More than ever, and for ever

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 20 · 15 October 1998

From Editors, ‘London Review’

In a fit of editorial enthusiasm, a reference in Michael Rogin’s article on Beauvoir and Nelson Algren (17 September) to Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964) – H.E.F. Donohue’s – was changed to Conversations with Sartre (1981) – Beauvoir’s. Apologies to our contributor, our readers and the august conversationalists.

Editors, ‘London Review’

Vol. 20 No. 21 · 29 October 1998

From Ian Wylie

Michael Rogin’s review of Simone de Beauvoir’s Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren (LRB, 17 September) quotes one of Algren’s three rules for getting through life: ‘Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.’ This leaves one eager to know the other two.

Ian Wylie
Holmes Chapel, Cheshire

Vol. 20 No. 22 · 12 November 1998

From Neal Ascherson

The first two don’ts in Nelson Algren’s warning-for-life, which were requested by Ian Wylie (Letters, 29 October), are ‘Never play cards with a man called Doc; Never eat in a diner that offers "Mom’s Cooking".’ The third, as I heard the rules from an American journalist in Poland many years ago, was ‘Never sleep with a woman who has more problems than you.’ But did Algren invent these rules? They sound like postwar American fiction – but maybe not his.

Neal Ascherson
London N5

From David Warren

I think Algren’s other two life rules were ‘Never play poker with anyone called "Pop" and ‘Never eat at any place called "Mom’s".’ An imaginative Oedipal theory could no doubt be advanced to cover all three.

David Warren
Kingston, Surrey

From Adam Wilkins

Algren’s other rules were ‘Never play cards with a guy named "Doc" and ‘Never eat at a place called "Mom’s".’ In my opinion, these are all excellent pieces of advice and when my son turned 20, I passed them on to him.

Adam Wilkins
Cambridge

Vol. 20 No. 23 · 26 November 1998

From Beverley Strauss

I have never played cards with a man call ‘Doc’ or dined at a place called ‘Mom’s’ (and a fat lot of good it’s done me), but in the case of Algren’s third axiom: how do you know beforehand?

Beverley Strauss
Lancaster

Vol. 20 No. 24 · 10 December 1998

From Sylvia Lawson

It’s ironic that Michael Rogin’s article on Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to Nelson Algren (LRB, 17 September) has provoked notes only on Algren’s rueful aphorisms. Surely the problem is with the book’s central paradox: the letters, while affirming the famous transatlantic passion, simultan eously register Beauvoir’s crowded, work-centred, politicised life in Paris. During the period they cover she wrote 12 books, including The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, and also pitched in hard with Sartre and thousands of others in the campaign against the Algerian war. For all the force of the letters, the interesting new material is less on Algren than on the amazing range of her commitments. She did nothing by halves.

Michael Rogin ascribes to the letters ‘an eloquence rarely found in the volumes Beauvoir wrote for publication’. This curious judgment compares informal, idiosyncratic, foreigner’s English with French in many and various modes. It also ignores the claims of a lifetime’s writing, with durable kinds of ‘eloquence’ across the genres – fiction, memoirs, essays, journalism, polemics, letters. It collaborates, even if against Rogin’s intentions, with those myth-makers who reduce her life and works to a string of love-affairs; it’s exactly the sort of mystification (her word) Beauvoir sought to demolish in The Second Sex.

Recent commentators have performed a similar operation on Hannah Arendt: against the evidence of major works in political philosophy and two interesting marriages, she’s supposed to have spent decades carrying a torch for Heidegger. It seems that the intellectual woman is still a disconcerting figure in the landscape.

Sylvia Lawson
Sydney