Dynamite in the Tower

SHE CAME TO STAY (404 pp.)--Simone de Beauvoir--World ($5).

Simone de Beauvoir's place in the French intellectual world is that of a woman who has marched into an all-male club and taken over a deep chair by the window. She cannot be thrown out because 1) she is a first-rate expounder of the teachings of one of the club's most celebrated current philosophers (and her great and good friend), Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, and 2) she can talk most of the other members under the intellectual table.

Author de Beauvoir's introduction to the club was perhaps her 1943 novel, L'Invitee, now published in the U.S. as She Came to Stay. It is the story of what happens when a devoted couple make the mistake of inviting a blonde to live with them in Paris, and Author de Beauvoir's publishers have jacketed the book with a picture of the kind of sultry number for whom strong men lose their wits. This is a mistake. She Came to Stay is an admirable novel not because there is a blonde in it, but because there is a brain back of it.

Passion for Pacifism. Author de Beauvoir begins by showing the perfect, almost mathematical harmony into which her lovers, Pierre and Franchise, have built their lives. He is an intellectual actor-producer, she an equally intellectual writer. Around this hard-working pair in 1938-39 swirls the theater life of Paris, popping with misfits, eccentrics, and tough careerists. Smug in her harmony with Pierre, Franchise finds it hard to understand why other people's lives are so full of discord:

"What's become of your lover?" she asks Pierre's sister.

"Moreau? We had a terrible row. About pacifism . . . He ended up by almost strangling me . . . Here, look at his last letter . . . Just imagine, he pinned me against a lamppost, grabbed me by the throat, while he shouted dramatically, 'I'll have you, Elisabeth, or I'll kill you!' . . . I said to him, 'Strangle me, but don't kiss me!'"

"Well, my God! . . . Was it because of his passion for pacifism?"

"He was incensed . . ."

Pierre and Franchise take for granted that when they are incensed they can thrash it all out coolly and methodically, like a problem in one of Pierre's plays. But null soon takes pity on bored, blonde Xaviere and determines to awaken the girl's interest in life. Pierre feels irritated with null for having brought such a chore into their busy lives, and Xaviere. for her part, instantly detests Pierre. Only after a hundred pages of mutual sneers does Pierre decide that it is his duty to lend null a hand.

Lessons for Children. Author de Beauvoir is at her brightest and best in describing the sort of exasperation that takes a keen-witted, methodical man when he tries to get the better of a girl who lives stubbornly by whim and base instinct. The more Pierre tries to discipline Xaviere, the more apt she is to turn up at the wrong place at the wrong time, or to keep an appointment for an intellectual talk at a sidewalk cafe loaded down with a bag of shrimp and bananas.

It is not long before Pierre has turned into a semi-lunatic wooer, obsessed with the idea of conquest at any cost. The high point of comedy finds him creeping down corridors in his pajamas, glaring through the keyhole of Xaviere's bedroom to see if she has a secret lover (she has) and then raging back to bed to share his anguish with poor null Equally mortifying is the fact that it is soon Xaviere's turn to lecture the distraught couple as if they were willful children, using the very words they once used on her. "You see, all that was needed was the desire to do it." she smilingly says, after teaching angry Frangoise how to rumba. "I'm systematic.'' she explains gravely, as she stands their beautiful relationship on its head.

Xaviere is not the victor in the end, for the simple reason that her victims eventually become as unscrupulous and primitive as she is. Pierre rounds on her like a vindictive animal; null casts dignity and high principles to the winds and runs away--with Xaviere's lover. World War II breaks out just in time to get the two men into the relative safety of the army and leave the two women to fight it out behind the blackout curtains.

She Came to Stay is a triumph of men tal concentration. It is built of thousands of little bits and pieces, all with the awkward angles of real life but all so solidly fitted together that the tatty climax (in which null asphyxiates Xaviere) seems an inexcusable last resort. Unlike many modern French novelists, Author de Beauvoir does not float in a sea of inhuman symbols; she show's perfectly clearly that when the ivory tower loses its head in the clouds, dynamiters like Xaviere are always at hand to bring it down to earth.

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