Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (83 page)

Ionesco was very attuned to the achievements of science, the psychology of Freud and Jung in particular, but biology too. It instilled in him his own brand of pessimism. ‘I wonder if art hasn’t reached a dead-end,’ he said in 1970. ‘If indeed in its present form, it hasn’t already reached its end. Once, writers and poets were venerated as seers and prophets. They had a certain intuition, a sharper sensitivity than their contemporaries, better still, they discovered things and their imaginations went beyond the discoveries even of science itself, to things science would only establish twenty-five or fifty years later. In the relation to the psychology in his time, Proust was a precursor…. But for some time now, science and the psychology of the subconscious have been making enormous progress, whereas the empirical revelations of writers have been making very little. In these conditions, can literature still be considered as a means to knowledge?’ And he added, ‘Telstar [the television satellite] in itself is an amazing achievement. But it’s used to bring us a play by Terence Rattigan. Similarly, the cinema is more interesting as an achievement than the films that are shown in its theatres.’
⁶³

These observations by Ionesco were no less timely than his plays. Paris in the 1950s saw the last great throw of modernism, the last time high culture
could be said to dominate any major civilisation. As we shall see in chapters 25 and 26, a seismic change in the structure of intellectual life was beginning to make itself felt.

‘La famille Sartre’ was the name given to the group of writers and intellectuals around the philosopher/novelist/playwright. This was not without irony, certainly so far as his chief companion, Simone de Beauvoir, was concerned, for by the late 1940s their ménage was fairly complicated. The couple had met in 1929, at the Lycée Janson de Sadly, where de Beauvoir took courses to become a trainee teacher (together with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss). She easily attracted attention to herself by virtue of her exceptional cleverness, so that she was eventually accepted into the elite intellectual
bande
at the school, led by Sartre. This began the long-term and somewhat unusual relationship between these two – unusual in that no sooner had they begun their affair than Sartre told de Beauvoir that he was not attracted to her in bed. This was less than flattering, but she adjusted to the situation and always considered herself his main companion, even to the extent of helping him to procure other lovers, as well as acting as his chief spokesperson after he developed his theory of existentiadsm.
¹
For his part, Sartre was generous, supporting de Beauvoir financially (as he did several others) when his early novels and plays proved successful. There was no secret about their relationship, and de Beauvoir did not lack admirers. She became the object of a powerful lesbian passion from the writer Violette le Duc.
²

Sartre and de Beauvoir were always irked by the fact that the world viewed them as existentialists – and only as existentialists. But on occasion it paid off. In spring 1947, de Beauvoir left France for America for a coast-to-coast lecture tour where she was billed as ‘France’s No. 2 existentialist.’ While in Chicago she met Nelson Algren, a writer who insisted on showing her what he called ‘the real America’ beyond the obvious tourist traps. They became lovers immediately (they only had two days together), and she had, she later admitted, achieved her ‘first complete orgasm’ (at the age of thirty-nine).
³
With him, she said, she learned ‘how truly passionate love could be between men and women.’ Despite her dislike of America (a feeling she shared with Sartre), she considered not returning to France. As it was, when she did return, it was as a different woman. Until then she had been rather frumpy (Sartre called her ‘Castor,’ meaning Beaver, and others called her La Grande Sartreuse). But she was not unattractive, and the experience with Algren reinforced that. At that stage
nothing she had written could be called memorable (articles in
Les Temps modernes
and
All Men Are Mortal),
but she returned to France with something different in mind that had nothing to do with existentialism. The idea wasn’t original to her; it had first been suggested for her by Colette Audry, a longstanding friend who had taught at the same school as de Beauvoir, in Rouen.
⁴
Audry was always threatening to write the book herself but knew her friend would do a better job.
⁵
Audry’s idea was a book that investigated the situation of women in the postwar world, and after years of prevarication de Beauvoir seems to have been precipitated into the project by two factors. One was her visit to America, which had shown her the similarities – and very great differences – between women in the United States and in Europe, especially France. The second reason was her experience with Algren, which highlighted her own curious position vis-à-vis Sartre. She was in a stable relationship; they were viewed by all their friends and colleagues as ‘a couple’ (‘La Grande Sartreuse’ was very revealing); yet they weren’t married, didn’t have sex, and she was supported by him financially. This ‘marginal’ position, which distanced her from the situation ‘normal’ women found themselves in, gave de Beauvoir a vantage point that, she felt, would help her write about her sex with objectivity and sympathy. ‘One day I wanted to explain myself to myself. I began to reflect all about myself and it struck me with a sort of surprise that the first thing I had to say was “I am a woman.” ‘At the same time, she was reflecting something more general: 1947 was the year women got the vote in France, and her book appeared at almost exactly the time Alfred Kinsey produced his first report on sex in the human male. No doubt the war had something to do with the changed conditions between men and women. De Beauvoir began her research in October 1946 and finished in June 1949, spending four months in America in 1947.
⁶
She then went back to
la famille Sartre,
the work a one-off, at a distance from her other offerings and, in a sense, from her. Years later a critic said that she understood the feminine condition because she herself had escaped it, and she agreed with him.
⁷

De Beauvoir relied on her own experience, supported by wide reading, and she also carried out a series of interviews with total strangers. The book is in two parts – the French edition was published in two volumes. Book I, called
Facts and Myths,
provides an historical overview of women and is itself divided into three. In ‘Destiny,’ the female predicament is examined from a biological, psychoanalytic, and historical standpoint. In the historical section women are described, for example, in the Middle Ages, in primitive societies, and in the Enlightenment, and she closes the section with an account of present-day women. In the section on myth she examines the treatment of women in five (male) authors: Henri de Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel, André Breton, and Stendhal. She did not like Lawrence, believing his stories to be ‘tedious,’ though she conceded that ‘he writes the simple truth about love.’ On the other hand, she felt that Stendhal was ‘the greatest French novelist.’ The second volume, or book 2, is called
Women’s Life Today
and explores childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age.
⁸
She writes of love, sex, marriage, lesbianism. She made use of her impressive gallery of friends and acquaintances,
spending several mornings with Lévi-Strauss discussing anthropology and with Jacques Lacan learning about psychoanalysis.
⁹
Algren’s influence is as much evident in the book as Sartre’s. It was the American who had suggested she also look at black women in a prejudicial society and introduced her not only to black Americans but to the literature on race, including Gunnar Myrdal’s
An American Dilemma.
Initially she thought of calling her book
The Other
Sex; the title used,
The Second Sex,
was suggested by Jacques-Laurent Bost, one of the
premiers disciples
of Sartre, during an evening’s drinking in a Left Bank café.
¹⁰

When
The Second Sex
appeared, there were those critics (as there are always those critics) who complained that she didn’t say anything new. But there were many more who felt she had put her finger on something that other people, other women, were working out for themselves at that time, and moreover that, in doing her research, she had provided them with ammunition: ‘She had provided a generation of women with a voice.’
¹¹
The book was translated into English very early, thanks to Blanche Knopf – wife of the publisher Alfred – whose attention had been drawn to the book by the Gallimard family when she was on a visit to Paris. Conscious of the great interest among American students in the bohemia of the Left Bank at the time, both Blanche and Alfred believed the book was bound to be a sound commercial proposition. They were right. When the book was released in America in February 1953, it was by and large well received, though there were several reviewers – Stevie Smith and Charles Rodo among them – who didn’t like her tone, who thought she ‘carried the feminist grievance too far.’
¹²
The most interesting reaction, however, was that of the editors of the
Saturday Review of Literature,
who believed the book’s theme was too large for one reviewer and so commissioned six, among them the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, Margaret Mead, and another anthropologist, Ashley Montagu. Mead found the book’s central argument – that society has wasted women’s gifts – a sound one but added that de Beauvoir had violated every canon of science in her partisan selection of material. Above ad, however, de Beauvoir’s book was taken seriously, which meant that the issues it raised were considered soberly, something that had not always happened. De Beauvoir’s strange idea that women represented ‘the other’ in society caught on, and would much infuse the feminine movement in years to come. Brendan Gill, in a review entitled ‘No More Eve’ in the
New Yorker,
summed up his reaction in a way others have noted: ‘What we are faced with is more than a work of scholarship; it is a work of art, with the salt of recklessness that makes art sting.
¹³

When Blanche Knopf had first come across
The Second Sex, on
her visit to Paris, her appetite had been whetted on being told that it read like ‘a cross between Havelock Ellis and the Kinsey Report.
¹⁴
Havelock Ellis was old news;
Studies in the Psychology of Sex,
begun in 1897, had ceased publication as long ago as 1928, and he had been dead since 1939. The Kinsey Report, however, was new. Like
The Second Sex, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male
reflected a changed, postwar world.

The generation that came back from World War II settled down almost
immediately. They took opportunities to be educated, they got married – and then proceeded to have more children than their parents’ generation: this was the baby boom. But they had seen life; they knew its attractions, and they knew its shallows. Living in close proximity to others, often in conditions of great danger, they had known intimacy as few people experience it. So they were particularly aware that there was a marked gap between the way people were supposed to behave and the way they did behave. And perhaps this gap was greatest in one area: sex. Of course, sex happened before World War II, but it wasn’t talked about to anywhere near the same extent. When the Lynds carried out their study of Middletown in the 1920s, they had looked at marriage and dating, but not at sex per se. In fact, though, they had chronicled the one important social change that was to alter behaviour in this regard in the 1930s more than anything else: the motor car. The car took adolescents out of the home and away from parental supervision. It took adolescents to meeting places with their friends, as often as not the movie houses where Hollywood was selling the idea of romance. Most important of all, the car provided an alternative venue, a private area where intimate behaviour could take place. All of which meant that, by the late 1940s, behaviour had changed, but public perceptions of that behaviour had not kept up. It is this which mainly accounts for the unprecedented reception of a dry, 804-page academic report that appeared in 1948 under the title
Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male.
The author was a professor of zoology at the University of Indiana (not so far from Muncie).
¹⁵
The medical publisher who released the book printed an initial run of 5,000 copies but before long realised his error.
¹⁶
Nearly a quarter of a million copies were eventually sold, and the book spent twenty-seven weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list. Alfred Kinsey, the professor of zoology, became famous and appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine.
¹⁷

The scientific tone of the book clearly helped. Its elaborate charts and graphs, methodological discussions of the interviewing process, and consideration of the validity of ‘the data’, set it apart from pornography and allowed people to discuss sex in detail without appearing prurient or salacious. Moreover, Kinsey was an unlikely figure to spark such controversy. He had built his reputation on the study of wasps. His interest in human sexuality had begun when he had taught a course on marriage and the family in the late 1930s. He found students hungry for ‘accurate, unbiased information about sex,’ and indeed, being a scientist, Kinsey was dismayed by the dearth of ‘reliable, non-moralistic data’ concerning human sexual behaviour.
¹⁸
He therefore began to amass his own statistics by recording the sexual practices of students. He subsequently put together a small team of researchers and trained them in interviewing techniques, which meant they could explore a subject’s sex life in about two hours. Over ten years he collected material on 18,000 men and women.
¹⁹

In their study
Sexuality in America,
John d’Emilio and Estelle Freedman say, ‘Behind the scientific prose of
Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male
lay the most elaborate description of the sexual habits of ordinary white Americans (or anyone, for that matter) ever assembled. In great detail, Kinsey tabulated the frequency and incidence of masturbation, premarital petting
and coitus, marital intercourse, extramarital sex, homosexuality, and animal contacts. Avoiding as far as possible the moralistic tone he disliked in other works, Kinsey adopted a “count-and-catalogue” stance: how many respondents had done what, how many times and at what ages. His findings proved shocking to traditional moralists.’
²⁰
His study of the male revealed, for example, that masturbation and heterosexual petting were ‘nearly universal, that almost nine out of ten men had sex before marriage, that half had affairs, and that over a third of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience.’ Virtually all males had established a regular sexual outlet by the age of fifteen, and ‘fully 95 per cent had violated the law at least once on the way to orgasm.’
²¹
A second volume in the series,
Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female,
was published in 1953 and caused a similar storm. Although the figures for women were lower (and less shocking) than for men, six out of ten had engaged in masturbation, half had had sex before marriage, and a quarter had had affairs.
²²
Taken together, Kinsey’s statistics pointed to a vast hidden world of sexual experience sharply at odds with publicly espoused norms. The reports became cultural landmarks.
²³
But perhaps the most interesting reaction was the public’s. In general there was no shock/horror reaction from middle America. Instead, opinion polls suggested that a large majority of the public approved of scientific research on sexuality and were eager to learn more. Undoubtedly, the revelation of a wide divergence between ideals and actual behaviour alleviated the anxiety of many individuals as to whether their own private behaviour set them apart from others.