out over the ground." Still dazzled when the plane landed, the queen alighted, sped into the city, and, feeling estranged, could not quite believe she was there. "This city and Paris." she wrote in her diary, "were not linked together like two elements belonging to the same system ... I felt invisible to every look. Mine was the incognito of a phantom." Within 48 hours she found a catalyst to materialize her: she went to the hairdresser. There she noted the comforting fact: "These places are the same in every town."

All this happened on Author de Beauvoir's 1947 visit to the U.S. As a tourist, she had first-class tickets in curiosity and energy, although her luggage was overweight in preconceived notions. In four months she toured the nation coast to coast, taking in New England and California, Chicago and New Orleans. She traveled by plane, train, automobile, bus and river boat. She also walked, seeing more of New York in a few weeks than many New Yorkers see in a lifetime. America Day by Day is the diary of her trip, a mixed salad of surface impressions, often crisp and pungent, more often hand-me-down gossip and soggy ad hoc generalizations, mostly unripe.

Scotch & Democracy. Mlle. de Beauvoir did not like the taste of whisky, but at one point she drank Scotch until 3 in the morning "because Scotch is the key to America." She was astonished at the "sudden warmth and cordial simplicity" of Americans, and "American generosity" left her "feeling ashamed." In fact, she liked Americans so much that she wrote: "How I regretted that I could not feel more generously towards a country where the reign of man asserts itself so bravely."

Her political bias did not allow that degree of generosity. She was in New York less than two weeks when she observed: "The very resemblance of democracy was fading here from day to day." After almost three months in the U.S., however, she wrote: "Respect for the human being and the principles that guarantee his rights is solidly anchored in the hearts of the citizens. With them, one finds a truly democratic atmosphere, and it is this which makes the country so attractive at first sight." She could also rise to such shaky heights of enthusiasm as, "One of the virtues of Americans is that they are never vulgar."

Like many foreigners and not a few Americans, Tourist de Beauvoir hated racialism and loved orange juice, big breakfasts, drugstores, jazz (Chicago and New Orleans style), as well as movies, museums, old cowboy songs and. at the right time, a hamburger. Toward the end of her trip she began to learn that Americans were individuals and as hard to generalize about as Frenchmen. But she faithfully kept on generalizing. Relations between the sexes were difficult in the U.S., she feared. "Men shut themselves up in their clubs, women take refuge in theirs." Sexual frustration seemed typical, with the women frigid, the men inept. Whisky was the means of destroying inhibitions. "It's very expensive,'' a gentleman complained to her. "It takes a lot of whisky to reduce a woman to the right degree of drunkenness, and if the dose is too strong she's no longer fit for anything but sleep."

G-Strings & Morality. Author de Beauvoir gathered her evidence at swank hotels and dreary slums, saw and did whatever she could. In a New Orleans nightclub she saw a beautiful brunette do a striptease, and when the girl was down to her G-string, "the atmosphere was so charged with morality that one might have been in church." She also smoked marijuana in a New York hotel apartment with a group of initiates. One dark woman had an abandoned look and tears in her eyes, and kept saying she was "madly happy." Mlle. de Beauvoir smoked three cigarettes in a row. The taste "was sharp and none too agreeable." Longing for the happiness of the dark woman, she smoked away, but nothing happened. She simply went away with a burning throat.

When Author de Beauvoir left the U.S. she was still critical, but so captivated with New York that her "heart was torn." She felt "miserable to be leaving this country, which had so often irritated me." The full measure of her reaction is perhaps carried in her last page, where she describes her arrival in the Paris she loves. "How old the customs men were, how crumpled their uniforms! They did not seem proud to be French citizens; there was a hangdog look about them . . . The people are poorly dressed; the women have colorless, frizzy hair, the men grey faces, and they walk as if defeated . . . The weather was grey. Paris seemed numb ... I would have to relearn France and get back into my own skin."

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