Birth of a Beaver

MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER (382 pp.)--Simone de Beauvoir--World ($5).

Simone de Beauvoir was 20 when she indulged in her first ''orgy." She went to a bar with her cousin Jacques, to whom she was tacitly engaged, and had a dry martini, after which she smashed a few cocktail glasses. Arm in arm with Jacques ("I marveled at this physical intimacy''), she lived it up till 2 a.m. ("I found myself tossing off a creme de menthe") and then reeled home to mother. Mama was up, and in tears. She feared, says Simone, "that Jacques had dishonored me." Short years before. Mama de Beauvoir had pinned together pages or whole chapters of books which she considered unseemly for proper young girls. When Simone inadvertently discovered that George Eliot's unmarried heroine in Adam Bede was pregnant, she hid the book so Mama would not be horrified at her knowledge.

An amused incomprehension is likely to enfold U.S. readers trying to visualize the social climate in which Simone de Beauvoir rebelled against parental authority. As she depicts the French society of her girlhood, it was almost Oriental in its concern with losing face and in its rigid taboos. As a female emancipation proclamation, the Memoirs will also seem curiously dated to Americans, for Feminist de Beauvoir belongs uncompromisingly to the either-or camp on the marriage v. career question, and apparently consigns most of her sex to the vegetable bin of history. Nonetheless these graciously written memoirs carry distinct appeal in recording the emotional and intellectual birth pangs of a fascinating woman.

Parental Clay. In the France of 1908 --such a well-tended garden that it was almost a crime for a child to pick a flower --the De Beauvoirs tried to maintain rather than seek status. A soso lawyer. Papa was worldly, intelligent and a gifted amateur actor. Convent-bred Mama was pious, temperamentally capricious, and terribly afraid of making a social gaffe. When the couple engaged in loud-voiced wrangles, little Simone was bitterly disillusioned; parents were not gods, but common clay. At eight, the embryo novelist wrote a woefully sentimental saga about The Misfortunes of Marguerite.

Simone was more pious than her mother when she entered parochial school; she received Holy Communion three times a week and tried to practice self-mortification by scrubbing herself raw with pumice. But the day came when her longtime father-confessor charged her with arrogance and disobedience. Simone got flaming mad: "His priest's robe was only a disguise; it covered an old busybody who fed on gossip. With burning face I left the confessional, determined never to set foot in it again."

The Misfortunes of Simone continued when, after World War I, her father lost his money. At the university. Simone strove so relentlessly for her doctorate that she earned her famed nickname. "Beaver." All work and little play did not dull the beaver's tooth for philosophic talk, but the meaning of her own existence seemed empty. Three relationships of the university years gradually opened Simone's eyes to herself. There was her cousin Jacques in whom she saw only a romantic image, although he actually carried on a series of sordid liaisons, finally married for money and died of alcoholism at 46. There was her friend Zaza who overtaxed herself trying to be Simone's fellow freedom fighter against parental cant; when she died of meningitis, "I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death." And then there was Stepha. pert. Polish and feminine, who taught Simone to look at love more realistically and also to look in the mirror. Simone was a slob. She admits: "I hardly ever brushed my teeth and never cleaned my nails." Stepha played Professor Higgins to Simone's Eliza Doolittle. After Stepha's grooming, Simone was ready to be Professor Sartre's fair lady.

The House of Intellect. When she first met Jean-Paul Sartre, he was a fellow student at the Sorbonne. "Except when he's asleep. Sartre thinks all the time!" a friend told Simone. Petrified, she entered Sartre's lair for a day-long talkathon on her metaphysical treatise. The Concept in Leibnitz. Simone confided to her diary, "He's a marvelous trainer of intellects." Before long, they were playing pinball machines together, going to un-adult westerns, and scaling the roofs over the student dens, with the great intellect-trainer booming out Ol' Man River in a beery baritone. Here, felt Simone, was "the dream companion I had longed for since I was 15: he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspirations raised to the pitch of incandescence.''

The fact about Simone de Beauvoir that emerges most clearly from the Memoirs is that she lacks the classic French quality of mesure, or "nothing in excess." From the dutiful daughter she became the no-quarter feminist. From the total order of Catholicism, she moved to the universe of total absurdity embodied in atheist existentialism. Even travel, which ought to have broadened her mind, merely served to harden her. Thus, thinking Communism good, she went to Red China (The Long March) and found it a paradise; thinking the U.S. bad, she found America, Day by Day a demihell. The purity fetish instilled by Mama de Beauvoir has given Simone's intellectual life unquestionable integrity, but it also makes every clash between the ideal and the actual an emotional crisis. At the bar of reality, Simone is still a one-martini girl.

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