Bonjour, Tristesse

FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE by Simone de Beauvoir. 658 pages. Putnam. $10.

The lips are curved into an obliging, fixed half-smile. The grey hair is coiffured with mathematical precision, cleft exactly by the part. At the neck, not entirely masked by the photographer's shadows, a few age lines can be discerned. The dress is severe, revealing nothing, so dark that it blends into the background, relieved by a link necklace from which depend castings of the Greek letter epsilon. The whole suggests someone's amiable grandmother, intelligent, well preserved, still vigorous and minutely intent on keeping up appearances.

A Certain Pleasure. The portrait adorns the wrapper of this book, which is the third and presumably final installment in the memoirs of the most relentlessly intellectual and ungrand-motherish woman in France. Simone de Beauvoir has no husband and no children; by design, she has denied herself the rewards, or the burdens, of maternity. The smile is unreal, put on, perhaps, for the photographer; she cannot accept or endure the fact that she is now 57. Her mortality has obsessed her for a generation. "Since 1944, the most important, the most irreparable thing that has happened to me is that I have grown old. How is it that time, which has no form or substance, can crush me with so huge a weight that I can no longer breathe?"

Sadly enough, not only youth has abandoned Simone de Beauvoir. So has judgment. That brilliant, recalcitrant mind, trained at the Sorbonne and annealed during the French Resistance, cannot accept the shape of the postwar world. When Dienbienphu falls, she exults, although the fallen are Frenchmen. The U.S. is decadent and bent on war. Russia is interested only in world peace, and fills the sky with Sputniks in proof of its military superiority, which will keep the peace. Pope Pius XII dies, and Mile, de Beauvoir, who renounced God at 15, accepts the news "with a certain amount of pleasure."

A Discontented Estate. In justice, this book must be measured against the life that led up to it. Born to stifling bourgeois respectability, Mile, de Beauvoir fled to the Sorbonne, where only one of her classmates stood higher in the examinations, and she determined to cast her lot with him. "It was the first time in my life," she said of Jean-Paul Sartre, "that I had felt intellectually inferior to anyone else."

In the shadow of Sartre's celebrity, Mile, de Beauvoir found a derivative celebrity of her own. She was the Mother Hubbard of existentialism, a clock in a refrigerator, a cerebral loan of Arc--to cite some of the appellations, largely invidious, that were flung at her during her prime. Periodically, she issued books, all of them painstakingly analytical and exhaustingly long. The Second Sex, a dizzy blend of pedagogy, logic, emotion, prejudice and just plain talk about woman's discontented estate, became a classic. The Mandarins, her roman a clef of life with Sartre, Camus and their intellectual confraternity, was a bestseller on both sides of the ocean despite mixed reviews; one New York critic charged that "nothing in the book but the names of the characters appears to derive from her imagination."

A Fictional Guise. Her present book is a sort of envoi to an intellectual life that, for the memoirist, began to wane 20 years ago. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the first installment, delivered a telling and readable blow at the suffocating French middle-class life from which she escaped. Prime of Life detailed the years during which she and Sartre still burned with youth, and with the hope that the leftist causes they believed in would ultimately triumph. The postwar period extinguished both youth and hope. Her affair with U.S. Novelist Nelson Algren, reported in fictional guise in The Mandarins and retold here in greater detail, ends in misery.* Another, with a young French writer, 17 years her junior, merely serves to remind her of "the horrors of old age."

The cumulative effect on the persevering reader--and the book demands nothing if not perseverance--is one of sadness. Simone de Beauvoir attained everything that she ever aspired to as a girl: celebrity as a writer, the full exercise of her rebel spirit. Nevertheless, at 57, she finds herself "hostile to the society to which I belonged, banished by my age from the future, stripped fiber by fiber from my past."

"If it had at least enriched the earth," she writes, summing up her life. "If it had given birth to ... what? A hill? A rocket? The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze toward that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped."

* For Author Algren, the affair ended in something akin to exasperation. In a review of Force of Circumstance that is printed in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, he mournfully wonders: "Will she ever quit talking?"

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