Books: Minerva's Mother

A VERY EASY DEATH by Simone de Beauvoir. 106 pages. Putnam. $3.95.

Simone de Beauvoir's meticulous scholarship of her own psychology has made her a formidable, if exasperating, novelist and autobiographer. In both forms she has displayed an intransigent hostility toward the values of her own family—Catholic, provincial, bourgeois. She has celebrated an escape into atheism, Paris and existentialism, and she has strewn a great deal of philosophical confetti over her famous non-wedding with Jean-Paul Sartre, her unembarrassable non-bridegroom. Now, this brilliant, honest, but Gallically humorless woman, who in The Second Sex denied even the facts of life, confronts the fact of death.

Bartok & Hysteria. Simone de Beauvoir did not spring, like Minerva, full armed from the head of Jove. She had a mother, and the bitter title of her book was a nursing nun's obituary of Mme. de Beauvoir, who died of cancer, saying, "I'm too tired to pray: God is kind." It is a painful book to read, not least because the reader is unsure to the end whether natural piety toward the author's mother will prevail against her severe atheist principles. Mother was 77, "of an age to die," when she was attacked by severe abdominal pain, but nothing, it seems, had prepared Simone for the emotions that overwhelmed her.

She begins with a patronizing sketch of her mother's dim life—pious, faithful, impoverished, with only one book dedicated to her, and that "published at the author's expense." She had not wept for her father, and she told her sister that it would be "the same for Maman." Yet, on the night that her mother went under the knife, "I went home; I talked to Sartre; we played some Bartok. Suddenly, at eleven, an outburst of tears that almost degenerated into hysteria. Amazement."

A Member of the Funeral. The reader is amazed at her amazement. The rest of the book is a merciless record of the trivia of death—old age and bed wetting, pubic baldness, enemas, Levin tubes, indignity, pain—all made tolerable because it also sets down the stages by which this renowned intellectual prig came to terms with her natural feelings and at the end allowed herself tears at a Catholic funeral, without even sneering at the priest beyond pointing out that he had trousers on under his chasuble. It acknowledges: "I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative . . . if I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had lost her mother, I thought her neurotic." Then her rage against the fact of death asserts itself. "There is no such thing as a natural death . . . you do not die of being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age." To which the only answer is that there is such a thing. Man does die of being born, from having lived and from old age.

In the epigraph, the author quotes Dylan Thomas' splendid hymn to his dying father: "Do not go gentle into that good night. / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage rage against the dying of the light. . . ." Perhaps Simone de Beauvoir's rage against death was, as it explicitly was for Dylan Thomas, a form of prayer.