Reading with gusto

My bones are creaking and my teeth have been jangling from the cold, but I've been having a riotous time these past few days, reading Simone de Beauvoir's Journal de Guerre.

In the past I've questioned the merit of recording everything you do, eat, think, every day - there is already so much information circulating electronically and on little bits of paper. Even now I sometimes feel reluctant to post on my blog, to put something else out there in that big junkyard of broken up thoughts and crumpled second hand information.

In any case, in my diaries I've always favoured recording sentiments over - got up. fed cat. blew nose. But I'm so glad Simone de Beauvoir did this.

How well I can see Paris back then in 1939/1940, the first year of the Second World War. She describes the bars and cafes where she wrote and drank and exchanged ideas. Of course there are the obvious ones like Flore, the Dôme, and the Deux Magots, but she also talks about a cafe called Versailles that reminds her of cafes in the provinces, Milk Bar, Capoulade, the Jockey which the owner has modelled on the dance halls of Seville, and on and on. Because she didn't have a telly or the internet she was always pub crawling.

I should of course pause to say that this was a difficult time for Simone (separated from both Sartre and Jacques Bost), tearing open their daily correspondence, unable to work on her novel due to the uncertainty of the war, feeling like she was in limbo.

But she diligently records all. The films she saw, the clothes she bought. She was so proud of her yellow turban. She even mentions when she was in Alsace clandestinely visiting Sartre, that some soldiers noticed her turban and said when they saw her they felt like they were back on Les Boulevards, the turban being the pinnacle of parisian fashion in this epoque. It was also known as a cache-misère because it concealed your head on a bad hair day. The years between us feel so few when she describes in detail the hues and cuts of other women's outfits, when they look good, and more interestingly, when they look moche.

And oh how well we feel we are in Paris when she describes how "no" doesn't really mean "no". When she is trying to obtain a permit to go visit Sartre she well understands that if you push and poke someone a bit "no" becomes "yes", as she found on her hunt to snare the relevant bits of paper necessary to negotiate the French bureacracy. She even notes that her future reunion with Sartre and ultimate happiness are based on the caprice of a civil servant.

Of course she also describes the food she eats, details so often left out in the condensed moments of film, television and novels, and you get the impression she is eating all the time, when in fact it's just three meals a day. She certainly eats with gusto: sausages and ham and eggs and veal with weighty sauces.

However, when it comes to her more intimate life, the adventures in the love-bed, her details dry up. I'm just up to the bit where she goes to visit Sartre in Alsace and they spend a night in a glacial winter bed together. She doesn't comment on this night and I can't help wondering if this has anything to do with what she once said about Sartre:
"a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed".