The diaries Simone de Beauvoir wrote at eighteen, nineteen, and twenty are not stodgy tales of philosophical study, though philosophers and novelists are discussed and extensively quoted. Their current title misleads; Diary of a Tortured Adolescent might be closer to the truth. Yet de Beauvoir was never quite conventional: her examination of her anguish is frank, precise, unrelenting.
It is unclear whether de Beauvoir intended these diaries for publication. The opening pages carry a warning:
Nothing is more cowardly than to violate a secret when nobody is there to defend it. I have always suffered horribly from every indiscretion, but if someone, anyone, reads these pages, I will never forgive him. He will thus be doing a bad and ugly deed.
Reading against this admonition carries its own discomfort. These pages are raw with unsatisfied love, intellectual ambition, and the early tension between heart and mind. They are not the measured recollections of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter: there, de Beauvoir quotes from these diaries, but selectively, with the clarity of distance. Read consecutively, diary and memoir offer a study in the shaping of a self.
The foreground of these diaries may seem emotional, yet beneath it lies a formation of philosophical stance. De Beauvoir reflects sharply on gender and feeling:
In my intelligence, I am similar to men; in my heart, how different! It seems to me that they have a wider and less profound heart. More cordiality, an easier access, more indulgence, more pity, but also this does not descend into them as in me. For me, to love is the painful thing that Benda describes and blames, this identification with the other, this total “compassion.” This hardly touches them, does not penetrate into their internal universe: a refuge, a pleasure, not an avidity of the soul.
The early diaries show a mind already interrogating itself with painful honesty. They are worth reading slowly, carefully, allowing their unease to persist.
>I have just read "She came to stay" and I was completely drawn into it and it reminded me of those Sartre novels I read all those years ago. The prewar tensions, the cafe lifestyle, the intellectual melting pot that was Sartre and de Beauvoir's Paris. I will now endeavor to get my hands on more de Beauvoir.
>I'm fascinated by the contrast you draw here between her "source material" as it were, and the retrospective vision she was able to bring to her autobiography. It's so interesting that her life is self-documented from multiple angles, especially since she was SO analytical. Thanks for the posts on this one, Anthony.
>The above fore-mentioned: Those interwar years, particularly knowing what was to happen in Paris (and France), are fascinating. I am planning to read some of the novels at some point.
>The diaries are scintillatingly honest, but so painful as she analyses her emotional response to what seems a dysfunctional, one-sided love affair.Her use of the material in Memoirs suggests that she did not anticipate the source diaries being published.