Simone Beauvoir - The Mandarins

‘I don’t say one has to stop writing,’ Henri replied. He paused; Lambert’s reproach had touched a sore spot. Yes, there were a great many other things to be said about Portugal, and it was with no little regret that he had pushed them aside. An artist, a writer – that’s what he wanted to be, that’s what he had to keep in mind at all times. Long ago he had made great promises to himself; now was the time to keep them. Precocious triumphs, a too-opportune book, too highly praised – he wanted something else more than that. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he resumed, ‘I’ve just got started on the kind of novel you’ll like. Just a story, in which I’ll write what I please for my own pleasure.’

‘Really?’ Lambert said, his face brightening. ‘Have you done very much? Is it going well?’

‘Beginnings, you know, are always thankless. But it’s coming along!’ Henri replied.

‘You don’t know how happy I am to hear that!’ Lambert said. ‘It would be a damned shame if you let yourself be eaten up!’

‘I won’t let myself be eaten up,’ Henri said.

‘How’s your light novel coming along?’ Paula asked.

‘It’s coming,’ Henri replied.

She stretched herself out on the bed behind him, and he felt her eyes studying the back of his neck. She made him feel uneasy, but it would have been unkind of him to chase her out. After all, eyes make no noise. He tried to concentrate on the novel. During the past month, he had made several decisions and had finally resigned himself to setting the story in 1935. Perhaps it was a mistake – for days now, sentences had been withering at the tip of his pen.

‘Yes, it is a mistake,’ he said to himself decisively. He had wanted to write about himself. Well, he had nothing in common with the person he had been in 1935. His political indifference, his curiosity, his ambition, all that stubborn insistence on individualism – how quickly it passed, how foolish it was! It presupposed a future without obstacles, with guaranteed progress, the immediate brotherhood of man, and peace everlasting. Above all it presupposed selfishness and thoughtlessness. Oh, he would no doubt have been able to find excuses enough. But he was writing this book in order to try to tell the truth about his life, not to explain away its faults. ‘It has to be written in the present,’ he decided. He reread the last few pages. It was a pity to think that the past was going to be finally buried – his arrival in Paris, his first meetings with Dubreuilh, the trip to Djerba. ‘I’ve lived them; that should be enough,’ he said to himself. But if you take that position then the present is also enough, life itself is enough. And it obviously wasn’t, for he had to write to feel himself completely alive. Too bad then. In any case you can’t salvage everything. The question was to know what to say about himself, about himself today. ‘How far have I come? What do I want?’ It was funny – if you’re so set on expressing yourself, it’s because you feel you’re unique. And he was not even able to say in what way he thought he was! ‘Who am I?’ He did not ask himself that question in the past; then it had always been the others who were defined, had limits. But not he. His books and life were still ahead of him. It enabled him to dismiss all adverse criticism, and from the heights of his future works to look on everyone, even Dubreuilh, with a little condescension. But now, he had to admit to himself that he was a mature man: young people treated him as an elder, adults as one of them, and some even treated him with respect. Mature, bounded, finite, himself and no one else, nothing but himself. But who was he? In a way, his books would ultimately decide; but on the other hand, he had to know the truth about himself in order to write them. At first sight, the meaning of those months he had just lived through was quite clear, but if you looked more closely everything became hazy. Helping people to think straight, to live better lives – was his heart really set on it, or was it only a humanitarian daydream? Was he really interested in what happened to others, or only in soothing his own conscience? And literature? What meaning did it now hold for him? There’s nothing more abstract than wanting to write when you have nothing urgent to say. His pen hung motionless above the paper and he thought irritably that Paula was there behind him, watching him not write.

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