Name: A Very Easy Death
Rating: 4.25 (20 reviews)

Simone de Beauvoir

The French writer depicts the sorrow and pain and her quiet acceptance of her mother's last days before death from cancer

A Very Easy Death

Tim Pendry

The relationship between Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (and the latter’s various lovers) is the stuff of philosophical soap opera. All great soap operas have to deal eventually with the death of a leading character – in this particular case, it is De Beauvoir’s mother. This is a very well written account of the death of an aged person under relatively comfortable circumstances. It is ‘a very easy death’, a phrase written with irony as we think of the conditions of the majority then and now. It does not hide what death from cancer involves – anyone who has had a relative die under such circumstances (or no doubt been seriously ill themselves) will recognise many of the details of the account. What is interesting is that this contains no serious philosophy. Sartre does not even have a walk-on part, just brief mentions. He and his circle are present by their absence. De Beauvoir gives us a narrative that is really about the bonds of family where the Left Bank is suspended for the duration but I have to admit that I ‘doubt’ her narrative. Not because she is telling any lies at all but because she is too close to her own situation. This means that it is true about how she saw things but not necessarily true about how things actually were for her mother. It is an interpretation. The mother is loved but their relationship is detached. Indeed, it is a rather typical relationship between a twentieth century high-achieving feminist and a critical and perhaps neurotic (by force of circumstance rather than nature) woman who cleaves to conservative ways. ‘Maman’ is complex, not fixed at any one time in aspic but changing with her circumstances and (perhaps) presented to us in order to appear the type of the bourgeoise. A woman who I know would have driven me up the wall as much as she did De Beauvoir in her young years becomes a different person – still limited perhaps but more herself and less insecure – by the time death appears. I had the shock of not remembering the death of my own mother (despite the similarities in the case) until I was almost four fifths through the book. I suspect that the very similar nature of De Beauvoir’s Maman and my mother caused me to go into the same sort of partial denial that De Beauvoir herself goes through as she deals with Maman’s clinging to life. Indeed, it is only in writing this review that I recognise that the mother who died nearly thirty years ago, had she lived, was not likely to have been the person I remember but someone else connected to that person by the time she died ‘of old age’. That person would never be known to me – death in that sense does cut off the ability of the organism to ‘become’ much as Heidegger suggested. The portrait of Maman is fair and recognisable and is matched by a brief but understanding view of a husband (long since dead) who most contemporary feminists would have blackened as the devil himself. De Beauvoir’s detachment generally, though as we shall see, not always, permits her to be fair to all the players in the game: “I do not blame my father. It is tolerably well known that in men habit kills desire.” De Beauvoir refuses to engage in polemic about anyone’s situation. It would be hard to do so since Maman clearly chooses her own refusals to recognise reality while De Beauvoir herself shows a degree of understandable ‘mauvaise foi’ about truth-telling at critical times. There are also neat little truths to be had from the book that seem eternals within conventional society. A generation will tell two generations below things that they would never tell their own children but which their own children would have yearned to hear (a mistake I refuse to make with my own). Then there is that point in time that you will often see at the side of the dying when being nice and being cheerful has no meaning because it was all an elaborate performance for ‘society’. This is the moment when one sees a raw emotion or cynicism or frankness that shatters the myth of normality because it seems so out of place with the presumed character of the person. This is nonsense, of course – it simply means that no one ever bothered to ask who that person was in fact. The book is about Maman’s death but it is also about death in general. De Beauvoir has seen other close deaths by this time but this particular death seems like an experimental test-bed for her existentialist values. Heidegger introduced the absolute importance of death as both the defining end to which a person directed themselves and as a personal absolute in which no other could truly participate. Sartre and De Beauvoir made this aspect of Heidegger’s thinking central to their own development of existentialism for a Cartesian market. In this context, there is a certain unintended rightness about the fact that De Beauvoir is not ‘in at the kill’ so to speak. She is not there when Maman dies. She dies, as we all die, alone and, the implication is, never really accepting the reality of her situation. To the twenty-first century mind perhaps one aspect of the book stands out. There is a lack of presumption that persons should be told about their condition or that experts should be questioned. Faced with this as a fact on the ground, De Beauvoir own principles seem to fail her, as if the social reality that stands in opposition to individual understanding and commitment was simply too strong even for this woman. The power of the social over the individual is clear in this work. More interesting perhaps is the possible contribution, nearly fifty years on, of the book to the very live debate on euthanasia. Unfortunately, it gives no answers. On the one hand, De Beauvoir tends towards helping Maman out with a quick end. She gets frustrated with the doctors determination to keep her ‘officiously alive’. On the other, Maman clings to life with tenacity, seems to abandon her interest in the solaces of religion (which now appear to be a cultural prop rather than inward reality) and will not ‘go gentle into that good night’. This represents an unspoken incomprehension between author and subject. Maman was no existentialist looking death in the face with dignity and a final culmination devoutly to be managed of all that went before. She denied it and clung on and this is probably what most people do. De Beauvoir’s horror at her suffering comes to look unintentionally selfish – a desire not so much to end Maman’s suffering but her own and her sister’s, and perhaps to halt having to think about what was happening and how the theory may have clashed with the brute reality. Dare I say it but at this point, De Beauvoir is drifting into ‘mauvaise foi’. Paradoxically, she is perhaps in denial about her motivations in no less a way than her Maman about death in itself. Since this is not something she talks about in the book, one assumes that the denial continued after the event. Even the philosopher whose escape from bourgeois normality was engineered through rational thought and detachment finds, at this point, that rational thought and detachment have taken on lives of its own. At the last, rationality (and writing) becomes a means of attempting an escape from the reality of death, the central fact in her philosophy .

A Very Easy Death

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