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From Script to Scream

Richard Mayne, 18 December 1980

Caligari’s Children 
by S.S. Prawer.
Oxford, 307 pp., £8.95, March 1980, 9780192175847
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The Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman 
by Robert Phillip Kolker.
Oxford, 395 pp., £8.50, April 1980, 0 19 502588 1
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... watching a horror movie – involved but powerless, transfixed by uncontrollable events. As Simone deBeauvoir once quaintly put it, ‘when I go into a cinema, my praxis is paralysed.’ Many films resemble dreams or nightmares: many directors are Luna-park sorcerers, turning the spectator into a spellbound ...

Performing Seals

Christopher Hitchens: The PR Crowd, 10 August 2000

Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals 
by David Laskin.
Simon and Schuster, 319 pp., $26, January 2000, 0 684 81565 6
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... Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. But two of them had a crack at the earlier work of Simone deBeauvoir. Mary McCarthy pointed out waspishly that the great Parisienne was no more than an appendage to Sartre. Elizabeth Hardwick took a higher tone, at least as sarcastically described by Lowell, who wrote in ...

Meg, Jo, Beth and Me

Elaine Showalter, 23 March 1995

Little Women 
directed by Gillian Armstrong.
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... be no other book so loved by one sex and ignored by the other. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone deBeauvoir writes: ‘There was one book in which I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott ... I identified passionately with Jo, the intellectual ... She wrote; in ...

Dive In!

Bruce Robbins: Hegelian reflections, 2 November 2000

Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in 20th-Century France 
by Judith Butler.
Columbia, 268 pp., £12, June 1999, 0 231 06451 9
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... bondage in the recreational sense and, aside from a few pages at the end about Julia Kristeva and Simone deBeauvoir, was mostly indifferent to questions of sexuality. It is sexual politics that has generated Butler’s present celebrity, however, which no doubt helps explain the republication of the Hegel book ...

The Excitement of the Stuff

Terry Eagleton: On Fredric Jameson, 10 October 2024

The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 458 pp., £20, October, 978 1 80429 589 2
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... book pushes the years of French theory back to the aftermath of the Second World War (Sartre, Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty) and in doing so weaves a personal biography into its intellectual history. Jameson’s first book was on Sartre; he regarded himself as a ‘more-than-former-Sartrean’ and was inclined to overrate Being and ...

I dive under the covers

Sheila Heti: Mad Wives, 6 June 2013

Heroines 
by Kate Zambreno.
Semiotext(e), 309 pp., £12.95, November 2012, 978 1 58435 114 6
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... periods and headaches – she does, too. How far can she go? In one scene, she looks at Simone Weil. ‘I am Simone Weil,’ she declares, ‘although Simone Weil pushed bravely past her sinus headaches, working in the fields and organising worker protests, and writing her ...

Mon Charabia

Olivier Todd: Bad Duras, 4 March 1999

Marguerite Duras 
by Laure Adler.
Gallimard, 627 pp., frs 155, August 1998, 2 07 074523 6
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No More 
by Marguerite Duras.
Seven Stories, 203 pp., £10.99, November 1998, 1 888363 65 7
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... Her biographer suggests that the ‘purity’ of her style derives from her study of Madame de Lafayette and Racine, but this is hard to reconcile with the alleged influence of Bataille and Blanchot. With Lewis Carroll, it was love at first sight, but the infatuation was short-lived: humour was not Duras’s strong point. She laughed a lot, it is ...

It isn’t your home

Toril Moi: Sarraute gets her due, 10 September 2020

Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between 
by Ann Jefferson.
Princeton, 425 pp., £34, August 2020, 978 0 691 19787 6
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... more alike than they were, for they were united by a common enemy: existentialism. Sartre and Beauvoir and their adherents dominated the immediate postwar period in France. The new writers and theorists would have to slay the existentialist dragon. They accused the existentialists of embracing a naive view of language and equally naive ideas about freedom ...

Private Lives and Public Affairs

Onora O’Neill, 18 October 1984

Public and Private in Social Life 
edited by S.I. Benn and G.F. Gaus.
Croom Helm, 412 pp., £19.95, July 1983, 0 7099 0668 4
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Public Man, Private Woman 
by Jean Bethke Elshtain.
Martin Robertson, 376 pp., £22.50, February 1982, 0 85520 470 2
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Women’s Choices: Philosophical Problems facing Feminism 
by Mary Midgley and Judith Hughes.
Weidenfeld, 242 pp., £12.95, September 1983, 0 297 78221 5
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... libertarian liberals but by some feminist thinkers, might be to take individualism more seriously. Simone deBeauvoir and Shulamith Firestone both argued that if women are prevented by their traditional domestic roles and intimate ties from enjoying equal rights and citizenship, then these ties should be severed. Birth ...

Critics in the Sky

Emily Witt: Sheila Heti’s New Cosmology, 21 April 2022

Pure Colour 
by Sheila Heti.
Harvill Secker, 216 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 78730 280 8
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... existentialists who seem to be their intellectual predecessors. They are not the daughters of Simone deBeauvoir, shaping their lives through determined acts of will. Instead, they grapple with an unstable sense of self, their certainty easily swayed by whoever is nearby. They want to escape the dysfunction and ...

Life Soup

Liam Shaw: Slime!, 21 April 2022

Slime: A Natural History 
by Susanne Wedlich, translated by Ayça Türkoğlu.
Granta, 326 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 1 78378 670 1
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... with mescaline by his friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone deBeauvoir phoned to check in on the first-time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she had interrupted a losing battle against a mass of octopuses. He had been promised a ...

Terror on the Vineyard

Terry Castle: Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, 15 April 1999

A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman 
by Rosemary Mahoney.
Doubleday, 273 pp., $23.95, November 1998, 9780385479318
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... a famous and idealised older woman fails to live up to the needs of a younger protégée it is de rigueur nowadays for the latter to rage in print at the cruelty of her faithless idol. Mommie Dearest (1978), Christina Crawford’s high-kitsch account of her wretched childhood with her adoptive mother Joan Crawford, is the archetype here – the first and ...

How to do the life

Lorna Sage, 10 February 1994

Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World 
by Carol Brightman.
Lime Tree, 714 pp., £20, July 1993, 0 413 45821 0
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... the daughter, or even granddaughter generation. She inevitably regards McCarthy’s tours de force in exposing the bad faith of the radicals of the Thirties and Forties with some ambivalence: ‘By withholding pity, by honouring the weight and worth of convention in American life, McCarthy uncovers a deeper truth about the way in which American ...
Biting the Dust: The Joys of Housework 
by Margaret Horsfield.
Fourth Estate, 292 pp., £14.99, April 1997, 1 85702 422 2
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... be ranked? As a profession? As domestic science? As art and mystery? A ‘torture of Sisyphus’ (Simone deBeauvoir)? A sanitarian crusade? A divinely ordained form of drudgery? An unpaid, male-imposed scam? A therapy that expands the chest while allowing the stressed mind to freewheel? Or was it, and is it, just the ...

No Rain-Soaked Boots

Toril Moi: On Cristina Campo, 24 October 2024

‘The Unforgivable’ and Other Writings 
by Cristina Campo, translated by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 269 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 68137 802 2
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... is something fascinating about opening a book by a writer one knows nothing about. A good reader, Simone deBeauvoir once wrote, has to be willing to follow the writer on her adventure. I took her advice, cleared my mind and tried to follow Cristina Campo on her journey. I was in for a shock: in these essays, Campo ...

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