Who Knows?

THE MANDARINS (610 pp.)--Simone de Beauvoir--World Publishing ($6).

Like many of her sisters in what she bitterly refers to as the Second Sex, France's Simone de Beauvoir would rather talk than eat. Since she is the grande dame of French existentialism and all-round good friend of Jean-Paul Sartre who founded it, it goes without saying that there is a minimum of natter in her chatter. She can be wrongheaded, she can make ridiculous statements (America Day by Day; TIME, Dec. 14, 1953), but even her nonsense is the product of one of the sharpest and best-stocked minds in letters.

When Simone de Beauvoir is not talking, she is writing. Her novels, like her talk, run the gamut from just silly (All Men Are Mortal; TIME, Feb. 7, 1955) to brilliant (She Came to Stay; TIME, March 15, 1954). Her latest novel, The Mandarins (roughly, The Intellectuals), is not her best, but it is her most successful. It brought her close to a seat in the Goncourt Academy, fetched her the Goncourt Prize instead, and brought her a sale in France of 250,000 copies. Now that it is published in the U.S., it is not too hard to see why the French crowded the bookshops. The book, which is dedicated to Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren (see below), is about Paris intellectuals immediately after the liberation. Most of them are famous writers who figured in the resistance and wrote some of France's best contemporary books. What is more to the point, they are barely disguised in The Mandarins. It also gives a detailed account of the French heroine's affair with a Chicago novelist, so candid and anguished as to read like a letter to a confessor.

Punch Out a Meaning. At 48, Simone de Beauvoir is a handsome woman. She has never married, and her years-long liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has brought to birth only a bleak philosophy which says that it is up to each man or woman to punch out a meaning to life in a meaningless world that none ever sought. A not uncommon game among Paris intellectuals consists in trying to answer the question: How did Simone get that way? Her Parisian parents were Roman Catholics, her father a bookish lawyer, her mother a reserved middle-class lady. Simone and her younger sister Helene went to a good Catholic school, Cours Desir, where they studied hard and did well.

Simone went on to the Sorbonne, where she finished secondbest, in competition for a top graduate degree (1929), to a student named Jean-Paul Sartre. From that time on, the two have seldom been long separated.

When Sartre came back from a German prison camp in 1941, they settled down in an unheated Left Bank Paris hotel, made the heated Cafe de Flore and the Deux Magots their workrooms, talked and wrote and wrote and talked until French existentialism was born. With limited assists from Philosophers Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir decided that life had no purpose, no meaning except what each man could find for himself in his own existence. To the young, hungry intellectuals of a shamed and broken country, existentialism seemed a revelation. Overnight Sartre became its high priest, Simone its No. 1 priestess.

Simone-Like Heroine. Readers of The Mandarins need not expect a good story or flashy writing. But anyone wanting to know what interesting people like Sartre, Novelist Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler and others were thinking at war's end about France, Russia, the U.S., Communism and life generally will find the answers here in abundance. Her setting is Paris just after the liberation, her characters writers and intellectuals who live to talk and make love as though they were being put through their paces by an observant Kinsey. They also say just what Author de Beauvoir wants them to say and so have no fictional life of their own. The heroine, Anne Dubreuilh, is a Simone-like woman of 39, a psychiatrist married to a much older, Sartre-like writer. Their love life has long since ceased, but Anne tries a fling with an anti-Communist friend and finds it depressing. Robert, her husband, tells her not to worry about it. Their daughter hops in and out of bed with whomever strikes her fancy, but her mother feels she must not interfere.

Henri, hero of The Mandarins, is a writer and newspaper editor who is under Robert's intellectual thumb. His chief problem: how to keep his struggling paper out of the hands of both capitalists and Communists. Most of his crowd is bitterly anti-U.S., strongly pro-Russian. But Henri is also a man of conscience. When he learns about the Russian forced-labor camps, he becomes uneasy, and almost breaks with Robert. While all this ideological clatter goes on, archaically reminiscent of Manhattan's literary climate in the '30s, Anne goes off to the U.S. (Simone made a tour of the U.S. in 1947). In Chicago Anne meets a novelist whose special province is slum life ("Why are all your best friends pickpockets, or drug addicts, or pimps?" she asks him). In spite of his intellectual limitations, their affair takes on the temperature and pace of a prairie fire, and Anne comes back the following year for more of the same. But after two hot summers of this, the novelist cools and, chastened, Anne returns to her fellow mandarins.

Food & Drink. By this time Henri has married Anne's wayward daughter and has decided to publish an intellectual weekly with Husband Robert. For them, writing and talking are food and drink. But Anne, not so easily nourished, comes close to suicide--not only because of her broken affair, but because she has that old existentialist idea that life is empty. It is just here, in the very last paragraph of The Mandarins, that Priestess de Beauvoir chooses to suggest that existentialism is not simply a philosophy of pessimism. Just because life is essentially meaningless, she seems to say, it does not follow that each man and woman must live without developing his or her own meaning. But that meaning must connect the individual to the events of his time and to other people. Man, says Simone, is free, but his freedom to choose will surely lead him to destruction if he retreats before the come-and-go of his time. Heroine Anne sees all this just in time. She puts away her poison vial and determines to be useful to her family and friends. The last words of the book are hers, and they are about as optimistic as a careful existentialist novelist ever lets a heroine become: "Who knows? Perhaps one day I'll be happy again. Who knows?"

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