'"Why should people give a damn about what I think, what I feel?", Henri said. "My little personal stories don't interest anyone, and history, the big story, isn't in my opinion a fit subject for a novel."'
That's Henri Perron (a character in The Mandarins) who hasn't figured out how to encapsulate history in a novel, but Simone de Beauvoir has managed a pretty good job of it.
There are two conflicts that drive the novel that interlock with each other. The first is politics.
The Mandarins begins at a party that first Christmas in 1944 after Paris has been liberated. The war isn't over, but its end is in sight. With the US and Soviet Russia looking so dominant, what will happen to France?
Perron had founded a Resistance magazine L'Espoir during the war; his friend and mentor Robert Dubreuilh had written for it. Resistance members had distributed the magazine; some had died in doing so. The fate of the magazine is one of the main drivers of the novel's plot. Dubreuilh creates a new left wing Socialist movement, non-Communist but still hopeful of establishing a Popular Front with the Communists. He wants L'Espoir to be the house organ for his new movement.
Perron is in general agreement with Dubreuilh's politics, but feels that L'Espoir should remain independent. If he isn't able to say what he thinks, he's going to lose some of his audience, he fears, and his fears prove true. Dubreuilh manipulates him into supporting his movement; Perron is no longer viewed as truth-telling; the magazine does lose readers and becomes dependent on deep-pocketed donors with agendas.
Then the first reports of the Gulag start to arrive. Can Perron truly say nothing? But if he reports on it, even with the hope of correcting what he sees as (excuseable) Soviet excesses, is a Popular Front still possible? Maybe he should just abandon politics? Go back to writing novels. But World War III feels close.
(One can ask was a Popular Front with Soviet Union under Stalin even possible after World War II? The character Scriassine says no.)
There's a second set of conflicts that also drive the novel; unsurprisingly (it is Simone de Beauvoir) it's the relationship between the sexes.
Both Perron and Dubreuilh are married at the start of the novel. Paula Perron could sing and used to do so, but she felt she could never be Edith Piaf. Now she's let her entire life be absorbed in promoting Perron's purported greatness. But Perron has fallen out of love with her during the war when they were generally separated, and he's no longer convinced of his own greatness. He tries to convince her to take an interest in singing again, or in something other than himself, but are his encouragements genuine? Or just selfishness? He's not entirely sure himself. In the meantime he has affairs.
Anne Dubreuilh is a psychoanalyst with a thriving practice of her own. She and Dubreuilh are no longer sleeping together, but she still finds him intellectually stimulating. But the war's over! She's still young! Pleasure is possible! After five years of chastity, she has a one night stand, with Scriassine, but it's not very satisfying. But the door is open.
With the end of the war travel again becomes possible, but nobody has money. Perron gets an offer to go to Portugal for a French cultural agency. Nadine, the Dubreuilh's daughter, desperate to go anywhere, convinces him to take her as his secretary; they become lovers.
Then Anne Dubreuilh gets an offer to go to a psychoanalysis conference in New York, with a subequent lecture tour. She hems and haws--she can't leave her husband, her daughter, her patients--but in the end she does go; in Chicago, she meets the writer Lewis Brogan, who becomes the great romance of her life.
What happens politcally? What happens romantically? Well, I can't tell you that, of course... 😉
The novel is structured in alternating chapters. It starts with third-person narration with Henri Perron as the focus character; the other chapters are in first person as written by Anne Dubreuilh.
The novel is often called a roman à clef, though de Beauvoir didn't like that as a description. But if so, Henri Perron is Camus, Robert Dubreuilh is Sartre, Anne Dubreuilh is de Beauvoir herself, Scriassine is Arthur Koestler, and Lewis Brogan is Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, who is also the dedicatee of the book. But Dubreuilh is twenty years older than Sartre, Camus was much less sympathetic to Communism than Perron, de Beauvoir and Sartre didn't have a daughter. She does however say in her autobiography Force of Circumstance that Lewis 'is the one who approaches closest to a living model.' When Anne says to Lewis, "Why are all your best friends pickpockets, or drug addicts, or pimps?" that does feel very much like Algren.
Henri Perron says at one point:
"If you spend the best days of your life trying to communicate with others, it's because others count..."
The novel came out in 1954 and won the Prix Goncourt for its year. I read it in the English translation by Leonard Friedman of 1957.
It's a book off my Classics Club list:
and is my visit to Paris this July (hosted by Emma at Words and Peace):
