America Day by Day

by Simone de Beauvoir, Carol Cosman (Translator)

Here is the ultimate American road book, one with a perspective unlike that of any other. In January 1947 Simone de Beauvoir landed at La Guardia airport and began a four-month journey that took her from one coast of the United States to the other, and back again. Embraced by the Condé Nast set in a swirl of cocktail parties in New York, where she was hailed as the "prettiest existentialist" by Janet Flanner in The New Yorker , de Beauvoir traveled west by car, train, and Greyhound, immersing herself in the nation's culture, customs, people, and landscape. The detailed diary she kept of her trip became America Day by Day, published in France in 1948 and offered here in a completely new translation. It is one of the most intimate, warm, and compulsively readable texts from the great writer's pen.

Fascinating passages are devoted to Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and San Antonio. We see de Beauvoir gambling in a Reno casino, smoking her first marijuana cigarette in the Plaza Hotel, donning raingear to view Niagara Falls, lecturing at Vassar College, and learning firsthand about the Chicago underworld of morphine addicts and petty thieves with her lover Nelson Algren as her guide. This fresh, faithful translation superbly captures the essence of Simone de Beauvoir's distinctive voice. It demonstrates once again why she is one of the most profound, original, and influential writers and thinkers of the twentieth century.

On New "I walk between the steep cliffs at the bottom of a canyon where no sun it's permeated by a salt smell. Human history is not inscribed on these carefully calibrated They are closer to prehistoric caves than to the houses of Paris or Rome."

On Los "I watch the Mexican dances and eat chili con carne, which takes the roof off my mouth, I drink the tequila and I'm utterly dazed with pleasure."

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Memoir, Philosophy, France, Classics, Feminism

412 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Works of Simone de Beauvoir, French writer, existentialist, and feminist, include The Second Sex in 1949 and The Coming of Age , a study in 1970 of views of different cultures on the old.


Simone de Beauvoir, an author and philosopher, wrote novels, monographs, political and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. People now best know She Came to Stay and The Mandarins , her metaphysical novels. Her treatise, a foundational contemporary tract, of 1949 detailed analysis of oppression of women.

Reviews

[Paula Mota]

Este país, contra o qual tantas vezes me irritei, eis que me punge deixá-lo. Muitas vezes me perguntaram nestes últimos tempos: “Gosta da América?” e eu tinha o hábito de responder: “Em parte sim, em parte não”, ou “50%”. Esta avaliação matemática não significa grande coisa; reflecte simplesmente as minhas hesitações. Não passou um dia na América em que me não sentisse deslumbrada, nem um dia em que me não sentisse decepcionada.

Em 1947, Simone de Beauvoir passou quatro meses nos Estados Unidos da América. Cosmopolita como era, apaixona-se pela efervescente cidade de Nova Iorque, mas não tanto pelo resto do país, ora tacanho e segregacionista, ora resplandecente e oco, que conheceu sobretudo em várias road trips aos locais mais turísticos, como Hollywood, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Grand Canyon e cataratas do Niagara, divertindo-se “como num circo ruim”. Quem tem presente a imagem da filósofa francesa, com o seu coque em forma de coroa e o seu ar altivo, dificilmente a imagina a frequentar bares de jazz duvidosos, a atravessar o deserto num carro que pode avariar a qualquer instante, a assistir a combates de wrestling, a percorrer estados como Novo México, Texas, Carolina do Sul e Virginia nos míticos Greyhound ou a fazer uma excursão de burro, e muito menos a fumar um charro…

Tento uma vez mais; é a última; os olhares estão fitos em mim, carregados, severos: sinto-me digna de censura; a garganta arde-me. Engulo o fumo todo e nenhum anjo se incomoda para me erguer do solo: não devo ser sensível à marijuana.

…mas aqui está tudo isso, escrito pelo seu próprio punho neste diário. Um ano e pouco depois do término da Segunda Guerra Mundial, vinda de um país por ela fustigado, Simone de Beauvoir aprecia as lojas bem recheadas não só de bens essenciais como artigos de luxo tendo, no entanto, de suportar a sobranceria norte-americana que já então iniciara o apoio económico à Europa.

Fala com uma enternecida piedade da pobrezinha Europa, sem tecto, sem pão, sem fogo, sem sapatos, e da ajuda que a América lhe deve prestar, dos livros que lhe deve enviar para a alimentar espiritualmente. “No momento em que os transportes eram raros e difíceis, diz ele, mandámos de avião para a Polónia uma cópia do filme “E Tudo o Vento Levou”. Houve quem nos censurasse essa dissipação. Mas talvez tivesse havido um punhado de polacos que, ao assistir à exibição deste filme, tenha compreendido que ainda havia no mundo uma terra de liberdade…”

Para de imediato contrapor a esta declaração de um elemento de Departamento de Estado outra de um amigo seu…

A nossa democracia não passa de uma pseudodemocracia. (…) A palavra liberdade esvaziou-se de todo o seu conteúdo.

…dando como exemplo algo que continua a ser alarmante nos nossos dias: a censura nas bibliotecas públicas. Falando em literatura, também não poderia ser mais actual e pertinente a apreciação sobre o mercado editorial de então:

Se decidirem fazer de um livro um best-seller, por medíocre que seja, consegui-lo-ão à custa de publicidade: são os editores quem, em grande parte, financiam todas as revistas e exigem que se fale elogiosamente dos livros que publicam; o propósito dos artigos críticos é promover a venda do livro criticado.

Entre os vários escritores com quem privou durante os quatro meses da sua estadia, a quem geralmente só se refere por siglas, conheceu em Chicago Nelson Algren, com quem iria viver um “amor transatlântico” durante 17 anos, ainda que nas páginas deste diário não se consiga suspeitar dessa relação amorosa, aproveitando antes para o dar como exemplo da “solidão intelectual em que vivem os escritores da América”.
O propósito desta visita a terras americanas foi também o de dar conferências, sobretudo em universidades, apesar de alguns comentários ao comunismo militante da filósofa e à ousadia de um país na penúria ainda ter pensadores. Não são sequer esquecidas as referências ao feminismo que a tornou célebre, ainda que “O Segundo Sexo” só fosse publicado dois anos depois:

Em vez de ultrapassar os resultados adquiridos pelas que as precederam, as mulheres o que procuram é gozá-los estaticamente, o que é um grave erro, visto um fim só ser válido na medida em que sirva de novo ponto de partida.

Para lá de todas as festas, paisagens, palestras e encontros com jornalistas e escritores, De Beauvoir, volta uma e outra vez a apontar o elefante na sala aonde quer que vá, apesar de logo na primeira noite em Nova Iorque um francês lhe ter pedido para não escreve nada sobre a questão racial. Como poderia, no entanto, ignorar o problema óbvio se um dos grandes amigos que fez de imediato, Richard Wright, casado com uma branca de Brooklyn, é um constante alvo de ofensas racistas na sua presença?

À saída da 59ª Rua, uma senhora interpela-me com irritação: “Que fazem as duas com esse preto?” Mesmo os americanos que se dão com os Pretos fazem-no com uma certa prudência. Wright é recebido de bom grado, porque é um escritor célebre. Mas reparo que, na única casa verdadeiramente de high-class em que é admitido, nunca convidam, ao mesmo tempo que ele, senão franceses, judeus, japoneses, chineses e hindus; e nessa mesma casa provoquei eu mal-estar evidente quando relatei as minhas impressões do Sul.

Mas na América das leis Jim Crow, a escritora, recebida calorosamente num serviço religioso do Harlem por ser proveniente de um país que desconhece a segregação racial, não aponta o dedo apenas ao preconceito contra os negros. Não esquece, por isso, os nativos…

À parte de alguns privilegiados, os índios são pobres e o seu nível de vida é muito baixo. Mas podem vegetar mais ou menos em paz no interior dos territórios que se lhe estabeleceram: não têm nem o título de cidadão americano nem os direitos que tal título implica (…) e sob o protectorado paternalista dos Brancos, gozam de um simulacro de autonomia.

…nem sequer os judeus, tão pouco tempo depois do Holocausto.

Em certos pontos do Massachusetts e do Connecticut (centro da América real) há praias reservadas aos judeus, que não têm o direito de tomar banho com os arianos; mas os judeus mandam por seu turno os seus criados pretos tomar banho noutra praia.

Neste ciclo vicioso de discriminação, Simone recorre a uma citação de George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) para resumir a situação: “A orgulhosa nação americana… obriga o Preto a encerar-lhe os sapatos e demonstra-lhe em seguida a inferioridade física e mental pelo facto de ser engraxador”. É, pois, perante a este estado da nação que a pensadora francesa conclui candidamente sobre o povo americano:

Apenas nos cartazes e nas páginas de anúncios é que os Americanos têm estas faces felizes, estes risos abertos, estes olhares límpidos, estas faces inebriadas de boa consciência; na verdade, quase todos andam em conflito consigo próprios; a bebida é o remédio para este mal-estar íntimo, cujo aspecto mais vulgar é o tédio: como o facto de beber é admitido pela sociedade, não é tomado como sinal de desadaptação; é a forma adaptada da desadaptação.

Seguindo essa ordem de ideias, não posso deixar de referir uma das menções que De Beauvoir faz, por contraste, a Portugal.

Em Nápoles, em Lisboa, por mais pobres que as pessoas sejam, ainda gozam de alegrias animais: o ardor do sol, o frescor de uma laranja, um amplexo na sombra dos leitos; ouvem-se muitas vezes a cantar e rir; e falam umas com as outras; são pobres em comum, em comum tratam das suas doenças, choram os seus mortos, veneram os seus santos; em torno dos seus corpos aflitos sentem, ao menos, um calor humano.

[NOLaBookish aka blue-collared mind · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just read parts of this again, after originally reading it a decade ago. Like Italo Calvino's "Hermit In Paris" it's fascinating to read what European intellectuals found of interest in the new world. Both of them first came and wrote about it in the 1950s and yet their perspectives of America remain current, including the public ugliness of segregation and racism in America.
But for Beauvoir, the real treat is her study of all people, especially of women and intellectual posers. As befitting her reputation, you won't find any retreat from serious subjects into female snipping or coy retorts (which even my all-star Mrs. Parker was guilty at times) when the going gets sticky:

I'm giving a lecture to the Cultural Relations, followed by a cocktail party. A Frenchwoman, at least 40 years old, challenges me:"In the name of French youth, I declare myself against everything you said. "Another woman shakes my hand effusively: "I thank you in the name of France.' I would certainly like to know what supernatural voices gave them such mandates.



I think many who were around have forgotten what the 1950s were really about besides the cool clothes and the smoking; that it was the beginning of the corporatization of our culture and the utter insane belief held by most of the population here that we somehow deservedly ruled the world and no longer had to listen to anyone else. Of course, America has its charms and Simone finds them: with her lover Nelson Algren in his Chicago, in the South, in New York, even at wrestling matches in Houston. She was attempting to place its role in history, and I think she did it brilliantly:

"And inherent in what I like and loathe in this country is something fascinating: the enormous opportunities and risks America runs today and the world along with it. All human problems are posed here on a gigantic scale, and to a great degree, the solutions they find here will illuminate those problems, retrospectively, in a moving way or swallow them up in the night of indifference. Yes, I believe this is what moves me so strongly at the moment of my departure; America is one of the pivotal points of the world, where the future of man is being played out. To "like" America, to "dislike" it-these words have no meaning. It is a battlefield, and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging for itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure."

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

"So why choose one toothpaste over another? In this useless profusion, there's an aftertaste of deception. There are a thousand possibilities, but they're all the same. A thousand choices, but all equivalent. In this way, the American citizen can squander his obligatory domestic freedom without perceiving that this life itself is not free."
Simone de Beauvoir
New York January 1947

Non-fiction travel.
First published in France 1954. First published in Great Britain 1998

In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir made her first trip to America - four months - not a 'serious study' but a 'faithful account' "because concrete experience involves both subject and object, I have not tried to eliminate myself from the narrative. That is why I have adopted the journal form." "Although written in retrospect, this journal - reconstituted from notes, letters, and memories that are still fresh - is scrupulously accurate." (from the Preface)
Page 36, Advertising: "The constipated girl smiles a loving smile at the lemon juice that relieves her intestines. In the subway, in the streets, on magazine pages, these smiles pursue me like obsessions. I read a sign in a drugstore, 'not to grin is a sin'. "

Objective - Subjective, the Existentialist can see both simultaneously, which is cool. A child sees the world through new eyes. De Beauvoir observes the New World through old world eyes.
The translation from French of an existential perception describing observations of a new environment and culture has a strong sense of nothing being lost from one language to another.

A very good Forward by Douglas Brinkley, 1996. He describes de Beauvoir as 'The Existential Tourist.'
De Beauvoir was aged 39 in 1947.

Synopsis
In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir made her first long-awaited trip to America, travelling intrepidly from coast to coast by car, train and Greyhound bus. America Day by Day is her absorbing account of her travels around the country, from New York to Hollywood, New Mexico to Texas, Louisiana to Washington, DC. She rode a pony through the Grand Canyon, listened to jazz in New Orleans and, with Nelson Algren as her guide, visited the dives and flophouses of Chicago.

America Day by Day bursts with descriptions of landscapes and cities, and with exhilarating analyses of American architecture, advertisements, food, politics, clothing and sexual mores. De Beauvoir was disturbed by the poverty and segregation she encounted, but was delighted by American energy and friendliness. Many of de Beauvoir's observations remain startlingly fresh and relevant today, but the book is also a fascinating period piece on postwar America.

'A forgotten gem . . . America Day by Day, hidden from us for nearly fifty years, comes to the reader like a dusty bottle of vintage French cognac, asking only to be uncorked'
New York Times

'She thrills at the sparkling wealth of the country, at New York's cosmopolitanism, and at the wonders of the landscape'
Sunday Times

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geoff Dyer once wrote that after reading a writer's biographies and her fiction, to discover the real writer one should read her journals and letters. Having already read de Beauvoir's letters, those to Sartre, at least, I dived into this daily account of her 1947 trip to America. She was hungry for the experience. She'd wanted to come with Sartre in 1945 but had been unable to secure a sponsor. Sartre later wrangled an invitation for her alone, a trip combining travel and visits with scheduled lectures. She didn't keep a daily record of her trip, but the book compiled from her notes makes a compelling read.

It's obvious from her first days in country that she made sharp observations. She'd come from a France still experiencing some wartime shortages and was almost overwhelmed by the consumerism, not only by the quantity of products but the quality as well. She soon learned to enjoy the plenty. She especially enjoyed drug store lunch counters. She liked American whiskey, too. I thought at one point it was too important to her to record cafe life and the number of drinks sh and her acquaintances put away. And she loved the American southwest and its landscapes. She wrote she'd like to live in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico.

As she traveled she made a great loop of the country. From New York City to Chicago by bus then to Los Angeles by train where she visits her great friend of Parisian days, Natasha Sorokine Moffat, and her husband. Together they travel California by car. Natasha accompanies her as she returns to NYC by Greyhound through the South. Each stop along the way is remembered through friends, nightlife experienced, and her observations.

Most of it she saw clearly. There are a few howlers. At Monterey, California, for instance, she describes it as the site of the Mexican War battle. And when in the Sierras she thinks she's in the Rockies. But these are quibbling factual mistakes. Her judgments of American character and society are full of insight. Without using the word she described Americans as provincial while also recognizing their inherent individualism. She liked the respect we hold for each other and for the principles that are the foundations of our freedoms. At the same time she saw our idea of the self-made man is a myth, that the money is in a few hands and social mobility limited. She wrote that for all the faith we have in individualism, the economy isn't individualistic. But she herself wrote that each "person can disguise the mediocrity of his fate by thinking he participates in the life of a great nation."

What unsettled her? The serious woman of the European political left was discomfited by the sense of threat Americans felt from the left and the feeling they were already in an ideological war. She found Americans militaristic, the country filled with war fever.

Surprisingly, American jazz disappointed her. She thought Americans "murdered" jazz, though they love it. It's an observation she made more than once as she listened to jazz in NYC and Chicago and LA. She didn't hear what she called "real jazz" until she got to New Orleans. She considered the music she heard there authentic.

The deeper one reads in the book the more confident de Beauvoir seems. She'd been asked by a friend in NYC to not write about race. Three months in the country, she was told, wasn't enough time to begin to understand it. But when she reached Savannah, Georgia, what she'd observed in the South compelled her to write her mind. Her comments on race form one of the longest daily entries in the book. Through them she demonstrated she had enough understanding of race to write about it with intelligence and insight. I was impressed. That her examination still stings today might be seen both as her penetrating vision and as a sign as how little progress has been made.

She was on a lecture tour and therefore met many prominent writers and public personalities. She mostly skims over Chicago's Nelson Algren, with whom she began an important affair. Though they were together most of her time in country, she hides him under a bushel. Her last few weeks in America, with NYC as a base and no doubt with Algren in tow, she spent making many lectures at universities in the northeast. Of particular importance to her were the times she spoke at prestigious women's colleges. She'd already begun to think about feminist issues, and the visits allowed her to solidify ideas and to form an analysis of American women that was probably the beginnings of her famous book The Second Sex. She claimed there's a basic enmity between the sexes in America. They don't like each other, and the fact of that contributes to the wholesale loneliness Americans feel.

As I say, I was impressed by the book. I don't have any experience with the more iconic travelogues of America by Europeans--like de Tocqueville or Dickens--but think de Beauvoir's observations should be as widely read as theirs. Though her trip was in 1947 and the book published in 1954, it describes many still-recognizable characteristics of American society. Simone could see far.

[Sara Saab · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beauvoir's deeply observed travelogue is from 1947, a time that had little body for me prior to reading this, but which turns out to share with 2020 the deep sense of a world shaken to its core by calamity (in Beauvoir's time, WWII, recently ended) and still in the grip of alarming social ills (racism and McCarthyism).

Both Beauvoir and I kind of love the same things about America, and that is what made this book so joyous to read. The exansiveness of America, the coiled potential of it (a false idol, but so deep in the marrow and gritted into the tarmac of it) but what Beauvoir cuts to, which I have never managed to articulate or thought to articulate, is a critique of American interiority. I have many critiques of America, but they are themed around capitalism and imperialism. For Beauvoir, the critique is one of intellectual inertia and siloing, deep solitude, a fatalism and insistence on optimism.

The book suffers from that ugliness of something written a long time ago: on gender, race, fatness, disability, difference, Beauvoir shows a crudeness I wish I could sweep away like dust on the page. However, in Beauvoir's many passages about the Black experience in the US, she spotlights whiteness, names it, and doesn't shy away from naming it and its responsibilities for racism. This element of her discourse I found direct and important.

My favourite passages, in spite of what I've said here, are the ones where the 39-year-old Beauvoir encounters, say, a barbecue joint for the first time, or a drugstore, or a hotel concourse outfitted with little shops. Her sense of marvel at New York City. Her wonder is infectious, and is beautiful on the page.

[Kuszma · Rating 4 out of 5]

„Alig volt nap, amikor Amerika el ne kápráztatott volna, s alig volt nap, hogy csalódást ne okozott volna.”

Kicsit olyan, mint azok a sci-fik, amiben a főhőst hibernálják 100 évre, aztán felébredvén fel se tudja fogni, hová csöppent. Beauvoir 1947-ben, a háborúban leszedált Európából ruccan át Amerikába, és úgy csapja hókon a kultúrsokk, mint valami kérges makarenkói férfitenyér. Felhőkarcolók, autók hada, és egyáltalán: a tenger sok önbizalom és vibráló cselekvőkészség. Persze némi akklimatizálódás után már látszanak a problémák is, a paranoid félelmek (elsősorban a kommunizmustól), a nyomortanyák, a szegregáció… de ha van ennek a kötetnek sosem sorvadó erénye, akkor az éppen az, hogy ezek a hibák sosem homályosítják el annyira a szerző szemét, hogy a jót észre ne vegye. Bár Beauvoir baloldali értékrendje egészen nyilvánvalóan kiszüremkedik a szövegből, azért az általánosítást mindig sikerrel elkerüli, ez pedig végül olyan útirajzot eredményez, ami arról az országról szól, ami egyfelől teljesen más, mint az összes többi (mert emberek lakják), másfelől viszont pont ugyanolyan: hisz van benne jó is, meg rossz is.

A szöveg uralkodó elemét a hangulatok jelentik: hogy mit érez az ember a Golden Gate-et, a Grand Canyont vagy New Orleans lüktető vibrálását látva. És hát Beauvoir érzékenysége tökéletesen alkalmas ezen emóciók átadására. Viszont aki korabeli pletykagyűjteményként kívánja olvasni a szöveget, csalatkozni fog, hisz nincsenek benne szaftos sztorik Henry Millerről vagy Humphrey Bogartról. Ami azt illeti, kifejezetten meglepő, hogy bár a szerzőt nyilván érdeklik az emberek, de maga az egyes ember nem különösebben – itt van például N., akivel gyakorlatilag együtt utazza be az országot, de annyit se tudunk meg róla, mint egy random texasi cowboy nyersbőr csizmájáról. (Ez utóbbiról ugyanis legalább megtudtuk, hogy nyersbőr.)

Továbbá sokáig azt is hittem, hogy Beauvoirt a társadalmi kérdések sem annyira érdeklik – regisztrálja ugyan őket, pontosan és érzékletesen, de az elemzésükre nem vállalkozik. Azonban a könyv felénél, a déli út során a faji kérdés, úgy fest, elérte az ingerküszöbét, mert alaposan belemélyed a témába. Örülök neki – egyértelműen elítélően, de hitem szerint tárgyilagosan nyilatkozik róla. És innentől kezdve az egész kötet esszéjelleget ölt (ami – gondolom – nem független attól, hogy ekkor a szerző már másodszorra érkezik New Yorkba, és ugye a hangulatok ábrázolásán túl vagyunk, foglalkozhatunk akár komolyabb témákkal is), elmerülünk a szabadpiaci kapitalizmus, illetve az amerikai beavatkozás-politika bírálatába. Megmondom őszintén, számomra ezek voltak a legnehézkesebb periódusok, visszasírtam az első kétszáz oldal színeit és ízeit.

Összegzés: jó volt. Bővebben: jó volt, de. Még bővebben: a maga idejében elképesztő élmény lehetett ilyen magas szintű íráskészség szűrőjén keresztül találkozni az USA problémáival, különösen ami a feketék helyzetét illeti. Viszont a politikai elemzések azóta mintha megkoptak volna. Ezzel együtt olvasásra ajánlom – egész egyszerűen azért, mert amikor egy Beauvoir-szintű író először kerül kontaktusba olyan újszerű dolgokkal, mint a felhőkarcolók erdeje vagy a sivatag homokján végigömlő naplemente, abból rossz dolog nem sülhet ki.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite wild to me that the trendy The Woman Destroyed with its pink cover is everywhere but I had to go through interlibrary loan to find a copy of this out of print Simone de Beauvoir gem, which is very sharp and resonant still today

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

While at times, I very much appreciated Beauvoir's gorgeous writing style, here's what I have to say after several weeks of plowing through this arduous collection of journal entries: GOOD RIDDANCE, BEAUVOIR.

About two hundred pages too long, "America Day by Day" comes across as an extremely judgmental narration of the country; the reader doesn't even get a taste for Beauvoir's true appreciation of certain aspects of America. Even when she is praising, her praise doesn't sound positive -- hers is too cold and objective of a voice. At times, it lacks warmth and feeling.

Moreover, I grew more than a little tired of Beauvoir's unrestrained, self-aggrandizing political views throughout her entries, as though she actually knew enough about American politics to speak about them effectively. She uses words such as "puritanical" (several times) in her critiques of American culture and morality, and frequently criticizes capitalism, deeming it a sort of "lottery system" where only a few "lucky" individuals are capable of making something of themselves while everyone else suffers at the expense of the system. I suppose she was a communist, yet she never makes a clear case for communism, instead choosing only to bash what she hates rather than bolster what she believes. It seems that this trend continues on the left today.

I will say that Beauvoir's views on American race relations were interesting, well-articulated, and important. I also enjoyed her fascination with New York, as well as some of her extremely poetic and insightful descriptions of American landscape and architecture. However, did these insights really need 400 pages of space, or does Beauvoir simply find each of her own thoughts too clever not to share?

2 stars. Would not recommend.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Plea for Less Restraint

I had hoped that this memoir about an affair with someone other than Sartre would be more stimulating than this, either intellectually or sexually or both.
But I don't think it was either.
SDB would be a far more stimulating author if she was having all of these experiences now, assuming she would be the same age she was when she had and wrote about them.
I guess what I mean is that there is a modesty and restraint about her writing that I wish she had broken free of (sorry I mean: from which I wish she had broken free).
Everything about life and love and mind is to be found in SDB.
I just wish she would be less modest and restrained.
I have tried to give her this advice, but she never responds to my emails.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dearly hope I'm never fated to live in Rochester.

[nina f]

I keep fighting the urge to copy page after page in my notebook.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is rare for me to begin a book and love it so fervently only to find myself skimming and skipping to applicable parts when the book is well underway. But, life is full of suprises, although past experiences with Simone du Beauvoir could have eluded to this reaction.
Because one of my two majors was French Studies, it makes sense that I've read some of her stuff before, and, before I even begain this I did mention to a friend I hoped I would find it too "accademic." But, I was a little mistaken regarding my "hang ups" on her writing. It's not that I was forced to speed-read Memoirs of a Duitiful Daughter, it's more that she's one of the most unreliable narrators on the planet.
Please do not misconstrue: I love and, generally, agree with her outlook on things. I found in particularly engaging to be pushed into a French woman's views on America rather than the reverse, which is far easier to find. And, having a deep-rooted, completely cliche love of France, French-culture, food, women, et al., I think I might be more willing to read the musings of a French woman.
That being said: my irritation/tiring feelings toward the novel emerged precisely because of that--du Beauvoir presents HERESELF as anything but "a French woman." She's intelligent, independent, a philosopher, looking at cultures with "the eyes of a sociologist." Granted, she's obviously more informed than most, especially most women at that time, but lets be honest. Where do du Beauvoir's astute observations COME from? Books? Periodicals? Word of mouth? I find the lack of sources really very trying.
When I began the book I took her observations at face value and declaired them not only feesible, but profound. However, as the book went on I began to really ponder the whole thing. She was here four months. FOUR months.
Not to bring myself into this because I obviously matter little in the grand scheme of things, but I lived in France, both the south of France and Paris, for over eight. I learned the Parisian metros, I could, by the time I leaving, talk to shop clerks, waiters, flight attendants and policemen in French that as coherent. I read Balzac, Beaudlaire and yes, even Inesqueo...attended classes, ate crepes, traveled by bus (and, ahem, I am American and I have taken bus tours. I am also not poor and I use the metropolitan bus system. I did here, in New York, LA and even with my nanny and babysitters as a child. So there).
Want to know what I DIDN'T do in France (keeping in mind I am not a philosopher or sociologist)? I DIDN'T keep a running log of extensive, pedantic notes of one-sided observations and assume my limited observations to be "true-isms" to use a "philosopical vocab" word I can remember.
A few that stand out in my mind? American women wear heels, make up and look done up all the time. Hm. Well, since I was not even a spark in my infant parents eyes at the time this book was written, I guess I can't affectively comment, but I can say, my mother, now 66, was told by a elderly French woman I got to know that "it simply would not do for a middle aged woman to wear anything but heels." Now, I took that with a grain of salt--in that, she was one French woman, and I lived with another (who, if she set foot outside the house, did ONLY wear high heels...but that's two). Guess what? My elderly French professor (a woman)did wear flats. They were still dress shoes, but yeah, they were flats. In short, it just seems narrow minded to make such grand assumptions based on a very limited experience with a country. Not to mention...France, as a whole, is as big as Texas. The US? I mean...I lived in NYC for over two years and she was there a month. Not even that in full. I don't think it's fair for her to say what "shameless" Americans will and won't do. Seeing one hung over guy order seltzer water at Duane Reed or whatever they had then hardly makes it a mass, socially acceptable thing to do.
She also does things that, as a visitor and a limited one at that, make perfect sense: she calls the East River the Hudson, the George Washington Bridge the Brooklyn, UCLA mixed up, The Sierra Nevadas the Rockies (ha ha ha) and parks and monuments mixed up (not knowing them myself, I can't say much). But--all this would be FINE if she just didn't take herself so seriously...have an editor...re-wrote this book AFTER the fact and extensive notes. I mean, my stance while living in France wasn't all that healthy, either--in usually consisted of muteness and very wide eyes because they speak FAST in Paris, but I think some fear and restraint is good, it's respectful.
And it's hard to even touch on the racism. There's not a book from this era that can make it look like it was anything but awful and tense, and my "education" hardly makes me an expert, but I do know I often used the whole "France is so open minded" theory, originally, and would offer up Josephine Baker as an example. Eh...in reality, I don't know of any white dancers who performed mostly nude and were ONLY depicted that way, so I have a hard time believing it was "equal." Better, sure, but you sure do see a lot of African street cleaners and trashmen in France...even now. I think we all have something. She's just so sure of herself, on such a highhorse/soap box. She's not anywhere long enough to know.
And...why the hell was she walking up La Cinega Blvd. anyway? I mean, you don't walk on MLK either, it doesn't mean the whole town's bad, just some places you don't walk.
In shrot, I did enjoy it, her perceptions, etc. But I liked the personal ones, those specific to SIMONE du Beauvoir--the white room feeling like an infirmary, the beauty of cities, the perceptions of individuals. But her crash course in America 101 left my nerves and sense of pride (good to know it's there) a bit raggid. And then she goes home and kind of even kocks France. I don't think comparison is always helpful. Can't places and people be observed for what they are?
***I have deliberately decided to omitt the "obnoxious" journalist in LA who is mouth, stupid and fat. Let's just say it made me so angery I could scream and I find it hard to believe anyone would EVER say those things, any of it, let alone all of it. I find it even more unlikely she would, (du Beauvoir) without a tape recorder or direct short hand, recall ALL that.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This journey through the United States in 1947 is fascinating and at times frustrating. Simone de Beauvoir was no ordinary tourist, of course. She was welcomed into cultural and intellectual circles that most visitors to the U.S. cannot access, and counted Richard Wright and Nelson Algren as guides in her forays into New York’s jazz clubs and Chicago’s dive bars respectively.

De Beauvoir is an observant and perceptive traveler whose writing is infused with a thoughtful outsider’s perspective. She captures America in all its complexity, offering her opinions on seemingly everything — American women, advertising, architecture, the tourism industry, the natural landscapes, American hospitality. She was enchanted by the azaleas and Spanish moss she encountered in the South but these charms did not blind her to the realities of Southern racism and segregation. Some of the book’s most incisive passages are those where de Beauvoir analyses racism.

My frustrations with parts of America Day by Day lie chiefly in the repetitious and tedious recounting of lectures given and whiskeys drunk. I sometimes felt I was reading a travelogue written by a hard-drinking academic. A bit of editing here and there would not have gone astray.

Overall, Simone de Beauvoir makes for an interesting travel companion in the immediate post-war period. She understands nuance and is curious about everything and everyone. At times, her writing is sublime.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating excitable trundle round America with interesting observations about race class gender and more along the way. Simone seemed to really like the sesh ngl

[Lily Borovets]

Many notes from sidewalks, trains, universities, and bars. Reflections on American life in 1947 *many of which hold true* and nothing like superiority was encountered by me.

[Sunny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible author writing about her experiences of America right after the Second World War. Here are the best bits:

But it’s difficult to cheat in America. The gears are precise: they serve man, provided he quietly compliant.

There. I understand what I’ve come to find, this plenitude that we really feel except in childhood or in early youth, when we’re utterly observed by something outside ourselves.

Here, says C., no one would let you die of hunger, perhaps, but offers of a dinner or a loan are alms granted grudgingly, making friendship impossible. In any case, even now that they have improved their material situation, my friends live in great isolation: there are no cafés or salons where intellectuals meet; everyone leads separate lives.

It's magical but deceptive, for can you see anything if you understand nothing?

Manhattan. The island was then called "Manhattanick," which meant, with strange prescience, "the island of drunkenness." The Indians sold it to the Dutch East India Company for sixty pieces of silver. The Dutch built New Amsterdam there, and in 1653 they built the wall from which Wall Street gets its name in order to defend the town against the claims of the English. But ten years later they ceded it to King Charles II, who made a gift of it to his brother, and in his honor, the city took the name New York.

I see clearly that the originality of their campus garb is only another kind of conformity. Jeans or mink—two uniforms. I think that American women never dress for comfort, for themselves. Their clothing is first and foremost a declaration of a certain standard of living. That's why there's no place for any personal flair that cannot be valued in dollars (save in certain artistic or intellectual circles, but even that rests on a firm foundation of silk and fur). There is only a quantitative hierarchy: the same wealth requires the same coat. A woman's social success is closely tied to how luxurious she looks; this is a terrible burden for the poor. A working girl, a secretary, is forced to spend around 25 percent of her salary on the beauty parlor and cosmetics. She would be looked down on if she came to the office in the same outfit two days in a row. To work at certain big women's magazines that require a sophisticated elegance, a woman needs a more expensive wardrobe than if she were a hostess in a Parisian nightclub. Many young women can't make the necessary outlays, and for this reason a great number of jobs are off-limits to those who need them most. When you arrive in New York, the brilliance and variety of hair and colors seem miraculous, but this miracle has its price. Another fact strikes me as significant: the standard clothing imposed on the American woman is not designed for her convenience; these women who keenly defend their independence on every occasion and so easily become aggressive toward men, nevertheless dress for men. Those high heels that paralyze their movement, those fragile feathers, those flowers in the dead of winter-all those showy things are clearly finery meant to emphasize their femininity and to attract masculine looks.

You have to understand, he explains to me that there isn’t a minute in a black persons life that isn’t penetrated by social consciousness.
dancing, praying, he can never forget that he is black, and
That makes him conscious every minute of the whole white world
from which the word "black" takes its meaning. Whatever he does, a
black man is "committed." There is no black writer who can avoid
the problem of commitment. It is resolved in advance.

When you feel dysfunctional, you're tempted to question the rest of the world. This revolutionary attitude is dangerous to the society it threatens and agonizing for the individual who finds himself facing decisions, risks, and responsibilities. It is accepted a priori that it's your dysfunction that's at fault, and you're only too happy to consider your muddle an illness as curable as a head cold. The questions you pose and your doubts and anguish are denied any inner truth: they are considered a given reality that must be studied scientifically. You are not a subject debating with yourself in a singular drama but an objectively defined case.
Every individual is a case, a universal singularity. The individual most notable for his extravagances, his eccentricities, for the affirmation of his individuality is called a "character," and again, this is a general category in which one's personal and singular freedoms are denied. The case is expressed by the "problem." Every American citizen has a problem, just as he has civil status. If he is normal and well informed, he knows how to define himself in terms that already indicate the solution. If he is less well informed, he defines the problem and demands a solution from competent people. And it is precisely these problems, accompanied by their solutions, that the radio and the press broadcast. If the subject is too muddled, he goes to the psychoanalyst to restore his equilibrium. Psychoanalysis is a vast enterprise of social recuperation; its sole aim is to permit each citizen to take his useful place in society. At this moment, there is a whole category of individuals they are actively trying to help the GIs back from Europe or the Pacific, whose experience abroad has been unsettling.
D. P. [Denise Perner], whose job is to test patients with psychological problems, tells me that many of the patients are veterans. It's easy to understand why, after breathing American optimism throughout their youth and living in a country that denies the existence of evil, these young men were overwhelmed by a sudden confrontation with the world at war, and their experience doesn't fit the system into which they must now reintegrate themselves.

But trust is ambiguous: is it generosity or hypocrisy?

If Americans have so little sense of nuances, it isn't that they're incapable of grasping them after all, American reality itself is sufficiently nuanced —but that they would be troubled by them. To accept nuances is to accept ambiguity of judg-ment, argument, and hesitation; such complex situations force you to think. They want to lead their lives by geometry, not by wisdom.
Geometry is taught, whereas wisdom is discovered, and only the first offers the refreshing certainties that a conscientious person needs. So they choose to believe in a geometric world where every right angle is set against another, like their buildings and their streets.

At Macon the students have sworn not to drink alcohol, no matter where they go. They explain to me proudly that college life depends in great part on the honor system. They take their final exams without surveillance, on their honor. On the whole, the honor system plays a large role in America.

I dine at the Maison Française with the students, and after my lecture they take me for a drink—a glass of milk. Oberlin is "dry," like most college and university towns.

What is most striking to me, and most discouraging, is that they are so apathetic while being neither blind nor unconscious. They know and deplore the oppression of thirteen million blacks, the terrible poverty of the South, the almost equally desperate poverty that pollutes the big cities. They witness the rise, more ominous every day, of racism and reactionary attitudes-the birth of a kind of fascism.
They know that their country is responsible for the world's future.
But they themselves don't feel responsible for anything, because they don't think they can do anything in this world. At the age of twenty, they are convinced that their thought is futile, their good intentions ineffective: "America is too vast and heavy a body for one individual to move it." And this evening I formulate what I've been thinking for days. In America, the individual is nothing. He is made into an abstract object of worship; by persuading him of his individual value, one stifles the awakening of a collective spirit in him. But reduced to
himself in this way, he is robbed of any concrete power.

And if French cooking is "thoughtful," as Colette says, this cuisine seems the fruit of a thousand years of meditation.

But music escapes the limitations of time and space. It can capture something out of thin air and give it to me.

It's here, they say, that the Robin Hood of New Mexico, Billy the Kid, the most famous outlaw, lived. Born in New York in 1850, he was twelve years old when he killed a man in New Mexico who had insulted his mother. He went to Arizona, then to Mexico and Texas, took part in the Lincoln County cattle war on the side of the Murphy faction, was taken prisoner, escaped his jailers in a sensational breakout, and then, while paying a visit to his sweetheart in Fort Sumner, was killed in the night by Sheriff Pat Garrett.
Legend has made him a hero who killed twenty-one men in twenty-one years, who distributed the property of the rich to the poor, avenged injustice, and with a price on his head, danced gaily in Gallisteo Street in Santa Fe.

The surest way to succeed is to convince oneself that the inequality between blacks and whites is not created by human will but merely confirms a given fact. It is asserted that certain racial characteristics exist that give blacks a lower rank than whites on the biological scale. But it is noteworthy that the idea of "race" in the scientific sense is never applied precisely to "racial" questions. Initially of African origin, American blacks are a highly mixed group. More than 70 percent of them have white blood, and about 20 percent have Indian blood. A black person in the U.S.A. is an individual with a percentage, however small, of black blood in his veins. That's why sociologists use the word "caste" rather than "race" to designate this category of cit-zens. Usually, certain specific physiological features distinguish blacks from whites. That's clear. But that these features imply inferiority is an unfounded assumption. The cranial capacity of blacks is a little smaller than that of whites, but science has established no connection between cranial capacity and mental capacity. The current prejudice about the supposedly gigantic size of blacks' genital organs— a sign of their bestiality—is absolutely contradicted by precise statistics. As for the "goatish" odor of black people, whites who were asked to identify sweat samples taken from black bodies and white bodies admitted that they were incapable of distinguishing between the two.

We walk along the wharves where, among the narrow docks smelling of tar, the Boston Tea Party took place. The Revolutionary War began when Bostonians, rebelling against taxes, threw a whole cargo of English tea into the water. The wharves are made of wood and lined with dilapidated houses.

"Sure, war is a despicable thing, but if we don't wage war today, who can guarantee that Russia won't wage war when it is even stronger?"

"This country is like an enormous whale. It has a tiny brain—that's the East-and an endless body." The tiny brain doesn't feel capable of commanding the crushing mass of flesh. For many reasons, a tradition of intellectual defeatism has been established in this world, so new and yet already so old.

Through a lack of participation in society, these young people do not harbor any bold individual ambitions-first, because the one hardly ever happens without the other. To dream of making one's way in the world requires that the world be open, unstable, malleable.

"Americans are just big children." Their tragedy is precisely that they are not children, that they have adult responsibilities, an adult existence, but they continue to cling to a ready-made, opaque uni-verse, like that of childhood. Conversely, American children are already little men: in one sense, childhood in this country is a golden age, yet at the same time it is hardly childhood—instead, it's an adult life on a smaller scale. And because the childhood world and the adult world are homogeneous, youth is not a privileged time; the individual doesn't question himself, form himself, or choose himself any more during this time than another. This has many consequences, and I shall return to them later. Today, I wanted only to talk about youth.
The impression I'm left with might be summed up this way: whereas in Europe every adolescent begins the world anew—whether in revolt, pride, eagerness, or fear, whether timidly or impetuously in America he simply fills the space assigned to him in a world that's external to him, a world that doesn't owe its existence to him. He spends his youth staying put, never knowing that it is man who is the measure of things, and not things that a priori impose limits on him.
Perhaps the reason Americans remain so young until an advanced age is that they have never really been young.

Perhaps their clumsiness in handling the American language helps them renounce their singularity and slip into the slots society has prepared for them. Contrary to what most people say, I Find it easier to speak than to understand. When I speak, I choose the words myself, and I use only the ones I know.

Throughout history, there have been moments when action has been possible. Lenin is an example of this. But today, the objective situation allows no effective individual intervention in France, or in America either. The will to action is now just a subjective attitude, a maladjusted attitude that begs to be psychoanalyzed— especially among intellectuals, given that, for the moment, they have no role to play. It's also noteworthy, he says, that the heroes of a Hemingway, like those of a Koestler, always define themselves as outsiders. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Jordan doesn't even know exactly why he's on the side of the Spanish Reds. Similarly, in Spanish Testament, Koestler is merely a journalist, a witness. He describes the drama of Palestine from the outside, not being a Zionist himself.

the French writer easily produces eddies and whirlwinds around him, and these results encourage him in an action that may be illusory, whereas the American does not disturb the frozen immutability he finds outside him.
Rather than speaking in the desert, he keeps quiet or confines himself to whispering confidences to a small circle of friends.

The majority of Americans are like those I've rubbed shoulders with —they're content to let their lives go round in the same circle. They have neither the taste nor the understanding for collective life; nor are they concerned about their individual fates. This is the source of the sadness I've often felt around them; this world that's full of generous promise is crushing them, and its splendor soon seems sterile because there are no men to dominate it. All civilizations offer men an escape into "the banality of daily life,” but what is unique here is the degree to which this escape is systematically organized. Neither a person's education nor the setting in which he's raised is designed to reveal his inner life to him. He becomes conscious of himself not only as a body of flesh and blood but also as an organism that is protected and extended by an arsenal of mechanical devices. He goes up and down from one floor to the other by elevator; he travels around by subway, speaks on the telephone, writes on a typewriter, sweeps up with a vacuum cleaner. Interposed between food and his stomach are factories that make canned goods, refrigerators, and electric stoves. Between his sexual desires and their satisfaction, there is a whole set of moral precepts and hygienic practices.
Society hems him in from childhood. He learns to look outside him-self, at others, for a model of behavior; this is the source of what we call "American conformism."

Listening to their jazz, talking with them about it, I often felt that even the time they're living in is abstract. They respect the past, but as an embalmed monument; the idea of a living past integrated with the present is alien to them. They want to know only a present that's cut off from the flow of time, and the future they project is one that can be mechanically deduced from it, not one whose slow ripening or abrupt explosion implies unpredictable risks. They believe in the future of a bridge or an economic plan, not the future of an art or a revolution. Their time is the "physicist's time," a pure exteriority that mirrors the exteriority of space. And because they reject duration, they also reject quality. It's not just for economic reasons that there is no "craftsmanship" in America; even in the leisure activities of domestic life, they don't aim for superior quality: food is cooked and fruit is ripened as quickly as possible. In every area they rush for fear that the result will already be outdated the moment it's achieved. Cut off from the past and the future, the present has no thickness.

[Celeste · Rating 4 out of 5]

This week there was a trend on Instagram where people are posting their photos from 2016. This book was the necessary jolt that brought me back to 2016, when I was a student easily excited by ideas in literature and philosophy, coincidentally visiting Paris and chancing upon Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter in a secondhand shop.

A fascinating part travel, part memoir, and part philosophical inquiry book by an excellent writer and translator. It was poignant to read this having travelled to almost all the locations Beauvoir did (NYC, DC, Niagara Falls, Cleveland, Chicago, LA, SF, Sacramento, Reno, Las Vegas, Lone Pine, Death Valley, Mojave Desert, Grand Canyon, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, Mississippi, Savannah, Charleston, Willamsburgh, Cambridge/ Boston/ Salem/ Rockport), albeit with an uncritical eye — and trying to grasp what I will miss about the USA once we depart in a few months.

One often reads travel stories of Americans traveling to Paris, rarely does one read the reverse — at least in the English language. Some thoughts:

- Beauvoir channels incredible energy and store of knowledge in her travels. One day she’s summarising her views of American universities and positing how Americans are eternal children from her experiences lecturing in Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Vassar, Oberlin, Wellesley; the next day she’s talking about the different neighbourhoods in New York and how you can get a different atmosphere depending on the direction you take.
- Intersperses philosophy with daily wandering. How could she accomplish so much in just 5 months! I see some casual writings I did in Paris and Lagos and how they fall short of serious writing and inquiry.
- People have accused Beauvoir of being manipulative and I could see a bit of the “taker” mentality in her travels: Calling up acquaintances without thinking twice, always looking for amusement/ pleasure/ learning, purposefully wandering to out of bound places, almost treating people like museum objects to be studied or fodder for her writing.
- Struggled between giving this book a 4 or 5 star read because she writes many bangers, but those daily diary entries can drone on for a while.

Excerpts

Everything amazes me, both the unexpected sights and those I've anticipated. I didn't know that in front of the apartment buildings [in New York] in the elegant neighbourhoods there would be a greenish canvas canopy marked with a big number and extending onto the sidewalk, as if announcing some kind of wedding. […] What disconcerts me is that those movie sets that I'd never really believed in are suddenly real.

Brooklyn exists, as does Manhattan with its skyscrapers and all of America on the horizon. As for me, I no longer exist. There. I understand what I've come to find - this plenitude that we rarely feel except in childhood or in early youth, when we're utterly absorbed by something outside ourselves. […] In a flash I'm freed from the cares of that tedious enterprise I call my life. I'm just the charmed consciousness through which the sovereign Object will reveal itself.

I walk slowly. I want to string the lights around my neck, stroke them, eat them. Here they are - and what can I do with them? My hands, my mouth, my eyes have not taken in this night. There are bars and restaurants here; I'm not hungry or thirsty. The stores - none of the objects they're selling will give me New York. A book would tear me away from New York. But strolling around Times Square won't help either. These people seem to be walking just like me, but they're going somewhere. The night is leading them ceremoniously toward a desired encounter. My desire is nothing but a myth - New York, which is everywhere and nowhere.

The senior editor is swivelling in his revolving armchair. From the height of his own power and American power in general, he throws me an ironic look: So France amuses itself with existentialism? Of course, he knows nothing about existentialism; his contempt is aimed at philosophy in general and more generally still at the presumptuousness of an economically impoverished country that claims to think. Isn't it preposterous to want to think when you don't have the advantage of being one of the heads of a big American newspaper, one that moreover does away with thinking? 'Yes,' he says, 'in France you pose problems, but you don't solve them. We solve problems, we don't pose them.' The armchair swivels and creaks. In France, the powerful people of this world affect intimidating indifference; this man plays at flippancy. Perhaps his restlessness - like the gum chewing of so many Americans - is meant to mask a feeling of inner uncertainty.

What is striking is the split between the intellectuals and the writers. Most of the [American] writers began as paperboys or shoe-shine boys and have acquired their culture haphazardly. It's very rare that cultivated men write - or at least write books that strike some chord. This quarrel is almost a class quarrel. In France, we have intellectuals to spare, whereas the effort of writers to integrate life in its crudest form into literature was quite new to us and singularly enriching.

Disciplines [like psychoanalysis] help [Americans] escape. When you feel dysfunctional, you're tempted to question the rest of the world. This revolutionary attitude is dangerous to the society it threatens and agonising for the individual who finds himself facing decisions, risks and responsibilities. It is accepted a priori that it's your dysfunction that's at fault, and you're only too happy to consider your muddle an illness as curable as a head cold. […] You are not a subject debating with yourself in a singular drama but an objectively defined case. Every individual is a case, a universal singularity. The individual most notable for his extravagances, his eccentricities, for the affirmation of his individuality is called a 'character' category in which one's personal and singular freedoms are denied.

The [movie] screen transfigured everyday objects, re-establishing that distance between the drugstore and me that seems to disappear every time I drink an orange juice and yet continues to exist. It was through these black-and-white images that I first knew America, and I still think of them as its real substance. The screen is a platonic heaven where I grasp the Idea in its purity once more.

There is something restful about finding yourself in the serene and international world of paintings: I could be at the Louvre, the Prado or the Uffizi. The new world meets the old - there is only one past. When I emerge, I'm surprised to find myself in Washington again.

There's an intellectual regionalism in America; Henry Miller isn't very important in New York, but on the West Coast, where he lives, he's thought of as a genius.

Tourism has a privileged character in America: it doesn't cut you off from the country it's revealing to you; on the contrary, it's a way of entering it. So often in Italy, in Greece, in Spain, I've felt such regret that my condition as a traveller separated me from the inhabitants, who hardly travel at all. In contrast, the average American devotes a great part of his leisure time to driving along the highways. The gas stations, roads, hotels and solitary inns exist only for the tourist and because of the tourist, and these things are profoundly part of America. These landscapes of the Far West we're travelling through exist essentially for the sake of tourists. Almost no one lives here, and their only human significance is that they welcome people who pass through without stopping. By travelling in America, I'm not distanced from it. No dream of rootedness challenges the giddy exhilaration of the car and the wind.

Throughout the day the great tragedy of the South pursues us like an obsession. Even the traveller confined to a bus and waiting rooms cannot escape it. From the time we entered Texas, everywhere we go there's the smell of hatred in the air - the arrogant hatred of whites, the silent hatred of blacks.

[In a circus] A man attempts to jump rope on a wire metres above the ground. There's no net, and the spectators hold their breath. As for me, I find this anxiety unbearable, and I'm indignant that nets are not mandatory, either in France or in America. I do know that it's the risk of death that gives this exercise the reality of an event; something is happening in earnest - that's what the acrobat wants and that's what fascinates the audience and me. Only the presence of death can give a moment of life such poignant authenticity. […] It’s the public itself that seems to be the murderer. Yet it refuses to assume this role: it watches; that’s all.

I always feel crushed by the ghastly opulence of big American hotels. You could live a whole life without ever going out: florists candy vendors, booksellers, hairdressers, manicurists, stenographers and typists are at your service. There are four different restaurants, bars, cafés and dance floors. It's a neutral zone, like the international boutiques in the middle of colonial capitals.

Americans turn away contemptuously from the past. ('What? You're still interested in old Faulkner?' a shocked publisher asked me.) The collective future is in the hands of a privileged class, the Pullman class, which has a monopoly on the joy of starting ventures and creating on a grand scale. The others don't know how to invent a unique future for themselves in the steel world in which they are merely cogs in the machine. They have no project, passion, nostalgia or hope that engages them beyond the present; they know only the indefinite repetition of the cycle of hours and seasons.

There is a tradition of self-criticism in America, as there was not long ago in France. And the people who speak most harshly of the country here are not those who are least attached to it. […] The Americans who attack a certain moral, political and economic position are showing that they insist on a destiny worthy of this great land where they are citizens; their demands and their lucidity are the highest forms of love.

If not disposed to action, [the American] is closed to ideas. In France and Italy, ideas are more readily welcomed because they have fewer consequences. For Puritan consciences that make clear distinctions between Good and Evil, between True and False, ideas have consequences, but they are also avoided, or at least not eagerly welcomed. It seems to me that this is the essential reason for that difference in attitude that I mentioned: the French writer easily produces eddies and whirlwinds around him, and these results encourage him in an action that may be illusory, whereas the American does not disturb the frozen immutability he finds outside him.

Americans adore these uninhibited actions in which they see ready proof of their love of freedom. This driver is a 'character', an original who has openly demonstrated that individualism America is so proud of. It's true that America is much more indulgent of sudden whims and impulses that do not seriously challenge its authority. […] The word “freedom” is devoid of all content. […] 'Everybody is free; even a coal miner is master in his own home.’ Yet if a citizen is considered Red, he will be fired from the civil service in the name of the general interest; on the other hand, private employers will refuse to hire him: 'It's their right; everybody is free.' And the citizen also finds himself free, to be Red and to die of hunger.

Before [slaughtered animals] are cut up, they spend twenty-four hours hanging from hooks in the huge refrigeration rooms. This seems to me more like a sacred rite than an operation with a useful purpose; it's the nightwatch before a battle, the initiation that transfigures a carnal being, rooted in nature and filled with murky discharges, into a human conquest that has its place and its role in society. The animal that just bellowed and spit its blood becomes a piece of food that a civilised individual can eat for nourishment with peace of mind. In the same way, marriage transforms a woman of the poisonous sex into a chaste wife.

Columbus Circle, Broadway, Times Square. Four months have passed. It's the same crowd, taxis, cars, glimmering lights. The drugstores and the skyscrapers have lost none of their magic. I know why I love them. There's a fascinating mirage that spreads out across this civilisation of ease and abundance: the image of an existence that would not wear itself out just staying in place and would make every effort to forge ahead. Eating, moving around, getting dressed, all this is done effortlessly and efficiently - everything can begin after this. […] [Americans] are not satisfied with inertia; they judge a man by his acts: in order to be, you must do. The great metal bridges, the buildings, Grand Central Station, Park Avenue, the airports, the roads and the mines are the affirmation of this faith. It will be hard for me to tear myself away from these grand visions of hope; yet I know their snares. In this country, too, life exhausts itself just to survive.

What do people do with their time, with the money they earn? The majority of Americans are like those I've rubbed shoulders with - they're content to let their lives go round in the same circle. They have neither the taste nor the understanding for collective life; nor are they concerned about their individual fates. This is the source of the sadness I've often felt around them; this world that's full of generous promise is crushing them, and its splendour soon seems sterile because there are no men to dominate it. All civilisations offer men an escape into 'the banality of daily life', but what is unique here is the degree to which this escape is systematically organised. Neither a person's education nor the setting in which he's raised is designed to reveal his inner life to him. […] That's why Americans love speed, alcohol, film 'thrillings' and sensational news. They feverishly demand something more and, again, something more, never able to quell their restlessness. Yet here, as everywhere else, life repeats itself day after day, so people amuse themselves with gadgets, and lacking real projects, they cultivate hobbies. These manias allow them to pretend to take responsibility, by choice, for their daily habits. Sports, movies and comics all offer distractions.

There are few really ambitious people here. There is hero worship, which is rather capricious in itself, but for themselves, people desire little more than to rise one or two steps in the social hierarchy; furthermore, a young man eager to distinguish himself will wish to be distinguished as a citizen, not as a man. He will not dream of emerging beyond the given world.

America is one of the pivotal points of the world, where the future of man is being played out. To 'like' America, to 'dislike' it - these words have no meaning. It is a battlefield, and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself.

[Pol Nicolaï · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great companion for a great roadtrip

[Carole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in contrast to Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, this book is a marked improvement. It pursues local knowledge with an awareness of the limitations of a four month timespan and a foreign perspective. It attempts the grand scheme and understanding that I wanted from Travels. Assembled from her notes during the trip, it even takes a more detailed and personal approach to the landscapes that de Beauvoir meets.
The translation was luminous, and though I cannot access the original, Carol Cosman's English prose suggests that de Beauvoir's writing has the charms of vivacity and specificity. Cosman's work was especially brilliant in the moments where de Beauvoir first encounters different landscapes, and where she compares the American scenes to places she loves and knows at home.
The scope of this book includes rather magnified insights into New York and Chicago, in addition to a survey of the nation. The narrator travels west through Niagara all the way to California for a stay with friends in San Francisco, and a road trip along that coast and through Nevada. The return route is through the South, portraying an interesting perspective on the racial conflicts of the time while careful to present a disclaimer to the effect of being an outsider and not having a true insight to the issue, which is interesting in its similarity to Steinbeck's story. I need another perspective on this subject from this time period.
The narrative is bookended by de Beauvoir's experiences in New York and Chicago, and it is clearly with this vibrant urban culture that she most identifies. The life which she establishes for herself and contrasts to her well-loved life in Paris is an interesting exercise in transplanting an intellectual life.
This story was endearing for the way it clearly set out its limitations in the preface, then defied these to write a travelogue that cut deep rather than running wide and shallow across American life. By the time de Beauvoir made her 4 pages of generalizations on Americans at the end of the book, the reader felt that she had credibility enough to make these assertions and empathy enough to apply them to the nation's character, rather than the virtue of individuals.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been wanting to read this for years, and am glad it has finally appeared in print again. I love de Beauvoir's autobiographical writing, and this chunk of her story adds to the detail of my favourite volume of it - Force of Circumstance. The book describes de Beauvoir's three-month tour of the US in 1947, and recounts her impressions of the country as she travels around giving lectures at mainly privileged women's colleges, meeting new friends (including Nelson Algren in Chicago who was to become one of the great loves of her life with Sartre and Lanzmann), and visiting Hollywood. She is an excellent travel writer from my point of view in that she really strives to understand and record differences in how people live their life, and how they think about it. She is not always flattering about Americans, but her observations remain interesting and pertinent even 70 or so years later. Any first-time visitor to the States - particularly New York - could happily have this on their bed-side table during their first week as both an aide-memoir for reflecting on their visit, and a challenge to be a less passive participant in the travel experience.

[Blanca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is book was recommended to me in the context for urban studies, but I also found it a compelling travel diary and memoir.

The author is often overlooked because she is overshadowed by her famous love interest and her more well known book, but if you are interested in reading the perspective of an America long-gone by a foreigner, this is an excellent read.

There is great attention to detail is the regional identity, speech, values and geography. As a foreigner, she is observant of the scenery and does not take for granted the American backdrop, which hardly exists anymore.

[Ariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely wonderful. could have been written last week. her insight and analysis of the american psyche and way of life are penetrating, fascinating. and she drinks loads of whiskey and often stays up til four, talking literature and philosophy. i want to travel with her!

[Craig Barner · Rating 5 out of 5]

My hands are practically shaking as I type. Simone de Beauvoir's America Day by Day is so engrossing that I am filled with enthusiasm. I want to shout about its brilliance: What an extraordinary book! This work is so erudite that it prompts me to wonder what assessment anyone could offer that would be of value. That, of course, would be the last thing that the great thinker from Paris would want. Simone de Beauvoir is all about keeping the thoughts going, but reviewing her work is like reviewing Socrates. I want to read it again, rather than criticize it. Underlined passages fill my copy.

A good teacher turns out students and followers. I urge anyone who reads these words to get America Day by Day. It is a book that opens minds and might even change lives, even if it is merely a road book. I almost suspect that the act of holding the work increases the intelligence of anyone who does.

America Day by Day is more than a conventional diary about a four-month visit to the U.S., though French thinker writes about what she did and where she went as part of her coast-to-coast tour. De Beauvoir's insights about the American nation and its virtues and failings are fascinating. And there are plenty of them.

De Beauvoir is even handed in her treatment of sensitive topics. Take the belief that is prevalent among Europeans in general and French in particular that Americans are immature:

"I think that the majority of adolescents in America do not make it; and this is what gives a certain truth to the otherwise superficial slogan 'Americans are just big children'", she writes. "Their tragedy is precisely that they are not children, that they have adult responsibilities, an adult existence, but they continue to cling to a ready-made, opaque universe, like that of childhood. Conversely, American children are already little men." This is trenchant given the fragmented, competitive, status-obsessed way of life in the US.

She also writes about Americans' insipid inertia, shameful racism, obsessive materialism, political defeatism and dozens of other foibles.

"The American is smitten with concrete reality, but the only manifestation of reality that he recognizes is an entirely abstract sign -- money. Other values are too difficult to appreciate." This and other gems inspire the reader to reflect on himself or herself.

Her insights about the essential passivity of Americans from all backgrounds are the most captivating. The people of America are inert, and they are deprived of any means of action, she claims.

"This passivity can be explained by the whole history of America," de Beauvoir says. "Immigration has led to the heterogeneity of cultures that is not conducive to collective conscious." She doesn't spare American "intellectuals" either. They lack projects and expectations, content to turn to their coterie of friends and bookshelves, possessing the veneer of intelligence. Action -- the true measure of an intellectual -- is missing.

The book isn't only about unearthing defects in the American character. De Beauvoir finds much to celebrate in the people she meets. They are authentically warm, generous and pragmatic. When Americans have something to say, she notes that they say it with more fire and passion than in any other country.

It might come as a surprise that the great French intellectual is intimidated by Americans. Dozens of times, she is overwhelmed by late-night debates over drinks in bars in New York and other places about politics, culture and literature. Indeed, de Beauvoir is practically exhausted after some debates. The great thinker has her own intellectual limits, it seems.

Though America Day by Day is primarily a cultural work, it is also represents a guidebook on how to travel. De Beauvoir sometimes bypasses the cultural gems. She wants to find the true character of a place. In Chicago, de Beauvoir does not even bother to write about the museums and cultural offerings. She is drawn to the city's skid row. There she sees the morphine addicts, prostitutes and down-and-outers who go about their lives almost in a zombie state. She sees bums on the street. She goes to the Union Stockyards, once the world's biggest slaughterhouse, to see animals butchered, noting the frothing blood, mounds of entrails and stained laborers. In the Southwest, de Beauvoir goes to a Native American town, where unfriendly locals meet her, but she is unfazed. She wants to see the bright places and dark spots of America, even those places where she is unwelcome and likely to feel uncomfortable.

And, I suspect, Simone de Beauvoir was never satisfied. Her appetite for discovery and insight was nearly unlimited. An insatiable appetite is another characteristic of the intellectual. There were few who could devour as much food for thought as she did.

[Mert · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 Stars (%55/100)

Though I've found the book interesting sometimes, it was difficult to go through because she was heavily inspired by Sartre's ideas. Here's a brief synopsis/analysis:

Simone de Beauvoir visited the US in 1947, the same year Sartre published his own essay, and recorded her experiences in America Day by Day. Because de Beauvoir and Sartre had a rather complicated relationship, their writing style has lots of similarities. For instance, de Beavoir’s book has an existentialist tone which was Sartre’s specialty. She stayed in the US for four months and from her writing, it can be said that she was very much fascinated by the people and American way of life in general. However, similar to Sartre, and perhaps Max Weber, she also talked about the contrasting values of Americans. First few entries are mostly about her fascination with New York and she thinks that the city “belongs to the future” (De Beauvoir 3). She continuously compares New York with Paris and believes that the two “do not exist together” (7). She feels like she is in an entirely different world and finds many things strange.

In her January 26 entry, she compares the day and night life New York and thinks that in time, she will find her place here. The comparison between America and Europe continues as the views the architecture of the city. Here, she calls New York the “city of contrasts” (10) and explains the difference between small alleys with huge skyscrapers. Still, like Max Weber, she is astonished by the city, and the US in general. She continues to meet Americans and some French people and compares their different behaviors. She explains that when she visited other cities, Paris remained in her heart. However, in America, she thinks that she has “landed not only in a foreign country but in another world—an autonomous, separate world” (13). On February 1, she meets more Americans and the differences between American and French people puzzle her.

Here, she talks about American literature and mentions a few important authors such as Faulkner and Hemingway. Different Americans have different views about America and she finds it difficult to understand the people much like Sartre or Weber. The more time she spends in the US, the more difficult it is to understand the people. Still, it can be understood from her entries that she likes to spend time with Americans as she finds them fascinating. In a party, the Americans find her statements “worthy of a Soviet agent” (41) and criticize her Europeanness. In one of her later entries, she talks about the Puritan values of goodness and virtue and explains that Americans truly believe in these values. However, she also explains that “American myths rest not on lies but rather on skillfully exploited truths” (66) and once again makes a comparison between Europe and America. When she visits Queens, she experiences the differences between Queens and New York and briefly touches upon racial issues, especially in terms of music. In short, like Sartre or other Europeans, Simone de Beauvoir also finds America fascinating with its contrasting characteristics

[Simona Calò · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reportage che suppongo essere piuttosto raro da reperire e meno conosciuto di molte pubblicazioni dell'autrice. Del suo viaggio americano lungo quattro mesi del 1955 abbiamo modo di sapere ogni cosa: le sue sensazioni, gli incontri con intellettuali, artisti e attivisti politici, le visite culturali, le descrizioni accuratissime, com'è nel suo stile, di paesaggi, rituali e tipi umani, il suo coinvolgimento rispetto al paese che visita. E' stato indubbiamente interessante scoprire quanto fossero diversi gli Stati Uniti settant'anni fa: la tenerezza di certe espressioni desuete e della sorpresa per oggetti e costumi oggi dati per scontati, ma anche l'amara consapevolezza di come alcuni aspetti non cambino mai. La sua appassionata disamina sugli americani, che confronta con europei e francesi in particolare, manca di qualsiasi superficialità a cui siamo abituati quando leggiamo o esprimiamo giudizi su un popolo o una cultura diversi, ma il suo inconfondibile approccio esistenzialista, la sua profondità umana e sociale giunge a osservazioni estremamente stimolanti e attuali (mi viene in mente le considerazioni che fa Severgnini nei suoi libri sugli Stati Uniti: ecco, un altro pianeta). Temi centrali della sua curiosità sono la segregazione razziale (che confronta con quella degli indiani nelle riserve), la gioventù, il capitalismo e il ruolo della donna.
La scelta di scrivere di ogni giornata trascorsa lo rende vivace e intimo come un diario, animato da descrizioni particolareggiate dei loisirs notturni, tra cene, concerti, night club e bassifondi.
Un'opera singolare, non interessante per tutti, che mi fa conoscere meglio uno dei miei modelli di riferimento. E' anche il viaggio in cui conosce Nelson Algren, con cui nasce una storia travolgente: si intuisce la sua presenza, ma la discrezione calata su ogni nome, che si limita alle sole iniziali, non permette di saperne di più.

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. This book took me on a journey (literally) and dazzled me at the end.

“To ‘like’ America, to ‘dislike’ it—these words have no meaning. It is a battlefield, and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure”.

This quote sums up how I feel about America in many ways. Anyone who knows me knows I have a longstanding affinity with America that I have often struggled to explain adequately or ‘defend’. But Simone de Beauvoir hits the nail on the head. America doesn’t care. It is a hot, writhing entity that is here to stay, no matter what you think.

I think de Beauvoir does a good job of being both an observer and a commentator. She poses some quite hefty sociological theories while also translating the humanness of her experiences there, many of which do not feel dated (although some of the language can be).

On reflection, this book gave a lot, although it felt meandering at times—yet ultimately that’s what a journey is. It’s messy, unexpected, and at times laborious.

I liked how she brought in her feelings about her own nationality, recognising the flaws in France as well as the U.S. This book spoke to me as a love letter about being unanchored and the feeling of endless possibility that might only ever be possible in America.

[Mike Clinton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last few pages of Beauvoir's account and reflection of her visit to the United States in 1947 are the most insightful of the whole book. Other parts in it provide memorable images and striking aperçus, too, while in other places her interpretation of the culture (and sometimes specific facts) reveal the understandable limits that her status as an outsider imposed on her. Even those moments, though, are valuable as opportunities to understand the misunderstandings of foreign visitors to the United States. It's also just enjoyable to travel here and there to destinations great and small across the country--she took a mule ride into the Grand Canyon and traveled by Greyhound bus from LA to Savannah...in 1947. There are many other encounters with and contemplations about places and people that make it worthwhile sometimes just as an escape in time and place or sometimes as a vehicle to think critically about the U.S. She met Nelson Algren in Chicago during this trip, too, and began her affair with him, given more intimate attention in her novel Les Mandarins (and their letters, which have been published); my next read, in fact, is Algren's own memoir of his visit to Paris a few years later.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great read. Fascinating to get this insightful perspective on our country from the keen mind & unwavering gaze of de Beauvoir, who falls under its spell (especially in New York City) but is also wise and unsparing in her criticism. Tho a bit frustrating to get into at first, the book soon settles into a rhythm and allows for some extended reflection that includes some startlingly clear-eyed analysis of America's greatest flaw: its bigotry. Venturing up into Harlem against the advice of the usual fear-mongers, de Beauvoir indulges her love of jazz and muses on the persistent attitude of jealousy, resentment & shame on the part of the white population in relation to the black, and how those deep-rooted attitudes bloom into all-out hatred and fury as her travels take her thru the segregated south. The drabness of small towns, the persistent salesmanship and commercialism, the exhausting discussions with intellectuals wherever she goes, nothing escapes de Beauvoir's notice, and she catalogues it all. At times thrilling, at others dull, this travelogue is more often than not a joy, by one who knows the transformative power of travel and of seeking out and embracing the unknown.

[Anna Kravchuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was really interesting to compare these impressions with my own. Despite 50 years between our trips, I discovered that on arrival the author was surprised by the same casual things I was: pharmacies, parks, smiles. On the other hand, the nightlife landscape has changed completely, the segregation decreased, the feminism got stronger (but still, it's astonishing how slow the society changes). I liked that she described a lot of dialogues with locals and her impressions of different universities -- she was quite observant and not judgemental, you can see easily that some opinions were in strong disagreement with her own but she was able to listen, she was interested in discussion, not dismission. It's a rare quality and it allowed her to show a bigger picture.
I'm not sure it would be a good reading choice if you haven't been to America though.

[Hollie Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed this book. This is her journal of her first trip to America in 1947. She was there for four months. Her observations about life as she saw and experienced it in the US are astute and insightful. She is touring colleges and universities on a lecture circuit and meets many interesting people, does lots of sightseeing, and comments on everything that strikes her. Jazz, NYC, the South, students and student life, Indian Pueblos, the Old West and the New West, Hollywood, New Orleans, Chicago's underbelly, 'the negro question', buses and bus stations, landscapes, cars, trains, homeless men, psychiatric hospitals, bars and drinking habits, fashion and politics. Nothing escapes her comment.