Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Inseparables'
Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Inseparables'
On the friendship which inspired 'The Second Sex'
*Disclaimer: Please note, this post may contain spoilers*
I received The Inseparables, the newly discovered novel by Simone de Beauvoir, as a Christmas gift from my daughter. I’m always a little cynical about ‘newly discovered’ texts from iconic authors. On the one hand, it’s exciting to discover something new and previously unread. On the other, there’s the lingering doubt that if the writer had wanted to publish the book before, or if it had been considered good enough for publication, wouldn’t it already have been done in their lifetime?
This is something which clearly concerned translator Lauren Elkin on approaching the task of translating this newly discovered text. As she points out in her Translator’s Note at the opening of the book: ‘“So, is it any good?” people have asked me when I’ve told them I’m translating a ‘lost’ novel by Simone de Beauvoir…’, and Elkin goes on to tell us: ‘I am relieved to say: yes. It is more than good. It is poignant, chilling and eviscerating’.1
The Inseparables is based on the real-life friendship between Beauvoir and her schoolfriend Elisabeth Lacoin (known as ‘Zaza’) with whom she formed an almost passionate friendship from the age of 9. But as Elkin is keen to point out, ‘it would be doing Beauvoir as novelist a disservice to read The Inseparables only as a work of memoir or therapy’. The novel’s streamlined narrative structure shows the incredible talent of Beauvoir as a novelist, whilst the insights developed through the two girls’ experiences in 1920’s Paris indicate much of her philosophical and political writing to come.
Much was made on the novel’s first publication in France of the ambiguous relationship between the two girls, and some have pointed to this as evidence of Beauvoir’s bisexuality. During her lifetime, Beauvoir never spoke publicly about her sexuality, and Elkin suggests that the story has elements of queerness and ambiguity in its representation of the strong feelings Sylvie holds for Andrée.
The novel is bursting with dialogue; one of the main strands of the girls’ friendship is conversation, on all manner of topics including literature and politics. The story is told from the point of view of Sylvie, a stand-in for Simone, whilst Andrée represents Zaza. As both Elkin and author Deborah Levy, who wrote the Introduction to the text point out, Beauvoir tried to write about Zaza in her 1958 memoirs The Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, however Elkin suggests that her story is brought to life within the fictional narrative of The Inseparables in Beauvoir’s urgent, taut script.
Levy, a talented novelist and memoirist herself, writes in the Introduction that she has been, since her twenties, ‘awed, confused, intrigued and inspired by Beauvoir’s attempt to live with meaning, pleasure and purpose.’2 She feels that the novel The Inseparables adds to this conversation. In her own memoir of the year following her divorce, The Cost of Living, Levy details the year she spent living alone with her children, finding herself in what she describes as ‘the Republic of Writing and Children’.3 She goes on to claim that Simone de Beauvoir was her muse, but that Levy certainly wouldn’t have been hers, though, she feels, they were both heading towards a freer life.
According to Elkin, the loss of her friend led Beauvoir to believe that ‘I had paid for my own freedom with her death’.
Andrée, as with Zaza, comes from a large family of siblings. Her mother, Madame Gallard, points out to her from an early age that there are only two choices open to women of her class: ‘Join a convent or get a husband; remaining unmarried is not a vocation’.4
As we are told in the narrative, Madame Gallard herself was coerced into marriage to a man she didn’t love, and Sylvie appears to struggle to reconcile this above all else within the story. Andrée, we are told, lives within a world bookmarked by family chores and social engagements, as shown in a scene where Andrée and Sylvie meet for tea. Sylvie here observes:
‘All around me perfumed women ate cake and talked about the cost of living. From the day she was born, Andrée was fated to be like them. But she was nothing like them’.
But though Andrée is indeed nothing like the women she is fated to become, she has one issue which Sylvie struggles to comprehend: an abiding love and duty to her mother. Sylvie’s jealousy, as well as difficulty understanding the closeness of their bond feel equally relevant in her opinion of Madame Gallard.
I found the use of repetition, patterning, and colour interesting in the novel. Much is made of the pureness of white, whilst we are told through Sylvie that Andrée’s favourite flowers are red roses. Were these Beauvoir’s reflections on the idea of chastity and intellectual and sexual freedom which fed much of her later work?
As Elkin suggests, the novel has as much relevance to women’s history, feminism, and religious thought as it does its central theme of friendship between young women, suggesting that the way Beauvoir witnessed the destruction of her closest friend by an unjust social system was to germinate her influential feminist writing to come. The girls’ discussions from an early age on matters including the female body are subversive and anti-religious, such as on Catholic teachings regarding women’s sexuality:
‘They teach you in catechism to respect your body. So selling your body in marriage must be as bad as selling it on the street,’ Andrée tells Sylvie.
As Levy points out, the very fact of the girls’ ongoing conversations was revolutionary in itself, at a time when female opinions and intellect were neither encouraged or respected. It is difficult to comprehend that when this story is set and until 1944, when Beauvoir was 36 years of age, women in France were still unable to vote. One can’t help when reading to find connections with Sylvie’s loss of faith and Beauvoir’s later philosophical ideology.
The Afterword of the novel is written by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, the legally adopted daughter of Simone shortly before her death, who takes the opportunity at the end of the novel to contextualise the real-life friendship between Simone and Zaza.
In a fascinating interview, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir discusses how Simone was haunted by the death of her childhood friend, and how she spent her life trying to recover the intimacy of their friendship. She suggests that she found some of this with herself, spending the last 26 years of her life with her adopted daughter. She is keen to point out, however, that the adoption was a completely legal move, rather than filial. Beauvoir wished Le Bon to manage her work after she died. Le Bon points out that other people often refer to Beauvoir as her mother given the age difference between them, though she states that she was nothing like a mother to her. The two women enjoyed a close friendship in Beauvoir’s later years, which Le Bon says was based on admiration and equality.
As to the suggestions by French media of the sexual ambiguity within The Inseparables and Beauvoir’s friendship with Zaza Lacoin, Le Bon disputes this, claiming that the two women shared a close friendship based on love. Desire and the body were not involved, she says, and sex had no bearing on their relationship. Le Bon asserts that Simone struggled to comprehend Zaza’s death, which she felt was due to the oppression of young women within the bourgeoisie, and that this directly influenced her writing of The Second Sex.
Le Bon speaks of Simone de Beauvoir as a woman who loved life; who was genuinely interested in the people around her. This comes across vividly in the persona of Sylvie in The Inseparables. When questioned by Andrée about how she can bear to be alive without faith in God, Sylvie replies simply: ‘But I love being alive’. Her love and affection for her friend manifests in a need to protect her from her demons, and the overriding wish to see Andrèe happy and unencumbered by the demands of the society in which she lives.
The novel is one which I think will have a lingering effect in the mind long after it is finished, and which suggests important discussions on the way women’s bodies - and lives - were and are often governed by circumstance.
Footnotes:
Lauren Elkin, ‘Translator’s note’, (2021), Simone de Beauvoir, The Inseparables, (Vintage Classics: 2020).
Deborah Levy, ‘Introduction’, (2021), Simone de Beauvoir, The Inseparables, (Vintage Classics: 2020).
Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living, (Penguin: 2018).
Simone de Beauvoir, The Inseparables, (Vintage Classics: 2020).
Thanks for introducing me to this novel!