After World War I, before World War II, Simone deBeauvoir wrote a collection of five linked stories, When Things of the Spirit Come First.
The book was rejected by publishing houses.
Of course it was. It’s the stories of five different young women, entwined lives, struggling to find or forge a version of their truest self, perhaps a happier self, sorting out how to both fit in and break free from expectations under patriarchy and the mess of Catholicism and other external, prescribed ways of being.
Forty years later, the book was published.
1979.
The world had turned, and crashed a few times. WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam—AKA, what the Vietnamese call, “The American War.” Women’s voices rose and dropped, with what’s been called “Second Wave Feminism”—if you buy into the wave metaphor of women trying to gain equal pay, education, autonomy, essential humanity.
The author was no longer a thirty-year-old. She was seventy. She’d hung on and found her voice and earned recognition as the only woman among the French Existentialists, a novelist, feminist and philosopher.
When Things of the Spirit Come First was translated into English in 1982, about forty-five years after it was written. I picked up a used copy a little later, as a twenty-year-old. The book seemed both ancient and relevant, a voice from another time speaking to me in my studio apartment, carried in my bag, dropped on the beer-sticky floor of who knows what dive, what bus, what city street. I’m sure the pages were steeped in second-hand smoke because what wasn’t?
On the darkest day of the year, out driving in Portland, between Christmas lights and construction zones, the title came back to me, as it sometimes does. It comes back to me as an assertion and a question full of questions: What is “the spirit”? What are the “things”and how or when do they come first?
It comes back to me as a reminder to check in with myself, and value my own internal being.
Writing and publishing may at times be slow mechanisms for change, but words on the page have their reach.
The holiday season, Portland’s 82nd Avenue is a mix of lights wrapped around telephone poles, strip clubs, car lots, boarded-over Mexican restaurants and the old Canton Grill’s sign reading, “Thank You for Seventy-Six Good Years!”
Have yourself that merry little Christmas...
When people mention the “holiday spirit,” so often it’s made manifest visually in objects. Materialism. That’s not the spirit at all, is it?
Decorations are only decorations. Put them up, take them down, do as you see fit. Don’t get too stressed about the holiday. You can’t buy a gift that will earn some greater level of love, just like you can’t go so wrong that an existing love is ruined. Don’t overspend.
Capitalism damages the human spirit, same as colonialism, same as slaughter, same as empires and war. It’s not just material collateral in landfills that’s burying us, in our collective humanity. It’s the superficiality of chasing commerce, at the expense of our lives and our planet.
Wait! I mean—Happy Holidays! Ha! Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, seasons greetings.
I’m wishing you a bit of the actual holiday spirit, the one you hold inside. May you find it in yourself, share it with somebody, or with the stars and the sky.
Simone deBeauvoir passed aways in 1986, the year after I’d found her work. These days the official word is that she died of pneumonia. At the time, newspapers reported that she died of “poor circulation.” I remember, because I was looking for her books and they were hard to find, not in circulation, and I thought about her life and death as an author and a human.
In 1979, Kirkus Reviews published a review of When Things of the Spirit Come First. The review reads, “Deceptively simple tales told with remarkably clear-eyed moral vision and pungent irony: a worthy opening to a shining career.”
A worthy opening to a shining career?
Gah. There’s almost a cruelty to that blithe statement, speaking of a woman who had worked for a lifetime, and already accomplished so much. But writing is one thing and the publishing industry is another.
I’d say, writing is a path to the human spirit.
Let’s let things of the spirit come first, this holiday season. Take care of yourself.
Keep going.
M
Great essay. For me, the spirit definitely comes first. Sometimes it's a hazy urge, sometimes it's a complete scene, and sometimes it's an urge to find (and share) the truth about a place or era. I put up a small piece about Vivian Maier that I wrote after seeing an exhibition of her work in Chicago (https://jhardycarroll.substack.com/p/miss-meyers) from the point of view of one of the kids she nannied.
After watching the Netflix Jane Campion film The Power of the Dog, I've also been delving into the works of Thomas Savage and thinking about the sense of place in my favorite writing. Turgenev was maybe the first author who made me notice it when he described 1840s Russia, but I also got a sense of 1960s Florida from John D. MacDonald.
I realize now that the place itself was a character in my favorite books, whether it was the sordid locales of Willie Vlautin's debut Motel Life, or Annie Proulx's weather-torn Newfoundland or Wyoming landscapes. That said, I get annoyed if there's too much of it (I'm thinking of Tolkien especially, but many of the fantasy/sci-fi writers overindulge in lavish descriptions).
I've been thinking about Portland a lot lately, having just watched Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy and watching the scene set beneath Lovejoy overpass. That town hasn't been around in a long time, yet in my memory it's all still there. Your mention of 82nd took me back, but I think it's to a place that no longer exists. One of the features of aging, I guess.
Have a wonderful holiday yourself!