YOU MIGHT have read a review in this paper the other day of a book by Bianca Lamblin. Now 75, Ms Lamblin had a three way affair in her youth with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, but got upset later when she discovered through de Beauvoir's posthumously published Letters to Sartre that the pair of them thought her ridiculous and held her in contempt. The book, A Disgraceble Affair, is her account of the whole business.
Our reviewer, Ethna Viney, said Lamblin should have no need in her old age for anger: "Sartre, and to a lesser extent de Beauvoir, are not without blame, but Lamblin, on reading the Letters, should have shrugged her shoulders and said: `Ah, la folie dejeunesse'."
Not without blame. The folly of Lamblin's own jeunesse, of course, if ye folly me: not that of Sartre and de Beauvoir, who were older and an awful lot uglier than the beautiful 17 year old Polish Jew they seduced, manipulated, lied to, drove to mental breakdown, privately mocked and callously discarded.
Ah yes. I often look back on the follies of my own youth a long series of loosely connected embarrassing incidents with the rare heroic moment for counterpoint shrug my shoulders (shrugging other parts of the body is a dead loss) and say, to anyone who cares to listen, `Ah, la folie de jeunesse." My French accent is fairly atrocious but I usually make myself understood.
If I am in more gnomic mood I might sometimes say: `Ah l'eau; c'est l'heure." Few people catch the wryness of this, the nostalgic understatement, the sense of the green light on the dock, Daisy giving her answer (do), the swallows flying south, the roses spilt on youth's red mouth, faeries dancing under the moon (a Druid land, a Druid tune!), boats heating against the stream, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
It's at times like these I feel ado to rid amoureuse langueur, to quote dear old Ronsard. If my attention wanders I might occasionally wonder how Yeats ever had the nerve to rhyme "moon" with "tune".
But look: Sartre and Simone were intellectuals, people who make their own rules, and damn good ones too. You wouldn't be up to them. The pair had, for example, what Sartre, a most engaging hypocrite, called an "essential" love which would allow for "contingent" affairs. An ordinary marriage or relationship was only for the bourgeoisie. Oh fair enough. Ms Viney thinks this is wonderful as it provided them "with a range of emotional experiences".
Right. Read Les Mots, Sartre's account of his Dublin inner city girlfriends in the 1950s and you will see the emotional experiences he got up to. Or take a gawk at Les Chemins de la Liberties, a glittering account of his trawl through Dublin 8 in search of young wans with whom to discuss nothingness (neant) or thingness (etre).
Ms Viney says: "With the self absorption of youth, she (Lamblin) might not have been expected to understand the complex relationship that existed between de Beauvoir and Sartre, or to appreciate that she was coming between them."
The self absorption of youth? Well excuse me being blunt but it was they who obviously appreciated Lamblin between them. But does anyone understand the "complex relationship" between two of the most obnoxious intellectuals of this century? Or want to?
But sure what harm is the ould bit of emotional cruelty, the callousness and self absorption of the intellectual when the pursuit of the higher life is involved? Why should Sartre and de Beauvoir have worried that they drove Lamblin to mental breakdown with their monumental egotism? Why should they have worried about a young Polish Jew in Nazi France? "She's prophesying doom like a Cassandra (what's new?) and hesitating between the concentration camp and suicide" wrote de Beauvoir to Sartre, in between sharing her in bed.
De Beauvoir went right off Ms Lamblin when the latter became a philosophy teacher and worse, a mother, thus giving in to disgustingly bourgeois inclinations. Alter all, de Beauvoir's hero, Sartre, when a young teacher, identified boldly and at great personal risk with the working classes by refusing to wear a tie.
And what an artist in chat up lines, the same lad. Just before the 33 year old teacher seduced the 17 year old girl for the first time in a Paris hotel room, he remarked to her: "The hotel chambermaid will really be surprised, because I already took a girl's virginity yesterday."
