<i> Simone de Beauvoir</i> A LIFE . . . A LOVE STORY<i> by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier; translated by Lisa Nesselson (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 412 pp., illustrated)</i>

Who is Simone de Beauvoir that her life and love story should command our attention for about 400 pages of text, including extensive bibliographies, myriad footnotes and a seemingly cosmic index? For starters, fresh on the heels of the May, 1968, student-worker revolution in Paris, in which she took a very active and supportive role at age 60, De Beauvoir emerged as an international figure in the second wave of feminism. Her two-volume work, “The Second Sex,” was universally adopted as the only existing text capable of grounding the old “woman question” and the new politics of feminism in theory. Indeed, since the publication of this far-ranging work in France in 1949, one could hardly speak or hear of “woman” or “woman’s condition,” let alone “feminism,” without “Simone de Beauvoir” and “The Second Sex” tripping over each other as they rolled off the tongue. Most people probably first learned about De Beauvoir through “The Second Sex”--now more widely read and circulated than when it was first published. Wanting to amplify this narrow image of a far more complex and compelling figure, Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier limited their treatment of De Beauvoir’s years in the women’s movement from 1970 to her death in 1986, at age 78, to a very condensed 13 pages. What they present, instead, is the life of a woman, who before, after and during her involvements in women’s causes was also novelist, essayist, and autobiographer; who was at one and the same time an intellectual, a socialist, and an existentialist; who was over and above all one of the ultimately indivisible union known as “Sartre and De Beauvoir.”

De Beauvoir first encountered Jean-Paul Sartre, France’s most illustrious 20th-Century intellectual, philosopher and political renegade, when they were students at the Sorbonne. Together, they studied for their “aggregation,” the most advanced and competitive examination for teachers in the French system, and passed it, Sartre in first place, De Beauvoir in close second, a not insignificant order that would be echoed throughout the rest of their lives and their writings. Their love affair, which began in 1929, became a lifelong primary (if shortly thereafter non-sexual) partnership, negotiated with multiple contracts. It endured world events of cataclysmic proportions, intellectual and political commitments of questionable merit, and celebrity and infamy for each. Over the course of 50 years, this “essential” relationship included, by mutual consent, but more at Sartre’s bidding than at De Beauvoir’s, a sizable cast of “contingent” lovers. “Contingent loves could last a long time, they might even be veritable passions, without in any way altering the essential bond that held the two of them together,” write the authors. For De Beauvoir, Nelson Algren was perhaps the most important contingent relationship in her life. He was also the most unwilling to accommodate the Sartre-De Beauvoir indivisibility.

As the authors proudly tell us in their “Notes and References,” “The point of departure for this biography was our tracking down of the handwritten, unpublished letters that Simone de Beauvoir wrote to the American author Nelson Algren, with whom she had fallen in love.” Written in English, the letters began when they met in Chicago in 1947 and extended beyond their rupture in 1951, to 1960. The excerpts from these letters reveal a heretofore unpublished, undiscovered De Beauvoir; a sensual, sexually reawakened 39-year-old woman in love, who had to do battle with her conscience and her body over the limitations imposed by the contract she had forged with Sartre two decades earlier, and this new passionate love for Algren. As the biography reveals, De Beauvoir had many, many fewer contingent relationships, and with the exception of the Algren letters, she was always circumspect about them, even in her autobiographies, relegating the stuff of sex and passion to fictional rewrites.

It is at times unsatisfactory that the authors do not further extend their inquiry into the reasons why, and how, De Beauvoir’s contingent love relationships were different from Sartre’s. Indeed, it is very disturbing to read on the one hand the graphic sexual descriptions that Sartre, the self-avowed womanizer, in the name of “transparency,” conscientiously wrote to De Beauvoir of his many very young mistresses and passing fancies; and on the other, only repetitions and overextended explanations of the carefully worded thoughts and responses that De Beauvoir had already published. Wouldn’t it have been preferable had the authors decided to go beyond, or at least outside, the limitations of the autobiographical word, had not stuck so closely to De Beauvoir’s own texts, and to restatements of her oft-repeated dicta about these relationships? These criticisms notwithstanding, the perspectives cast on Sartre, De Beauvoir and their entourage are provocative: Their love lives emerge as humorous and dramatic, at times unbelievable, and always disconcerting.

This biography of De Beauvoir complements, extends and at times contradicts her own monumental four-volume autobiography. It is the most comprehensive study of her life to have emerged amid the profusion of works which have been written on and about her since the women’s movements began, or since her death. While it contains some of the inherent awkwardness that often accompanies translations from French to English, Lisa Nesselson’s text is very readable. The original French version appeared simply as “Simon de Beauvoir” in 1985, before her death. This American translation with the addition of the subtitle “a life . . . a love story” contains an introduction that was not present in the French edition, some different photos, and a new last chapter describing De Beauvoir’s brief illness, her hospitalization and her unexpected death on April 14, 1986, one day short of the sixth anniversary of Sartre’s death. In addition to saying “farewell” in this final chapter, the authors use the introduction and the footnotes to the chapters to share with the reader some of the responses that De Beauvoir had to their original manuscript.

If Francis and Gontier’s point of view is somewhat less incisive or developed than we would have wished it to be, and if there is sometimes an overwhelming amount of detail, it is nevertheless a compelling book about a remarkable woman’s life, and her love affair with herself and the world.