The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘The Frog and the Crocodile’, by Joan Acocella

On the essays shelf:

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays by Joan Acocella. The next essay I want to excerpt is called ‘The Frog and the Crocodile’, originally published in The New Yorker.

Yet another essay by Joan Acocella that opened up a whole world of information to me I had never known before. As I’ve said, I am well read, but, like a lot of big readers, I have my blind spots and have areas that I have missed: entire genres, authors, and classic books. (I am finally reading Lolita for the very first time. In the last 5 years, I finally read Evelyn Waugh. There are so many more examples and one of the interesting and also anxiety-provoking things about life is the worry that I won’t live long enough to read everything I haven’t read yet!) Sometimes you read a book review or an essay and you just get the sense that it is written for “insiders”, those who already know about the topic. And you feel like, “God, I just will never catch up.” Acocella is the opposite. In clear warm prose, she says, “Here is someone who is important, here is why, here is the book for which they are famous, and here is what happened.” It was the way in which Acocella wrote about Stefan Zweig’s novel Beware of Pity that made me buy it immediately and start reading it. I had to experience for myself what she was talking about. (The same is true of Christopher Hitchens’ essays on Evelyn Waugh. His essay on Scoop was so funny that I laughed out loud the entire time I was reading it, and thought, “My God, where have I BEEN all this time, I must read some Evelyn Waugh!!”)

All of this is to say: Acocella’s essay ‘The Frog and the Crocodile’ is about the tormented sexual affair between French feminist Simone de Beauvoir and American proletariat writer Nelson Algren (he won the first National Book Award for his novel The Man with the Golden Arm). Haven’t read Beauvoir, although of course her work and life and connection to Sartre are familiar to me, as well as the most famous passages from The Second Sex… these things are in the culture by osmosis. And I haven’t read any Algren either. Bad Sheila. So. Let’s start with my ignorance. I admit it.

The occasion for this particular article was the publication of a collection of Beauvoir’s tortured chatty letters to her lover Algren, called A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren. Acocella’s assertion is that, although Beauvoir had already begun her major work The Second Sex when she met Algren, it was her sexual affair with Algren that really propelled her to contemplate the inferior status of women. But it’s not just that Algren was a traditional guy who wanted a nice little woman in the kitchen (although that seemed to be partly true). What happened between the two of them was explosive. Beauvoir was 39 when their affair began. She had basically pledged her troth to Sartre in her early 20s, and they came up with an agreement to have an egalitarian transparent relationship, which, naturally, meant that Sartre could fuck around and she couldn’t complain about it. Beauvoir went along with this, because her career was important to her, as was Sartre’s career – and she often trolled for girls FOR Sartre (all of this came out in a biography in the 90s, and it was like a bomb going off for feminists to realize their hero, one of the pioneers, had been so enslaved to a man, and WILLINGLY.) But there’s another element at play here, something Acocella goes into in depth, and something I found fascinating! Sartre was a womanizer, but apparently he was a horrible lay. May be mean to say but whatever, if you sleep with 100s of women then you have 100s of witnesses to who you are in the sack, and the reports were never good. Beauvoir was a humorless schoolmarm-y type, who was so afraid of not being valued for her brain that she consciously played down her femininity (an understandable solution if you live in a blatantly patriarchal society where women are only valued for their prettiness and their baby-making capabilities – this was Beauvoir’s world, and, to some degree, our world right now still, unfortunately.) She was so obsessed with Sartre (and he with her) that she did whatever he told her to do, she edited his manuscripts while he was out cavorting with other women, she put her own work on the back burner to help him out, and meanwhile … they were no longer sleeping together. She was his primary woman, she was the gate-keeper to Sartre and she relished that position, something that more modern feminists in the 70s and 80s found pathetic about Beauvoir.

But then: thunder bolt, lightning fork … on a trip to America, she met Nelson Algren in Chicago. They began an affair. For the first time in her life, and she was almost 40, she experienced good sex. Algren gave her her first orgasm. It was an “A-ha” moment for our humorless schoolmarm. What can I say, she was a late bloomer.

As long as sex remained somewhat abstract to Beauvoir, she could pooh-pooh the struggles that other women had with it, the bonding that happens with sex, the fact that you are playing with fire when you get into the sexual realm, that you are dealing with something inherently uncontrollable, something NOT intellectual at all. Walking around in the world, as a 39 year old woman, who has never had an orgasm, who has never experienced pleasure, it is easy to imagine that you would look at other women’s struggles, and think, “Honestly, what is everyone going on and on about? Sex isn’t all that. Can’t they live without?” Again, I know of what I speak. Well, have your first orgasm, late in the game, way after everyone else, and see how your attitude changes. The affair with Algren was passionate, mostly long-distant (she in Paris, he in Chicago), and involved some tortured reunions. He started to reject her. His career didn’t pan out the way he wanted it to. Meanwhile, she became such a literary star that she had to sneak out of her apartment in Paris to avoid the fans. This hurt Algren’s pride. Not to mention the fact that, along with The Second Sex, she was publishing a multi-volume autobiography, in which Algren played a huge part. He was furious about being name-checked in her book and went about dismissing her, and their relationship, in the press. This is also understandable if you look at it from his position. “What we had was casual. Don’t know what she was going on about. I couldn’t get rid of the dame, frankly.”

After almost 40 years on the planet, Beauvoir finally understood what sex was, what the appeal was, and what it could do. And it was out of that brand-new knowledge, that she wrote the majority of The Second Sex, which could explain some of its more startling passages. (Speaking of which, and this is a total side note: I have been following along with the critical panning of Naomi Wolf’s latest book, Vagina, and it has all been so fascinating. I am dying to read Vagina, for my own gossipy reasons. A guy I dated is in the book. The fact that Naomi Wolf has dovetailed with a guy I refer to as “Jackass McGee” is so deliciously funny to me. If you are aware of the “thrust” of Wolf’s book, then you know that basically she had been all fine in the orgasm department until she had surgery – which messed up her orgasmic apparatus and she no longer saw “colors flowing” and all of this other embarrassing prose which is totally cringe-worthy, even in excerpt. Then, she meets this new guy and voila – her fabulous ROYGBIV orgasms are back and she thinks: “Hmmm! The vagina and the rest of the body are connected! WHO KNEW???” Naomi? Everyone knew. My favorite criticisms of the book have come from the scientific community. Science-nerds decimating her “science”, basically saying, “Everyone on the planet knows that a woman’s sexual response is often connected to her emotions, her mood, and her physical well-being.” This is not news. A caveman probably figured it out. His cave-wife hurt her back dragging wood to make this brand new thing called Fire, and so she doesn’t “feel like it” that night, because her back hurts. Duh. A caveman can’t even freakin’ speak and he gets that the vagina is connected to the whole body. But Naomi Wolf acts like this is NEW news. Seriously, go look up some pans of this book, and pay particular attention to the responses from scientists. They are hilarious. As I said, I am mainly interested because Jackass McGee is in the damn book as a character and that is so weird and awesome to me. I mention Vagina because, although it is clearly a minor work and has been universally panned – unlike The Second Sex – it also came out of a totally personal sexual experience that Wolf then tried to make universal. It probably would have been better if she had just written a straight memoir: How I Got My Orgasm Back, or In Praise of Jackass McGee, or whatever, and not tried to make it a scientific book.)

Back to Beauvoir: She felt completely enslaved by her love for Algren. She prostrated herself before him. She understood, now, the biological need that women have for sex, not to make babies, but because it feels fucking awesome. She ached for him, burned for him, he had basically brought her to life, created a monster of sexual need, and then dropped her. (I actually don’t blame him. He just was being a good and proper lover, unlike Sartre, who sucked … and how was he supposed to know that he was going to ignite a woman’s sexual flame to such a degree that she would spend two books writing about it?? How could he know that? I suppose he could have guessed. She used her own life as material. Writers do that. Nobody is safe when a writer is around. But still: give a gal an orgasm because, you know, you want to be a good lover, and you create this succubus of need and desire? More worldly women, more used to having orgasms and all that, could have handled the affair with Algren. Beauvoir went nuts. I feel for her, I really do!)

Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren

Beauvoir’s reputation as a major feminist thinker has taken some hits, because of the recent revelations about her groveling relationship with Sartre, as well as her consciously slave-master relationship with Algren.

I happen to think it makes her even more fascinating. But then again, like I said, I relate.

Terrific essay. Here’s an excerpt.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, ‘The Frog and the Crocodile’, by Joan Acocella

But it was not in her autobiography, or even in The Mandarins, that Algren should have looked for the effect he had on Beauvoir; it was in The Second Sex. Many people have commented on the curious violence of The Second Sex, and on its “victim blaming.” Though Beauvoir repeats again and again that women are socialized into inferiority, she spends far fewer words on that process than on the manifestations of women’s weakness – their muddle-headedness, fatuity, vanity, envy, parasitism, resentment, frigidity, neuroticism, on and on – which, as the force of her portrayal gathers, seem to unmoor themselves from their social cause and become absolute. Her tone is one of disgust. Man, she says, is “transcendence,” action; woman is “immanence,” need. A famous passage, often quoted, is her description of the male and female genitals:

The sex organ of a man is simple and neat as a finger … but the feminine sex organ is mysterious even to the woman herself, concealed, mucous, and humid, as it is; it bleeds each month, it is often sullied with bodily fluids … a horrid decomposition … Man dives upon his prey like the eagle and the hawk; woman lies in wait like the carnivorous plant, the bog, in which insects and children are swallowed up. She is absorption, suction, humus, pitch and glue, a passive influx, insinuating and viscous.

It’s like something out of a monster movie. Here we see the reverberations of Beauvoir’s discovery of the power of sex, its ability to create hunger in the woman. Probably the strongest words in The Second Sex are those devoted to the subject of female masochism. For the woman in love, Beauvoir writes, “the descent … to masochistic madness is an easy one.” She showers the man with attentions, endearments; they “bore him to distraction”. She grovels, “gathers up the crumbs that the male cares to toss her.” These words, I am sorry to report, were written before, not after, Beauvoir hung around Algren’s summer cabin for two years in a row, apologizing for her tears. The book, of course, ends with a ringing call for an end to all that – for free and equal male-female relationships. Such arrangements, she promises, will not preclude “love, happiness, poetry, dream.” Whether that is true is something that men and women are still trying to figure out, but in The Second Sex we can read how unsure Beauvoir was, too, and how tempted by old-style dependency.

Not surprisingly, many feminists have had mixed feelings about The Second Sex. Just as, by the sixties, existentialism had been shouldered aside by structuralism – and classical philosophy itself by new theories coming out of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and semiology – so in the seventies French feminism came to be dominated by ideas born of those disciplines, above all by différence theory, which viewed women’s difference from man not as a source of oppression but as a well of richness: a better way of thinking and living. Beauvoir’s description of femininity as a swamp, a bog, did not go down well with the différence theorists. The trouble got worse in 1990, four years after Beauvoir’s death, when Bair published her biography, sparing no details of Beauvoir’s peonage to Sartre, and when Sylvia Le Bon de Beauvoir, sweeping up the literary remains (A Transatlantic Love Affair is part of that process), brought out an edition of Beauvoir’s previously unpublished Letters to Sartre, which broke the news of Beauvoir’s pimping for Sartre among her lycée students. Now Beauvoir was not just a misogynist; she was a closet bisexual. Indignation was great; her partisans had to plead for her. There will no doubt be more indignation, more pleading, when people get a load of A Transatlantic Love Affair.

Beauvoir’s critics should read some history books. When The Second Sex was published, in 1949, Frenchwomen had had the vote for only five years. If Beauvoir’s mind, as her detractors claim, was swamped with “masculinist” ideas, those were the only ideas around at the time. If she omitted to tell her public about her lesbian experiences, to do otherwise would have been fatal to the reputation of any woman writer of the period. (Beauvoir’s critics should also take another look at her defense of lesbianism – a whole chapter – in The Second Sex. For 1949, that was brave.) It is possible that the best writers on social injustice – certainly the most moving – are those who grew up when the injustice in question was not viewed as a problem, and who therefore say things that get them in trouble, later, with holders of more correct views, views that the earlier writers gave birth to. I am thinking of Abraham Lincoln’s pre-Civil War statements on the inferiority of Negroes, so decried by recent historians. It is one thing to free a people whom you regard as equal. But what does it take to free a people whom you have been trained to regard as inferior, and who, by your standards, are inferior? It takes something else, a kind of imagination and courage that we do not understand.

In the recent flap over Beauvoir we see again what might now be called Philip Larkin syndrome: the insistence on the part of modern critics that celebrated authors’ lives by as admirable as their books. In the case of Beauvoir one might answer, “Do as she said, not as she did.” (That, in fact, is the title of an article that Deirdre Bair was moved to write for the Times Magazine in response to the outrage over the revelations in her biography and in the Letters to Sartre.) But even if we did as she did, we wouldn’t be doing so badly. After all, she did not move to Chicago, and her reasons were not just Sartre but also her career, her place in the literary life of Paris. If that career was tied up with her servitude to Sartre, good writing has sprung from more humiliating conditions. And, of course, the relationship with Sartre helped to germinate The Second Sex. The affair with Algren, so sexual and therefore so searing, may have released her knowledge of the condition of women, but, whatever her denials, why would she, the year before meeting Algren, have begun work on what she described as a book “about women situation”. What situation was she planning to discuss?