To the Editor:

I was . . . surprised to find an article on Simone de Beauvoir written by a man [“Beauvoir’s Last Revolt,” August]. Aside from the need to hear from women on women . . . it’s like asking a French poet to comment on a Chinese poet. It can be done, but unless the Frenchman has steeped himself in Chinese poetry and culture, his insights will be blunted. For example, Mr. Grossman asks whether aging is so painful to Beauvoir because she, in particular, is experiencing it, and then he wonders whether children or grandchildren might have mitigated her agony. I feel he’s speaking in a foreign tongue.

First, having a child or grandchild does not necessarily help women come to terms with the menopause and approaching senility. On the contrary, for some intelligent women who are reaching maturity without accomplishment, children are seen as “pulling at me” and (perhaps because they’ve been given permission by the advent of Women’s Lib, which functions as an ethical synthesizer) are thought of as “takers.” The anguish of these women is as great as Beauvoir’s. I believe they suffer because they have not been gifted with the quality of motherliness (nor are they particularly loving); and, unfortunately, women (and men) have until recently been thought of as breeders, but their suitability as parents has not been considered.

Second, looking at their suffering, I find myself thinking of them as societal victims on another level. From what I know of these women, and from Mr. Grossman’s account, their problem appears to be a displaced vanity. . . . “The eyes of Others are mirrors, crueler even than her [Beauvoir’s] own, and she feels changed, diminished, twisted in reflection. Aging is a mutilation of her body and therefore of herself. . . .”

I’ve not read The Coming of Age, but I find myself wondering whether Beauvoir’s displaced vanity was allowed to develop until it choked her because she is a woman. Surely you don’t stop relating to other people simply because your skin is wrinkled and your body shrinking? . . .

Nan Mizrachi
New York City

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To the Editor:

“. . . If Beauvoir is to be believed, the worst thing about getting old is not getting sick, or even losing strength and power—it is receiving the dehumanizing look of Others,” states Edward Grossman. If I am to be believed, many of the statements made in the course of Mr. Grossman’s article dehumanize me, especially the following:

Put archetypically, a movie actress ought to be more profoundly affected by the very thought of menopause (or even the loss of looks that begins for a woman at thirty-five). . . .

When, in biological terms, she loses the ability to bear children, and her body loses the last of its power to excite desire. . . .

And, if old age is a mutilation, it begins early for women—at the menopause, in fact, or earlier.

I hate to think what power over me a look will one day have. . . .

Mr. Grossman points out that Beauvoir specifically in this book seems to depart from the lines of her former work. Whereas she formerly felt that she could take each stage in her life “cheerfully,” she now finds herself “afraid.” “It is in the autumn and winter of life that woman is freed from her chains,” she had once written. Now, she speaks of anguish. . . .

Beauvoir gives examples of decline with age that she has chosen from literature. For Mr. Grossman the most affecting ones are the pictures of the decline of women. Beauvoir herself, according to Mr. Grossman, feels that there are few comparatively happy old people and that old age is more painful and humiliating for a woman than for a man.

Simone de Beauvoir, as Mr. Grossman has adequately pointed out, has been a woman who has given of herself, an important part of herself, to her work. Whereas previously, as Mr. Grossman has also pointed out, Beauvoir was influenced, perhaps too much, by Marx, Freud, and Sartre, she now reveals that her anguish is part of her “situation” as a woman, a woman living in a world where the dominance is perceived finally as male, where the “look of Others” is the “look” of the male upon the female. . . .

Another dehumanizing aspect of the self-image that a woman “rebels” against is the unimportance of work, her own work, in her lifetime. For myself, I have found, and it is something that I must defend constantly, that the only time I feel that oneness within myself that I can think of as health is when I am working. . . .

Helen Duberstein
New York City

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To the Editor:

Having myself reviewed several of Simone de Beauvoir’s books in the French original, I fully agree with Edward Grossman’s brilliant article. I am glad to see that he has noted some of the rather exasperating sloppinesses of Mlle. de Beauvoir’s statements of fact about certain persons. Believe it or not, Mr. Grossman and I are, to my knowledge, the only reviewers of The Coming of Age in this country to have discovered Beauvoir’s strange claim that Lou Andreas-Salomé was Jewish. But there are many more “mistakes” of this type, some of which betray a rather grotesque ignorance. Let me quote my own findings (French Review, December 1970): “In connection with Freud, Mlle. de Beauvoir discusses Lou Andreas-Salomé, about whom she makes some rather erroneous statements. Lou von Salomé, the daughter of a Czarist Russian general, was not Jewish nor did she ‘discover sexuality’ only at the age of thirty-five. . . . Concerning Freud, the author [Beauvoir], falling for certain defeatist remarks of the father of, psychoanalysis in private correspondence, falsely claims that he had lost his creative power and ‘could not work any more’ as early as 1926, whereas Freud published several important works during the following decade. . . . There are other odd mix-ups, such as ‘L’Avenir d’une civilisation’ [sic] instead of ‘L’Avenir d’une illusion.’ . . . These . . . errors could easily have been avoided if the author had taken the trouble to check her sources a little more carefully.”

Henry Walter Brann
Takoma Park, Maryland

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Edward Grossman writes:

Nan Mizrachi declares that she hasn’t read The Coming of Age. Reading her letter, I find myself wondering whether she has read my article on it. I wrote that having children or grandchildren most probably wouldn’t have made aging significantly less painful for Simone de Beauvoir: “she is what she is,” I wrote, meaning that she is a woman who would have made the same hard demands on the world and on herself had she chosen to be a parent. Even though I am a man, I granted Beauvoir the right to the choice she did make, and saluted her bravery in facing up to its consequences.

There ought to be no need to add that I don’t equate personal worth with young good looks—that would “dehumanize” me even more than it would Helen Duberstein.

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