61. Simone de Beauvoir — The Inseparables with Lauren Elkin

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone! It's Kim Askew with my longtime friend, writing partner and co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Hi, everybody. This week's episode focuses on someone whose name you're likely already familiar with. Does Simone de Beauvoir ring any bells? 

KIM: Right. We're talking about the French intellectual and feminist. But even if you've read her work, you probably haven't read her most recently published novel.

AMY: Because although she died in 1986, a long-lost novella she wrote called The Inseparables was published just this fall to great acclaim. We have the full story and the translator of the UK Penguin Random House edition here to talk with us about the book and its fascinating author. 

KIM: Yes, and it's especially interesting because this novella was very personal to Beauvoir. We'll explain more about how it finally came to light later in this episode. And let us assure you now, listeners, it's excellent. It's a quick, but unforgettable, read and it's very much worth your time. 

AMY: Yes, we wouldn't steer you wrong here, although it's possible Kim and I could steer you wrong with our French pronunciation, which is terrible.

KIM: Yes. Good to note that. Don't judge us by our French pronunciation, listeners. 

AMY: If you've listened to enough of these episodes, you already know that about us, but luckily our guest today is very proficient in French. So it's time to introduce her. Let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today is Lauren Elkin, and I've been a fan of her writing for quite some time. Her essays and criticism appear regularly in The Guardian, The New York Times, and many other publications. She's the author of several books, including Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2017 and a BBC Radio Four Book of the Week. And her wonderful new book, No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus, is composed of entries in her iPhone's Notes app as she commuted to and from a teaching job in Paris in 2014 and 2015 -- and I love this book. She's also an award-winning translator. Her co-translation with Charlotte Mandell of Claude Arnaud's biography of Jean Cocteau won the 2017 French-American Foundation's translation award. After 20 years in Paris, Lauren recently moved to London. Welcome Lauren. We're so glad to have you! 

LAUREN: Thank you. I'm so delighted to be here. Thank you for asking me to do this! 

KIM: So before we get started, I have a confession to make. It's maybe somewhere on the razor's edge between embarrassing and relatable, but here it goes: I don't think I've ever read anything more than quotes by Beauvoir until this. I knew who she was, of course, and that she wrote the important feminist text, The Second Sex. But as an undergrad, I had my head buried in Medieval and Renaissance lit. And then in grad school, I was focused on the Victorian Era. So be honest, Lauren. Does this make me a bad feminist? 

LAUREN: Oh my God, not at all! Not at all. The Second Sex is full of a lot of stuff about, like, biology... like, amateur ethnography, and you know, it can be a slog to get through. That's why they asked a zoologist to translate it, you know, way back when it came out in English, they had this guy H.M. Parshley do it. And you know, I think they didn't even read the book before they handed it off to him. They just saw there was a lot of stuff about reproduction amongst mammals. So yeah. No, you're not a bad person. I think you can probably read the highlights and feel like you've gotten to grips with The Second Sex.

KIM: Okay, okay. But now that I've read The Inseparables, I can begin to redeem myself. And honestly, after The Inseparables, I'm actually looking forward to it. Amy, what about you? 

AMY: I have to count myself in that same doghouse. You take philosophy courses in college, and you're sort of like, "That's homework; that's heavy and deep." And she sounds really intimidating to me. And also, I have to admit, I didn't even realize that she wrote any fiction. Had I known that, I think I might've been more interested to start with some of her fiction works or her, you know, more memoir kind of stuff. But this story we're going to be talking about is a good little gateway drug. I feel like now that I've read it, I'm really interested in who she is and, um, wanting to read more. 

KIM: Yeah, it's kind of perfect for that. And in fact, I think we should start off with a little refresher on Beauvoir since her origin story is actually really intertwined with the plot of the book we're discussing today. Amy, do you want to take it away for us? . 

AMY: Sure. Okay, here are the basics to launch us into things: Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into a middle-class Parisian family. Her father was a legal secretary and her mother was a wealthy banker's daughter and devout Catholic. The family lost a lot of their money after World War I, but despite that, Beauvoir and her sister, Helene, went to a prestigious Catholic school. The Inseparables is a fictionalized story based on Beauvoir's friendship with another girl she went to school with nicknamed Zaza in the book. The young Simone is Sylvie, and Zaza is fictionalized as Andrée. The girls are given the nickname, "The Inseparables" because they are so connected at the hip. So Lauren, what can you tell us about this real-life friendship and how it compares to the fictionalized version? 

LAUREN: The first thing to say about the fictionalized version is that it's very compacted and streamlined. If you read it in comparison to the way that Beauvoir recounts the story of this friendship in her memoirs, Memoirs of a Beautiful Daughter, the first volume, um, there's so much else happening. There's lots of other players involved and, you know, there's a social context, a historical context. And in this book, it's almost like an allegory. It's really been kind of stripped to its essentials, the story. So yeah, these two young women, the real-life women and the fictional women, met as young girls and they stayed fast friends all throughout childhood and into adolescence. And then, um, both went to study together at the Sorbonne as young women, and then tragically, Andrée, or Zaza, contracted some kind of mysterious fever and died, and Beauvoir would be haunted by this death, the death of her friend, for the rest of her life. And it never quite felt to her like an honest tragedy. It always felt to her as if it had been kind of provoked, somehow, by the circumstances in which Zaza lived. The fact that she had this very overbearing, very, you know, well-to-do, upper-middle-class bourgeois, Catholic French family. The fact that she wasn't permitted to marry this young man with whom she'd fallen in love, who is also devoutly Catholic -- his name is Pascal in the novel. (He's modeled on the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.) The fact that she was going to be sent off to Cambridge or London or something to take her mind off of this infatuation. You know, we have science. We know that you can just catch a fever, unfortunately, and without adequate healthcare, you know, die, sadly. And it happens maybe more in the early 1920s, hopefully, than today, but in Beauvoir's mind, it was murder. And this book is an attempt to kind of point the finger and analyze the circumstances around that murder. At the very least, it's manslaughter. 

AMY: So let's jump into the book right off. Would you care to read maybe a favorite passage from the early part of The Inseparables to give us a sense of it?

LAUREN: Yeah. With great pleasure. I haven't actually had a chance to read from this, so I'd really be happy to! So I'll read a little bit from the very beginning and then a little bit from when they meet. That can be, you know, a good kind of sampler. So this is from the very beginning chapter: When I was nine years old, I was a good little girl, though this hadn't always been the case. As a small child the adults' tyranny caused me to throw such tantrums that one of my aunts declared, quite seriously: "Sylvie is possessed by a demon." War and religion tamed me. Right away I demonstrated perfect patriotism by stomping all over my doll because she was made in Germany, though I didn't really care for her to begin with. I was taught that God would only protect France if I were obedient and pious: there was no escaping it. The other girls and I would walk through the basilica of Sacré-Cœur, waving banners and singing. I began to pray frequently, and I developed a real taste for it. Abbé Dominique, the chaplain at the Collége Adelaïde where we went to school, encouraged my ardour. Dressed all in tulle,with a bonnet made of Irish lace, I made my First Communion, and from that day forward, I set a perfect example for my little sisters. 

So now I'll read just a little bit from the moment when Andrée and Sylvie meet, which is just about a page or so later. So this is the first day of school: When the bell rang, I entered the classroom they called Sainte-Marguerite. All the rooms look the same; the students sat around an oval table covered in black moleskin, which would be presided over by our teacher; our mothers sat behind us and kept watch while knitting balaclavas. I went over to my stool and saw the one next to it was occupied by a hollow-cheeked little girl with brown hair, whom I didn't recognize. She looked very young; her serious, shining eyes focused on me with intensity. "So you're the best student in the class?" " I'm Sylvie Lepage," I said. "What's your name?" "Andrée Gallard. I'm nine. If I look younger it's because I got burned alive and didn't grow much after that. I had to stop studying for a year but Maman wants me to catch up on what I missed. Can you lend me your notebooks from last year?" "Yes," I said. Andrée's confidence and rapid, precise speech unnerved me. She looked me over warily. "That girl said you're the best student in the class," she said, tilting her head a little at Lisette. "Is that true?" "I often come in first," I said, modest. I stared at Andrée, with her dark hair falling straight down around her face, and an ink spot on her chin. It's not every day that you meet a little girl who's been burned alive. 

KIM: That's so good. Oh my gosh. That was beautiful, Lauren! Wow. 

AMY: I want to chime in, because that very first portion that you read where the aunt says "Sylvie is possessed." ... It just reminds me so much (and Lauren, this might not make sense to you) but for anybody that listened to our earlier episode on Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, that book starts off almost identically with an aunt saying, "This child is possessed." 

KIM: Cassandra.

AMY: Yeah. It just struck me that those two just start off exactly the same way. 

KIM: Lauren, I wanted to ask, because I'm really interested in the translation aspect of this and sort of the process. Do you remember with these passages that you read, do you remember any decisions you had to make while translating, or anything that stood out to you about it while you were working on it?

LAUREN: God, I remember translating those early passages, because I did them for the sample translation. Toril Moi, who's a big Beauvoir scholar, gave my name to the American editor who had acquired the rights to this book and was going to publish it. And so he asked me if I wanted to submit a sample, and I said, "Sure." And so I translated these early passages for the sample, so I remember so vividly sitting up in my house in Liverpool, our old house, just falling in love with this voice. I mean, you know, from the moment that it begins where her aunt is like "Sylvie is possessed by a demon," I was like, "Oh yeah, I totally feel this." And I remember, you know, (I wrote about this in an essay really recently), but there's a scene very soon after that beginning where Sylvie is talking about how her mother had just made them some coats made of, like, real officers' serge, and they look like little military great coats. And I guess this is a time when you wouldn't really see kids in the military style. And Beauvoir writes that they had a little martingale on the back and that that martingale made the mother's friends raise their eyebrows in astonishment. And I was like, "First of all, what's a martingale? Second of all, how am I going to translate it? And third of all, how am I going to translate it so that it conveys to the reader what would be so surprising about it?" So I went round and round with dictionaries from the time and, you know, French-English dictionaries. And I talked to Toril Moi and talked to the French editors. It turns out that it's like a little piece of fabric at the back of a jacket to kind of nip in the waist. And so I couldn't figure out why that would be so astonishing, but it was really talking to Toril that I realized that it was the degree to which this coat was mimicking an officer's coat in the military, in the middle of the Great War. Beauvoir had written this novel in 1954 and then put it away, and we can talk about why in a little bit; I'm sure you're curious to talk about that. And then a few years later, she published the first volume of her memoirs, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. And so there's a lot of language that she took from this manuscript and reappropriated for that manuscript, and this passage with the martingale is one of them. So I looked at the other book to see how that translator did it. He wrote "bayonet frog." And I was like, "What? Weirder and weirder!" I don't know, but at least that kind of solidified for me that it was really like a military reference and that was the thing that was going to need to come through. Then at the end of the day, the French editors were like, "You know what, just write ‘martingale.’ People will look it up if they don't know what that is." 

AMY: And I did! It's just coming back to me in a flash that I paused at that point. And I was like, what exactly would that look like? And I did get from your meaning that it was a military style, but I did stop to figure that out. 

KIM: Yeah, it does really stand out. That part stands out. 

LAUREN: The martingale, yeah. And the language is really simple before that. It's very straightforward because it's written in the voice of this nine-year-old. So to suddenly have a martingale, I'm still not quite sure about it. Like I'm not sure nine-year-olds would know about the martingale. It is a bit of an intrusion, you know, on the part of the grown woman recalling, which maybe is okay, but, you know, I don't know. It kind of maybe confuses things. Um, oh! But I didn't finish my story about how it ended up with two translators! 

KIM: Yes. 

LAUREN: Well, so I did this translation, um, and they didn't like it. Well, I think they liked it fine, but they preferred the other translator, who's like a career translator, who had done lots of, you know, stuff from the same period. So I totally understood, you know, that they're picking her. But the British publisher preferred my translation. So that is how we ended up with a UK version and a U.S. version. 

KIM: Have you read the other version? 

LAUREN: I have not. I have not. All respect to the other translator, but it's like too intimate, you know, to see somebody else messing around with these words..

KIM: No, no, that makes sense, absolutely. No, I completely understand. That's a fascinating story and also fascinating detail about the translation process. 

AMY: So getting back to the book, these two best friends, Sylvie and Andrée, have these long conversations about everything, including marriage. And there's a line where Andrée compares marriage to prostitution. We've seen that before in some of the other books we featured, but can you give us a little bit of historical context in terms of what Andrée's options for the future were versus what Sylvie had to kind of look forward to?

LAUREN: Yeah. I mean, so Andrée comes from this very conventional, like haute bourgeois, even "upper-middle-class" doesn't quite convey it. They're not, you know, the aristocracy, but they're not too far off. So they're massive snobs, and they're very old fashioned and they have very strong ideas about what members of their families should be. For young women, it was really no different than it would've been a hundred years or 200 years earlier, you know? Join a convent or get married. Or maybe be a spinster and take care of your aging parents, if you really have no prospects. Um, but yeah, for Andrée, I mean, there's a scene midway through the book where Sylvie and Andrée see Andrée's older sister dressed up for this garden party. It's like, she's being pimped out to these wealthy boys from the neighborhood who are the "right sort of people," which is a phrase that Beauvoir uses quite a few times. And they're all hideous and boring, and the older sister is beside herself because she doesn't want to be promised off to one of them. But yeah, I mean, Beauvoir really paints, with a lot of force, yet delicacy, a picture of what is down the road for Andrée. So already it's a departure from tradition that she's allowed as a young woman to attend the Sorbonne. And I can only think that, you know, they were just indulging their slightly eccentric, intelligent, intellectual daughter and letting her go to school. But I think the understanding was at the end of it, she was going to get married. It wasn't like, you know, she could go off and earn her living. But for Beauvoir, who, as you said in your introduction, did come from a very bourgeois family, not the same kind of old, French Catholic family that Andrée does, but still, like very, you know, bien bourgeois, as they say. Nevertheless, her father, as you said, had lost a lot of money in the Great War, and so her future was not assured. There wasn't a sense that their role in the social structure was firm no matter what, even if he did lose all of that money. There's just a real sense of precariousness to the family's fortunes. That was true in Beauvoir's life, and it's true in Sylvie's. So I think Sylvie knew, or Beauvoir knew, from quite a young age, that she was going to have to go out and make a living. So Beauvoir studied philosophy and did the agrégation, which is a competitive, national examination to become a high school teacher. (In France, to be a high school teacher is a very lofty endeavor. It's like, you can take this very, very, very difficult and competitive written and oral examination. They call them professors. Then you're a professor at a lycee.) So that was what Beauvoir did after her years at the Sorbonne. And then, eventually, was able to support herself writing and didn't have to teach anymore. But there were, of course, also some controversies during her time as a teacher that you may be aware of.

AMY: I'm not, but maybe we can get into that. That sounds interesting.

KIM: Yes. So despite the fact that Sylvie and Andrée ... their futures are already wildly diverging by the time they're teenagers, or maybe partially because they're diverging, the two of them have this really intimate relationship. But Sylvie's feelings for Andrée go even deeper. She's really in love. And there's this part where 13-year-old Sylvie, who hates to do needlework, makes Andrée this beautiful silk bag. And because of it, Andrée's mother realizes, she sees this depth of feeling that Sylvie has for Andrée. What is it about Andrée that Sylvie falls in love with, do you think? 

LAUREN: I think, I mean, she's so different to any other child with whom Sylvie has come in contact, you know? You got a little bit of it in that scene that I read just before where she's like, kind of straight to the point, you know? No social niceties, just kind of like, "Yeah, okay. I got burned alive. Can I borrow your notes?" You know? "So you're the smartest one in the class? Yes or no?" And I think that was just really refreshing and unnerving, and then as the book unfolds, we find that she just is kind of in love with being alive. Like, she can get goose pimples on her arms just if someone says the word "orchid." She's this very sensitive creature. And she's great at playing the piano. She's doing a recital at one point, and as she gets through the part that she always messes up without making a mistake, she turns and sticks her tongue out at her mother. And so everyone in the room is like [gasps], but Andrée gets away with it. She's this irrepressible child. She just doesn't care. But I just love that.

AMY: It reminded me a little bit as if it was like a young girl's version of Nick and Jay Gatsby almost, you know? Like Sylvie's the more conservative, shy, quiet...Zaza is just full of charisma and lives life to the fullest. I kept thinking of those two characters. 

LAUREN: I love that. In another place across the ocean, Andrée would have run away or reinvented herself and have been throwing these parties in, you know, Great Egg, or whatever it's called.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: That's true. Imagine the life that Zaza would have lived had she survived. 

LAUREN: Yeah, I know, it would have been amazing.

AMY: If she could have escaped all the repression, I guess. Right. 

LAUREN: Yeah. Yeah.

AMY: So Deborah Levy, in the introduction to this book, she writes: "In every decade of my life since my twenties, I have been awed, confused, intrigued, and inspired by Beauvoir's attempt to live with meaning, pleasure and purpose." And she then references a quote from Beauvoir's autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, which we've talked about, which says: "Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody." As life mottos go, that's a really good one. 

KIM: Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned that quote, Amy, because I loved it too. 

AMY: It brought me back a little bit to Lorraine Hansberry, whom we also did an episode on, and Hansberry often talked about how Beauvoir was a major inspiration.

LAUREN: I didn't know that. 

KIM: Oh yeah, yeah.

AMY: Oh, big time. Yeah. 

KIM: And Hansberry's daily practice of living and working toward a vision of Black Radicalism -- you can definitely see the influence of Beauvoir there. 

LAUREN: I love that. And I love, I mean ... Deborah Levy's introduction for this book is just like, it's just a pleasure, you know, from beginning to end. It was so perfect for this novel. I think that you do get a sense, reading The Inseparables, of the degree to which Sylvie is really a sensualist from the very beginning. Just the kind of lush way that she communes with the trees and the flowers and, you know, the hedges. And there is a real change after she meets Andrée; it's very funny. First of all, she starts going for the forbidden books on the top shelf of grandpa's library, but she also writes something like "I wanted to taste the poisonous berries just to know what it tastes like.” And so I think, as I said, that sensuality and feeling for nature and being in the world is there before Andrée, but Andrée really accentuates it. It's being with this girl who's just no bullshit, get to the point, get what you need out of a situation, out of a conversation, out of a day, that has her just wanting experience for its own sake. And I think that also underlies her rage at Andrée being denied her future and her early death.

AMY: It feels like this friendship with Zaza was sort of the crucible that turned her into that woman. Like, you can see what a transformative experience this was for her to know this person. And we know she obviously becomes this incredibly famous person, but in The Inseparables the focus is really on this Zaza character. 

KIM: Yeah, and I'm going to read a little passage from Sylvie as the narrator that touches on:

But what I admired most about her were the little habits she had that I never understood. Like when she saw a peach or an orchid, or even if someone just said one of those words to her, she shivered, and gooseflesh stood out on her arms. It was in those moments that I was most troublingly aware of the gift she had received from heaven, which I found so enthralling: her personality. Secretly I thought to myself that Andrée was one of those prodigies about whom later on books would be written. 

LAUREN: I love that passage. I mean, this book is really spectacular. There are some really memorable sentences in it, and that is definitely one of them. "She was the kind of person about whom later books would be written." I get the chills just thinking about that line. And so I think, for Simone, it was just a question of, I think her home life was pretty boring. I think she felt very misunderstood by her parents. Beauvoir just had this ouverture d'esprit they call it, like, an openness of spirit, and she was deeply curious and wanted to just question things. She was just a born questioner and you see that in the way that Sylvie slowly loses her faith over the course of the novel, and then feels like she has to hide that from the people at school and all of the clergy people that she comes into contact with. And it's this amazing moment of revelation that she has with Andrée, this amazing scene in the kitchen beneath the fancy house where Andrée's family lives in the countryside where, you know, she confesses to having lost her faith and it's this dramatic moment of revelation. And she's really not sure how Andrée's going to take it, but it's like she needs to bare her soul and have Andrée see her as she really is. It might seem kind of tame or something like, "Okay, so you don't believe in God," but in that context and that time, for a young girl going to a Catholic school to say, "I don't believe in God" is so shocking, and Andrée says something like "If I thought that we lived and did this and then died and that was it. I couldn't bear to live," and Sylvia's like, "But I love living!" And that moment it's just, it illustrates all the differences in their philosophies. And it's such a sad moment. And yeah, it really, it encapsulates what I was saying before about Beauvoir the sensualist, like, she just, she loves living. It doesn't matter what happens after; living is the thing. 

KIM: So going back to what you said, about Sylvie's character gradually losing her faith, it really changed how she behaved. She went from obedient to more rebellious. And I'm curious about how that squares with Simone's own experience in losing her faith and what you can tell us about that.

LAUREN: I actually don't know a lot about Beauvoir herself, how she lost her faith. I had the great good fortune to read her early diaries when I was in grad school. They were published in French, the Cahiers de Jeunesse in like the middle of the two thousands, and I got them and I read them. I devoured them. And I mean, I'd looked at The Second Sex in college, but it didn't really get anywhere with it. But because I was coming at her from seeing her as this young person who is inventing herself, a bit like the Sontag diaries that, you know, everyone was reading a couple of years ago. You see this young person who's brilliant and like, nobody else she knows, except maybe for Zaza, who's making herself reading lists and, you know, trying to invent herself as a very serious scholar and philosopher, and you just get a completely different sense of them as a thinker. You see them as a person who thought great thoughts and, you know, worked really hard. It must be in the Cahiers de Jeunesse that she talks about it, but I must've been so uninterested in that aspect of her life and thinking as to just completely, you know, pass it by. 

KIM: So in a way, given just what you know, or what you've read and what you remember, it's almost like this could be a real clue into Beauvoir’s loss of faith. I mean, obviously we can't take it for sure, but it's interesting that that's how she portrays Silvie's lack of faith, so it could be very similar to hers. So, anyway, this is a part we're excited to talk about. The Inseparables was thought to be too intimate when it was written 75 years ago. Why do you think that is? And how was it rediscovered? 

AMY: It almost seemed like it was her choice to just put it away for herself. Like she had no interest in having it be published. 

LAUREN: Yeah. I wonder about that. So, I mean, the way that we know about this book was in Force of Circumstance, a later volume of her memoir series, she says that she wrote this novel and she showed it to Sartre and he held his nose and told her it had no interior or internal necessity. And so she put it away. So for decades, Beauvoir scholars had been like, "What is this book? What is this book? Where is it? When can we read it?"

AMY: For our listeners can you explain who that is?

LAUREN: Who who is?

AMY: John-Paul Sartre. 

LAUREN: Oh yeah. Oh! 

AMY: We haven't mentioned him yet. Yeah. 

LAUREN: Yeah. We don't even have to mention him. Everybody always mentions him. 

KIM: Yeah. How important is he, really? Well... 

LAUREN: She, okay. So she had this boyfriend on and off. 

KIM: Exactly. 

LAUREN: She could do better. 

KIM: She totally. 

LAUREN: She did do better.

KIM: Yeah. I love it!

LAUREN: But, he's a great philosopher as well, and she took his opinion very seriously. And he told her it stank. I mean the holding of the nose, that is....

AMY: Come on, that's a drama queen. 

LAUREN: Yeah. 

KIM: He was probably jealous of Zaza. 

LAUREN: Well, that's a really good theory. I mean, so I'll tell you the story about how it was found, and then I can tell you a bit more about my thoughts on the Sartre thing, but, um, so it sat in her drawer and then when she died, her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir, inherited all of her manuscripts and was now in charge of their fate. And a few years ago, this publisher in France called La Pléiade, which is like ... you know when you think of fancy books on a wall, they're always leather-bound and embossed in gold? This is the publisher in France that takes the collected works of a given author and turns them into beautifully-bound, complete works of whomever. And it's a great honor; it's like being canonized to enter into the Pléiade. So a few years ago, Simone de Beauvoir was published in a Pléiade edition, and Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir wanted to include The Inseparables as a kind of appendix to that publication. There wasn't room for all the stuff that she put away in drawers to be included, so Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir decided that she was going to publish this in its own right a couple of years ago. And then obviously, all of the foreign publishers around the world were like, "What? There's a lost novel by Simone de Beauvoir?" And I think, you know, to come back to why Sartre might have held his nose, and to come back to the novel's recent reception as it's come out, there has been some (I mean, controversy is putting too strong a word to it) but some disagreement about the nature of the relationship between Sylvie and Andrée. Obviously, it's not a lesbian novel in the sense that the two are not involved physically or even consciously articulating their desire for one another in a same-sex way. There was at least one piece by Paul Preciado, the philosopher, who said, "This is a lesbian novel." And then Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir and some other people were like, "No! This is not a lesbian novel!" And they thought that that was "like hitting a needle with a hammer," that it's actually much more subtle than that, but I think, you know, Preciado is not wrong. There is an element of queer desire to this novel, and queer desire does not have to consist of two girls getting it on together, or even consciously being aware that that's what they want to do. And I don't think that it's hitting a needle with a hammer to suggest that there's something more going on than just platonic love in this story. And I mean, the fact that she gives her a purse as a present? A red satin purse? Come on, who are you kidding? And so, as I mentioned before, there were some controversies with Beauvoir basically getting asked to leave her teaching job at the lycée in the provinces. It's because she was fondling female students, and that was frowned upon.

AMY: Oh, so now we're getting to it. 

KIM: Yeah. 

LAUREN: Yeah. So, you know, Beauvoir is someone whose sexuality is fluid, to put it mildly, and you know, her relationship with her adopted daughter was also fluid, you know? If you read Dierdre Bair's Parisian Lives, which came out a couple of years ago, Dierdre Bair wrote a memoir about the process of writing a biography of Beauvoir, and then the other half of it is she wrote a biography of Samuel Beckett, as well. So it's like writing about Beauvoir and Beckett. It's a great book — I really recommend it. But she mentioned the nature of their relationship. She asked, "What's your relationship with this young woman? And Beauvoir was like, "We're not lesbians. We don't do anything beneath the belt." 

AMY: Wow. 

LAUREN: Well... 

KIM: Okay. 

LAUREN: So we're not going to use the word "lesbian," but I think it's fine to use the word (and actually really politically and feminist really important) to use the word "queer." 

AMY: This is so fascinating. And now, I mean, this is all making me even more want to go read and learn more about her.

KIM: Yeah. It also kind of answers the question "Why now?" in a way, because, you know, now is when we can talk about that in an open way and we can have these discussions. Yeah. So, but also why else now? Is there anything else you want to say about why now? 

LAUREN: I mean, apart from the fact that it's lost novel by Simone de Beauvoir, so, you know, it's good to know what's in it, but in terms of thinking about how class functions in France at that time, and perhaps functions today, you know, the finer points of the way that the bourgeoisie have all of this power, and people who are maybe more precariously located on the outskirts of that class have a different path to trace, and the way that that intersects with gender and the way that young women have certain choices or don't. It's obviously a lot more subtle now, you know? We're not looking at like, "Am I going to get married or go join a convent?" But I think, you know, the way that young women are asked to be in the world is still very much, um, kind of ... how to phrase it ... I'm trying to think intersectionally, there's a lot of different aspects coming into play in terms of, you know, why a young woman's life takes the shape that it does. The way that Beauvoir is asking us to think about the way the class shapes a young woman's destiny is certainly something that we can stop and consider in this day and age.

KIM: Yes, very much so. I just want to say I think you did a beautiful job on the translation. It's absolutely wonderful. I completely lost myself in it, which is, you know, what you want, I think, from a translation -- that you forget that you're reading a translation, and that absolutely happened for me with this. I highlighted passages and lines throughout, and I would have done that even if I hadn't been, you know, working on the project. So thank you for doing such an amazing job and bringing this book to us in English. 

LAUREN: Thank you. It was all Simone, I was just the channel. 

AMY: It's not homework to read this book. It's enjoyable. 

KIM: It's a pleasure to read it. 

LAUREN: Yeah, completely. 

AMY: And I can't imagine the pressure you must have felt. 

KIM: Oh, I know.

AMY: There had to have been like, an "Oh my God! I've got to get this right! I don't want to mess this up!" 

LAUREN: Yeah, completely. I mean, it was like that at the outset before I was actually working on it, but once I was into it, I felt very sure of myself in a way that I don't often feel sure. (I'm not someone who usually feels sure of herself.) So it felt like a very... I mean, it was a lot of work, but it felt like a very natural kind of work, like my body knew how to do this work. My brain knew how to do this work. And then, yeah, after I had finished a draft, then I definitely was on the horn to some of my translator friends or French-speaking friends, to make sure that I had gotten everything right. And so far, I haven't heard from anyone that there's anything glaringly wrong.

KIM: It seems like the response has been fantastic, though. I'm glad to see that. 

LAUREN: Yeah. It's been a relief. Yeah. 

KIM: Good. 

LAUREN: It's such an amazing book. I can't even believe my luck getting to translate this book. Getting to put this book in my voice is, like, just amazing.

AMY: If listeners want to read more of Beauvoir's fiction after reading this one, what would you suggest next? I mean, I know her book, The Mandarins, won the Prix Goncourt.

LAUREN: I love The Mandarins. I mean, it's very different to this book in the sense that it's very long, and this book, it's very much like Zaza's life: short, sweet and tragic, and you're just like, "No! I want more! It's over! No!" The Mandarins, I mean, I don't think at the end, I was like, "I want more," because it's like 900 pages long. I felt like I'd had enough. But it's so rich. It's about life in Paris just after the end of the Second World War, and these intellectuals, who are all based on, you know, Camus and Sartre and everybody in their circle, having love affairs and trying to do good work; work that would rise to the historical occasion that they found themselves faced with. Like, "How are we going to rebuild France? How are we going to be free?" You know, all of the questions that were facing people who cared about the way that society was put together at the time, you know? Was Communism the way to go? Was Gaullism the way to go? Like, what would happen to the Republic? What was the intellectual's role in the remaking of France at that time? And also questions about love and sexual freedom and female aging and sex after forty, which at the time, I guess, was quite old. It's an amazing, amazing novel, and one you can lose yourself in. 

KIM: I want to go read that right away. So listeners, we encourage you to read The Inseparables right away, if you haven't already. Not only is it a real page-turner, as we've shown, but it seems like an essential piece of the puzzle if you want to understand more about the person who launched the second wave of feminism. 

LAUREN: I should add, if you do want to read my translation of this novel, you probably have to order it from the UK if you're not based in the UK. And I believe Blackwell's has them for like $15, shipping included, to America.

AMY: Oh, perfect. I'm glad you mentioned that. 

LAUREN: Yeah. So no offense to the other translator, you can read that one too, but you know, my one was a good one.

KIM: Yeah, you want to read Lauren's since she was our guest.

LAUREN: I barely even get any royalties, too, so really, it's not like I get more money if you buy my version.

KIM: But it doesn't hurt, so go buy it.

LAUREN: It doesn't hurt, but I mean, that's something that I don't know that people know about, is that translators get like maybe 1%, if they're lucky, and most of the time they don't get anything at all. So that's like a penny.

AMY: Labor of love. Labor of love. 

LAUREN: Yeah, exactly. 

AMY: Speaking of, is there anything else that you're working on now? What's your next project? Anything you can share?

LAUREN: Well, I'm in the revising stages of a book called Art Monsters, which is ... it's trying to argue for an aesthetics of monstrosity as a major kind of feminist tool or way of seeing the world or a way of making art, pretty much from like the seventies to today, but it reaches back to Virginia Woolf and Claude Cahun and the Baroness Elsa. So there's stuff from the earlier 20th century, but it's mainly like Seventies, Eighties, Nineties. So art and literature ... a little bit of film. The way that I'm describing "monstrosity" is really about almost a tactility of viscerality, an attempt to tell the truth of our experience as bodies. (That's a Woolf quote, that's not me.) And so it's art that really is taking embodiment as its point of departure. I think that that's an important way of thinking about "What is feminist art, and what can feminist art do?" Rather than, you know, arguing about who is a woman and who isn't. It's to look at art that moves from the experience of being a body, whatever kind of body that is, and looking at how it's interested in, you know, women's lives.

KIM: That sounds fascinating, and we'd love to have you back on to discuss that one when it's ready. 

LAUREN: Cool, cool.

KIM: Thank you again for joining us, Lauren. This was such a fantastic conversation. What a delight to get to talk to you about this! 

LAUREN: Thank you. It was a pleasure to talk to you guys. This is a fantastic conversation, and yeah, really happy to talk about the book with people who really get it. It's been lovely. 

KIM: Thank you, Lauren. 

AMY: Thank you. Well, we'll keep in touch.

LAUREN: Yeah, definitely. Speak soon!

KIM: So we'll sign off now, but don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter where we'll occasionally be giving out sneak-peek info on which books we'll be featuring in future episodes. You can get a jump on your reading if you're inclined to read along with us.

AMY: And as always, check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show and further information. 

KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jenny Malone. And our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.