Emily Zarevich is a teacher, writer and book lover from Ontario, Canada. Here, she writes to a fellow reader she’ll never meet in person, only in the margins of a second-hand copy of “A Dangerous Liaison: A Revelatory New Biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.”
I’ll be honest. When I ordered the book online and it arrived in the mail, I wasn’t expecting, as a bonus, a review written by you as well. I sat down on the couch. I opened it up. I expected a straightforward dual biography. I received that along with an unexpected third competitor for my attention. Rows and rows of commentary, scribbled in by you in tar black pen. And there was more. Phrases circled, paragraphs fenced in by brackets, key information duly underlined. I own this book now, but it’s still somehow yours. You marked it as your territory before it was passed on to me.
I don’t know you or anything about you other than the fact that before me you owned A Dangerous Liaison: A Revelatory New Biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Carole Seymour-Jones, and you regarded its margins as your own private journal. Your repository for every thought and reaction as you embarked on your own journey through the startling lives of him (Sartre) and her (Beauvoir). Does this count as a travelogue? Have I inherited here the revealing diary of a mysterious adventurer, whose identity has been lost to history? I brought the book to my nose to sniff it, to try to determine through the detective work of my senses where you’ve been. But I don’t detect hints of the ocean or the jungle or even the alleyways of New York City. I just smell paper. Who are you, and why did the story of two controversial philosophers have such a grasp on you that you felt compelled to record yourself interacting with nearly every section of it, as if you were a lab rat, presented with a maze? As if you were Dr. Jekyll, operating under a potion that drew out your hidden side? What did I just buy?
My first thought was that, obviously, you must be a student of philosophy. This cement brick of a book was assigned to you, you wouldn’t take on such a mountainous task without a good mark at stake. I’m guessing this was the essay that made up forty percent of your grade. You had to write on how Sartre and Beauvoir’s lives shaped their philosophy. You had to do a psychological dive into their behavioural patterns, their transgressions, their work ethics, their affairs. You had to compare and contrast yourself to them, as closely as you could. I get it, I took my homework that seriously too. I scratched rapid thoughts into my own books in university, so mistrustful was I of my own faulty memory and my ability to retain any prose-worthy ideas. I imagine you in a crowded school cafeteria, making these notes happen amid the wild chatter and thunderous clashing of forks and knives. I look for evidence of French fry grease stains or perhaps a teardrop of coffee. When I find none, I become slightly skeptical of my own theory. I might also be willfully ignoring my own slobbish un-talent of eating and studying gracefully at the same time. Maybe you just do it better than me.
You must have been a student when you did all this book personalizing, though. You must have been. The evidence is all there. The greatest clue is all the brackets and underlines you made, all the sentences you put in captivity or grounded on a platform for a later use. The families of words you chose: “…the interior monologue.” “…a sort of nausea of the hands.” “…attempts to clothe the nakedness of existence with such trimmings of meaning.” “…theory of contingency…” Your remarks on dissociation, predatory behaviour, personality disorders, memories, and gender roles. You were scavenging, collecting and securing tidbits for a project. There had to be an end goal here, an objective. If it were a magazine, you would have cut the pieces out with scissors to paste on a Bristol board. But this is a book, an un-frivolous mammoth of a text. As you probably know, that would be sacrilege.
There is too much for me to determine the subject of your hypothetical essay. I cannot perceive its title or thesis with such scattered pieces, such ramshackle hints. I want to know what you constructed from what you mined here. Was it enough to earn you that much-coveted A? Did your evidence slip tidily into your body paragraphs? This is the English teacher coming out in me, and perhaps the nerd too. I want to know what you did with all this grinding preparation.
While I was reading, I also considered that you might be just like me, a professional writer hunting for material, scouring a book for hidden treasures, something you can mold into an article or an entry for a contest. You could even be long past your student days and reading, revolutionarily enough, for pure pleasure, with no academic or institutional agenda at all. Maybe writing in the margins is your hobby. Maybe it’s all just for fun. People have done it for ages, and will continue to do it. Your pastime wouldn’t have been that out of place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Everybody was nesting in margins then, before the internet and Goodreads offered a platform for people’s says on what they read. You know who would have approved of your marginalia the most? Edgar Allen Poe, of all people. This is what he wrote in his 1844 essay on the subject. Does this click with you? It clicks with me.
“But the purely marginal jottings, done with no eye to the Memorandum Book, have a distinct complexion, and not only a distinct purpose, but none at all; this it is which imparts to them a value. They have a rank somewhat above the chance and desultory comments of literary chit-chat — for these latter are not unfrequently ‘talk for talk’s sake,’ hurried out of the mouth; while the marginalia are deliberately pencilled, because the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought; — however flippant — however silly — however trivial — still a thought indeed, not merely a thing that might have been a thought in time, and under more favorable circumstances.”
Poe understood the euphoria of claiming a book for one’s own, so the next owner knows its worth. It feels good to me to have my own byline ramblings validated by a master of the craft. I’ve been embarrassed at times but what got documented in the margins of my own books. A thesis that a professor would later dub as weak, a scrap piece of insight that can’t be used for anything. Reminders that should have gone in my planner, informal musings that would have been better suited to a blog or a text. But I think you would agree with me when I say that sometimes the wrong response is actually the right response, or a silly line in a book calls for silly retribution. You used “lmao” at one point, when Beauvoir’s lover Bost, mediating on his co-dependant relationship with his mother and his inclination to eat homecooked meals at her place all the time, muses, “It’s not always fun but it’s food.” You can’t write an essay on that anyway, so you might as well abandon all seriousness.
I worked hard to decipher your handwriting. I confess that sometimes you lost me. I acknowledge that perhaps you didn’t actually mean for anyone other than yourself to read your notes. Your words, to me, are loopy. Evasive. Your Ls have little wisps at the end of them like the legs of insects. Sometimes it felt like I was trying to crack a code. I felt like I was dealing with the Voynich Manuscript and a language that has been dissolved over the course of time. You didn’t write in cursive but your letters still hold hands like happy, hyper children and dance across the page. But when I understood, I really understood, and I knew instinctively you had nearly the same reading experience as I did.
There is something I desperately want to know. Are you, possibly, feasibly, asexual, like I am? And sex-repulsed? I don’t want to be presumptuous, but something struck in me when I came across what you put down about Sartre and his mistress, Wanda Kosakiewicz. and his messy and uncomfortably aggressive attempts at seducing her.
Seymour-Jones wrote, “Meeting her at the Dôme a few hours later, ‘I froze her out, abruptly dropping my game and declaring that we were through unless she became more loving with me.’ Wanda promised to think about it. They moved on to another café at the Palais-Royal, where she demurely explained that she deprived complete physical pleasure merely from contact and a few kisses.”
You underlined the last sentence and you wrote, in response, one word that boomed off the page. You pressed your pen right in. I could feel the dent on the paper when I ran my finger across it. “MEEE.”
It’s like you, with a single expanded word, channeled my own stance and stamped it in the book for me. You didn’t just agree with me, and Wanda, you almost spoke for me, for us. I want to ask you, how did you know what kind of reader I, the successor of ownership of this book, am? I desperately want to believe that you only could have written what you wrote if you were cut from the same cloth. But then again, I don’t know you. My keen speculations are, at best, wishful thinking. I also got excited by all of your scathing protests at Sartre and Beauvoir’s general sexual chaos. You, like me, were not dazzled by the glamorous myth of their bohemianism. You didn’t look past the grime. Forgive me. It’s hard to meet other asexual people sometimes. We’re quite flung about, and invisible. I’m snatching at crumbs here. I don’t expect any orientation from you. I just wonder.
And then, my final thought, my final question. Do you, in a way, aspire to become a philosopher yourself? Is that where this all began, in a deep-seated ambition to establish yourself among the greats by studying their lifestyles and techniques first? To rise higher, to do better? I applaud you for taking a stand against these giants, and daring to critique them even though their armies of followers are still on standby to defend them. You establish with your own writings that you have a working mind of your own. Like a true feminist ally, you stand up for Beauvoir against what is frankly an unfair attack on her career performance by Sartre, which was admittedly beginning to falter at the time, but was still undeserving of such derogatory comparisons between her past and present mental states. He admonished her for not having enough ideas to make it as a journalist. She approached an editor empty-handed, and was swiftly shooed away and advised to teach instead. Sartre sprinkled acid into the wound. You and I both know, even if Sartre doesn’t, that ideas are always there, they just need a little stoking to get the fire going. You wrote this. You devised this slogan for Beauvoir, she who, despite her many, many personal faults and misdeeds, wrote many an unforgettable line for the campaign for social progress. You paid her back.
You wrote, clearly, amazingly, “Change sometimes brings a steady loss of what you are/were until it’s too late to retrieve once you realize, and must begin again.”
Whoever you are, I’m writing this letter to you, because you wrote one to me first. Notes in the margins of book are a letter from a first reader to a second. It’s a one-sided conversation, a shout from the edge of a cliff that warrants an echo. I’m replying and keeping my fingers crossed that you’ll see this and know that your book reached me. That you reached me. I read what you wrote and the connection I feel to you is solid, and frustrating. We read the same book, but we will never meet to discuss it. Our hands touched the same paper but they will never share a friendly handshake. We’re classmates of the same school but we didn’t graduate together. You, like I do sometimes, must have felt suppressed by your own unexpressed opinions, as you had to relay them to a book that feels nothing, that doesn’t engage back. You’re utterly fascinated by the lives of philosophers, and so am I. I’ll never learn your name. Go back to the beginning of this letter and you’ll find mine.
If you’re out there, and you’re reading this, thank you for letting go of the book. Thank you for letting me have it next. If I could return the favour and send to you a book of my own, with my own fragmented story written inside, I would.