A Postponement of Defeat

THE WOMAN DESTROYED by Simone de Beauvoir. 254 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

To Simone de Beauvoir, it seems maddeningly unfair that a sufferer from the degenerative disease, life, should in addition be tormented by the petty affliction of being female. In three new novellas she returns to the theme as to a sore tooth.

As the title of the collection suggests, two of the self-absorbed women who relate their predicaments are truly destroyed and the third is near to it. But by what? By nothing worse--and this is what galls--than age, the defection of children, the cooling interest of husbands.

The best of the novellas is a strong and subtle study of growing old. In an anguished narration, a literary woman of 60 (Novelist de Beauvoir is 61) watches herself deteriorate into shrewish fury as her stable world shifts and then resettles, diminished, along the fault line of age. She realizes, at first only with impatience, that her husband is willfully allowing himself to become old. Nothing interests him. He is a respected scientist, but he says he has not had a fresh idea in 15 years, and he repeats the aphorism that "Great scientists are valuable to science in the first half of their lives and harmful in the second." She broods: "Philippe has gone, and I am to spend the rest of my life with an old man!" But this is ridiculous. She reasons that age need not mean decline; that even though one's body is no longer 20, to a reflective mind there are enormous advantages in possessing a rich lode of memory; and that she herself has never written so well.

Is any of it true? Suddenly the earth is no longer steady. Their son, whom she had raised to be a left-wing intellectual, quits work on his Ph.D. thesis and, to please his shallow wife, takes a profitable sinecure in the Ministry of Culture. (The choice is amusing; Leftist de Beauvoir is taking a poke at De Gaulle's "house" intellectual, Minister of Culture Andre Malraux.) Then reviews appear of her latest book, a work intended to offer fresh approaches to literary criticism. "Wearisome repetition," they say, or at best, "an interesting restatement." The reviewers are correct, she realizes, and it seems to her that her career is over. A vacation with her husband is painful. She refuses to swim. "An old man's body, I said to myself, watching him splash about in the water, is after all less ghastly than an old woman's."

In the end her earth does resettle. There is no victory, of course, but there is a postponement of defeat. Man and wife reach an accommodation with age. It is a counting of what is left, rather than what is gone: his clarity of mind and a measure of curiosity, her skill and knowledge, a love based solidly on respect. For the moment, these outweigh the prospect of false teeth and sciatica. Will they continue to? "I do not know. Let us hope so. We have no choice in the matter."

There is a considerable richness to this short work, and the other two novellas seem thin in comparison. One is a monologue, veering in and out of hysteria, by a used-up, discarded woman of 43 who has spent New Year's Eve alone and now is cursing herself to sleep. The other is the diary of a middle-aged housewife who gradually realizes that she is losing her husband to his mistress. Each recital of pain is perfectly counterfeited but contains no surprises. In balance, however, it can be agreed that Author de Beauvoir's latest book is more than just an interesting restatement of her fascination with the second sex, and that she is not, at least for the time being, doomed to spend the rest of her life with an old woman.

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