Being Seen

I'm an Adam Gopnik fan, and though his January 28th New Yorker bright on Nicholas Sarkozy's love life didn't show him at his free-wheeling, insightful best, it did mention a cover of France's le nouvel observateur I wanted to see. And here it is.


You may not recognize the obscured face or bare fanny, but as the red letters say, it's Simone de Beauvoir. She was photographed in 1950 in Chicago, where she was having a tryst with the slum-living and -writing novelist Nelson Algren. She later wrote ecstatically of the romance and dedicated a book to him. Algren made light of the affair. "So I slept with her," he told his friends. "I showed her around Chicago," he told Paris Review interviewers in 1955. "I showed her the electric chair and everything." In his Walk on the Wild Side (1956), he famously wrote, "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

Though I've read almost nothing by de Beauvoir, I bet she would love appearing in this photo on the cover of a leading French magazine and celebrating her hundred birthday, January 9, 2008, in her birthday suit. First, because the photo shows a de Beauvoir that those of us who remember her don't, can't, remember. This is Simone at 42, still a delectable nymph. Gopkin says, "It's quite a photograph. (It's quite a rear)," as though the rear were big; but no! he's not seeing the rear that's here but rather the rear he imagines from pictures he's seen of de Beauvoir grown old and matronly. The rear that's here could grace a Balanchine dancer. And like a Balanchine dancer's, de Beauvoir's torso is poignantly thin. One wants her to turn from the mirror and run to us for comfort and affection.

Second, de Beauvoir is here presenting herself as she wanted--or was willing--to be seen. (The picture wasn't taken by Algren but by a photographer friend, Art Shay, and was obviously set up.) The Second Sex (1949) had made her famous, and its argument that men belittle women when they see them as sex objects didn't take an Einstein to understand, an Algren would do. Still, de Beauvoir isn't ashamed of being a sex object; on the contrary, she revels in it. Later, she who championed women's equality with men would several times a day put aside whatever she was doing to do the bidding (run to the pharmacy to get cough medicine) of her impossible, life-long love, Jean-Paul Sartre. When a biographer asked de Beauvoir about the contradiction between what she said and what she did, she said, "Real life is messy. I wrote a feminist statement, and then I went on to live my life as I wanted."

Finally, I suspect de Beauvoir would love presenting herself thus because she knew doing so was something many of us--common people, not just artists and exhibitionists--would like to do but lack the guts. I think we would liked to be memorialized naked in a picture or video when we felt our body was beautiful, at the magic age of 27, say, though 42 would do and even later. It's partly the wish to keep something "permanent" of our body from the ongoing train wreck of time. John Wayne said he found it hard to watch the movies he'd made in his 40's because he was so beautiful then; needless to say, he was happy for others to watch them. It's also partly the wish to be known, to be entirely visible yet unashamed. To say, "It's me, this. I'm the person in clothes who you know, and I'm all the things I say and do. But I'm this too. And it's okay. I'm not afraid to be naked to you, and I hope you're not offended."

Annie Leibovitz's photographic session with writer Robert Penn Warren, then 75, hadn't gone well, and both of them must have felt it, because, as Leibovitz was driving away, she saw Warren, in an upstairs window, meaning to be seen, taking off his shirt. She went inside and photographed him naked to the waist.