Parisian Lives Page 11
Suddenly we had thirteen people invited for drinks with ten staying for dinner. Montague ostentatiously let us all know that he had a dinner engagement, hinting that it was with Beckett. I exchanged looks with Con and Marion, for we knew that Beckett was not even in Paris. By now I was used to dealing with all the “Becketteers” who claimed they had had drinks and dinners with “Sam” at times when he was nowhere near town; I just smiled and wished Montague well.
Fortunately, the dining table in the apartment was a large one that ten people could crowd around. But what to serve them? We decided to be very American and make hamburgers and potato salad, served along with some excellent cheeses, and for dessert I would make a tarte Tatin that could pass for an American apple pie. Everyone loved the menu and ate heartily, and when Beckett returned from Ussy the following week, he knew all about the party, because he had interrogated most of the guests. He knew that we had served American food, and that my children had come late from the parade, gobbled their dinner, and left abruptly to get to Parc Montsouris in time for the fireworks. He asked many questions about the hamburgers, especially about the bread I served with them, saying that he had not much liked the bread (bun) when he had had one in New York in 1964, the only time he was in the United States. He knew that Blin and Martin had “performed,” as they entranced with stories of what it was like to appear in a Beckett play, even acting out a few parts. Everyone stayed until well after the Métro shut down for the night, and my husband and I took turns escorting them to the taxi rank down the street, where it seemed we waited forever for cars to come. We were exhausted, and it was growing light when we could finally go to bed. I told Beckett it had been a wonderful evening, to have so many of his friends there, and all of them celebrating him. At that point things changed radically.
Our conversation had begun cordially, but I sensed Beckett’s questions were becoming sharper, carrying a definite aura of disapproval. He did not appreciate that so many of his friends had become my friends. Even more, I think he was horrified that I had ruptured his compartmentalization by bringing them all together where they could compare notes and exchange information about him. My mind flashed back to New York, with Reavey living on East Eighty-Fifth Street and Kobler on West Eighty-Fifth and the two of them not daring to meet each other until I brashly introduced them. I realized that the same thing had just happened in my apartment on Bastille Day. With the exception of the Hayters and the Leventhals, none of Beckett’s friends had known each other before then.
My impression was strengthened when Avigdor Arikha telephoned several days after my meeting with Beckett to say that he had run into the Reaveys on the boulevard du Montparnasse as they were all gathering to walk to dinner with Beckett, and George had told him about the party. The conversation had resumed at the dinner table, when Avigdor asked the Reaveys why I had not invited him, which he could see made Beckett upset. What did Beckett say? I asked. Avigdor mumbled something I could not understand, but it was pretty clear that Beckett did not like it at all, neither the party nor the various conversations and questions that followed.
I related all this to Mary Kling, who had done so much that summer to make my way smooth, and Mary said that perhaps it was time for me to leave Paris so that things could “quiet down.” Mary’s contacts in the publishing world were extensive, and the signals from within the smaller Beckett world indicated uproar. She reported that feedback ranged from curiosity (who was I, what was I doing, and why was Beckett allowing me to do it) to pique (mainly, why had I contacted X and not Y?). Most stunning of all was when Mary told me that Lindon had told her that Beckett was upset over having allowed himself to be drawn into the “excitement” that my presence and my project had created.
Mary was amazed by what I had accomplished in such a short time, and when I added up all I had done, I realized that it really was an amazing amount of work. I also realized that I was exhausted. My family had had a glorious time exploring the city and its environs, and I decided that it was time for me to have a little fun myself. We made farewell visits to favorite restaurants, museums, and stores. We visited our favorite markets and bought exotic cheeses and fruits. We sat in the Luxembourg Gardens and watched children sailing little boats, and I watched my own as they made farewell runs through the Parc Montsouris.
By then it was almost mid-August and I had two kids I needed to get ready for school. I needed to get myself ready also, as I was about to begin the pattern that would persist until the book was written and in production: I would teach for one semester as a part-time professor anywhere I could find a job, save as much money as I could, and return to Paris as soon as the semester ended for the next research trip.
It was time to go home. We were sad to leave the rue d’Alésia, and we had to buy an extra-large suitcase to carry all the materials I had collected. We made our farewells and off we went, with me planning, plotting, and worrying all across the Atlantic. Once I was back in my office in Connecticut and I opened that suitcase, what then? I was nowhere near ready to start writing, but at some point I would have to sit down quietly and figure out how one actually went about writing a biography.
11
On November 17, 1973, I noted in my DD that “two years ago today I met Samuel Beckett for the first time. If I had only known!” On the same page, I also wrote: “This year is almost ended and I really haven’t written a word. Disgusting.” I couldn’t be too depressed about not writing, though, because I had been given several important collections of documents, which took time to read and study, including Professor Laurence Wylie’s archive about Rousillon, where Beckett hid during the war after his Resistance cell was exposed.
And yet, even though I was buoyed by the generosity of Wylie and several American academics, it was disheartening to think that the only real writing I had done since returning from Paris was in numerous grant applications, desperately searching for research money while I kept busy teaching two difficult and overenrolled courses at Trinity College in Hartford during my one-semester appointment as a sabbatical replacement. Trying to raise funds for the necessary research while balancing responsibilities to my family would nearly consume the next four years of my life. I had friends on the faculties at several Connecticut state universities, and when someone at Southern or Central was on leave, they arranged for me to fill in. I was at the bottom of the state’s academic totem pole, where it was customary for professors to teach three or four courses, so I was usually assigned four sections of composition, with enrollments in each class always between thirty and forty students who resented having to fulfill this requirement.
Thinking about their weekly essays, I am still reluctant to add up the amount of red ink I used to correct them. And for all this I was paid an adjunct’s pitiful salary. Small wonder, then, that the year was ending and I had not written a word; nor was it a surprise that I blamed myself for my lack of progress, for my inability “to have it all” and to be the amazingly “together” creature all the women’s magazines were telling me I should be.
On top of all the teaching, the grant-writing process consumed me, from the sheer physical exhaustion of filling out forms to the emotional tension of waiting to hear the results. I was truly a nobody, a PhD without a full-time job who was writing a biography—anathema to the literature scholars who would be judging my applications. Still, several of the most revered fellowship organizations were sufficiently intrigued by my project to ask for detailed descriptions and samples of my writing. Having raised my hopes, they then went on to dash them.
I did not secure any of the lucrative fellowships that would have let me spend a year doing writing and research, but I did end up getting grants-in-aid totaling several thousand dollars from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society. It was a great relief, because they were enough to let me arrange for a winter research trip to London and Dublin at the start of 1974 that would end with a brief soj
ourn in Paris. But they were not enough to let me contribute anything toward household expenses, particularly the children’s tuition at the local private school.
This was a circumstance not born of parental vanity, because our local public schools were excellent. However, the public schoolday would have begun with a 7:30 a.m. bus pickup and would have brought them home at 12:45. I worked at home, and it would have been difficult to have two adolescents doing all the loud and noisy things teenagers liked to do during my most productive writing hours. Also, when I was traveling for research, I did not want them to have so much unsupervised time until their father came home. They were good, trustworthy kids, but it was still too much alone time. While they were at the Hopkins School, they left the house at 8 a.m., were in classes until 4, and had compulsory sports afterward. They returned home at 6, along with their father, and we all had dinner together shortly after. It was a much better schedule for everyone. I may have been away from home a lot during the next several years, but I was determined that when we were together, we would observe family traditions, and having dinner together was important to us all.
By then my husband, Von, was a museum administrator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the celebrated museum that was then under the visionary direction of James Elliott. Von oversaw day-to-day operations, freeing Jim to concentrate on filling the museum with vanguard contemporary art. Peter Marlow was the curator who worked with Jim, and he gave both Von and me an education in what was cutting-edge, while another colleague, Charles Edwards, helped Von steer the financial ship. Serendipity played a large role in my book research, and Charlie Edwards was one of the foremost examples. His father-in-law, General Pierre Reynauld, happened to be a prominent officer in the French Army who secured my entry to the military archives at Vincennes, where I discovered the citation for the médaille de la Résistance that Beckett earned for his heroic work in World War II.
The Atheneum brought other serendipitous contacts, such as Alexander “Sandy” Calder, and his wife, Louisa. Both Calders knew Beckett slightly, having met him during what they called his “Joyce years,” and they gave me a useful list of people in France, including Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, the ex-wife of the painter Francis Picabia, and their daughter Jeanine, who had been two of Beckett’s primary Resistance associates. Louisa described the heavy, bulky stamp machine the Nazis had used for identity cards that Jeanine Picabia had stolen from an office where she was being interrogated. When I met the Picabias, mother and daughter took great delight in acting out how they had hidden it under Gabrielle’s voluminous skirt and how she had had to shuffle out of the building with her legs held together while Jeanine waved off several solicitous young soldiers who wanted to help the two ladies.
Another Atheneum boon of tremendous importance came through the network of museum donors. I used to call myself “the hired help’s wife” because of all the black-tie events I had to attend, where I was expected to help charm wives who might have otherwise been neglected while their wealthy husbands were being courted for donations. At one of them, someone told me that the Connecticut Commission on the Arts was dispensing grants-in-aid to scholars and writers. I thought I had nothing to lose, so I applied for one. That little $1,000 grant took more of my time than all the others combined, because no one on the staff knew quite what to make of it. The program was relatively new and no firm procedures had been set up, and because my request was fairly unusual, I had to submit to a number of steps that were afterward streamlined. Not only did I have to submit budgets and detailed statements of how the grant would be used, I had to go in person to be interviewed by several members of the board. I also had to submit a “personal” section of the file, where I wrote of my two children and my need to contribute to their education. Eventually I did get the grant, which meant that, coupled with the other two, both my personal and professional responsibilities for 1974 were covered.
Many years later, the arts commission’s then-director, Anthony Keller, told me that within the organization there had been hesitation about whether to award what became known thereafter as “the first baby-sitting grant.” In subsequent years, when feminism was both pushing women to work and permitting them to take part in public life, mine became the model the board always cited when debating whether to fund women with unusual requests. I was so pleased and proud when Tony told me of the small role I played in helping this to happen.
And so, with the money in place, it was time to get the family ready to function for the month or so I planned to be away. We had an enormous chest freezer in our basement, and even though my husband was a talented cook—certainly more than I was—I thought it was my obligation to fill it. After dinner, as I graded papers, vats of spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove. On several autumn Saturdays the other three Bairs peeled apples from the backyard tree while I made crusts for fifteen pies. I made meatloaves, prepared stews, and made cookies and casseroles. My husband kept telling me I didn’t have to do all this work, but at the time I felt I had to be and do everything, especially on the domestic front; if I wanted a life of my own, I had to make sure that my family came first. I did all this as much out of guilt for leaving them as in the hope that the food would remind them of my love while I was gone.
Katney recently told me a story I had not heard before, of the neighbor across the street, a stay-at-home wife and mother, who always prepared a gigantic hot lunch for her husband and two daughters. “You poor little thing,” she would say to my daughter, “so neglected by your mother, who goes away and leaves you. You had better come and eat with us.” Katney said she was always puzzled by this. She missed me, certainly, but she loved the way I always returned with wonderful souvenirs from wherever I went. Vonn Scott told me that he didn’t remember anything at all “bad” about my being away, because I always found a way to stay in touch. Transatlantic phone calls were expensive, but mail was relatively cheap, so we exchanged weekly voice tapes. He still remembers one he made with third-grader Katney, who was just starting school music lessons, on which he acted as an announcer to tell me that she would now entertain me with her “plucking viola.” Besides the weekly tapes, I always inserted something interesting into my frequent letters, usually clips from local papers about rock bands or chess tournaments. Even more important to a growing boy, there was always something tasty for dinner, so it didn’t matter that much if I was not there to eat it with them.
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Because the grant money came in the fall of 1973 and I was not able to leave for Europe until January of 1974, I decided to use a small part of it in October to make a quick overnight visit to Ottawa to interview the Polish playwright and critic Adam Tarn. He had been instrumental in presenting the avant-garde French theater to his country as editor of Dialog, and he had worked directly with Beckett on a Polish translation of Godot that he helped to stage. I found Tarn to be a personable and fascinating conversationalist despite his poor health (he died a little over a year later), but his condition may have been why he was so eager to talk freely about Beckett. For every interaction they had had, or for every theatrical event concerning one of Beckett’s plays in which Tarn was involved, he produced reams of documentation. That was why I was so flummoxed when he produced letters and other notes telling me something puzzling and, from my standpoint as biographer, problematic about Beckett’s sexuality—exactly the kind of thing I hoped I would not find out. Tarn showed me letters in which Beckett hinted vaguely at sexual encounters that he seemed to be saying were initiated not by him but by other men. When I met Tarn again the following day and asked to reread the letters and make notes, he seemed amused by my “American sexual puritanism.” He presented the letters matter-of-factly, but frankly, I was too embarrassed and nonplussed to ask about them in detail, because I really did not want to have to deal with this information. I had no idea how I would handle it in the biography, so I just accepted his explanation that such encounters were unexce
ptional and did not originate with Beckett but with others. I thought I could file the information away for future reference and count on other interviews either to verify or discount what he told me.
That night on the short flight to LaGuardia Airport, I struggled with what to do about this knowledge. In 1973, the word “gay” was still relatively new, and most public figures who were gay or bisexual kept that fact deeply private. To “out” someone did not exist in the lexicon, and “closet” had only one meaning. For me to out a man of Samuel Beckett’s stature would have been simply unthinkable. Still, I had to find a way to deal with whatever information came my way—I could not ignore what Tarn so casually insisted was fact—but I would have to find a discreet, tactful way to ask others about it. I could not show my cards, and I certainly did not want to alert or alarm anyone, especially Samuel Beckett.
During the flight I thought back to the previous summer, when John Montague and I were chatting in Bill Hayter’s atelier. Montague could not conceal his glee as he told me, “You are making Sam very nervous, because he is sure you are going to write about his sex life.” At the time I thought Montague was merely hinting at Beckett’s Dublin romances or his ongoing liaison with Barbara Bray. I had turned to Bill Hayter with a question on my face: could what Montague just said about Beckett possibly be true? Montague had proven himself to be “the Great Exaggerator” in my notes, and I considered him an unreliable witness. However, Hayter was not smiling, and his face was stern as he nodded his head in agreement. I had filed that away for future thought and had not pursued it, but as the plane touched down, I could not help but wonder if it had been this aspect of Beckett’s sexuality, so offhandedly divulged by Tarn, that made him so uneasy during several of our less successful conversations.