“If truth be told, one is not born, but becomes, a genius; and the feminine condition has, until now, rendered this becoming impossible.”
- Happy 118th birthday, Simone de Beauvoir!
Joyeaux Noël !
It is in The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy under the title ‘Literature and Metaphysics’.
Beauvoir’s lecture was at the same venue as Sartre’s famously chaotic event six weeks earlier, but seems to have been rather calmer.
A written version was later published in Les Temps Modernes issue 7 (April 1946).
11 December 1945:
Beauvoir gave a lecture titled ‘Roman et métaphysique’ at Club Maintenant in Paris.
Beauvoir argued that novels can provide richer and more nuanced metaphysical visions of human reality than is possible using the skeletal abstractions of philosophical prose.
7 December 1945:
Beauvoir’s play Les Bouches Inutiles, which had been first performed on 29 October, is published.
An English translation is available as The Useless Mouths.
2 December 1945:
Sartre publishes the second novel in his series Les Chemins de la Liberté ––
Le Sursis is set during ‘the phoney war’ of September 1939 to March 1940, after the war was declared but before the fighting had begun.
An English translation is available from Penguin as The Reprieve.
Translations of both articles —
as ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’ and ‘Portrait of the Anti-Semite’
— are at the centre of The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy.
1 December 1945:
Les Temps Modernes issue 3 is published.
Beauvoir’s ‘L’existentialisme et la sagesse des nations’ – by far the best short introduction to existentialism ever published – is the lead article.
Sartre’s highly influential ‘Portrait de l’antisémite’ is in the same issue.
#philsky
30-minute interview with me on Dublin City FM
about The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy
::
(Newspaper image from gallica.bnf.fr)
80 years later the full article becomes available in English for the first time in The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy.
15 November 1945:
An interview with Camus appears on the front page of Les Nouvelle’s Littéraires headlined:
‘NON, je ne suis pas existentialiste’, nous dit ALBERT CAMUS
✨✨
The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy
edited by me
is published today in the UK!
(Australia and North America publication is next February.)
✨✨
1 November 1945:
Issue 2 of Les Temps Modernes is published
Beauvoir’s essay ‘Idéalisme moral et réalisme politique’ addresses a theme of her novel La Sang des Autres and her play Les Bouches Inutiles
– the place of morality in political action and the foundational value of each person’s freedom
Olga is also the inspiration for the character Ivich in Sartre’s Roads To Freedom novels.
She had made her theatrical debut two years earlier as Electra in Sartre’s play The Flies.
Getty Images also has this rather striking photo of her in The Flies, though dated to 1951 ––
One of the characters was played by Olga Dominique (née Kosakiewicz).
She and her sister Wanda are the inspiration for the character Xavière in Beauvoir’s novel L’Invitée (She Came To Stay).
Getty Images has a publicity photo for the original production featuring her and Jean Berger ––
In a besieged medieval town faced with starvation, the (all male) council decide that food should be reserved for soldiers and workers — so denied to women, children, and elderly men.
It is Beauvoir’s only play.
29 October 1945:
Premiere performance of Beauvoir’s play Les Bouches Inutiles (aka Useless Mouths or Who Shall Die) at Théâtre des Carrefours (now Théâtre des Bouffes-du-Nord) by Gare du Nord in Paris.
For this reason, The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy does not include this confusing attempt to introduce existentialism.
It has instead Beauvoir’s much more coherent and focused essay ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’, published just a few weeks after Sartre’s lecture took place.
Sartre regretted publishing it. The book is overly technical in some places, under-motivated in others, and clearly inconsistent overall. It is not much less chaotic than the circumstances it was composed in.
Even so, someone managed to take comprehensive notes, which were edited into a transcript.
The resulting publication became one of the best selling and most widely translated philosophy books of the twentieth century -- its most recent English title is Existentialism Is a Humanism.
The event was chaotic. Chairs were broken. People fainted and had to be carried outside.
The discussion was cut short for the sake of public safety.
This made its reputation as the defining event of the existentialist offensive.
29 October 1945:
Sartre gives a lecture titled ‘L’existentialisme – est-il un humanisme?’ at Club Maintenant in Paris.
Far too many people turned up. Sartre had to push his way through to the stage, much to the annoyance of the crowd.
He spoke for about an hour without notes and took questions.
24 October 1945:
The United Nations officially comes into being, as the UN Charter has now been ratified by the majority of its signatories including the five permanent members of the Security Council.
24 October has been celebrated as United Nations Day since 1948.
Sources:
The Iris Murdoch archive at the University of Kingston for the notebook. Thank you to Lucy Bolton for the photo.
Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries, 1939-45, edited by Peter J. Conradi for the letter.
I wish I knew more of German philosophy. Have you read Nietzsche & Schopenhauer & those boys? I begin to think that, as far as ethics is concerned, their great big mistakes are worth infinitely more than the colour-less finicky liberalism of our Rosses & Cook Wilsons.”
I begin to like his ideas more & more ... his writing and talking on morals – will, liberty, choice – is hard & lucid & invigorating. It’s the real thing – so exciting, & so sobering, to meet at last – after turning away in despair from the shallow stupid milk & water ‘ethics’ of English ‘moralists’
A week later Murdoch wrote in a letter ––
"Last week I had a great experience. I met Jean Paul Sartre. He was in Brussels to lecture on existentialism, & I was introduced to him at a small gathering after the lecture, & met him again at a long café seance the following day ...
24 October 1945:
Sartre gives a lecture on existentialism in Brussels and one Iris Murdoch is in the audience.
From her notes, this was clearly a version of the now rather famous lecture he was to give in Paris five days later.
(Women first voted in French municipal elections on 29 April 1945.)
