When Things of the Spirit Come First

"When Things of the Spirit Come First" is Simone de Beauvoir's 'first' work of fiction. After a number of false starts, in 1937 she submitted this collection of interlinked stories to a publisher. But it was turned down by both Gallimard and Grasset.

However, in 1979, by which time she had achieved a world-wide reputation as a writer, Gallimard brought out the collection as "Quand prime le spirituel" (Beauvoir had originally entitled it, ironically, "Primauté du spirituel", "The Primacy of the Spiritual"). By then what turned out to be her "last" fictional work - her only other collection of short stories, "The Woman Destroyed" - had been published some 11 years earlier.

The stories are:'Marcelle"Chantal"Lisa"Anne"Marguerite'.

The fictional Marcelle was born just before the end of the 19th century, while the last story - the only one to be told entirely in the first person - is narrated retrospectively by her younger sister Marguerite from a point considerably later than any of the events in the other stories. The chronology of the stories is thus quite firmly fixed and, although Beauvoir claimed that she did not set out to depict social behaviour, they have a certain documentary value as a record of some aspects of French life in the 1920s and early 1930s (schools of different kinds, social movements of the time, some of the less salubrious Paris settings, etc). In particular, they give a picture of middle-class women's condition in France at the time (arranged marriages, for instance, figure in more than one of the stories).

The general theme that Beauvoir takes up is that of the harm inflicted upon young women by the 'spiritual' values and mystifications of the ruling French middle classes of her time. In the brief Preface to the 1979 edition of the collection Beauvoir stressed how much of herself went into the book and how she herself had been oppressed by spiritualism. She also pointed out that many of the themes that were to be pursued in her later fiction are already touched on in these early stories.

She also refers to the young women who are the oppressed but 'more or less consenting' victims of spiritualism and this is a useful reminder that self-deception ('mauvaise foi') is a crucial element in the make-up of many of the women characters here (it is also a vital factor in the stories of "The Woman Destroyed"). In fact, a revealing point in the light of Beauvoir's subsequent writings is that there is no strong or direct sense here in which the blame for women's ills is particularly attached to men. Beauvoir was aware that the stories depict women for whom the reader is unlikely to feel more than limited sympathy.

She was clearly still in the process of locating the precise targets of her disapproval and satire. Moreover, even some of the principal artistic features of the collection leave something to be desired. Yet none of this (or the very graphic sexual scenes) justifies doubts about the value of publishing the collection some 40 years after it was written. Beauvoir's project is an interesting and valuable one, the text contains some outstanding sequences, and the writing involves a sophistication that belies her inexperience in the mid-1930s.