It was my father who made me realize what it would be like; I had counted on his support, his sympathy, his approval: I was deeply disappointed when he withheld them from me. It was a far cry from my own high-flown ideas to his morose scepticism; his moral code insisted that institutions should be respected; as for individuals, they had no other purpose on earth than to keep out of trouble and enjoy life to the best of their abilities. My father often stated that one should have an ideal, and though he detested them, he admired the Italians because they had one in Mussolini: yet he never suggested what my ideal should be. But I didn’t expect him to do as much as that for me. Considering his age and circumstances, I thought his attitude was a natural one, and it seemed to me that he might have been able to understand mine. On many points – the League of Nations, the Radical Coalition, and the war in Morocco – I had no opinion of my own and I agreed with everything he said about them. The points on which we disagreed seemed to me so unimportant that at first I made no effort to reconcile our differences.
My father regarded Anatole France as the greatest writer of the century; at the end of the summer holidays he had made me read The Red Lily and The Gods Athirst. I had not evinced much enthusiasm for these. But he persisted and gave me for my eighteenth birthday the four volumes of The Literary Life. France’s hedonism filled me with indignation. All he looked for in art was the satisfaction of egotistical desires: how low can you get! I thought. I despised also the platitude of Maupassant’s novels which my father considered to be works of art. I told him so politely, but he took it the wrong way: he was well aware that my tastes brought many things into question. He was more seriously annoyed when I attacked certain traditions. It was only with very bad grace that I attended the dinners and luncheons which several times a year reunited the whole blessed family at one cousin’s or another’s; only personal feelings are important, I claimed, and not chance ties of blood; but my father encouraged the cult of the family and he began to think that I was quite heartless. I couldn’t accept his concept of marriage; he was less austere than the Mabilles, and admitted that love should play a fairly big part; but I couldn’t separate love from friendship: he couldn’t see what these two sentiments had in common. I couldn’t accept that one of the partners should ‘be unfaithful’ to the other: if they didn’t get along together, then they should separate. It exasperated me that my father should think it was quite all right for the husband to sabotage the marriage settlement. I was not a feminist to the extent of caring about politics: I didn’t give twopence for women’s right to the vote. But in my opinion men and women had a right to be considered equal as human beings, and I demanded that they should have exactly reciprocal benefits and privileges. My father’s attitude towards ‘the fair sex’ wounded me deeply. Taken as a whole, the frivolity of bourgeois love-affairs and adulteries made me sick. My Uncle Gaston took my sister, a girl cousin, and myself to see an innocent little operetta by Mirande called Passionately; when we got back home I expressed my disgust with a vigour which took my parents by surprise: yet I could read Gide and Proust without batting an eyelid. Current notions of sexual morality scandalized me both by their indulgence and their severity. I was stupefied to learn from a small news item that abortion was a crime: what went on in one’s body should be one’s own concern; no amount of argument could make me see it any differently.
Our disputes soon took on an acrid note; if he had shown himself inclined to be tolerant I could have accepted my father for what he was; but I was still nobody, I was still trying to come to a decision about what I was to be, and by adopting opinions and tastes that were at variance with his own, it seemed to him as if I were deliberately disowning him. On the other hand, he could see much more clearly than I could the downward path I was treading. I was renouncing the hierarchies, the values, and the ceremonies which distinguish the élite; my critical attitude towards it was only serving, I thought, to rid it of futile relics of past times: it did, in fact, imply the liquidation of the élite. Only the individual seemed to me to be real and important: I would, in the end, inevitably be led to prefer society as a whole to my own class. After all, it was I who had opened fire; but I didn’t realize this, and I couldn’t understand why my father and the other members of my social class were condemning me. I had fallen into a trap; the bourgeoisie had persuaded me that its interests were closely linked with those of humanity as a whole; I thought that I could enlist the support of my own class in the pursuit of truths that would be valid for everyone: but as soon as I made my intentions clear, it was up in arms against me. I felt myself to be ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’. Who or what had misled me? Why? And how? In any case, I was the victim of an injustice, and gradually my resentment turned to open rebellion.
No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me. I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose novelty dumbfounded me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, its deliriums, the splendour of great renunciations and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills. I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself. I was grateful for an exile which had driven me to find such lonely and such lofty joys; I despised those who knew nothing about them, and was astonished that I had been able to exist for so long without them.
At the same time I persisted in my determination to be of service to humanity. I attacked Renan in my diary. I protested that a great man is not an end in himself: he will only justify his existence if he contributes to the raising of the moral and intellectual standards of common humanity. My Catholic upbringing had taught me never to look upon any individual, however lowly, as of no account: everyone had the right to bring to fulfilment what I called their eternal essence. My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich, and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.
I felt I should already be trying to communicate the experience of solitude which I was then undergoing. In April I wrote the first pages of a novel. In the character of Éliane, I described myself wandering in a park with some of my cousins; I picked up a beetle out of the grass. ‘Let’s see!’ they cried. They thronged round me, but I struggled out of their grasp and ran away with the beetle jealously guarded in my hand. They ran after me; breathless, with pounding heart, I ran deeper and deeper into the woods until I shook them off; then I began to cry softly. Soon I dried my tears, and murmured to myself: ‘No one will ever know.’ I walked slowly back home. ‘She felt sufficiently strong in herself to defend her one possession against blows and blandishments, and to keep her fist tightly closed all the time.’
This little fable expressed my most obsessive worry: how to defend myself against other people; for though my parents did not spare me their reproaches, they demanded my confidences. My mother had often told me how she had suffered from grandmama’s coldness towards her, and that she hoped she could be a friend to her daughters; but how could she have talked to me as one woman to another? In her eyes I was a soul in mortal peril; I had to be saved from damnation: I was an object, not a woman. The firmness of her convictions forbade her to make the slightest concession. If she questioned me, it was not in order to come to an understanding with me on common ground: she was simply making an investigation. I always had the feeling, whenever she asked me a question, that she was spying on me through a keyhole. The very fact that she had renounced all her claims on me shut me up like a clam. This made her resentful towards me and she tried to break down my resistance by deploying a solicitude which only strengthened it.
‘Simone would rather bite out her tongue than say what she’s thinking,’ she would remark in a tone of sharp vexation. That was quite true: I was prodigiously silent. I had given up arguing, even with my father; I hadn’t the slightest chance of influencing his way of thinking – it was like beating my head against a brick wall. Once and for all, and just as radically as my mother, he had made up his mind about me, and for the worse; he no longer even tried to convince me of the error of my ways; all he wanted was to find fault with me. The most innocent conversations were full of hidden traps; my parents construed my words in their own idiom and ascribed to me ideas that had nothing in common with what I really thought. I had always fought against the tyranny of language, and now I found myself repeating Barrès’ phrase: ‘Why have words, when their brutal precision bruises our complicated souls?’ As soon as I opened my mouth I provided them with a stick to beat me with, and once more I would be shut up in that world which I had spent years trying to get away from, in which everything, without any possibility of mistake, has its own name, its set place and its agreed function, in which hate and love, good and evil are as crudely differentiated as black and white, in which from the start everything is classified, catalogued, fixed and formulated, and irrevocably judged; that world with the sharp edges, its bare outlines starkly illuminated by an implacable flat light that is never once touched by the shadow of a doubt. I preferred to hold my tongue. But my parents wouldn’t put up with that: they had to charge me with ingratitude. I was not nearly as heartless as my father thought, and I was deeply distressed; at night I wept on my pillow. It even came about that I burst into tears to their faces; they took offence at this and reproached me all the more with being a monster of ingratitude. I tried to pretend, to lie, to give soft answers, but I did it with ill grace: I felt I was being a traitor to myself. I decided I must ‘tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’: in that way I would avoid disguising and at the same time betraying my thoughts. This was not very clever of me, for I merely succeeded in scandalizing my parents without satisfying their curiosity. In fact, there was no possible solution to the situation. I was cornered; my parents could bear neither what I had to say, nor my dogged silence; when I took the risk and gave them certain explanations, they were staggered by them. ‘You’re taking the wrong view of life altogether; life isn’t as complicated as all that,’ my mother would say. But if I withdrew into my shell, my father would complain that I had no heart, that I was all brain and no feeling. There was talk of sending me abroad, all sorts of people were asked for advice and there was a general panic. I tried to put on protective armour by exhorting myself not to be afraid of blame, ridicule, or lack of understanding: it little mattered what opinion people had of me, whether well-founded or not. When I reached this state of indifference, I could laugh even when I least felt like laughing and agree with everything that was being said. But then I would feel so utterly cut off from my fellow-beings; I would gaze in the looking-glass at the person they could see: it wasn’t me; I wasn’t there, I wasn’t anywhere; how could I find myself again? I was on the wrong track. ‘Life is a lie,’ I would tell myself in a fit of depression. In principle, I had nothing against lying; but from a practical point of view I found it exhausting to be always fabricating masks. Sometimes I used to think that my strength would fail me and that I would have to give in and become like all the others.
I found this idea all the more frightening because I was now returning their hostility. Formerly, when I had sworn never to be like them, I used to feel pity for them, and not animosity; but now they detested in me whatever distinguished me from them, the things to which I attached the greatest value: I moved on from commiseration to anger. How sure they were that they were right! I They refused to admit any possibility of change or argument; they turned a blind eye to every problem. In order to understand the world and find myself I had to save myself from them.
It was very disconcerting, when I had thought I was making a triumphal progress, to realize suddenly that I was engaged in a bitter struggle; it gave me a shock from which I took a long time to recover; at any rate, books helped me to regain some of my crestfallen pride. ‘Family, I hate you! You dead homes and shut doors!’ Ménalque’s* imprecation re-assured me that by finding home dull I was serving a sacred cause. When I read the first books by Barrès I learnt that ‘the free man’ always arouses the ire of the ‘barbarians’, and that my first duty was to hold my own against them. So I was not suffering under some obscure misfortune; I was fighting the good fight.
Barrès, Gide, Valéry, Claudel: I took part in the devotions of a new generation of writers; and I read feverishly all the novels, all the essays of my older contemporaries. It was quite natural that I should have recognized myself in them because we were all in the same boat. Bourgeois like myself, they too felt ill at ease and out of place. The war had destroyed their security without freeing them from the trammels of class distinction; they were in revolt, but only against their parents, their family, and tradition. Sick of the ‘bull’ they had had to put up with during the war, they were now claiming the right to look things squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. As they had no intention of overthrowing society they contented themselves with studying the states of their precious souls in the minutest detail: they preached ‘sincerity towards oneself’. Rejecting all clichés and commonplaces, they disdainfully refused to accept the wisdom of their elders whose failure they had witnessed, but did not attempt to find another to take its place; they preferred to insist that one should never be satisfied with anything: theirs was a worship of disquiet. Every smart young man was an apostle of disquiet; during Lent in 1925 Father Sanson had preached in Notre-Dame on ‘Human Disquiet’. Out of disgust with an outworn morality, the most daring went as far as to question the existence of Good and Evil: they were admirers of Dostoyevsky’s ‘possessed’ creatures; Dostoyevsky became one of their idols. Certain of them practised a disdainful aestheticism; others rallied round the flag of the immoralists.
I was in exactly the same position as these unhinged young men from respectable homes; I, too, was breaking away from the class to which I belonged: where was I to go? There was no question of sinking to the level of the ‘lower orders’; one could, one ought to help them to rise above their inferior condition, but just at that period in my diary I was confusing my disgust for the epicurism of Anatole France with the crass materialism of the workers who ‘crammed the cinemas’. As I couldn’t imagine any place on earth that would suit my temperament, I gaily accepted the idea that I would never settle anywhere. I dedicated myself to the cult of Disquiet. Since childhood I had been questing for absolute sincerity. All around me people deplored falsehood, but were careful to avoid the truth; if I found so much difficulty in speaking freely now, it was because I felt it was repugnant to make use of the counterfeit coinage that was current in my environment. I lost no time in embracing the principles of immoralism. Of course, I did not approve of people stealing out of self-interest or going to bed with someone for the pure pleasure of it; but if these became quite gratuitous acts, acts of desperation and revolt – and, of course, quite imaginary – I was prepared to stomach all the vices, the rapes, and the assassinations you might care to mention. Doing wrong was the most uncompromising way of repudiating all connexions with respectable people.
A refusal to use hollow words, false moralizing and its too-easy consolations: the literature of those days was presenting this negative attitude as a positive ethical system. It was turning our disquiet into a crusade; we were seeking for salvation. If we had renounced our class, it was in order to get closer to the Absolute. ‘Sin is God’s empty place,’ Stanislas Fumet wrote in Our Baudelaire. So immoralism was not just a snook cocked at society; it was a way of reaching God. Believers and unbelievers alike used this name. According to some, it signified an inaccessible presence, and to others, a vertiginous absence; there was no difference, and I had no difficulty in amalgamating Claudel and Gide; in
both of them, God was defined, in relationship to the bourgeois world, as the other, and everything that was other was a manifestation of something divine. I could recognize the thirst that tortured Nathanaël as the emptiness at the heart of Péguy’s Joan of Arc and the leprosy gnawing at the flesh of Violaine; there is not much distance between a superhuman sacrifice and a gratuitous crime, and I saw in Sygne the sister of Lafcadio. The important thing was to use whatever means one could to find release from the world, and then one would come within reach of eternity.
A small number of young writers – Ramon Fernandez, Jean Prévost, and others- turned from these mystical ways in order to try to build a new humanism; I did not follow them. Yet the year before I had read Henri Poincaré with excitement; I was glad to be alive; but humanism – unless it were revolutionary, and the sort that was talked about in the Nouvelle Revue Française was not – implies that one can attain the universal and still be a bourgeois: and I had just made the brutal discovery that such a hope was a trap. From then on, I only attached a relative value to my intellectual life, as it had failed to reconcile me with everyone whose respect I wanted. I invoked a superior authority which would allow me to challenge outside judgements: I took refuge in ‘my inmost self’ and decided that my whole existence would be subordinate to it.