Just a Couple of Couples

An excerpt from The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir about surviving her husband's sudden death, was published today in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

Nine months and five days ago, at approximately 9 o'clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.

At the time, their only child, Quintana, lay unconscious in an intensive-care unit fighting for her own life after a severe case of pneumonia and septic shock. The night of Dunne's death, the couple had gone to see her in a nearby hospital. Just a few weeks ago, as the book was being readied for market, Quintana passed away, having never fully recovered from the ailment that beset her at the time of her father's death.

Didion's grief is overwhelming, as one can not imagine. The excerpts make for difficult reading in more than one sense, and their extra-therapeutic value is not immediately evident. What does one make, for example, of the following paragraph about Didion's consent to have her husband's body autopsied?:

I knew exactly what occurred, the chest open like a chicken in a butcher's case, the face peeled down, the scale on which the organs are weighed. I had seen homicide detectives avert their eyes from an autopsy in progress. I still wanted one. I needed to know how and why and when it had happened. In fact I wanted to be in the room when they did it …

What Didion seems to offer is an anatomy of grief, from its precise physical symptoms—tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing..."—to the repeated psychic shock, for example, of having to remember every morning upon waking why again one is alone. They may not have been Sartre and Beauvoir, but both Didion and Dunne were writers of some repute, and their life together is weaved by the words they shared, including these words of Gerard Manley Hopkins which seem both to intensify and to assuage her pain: I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

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And speaking of Sartre and Beauvoir, even they were no Sartre and Beauvoir, as one is reminded again and again in reading Louis Menand's recent review in the New Yorker of the latest book on the topic, Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Himself an “agressively” ugly man, as Menand is not the first to spell out, Sartre preferred the company of women. Moreover, he preferred pretty women, whatever their other qualities (or lack thereof), to ugly ones. Perhaps one might have expected otherwise from someone who seemed to devote himself to the life of the mind. But the body, too, offers food for thought, just as thoughts, in turn can be peddled like flesh and indeed for flesh. (Sartre famously said that the primary motive behind his philosophical project was to seduce women.)

One cannot begin to understand his Existentialism, at any rate, without first grasping the fact that his is the philosophy of an essentially—and necessarily—ugly man. That might sound like reproof and reduction; it is neither. Ugliness, as one should not fail to see, is profound.

Menand pauses but a second to consider Sartre’s ugliness, summarized entirely in one line:

Sartre was about five feet tall, and he had lost almost all the sight in his right eye when he was three; he dressed in oversized clothes, with no sense of fashion; his skin and teeth suggested an indifference to hygiene.

One could put it even more baldly: Sartre was short, walleyed, ill-dressed, mal-odored and yellow-teethed. It is an indication of the banality of the author’s observations on this score that he describes Sartre’s physical repulsiveness simply as a thing to be overcome, or ignored, as if Sartre seduced women despite his ugliness rather than in spite of it. Sartre had a wandering eye, as they say, because he literally had a wandering eye (il est louche parce qu’il louche, in French). Somewhat less banal is the observation that not only would Sartre have been far less adept at the art of seduction, had he cut a handsomer figure, but his philosophy couldn't have possibly made out as well, since intellectual bedazzlement was precisely the art he'd developed, by his own admission, to seduce women.

Sartre’s pursuit of pretty girls was part and parcel, origin and end, of a philosophy that championed freedom over necessity, existence over essence; the kind of free existence, for example, that would allow one to escape the essential condition—if not the condemnation–of a congenital ugliness. His “preference,” however, could not have exercised in Beauvoir, whose intellect (unlike her ego) might have surprassed even that of Sartre, a little pain, and her probings in that regard are both personal and philosophical, as she begins to detect here the deep fissures in a grand system of self-rationalisation.

The contradictions between freedom and faith ultimately proved fatal for Existentialism, as it nearly did for their personal relationship; and nowhere was Sartre’s own bad faith more in evidence than in the famous “pact” he made with Beauvoir, a pact that was effectively sexual license disguised as metaphysical freedom. Theirs was an “essential” love, cooed Sartre, as opposed to the “contingent” affairs that became their apparent obsession and existence. Thus they were able to deceive each other while remaining true to one another; to be unfaithful, in other words, in good faith. That this arrangement survived such internal contradictions is a mystery that no books other than their own can explain.

Menand takes some relish in describing the quasi-incestuous pairings that united Beauvoir, and the young female students she seduced and then abandoned, to Sartre. Perhaps she was “excited by the affront to conventional standards of domesticity that Sartre’s arrangement posed,” even if she knew it to be a bit of a sham. Menand drives in the point, obvious by now, that the contingent love affairs were not incidental to their relationship but the very “stuff and substance of their ‘marriage’” and that “the pact was just the traditional sexist arrangement—in which the man sleeps around and the woman nobly ‘accepts’ the situation—on philosophical stilts.” He concludes, easily, that "Sartre was the classic womanizer, and Beauvoir was the classic enabler.” That is saying too much and too little, but it seems to be the final word for now on their half-century affair.

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If what started out as an affront to conventions of domesticity ended in the banality of a bad marriage, in the case of Sartre and Beauvoir, the conventions of domesticity take on an exalted, even philosophical significance in the case of Dunne and Didion. Like the contemplation of meaninglessness, grief forces one to ever greater perspectives in a diminishingly futile search for solace. Even a child knows the experience of loss in this sense, in its absence of meaning. In the most striking passage of the excerpt, Didion writes:

As a child I thought a great deal about meaninglessness, which seemed at the time the most prominent negative feature on the horizon. After a few years of failing to find meaning in the more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words "as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end," which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away. I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the scheme could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No one was watching me. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

Forty years of marriage however produce their own geological monument, a heap from which all the banalities and conventions of domesticity can be glimpsed at once as if from eternity. There is no final word here, just the many daily words that in their small way constitute a life together :

Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of my life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots; the two systems existed for me on parallel tracks that occasionally converged, notably during earthquakes.