The Prime of Life

Beauvoir wrote La Force de l'âge between 1958 and 1960 and Gallimard published it in Paris in November 1960, two years after Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Peter Green's English translation appeared from World Publishing in Cleveland in 1962 and from André Deutsch in London the same year. The volume is longer than the first (roughly six hundred pages in most editions) and less shaped: Beauvoir's argument, in the preface, is that the years after her agrégation are less easily narrated as one story because she was living them rather than being made by them.

The book covers what would prove to be the years of Beauvoir's professional and personal formation. She and Sartre established, in the first months after the agrégation, the ground rules of their partnership — the essential relationship, the contingent affairs, the promise of complete honesty — that would last, in some form, for fifty years. She began serious fiction alongside her teaching. She and Sartre travelled every summer they could afford it (Spain, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Berlin, London). She took up with Olga Kosakiewicz in Rouen in 1935 in the intense three-year triangle that both She Came to Stay and this volume describe from the two sides available.

The second half of the book is the war. Sartre is mobilised in September 1939, captured at Padoux in June 1940, held at Stalag XII-D until March 1941, and released after faking a medical exemption. Occupied Paris follows. Beauvoir teaches, writes, cycles hundreds of kilometres in the summers to visit Sartre's family in the free zone, is dismissed from her teaching post in June 1943 after a complaint from the mother of her former student Nathalie Sorokine, and works on La Force de l'âge's third major novel, Le Sang des autres (published later as The Blood of Others). The book closes on the celebration in the streets of Paris when the Germans left in August 1944.

Part I opens in October 1929, days after the agrégation results. Beauvoir at twenty-one moves out of her parents' apartment on the rue de Rennes and into a rented room at her grandmother's flat on rue Denfert-Rochereau, where she does not have to explain herself. She and Sartre, who has just been called up for eighteen months of military service, work out the terms of their relationship over a park bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg: a two-year pact renewable, allowing each other 'contingent loves' but promising complete honesty. It becomes the shape of their life. In 1931 Beauvoir takes her first teaching post at the Lycée Montgrand in Marseille, where she walks eight or nine hours a day in the surrounding hills; in 1932 she is transferred to the Lycée Jeanne d'Arc in Rouen, where she remains for four years. She writes her first novel in Rouen and cannot get it published. She and Sartre travel every summer they can afford: Spain in 1931, Italy in 1932, Berlin in the winter of 1933–34 (where Sartre is on a fellowship at the Institut Français and where they see Nazi rallies in the street), Corsica in 1935, Greece in 1937.

Part II is the trio and its aftermath. In 1935, Olga Kosakiewicz — a Russian-born former pupil of Beauvoir's from Rouen — moves to Paris to prepare her baccalauréat. Beauvoir and Sartre take her up together, financially and emotionally; the three of them form the intense triangle that Beauvoir would fictionalise as Françoise, Pierre, and Xavière in She Came to Stay. The real trio ends in 1937 in exhaustion and separate re-attachments rather than in murder; Olga marries Sartre's young protégé Jacques-Laurent Bost in 1938, and Beauvoir begins her own relationship with Bost that would run alongside her partnership with Sartre for the rest of both lives. In 1936 Beauvoir moves to Paris — teaching first at the Lycée Molière in Passy, then from 1938 at the Lycée Camille Sée in the 15th arrondissement. She continues writing; she starts the novel that would become L'Invitée in the summer of 1938 and finishes the first draft in the spring of 1941.

Part III is the war. Germany invades Poland in September 1939. Sartre is mobilised as a meteorologist and posted to Alsace. Beauvoir keeps his letters and her own diary — she quotes both at length in the memoir, and the war chapters are, in their sourcing, closer to a documentary account than the earlier volumes. In June 1940 France falls; Sartre is captured at Padoux and sent to Stalag XII-D in Trier. He is released in March 1941 after producing a false medical certificate. Occupied Paris follows: teaching under the Vichy state, writing L'Invitée, then Pyrrhus and Cineas, then Le Sang des autres, cycling hundreds of kilometres in the summers to visit Sartre's family in the free zone, food shortages, a small resistance group Sartre founds called Socialisme et Liberté that dissolves after a few months. In June 1943 the mother of her former student Nathalie Sorokine — with whom Beauvoir had been in an affair — files a complaint with the Vichy education ministry and Beauvoir is dismissed from her teaching post for 'incitement of a minor to debauchery.' She never teaches again.