[In the following review of Beauvoir's collection The Woman Destroyed, Tindall argues that the women protagonists featured in the three novellas suffer from a "human condition" rather than "exclusively feminine misfortunes. "]

At 55 Simone de Beauvoir wrote in the third volume of her autobiography: To grow older is to define oneself. . . . I have written certain books, not written others'. She puts the same thought into the mind of the 60-year-old teacher in the first of her three new stories: 'All in all my literary work will remain what it is: I've seen my limits.' The limitations imposed by ageing seem to have preoccupied her much in recent years. In view of the way that in all her writing, not just in her memoirs, she candidly invites the reader to participate in her personal journey through life, it seems appropriate to ask at this point: 'Well—what has her work been? How do we classify her, basically? And does this latest book fit the picture?'

To many readers Simone de Beauvoir is primarily the feminist author of The Second Sex. This large, non-fiction work has never enjoyed in England either the vogue or the notoriety that it met with in France, partly because it has less universal application outside France than its author perhaps supposed; but there are nevertheless quite a lot of English readers who appear to have responded to its passionate tone with an equally partisan emotion, and who thus think of Madame de Beauvoir first, last and all the time as their champion in the (sic) Sex War. For these readers, then, The Woman Destroyed, and the two shorter pieces that make up the latest book, will slot naturally into the category of Further Evidence of the Awfulness of Being a Woman. Each of the three narrators is a woman at crisis-point from whom time is threatening to remove the thing for which she has lived. In The Age of Discretion the teacher faces, among other unpalatable realities, the fact that her adored son has grown into an arriviste who does not value the causes to which she and his father have devoted their lives; in Monologue a neurotic bitch inveighs hysterically against the loneliness which she has reaped; in The Woman Destroyed a helpless wife approaching middle age sees her husband gradually leave her for another woman. This selection of characters skilfully invites the reader to balance sympathy, to reflect on the need to be 'fair' to all concerned—yet Madame de Beauvoir's choice of The Woman Destroyed (La Femme Rompue) as the general title for the work suggests an overall sense of the intrinsic unfairness of the feminine lot, the built-in vulnerability. The implication is not so much that the callous husband is the destroyer (the portrayal of this couple is a masterpiece of restraint and verisimilitude) but that the wife's highly 'feminine' femme d'intérieur life with him carried all the time the germ of its own destruction.

This, briefly, is the sexual interpretation of what passes in the book. It seems to me, however, that what Simone de Beauvoir is dealing with (whether or not she sees it this way herself) is the human condition as much as the specifically feminine one. Betrayal and abandonment are by no means exclusively feminine misfortunes, though men may suffer them most typically in slightly different forms. Each of the three stones could have been re-written with a male protagonist and their essential message—for me—would have been unchanged. Men, like women, can suffer from crippling blows to self-esteem, from the loss of love or of children, from the collapse of a life's endeavour. They can face the imperative of coming to terms with realities that must drastically modify their whole self-image, they can find it equally intolerable to grasp (like the narrator of The Woman Destroyed, or like Paule and also Anne in The Mandarins) that, quite simply, time passes, that glowing memories turn themselves into traps of stagnation the moment you begin to take refuge in them.

Men can also suffer from the nightmare knowledge that the Other (lover, spouse, child, friend) no longer wants to listen to them. In each of the stories the narrator is consumed with frustration, wanting to get through to an Other, but meeting either no response or what seems an evasive one. It is indeed possible to see the whole book primarily in terms of this particular human predicament, and perhaps the only good argument against the subjects being men rather than women is that in analogous situations many men would retreat miserably rather than making the attempt to communicate. For her, the hysterical phone call, for him the lonely bar—but the predicament is the same.

Like many creative writers, Madame de Beauvoir seems gifted with greater insight in her fiction than when writing directly about herself. It is perhaps not presumptuous to suggest that these stories (so welcome after the unilluminating novel Les Belles ¡mages) actually contain some of the answers to the anxieties she has voiced in her memoirs. On a more immediate level, they are intensely readable, with a return to the warmth and identification with the characters that made The Mandarins outstanding. The old clarity and precision of style is unimpaired, though, as usual, only moderately well-served by the translator. I know the commercial reasons why she is translated into a mid-atlantic compromise idiom, but I think it a great pity. More particularly, the distinctive pastiche-style of Monologue—a fetid stream of lower-class Parisian consciousness—represents a formidable challenge to any translator; in diluted American, Mr O'Brian has reproduced the obscenity of the original but not its equally hideous genteelism. This piece is a new departure for the author, who has always had an excellent ear for dialogue: my hope is that she will experiment further in future works with other voices as far removed from her own. I do not think that the time to sum up her contribution to literature has come yet, either for her or for us.