Parisian Lives Page 12
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I thought I had an opportunity to begin the process of unraveling Beckett’s sexuality in December, when something extraordinary happened. I received a letter from Con Leventhal telling me that he and Marion were planning to be in New York and they would like nothing better than to visit me in Connecticut. This was an astonishing development on several fronts. Con and Marion were not in the most robust health, and they did not have American contacts or family ties that I knew of. Also, they were poor pensioners who lived so modestly in France that such an extravagant vacation seemed beyond their means. George Reavey was quick to tell me that it was a gift from Beckett, who paid for their plane fare and posh midtown hotel. And of course when Con and Marion came to Connecticut, George and Jean would come, too, having appointed themselves their escorts.
Fortunately, the semester I taught at Trinity College had just ended, so I was free to invite them for a day. I met the four of them at New Haven’s Union Station and we drove directly to Hartford and the Atheneum, where we had lunch in the restaurant and then toured the galleries. Afterward, Von joined us to crowd into my big old Ford Country Squire and drive to our home. My terrific kids had set the dinner table, put the huge roast beef into the oven, and lit a match to the fire I had laid that morning. We had just put up a few Christmas lights, and I lit some candles. The house gleamed and glittered, and I saw Con and Marion exchange looks that showed they were impressed. As soon as we arrived, George headed straight for the liquor cabinet and the scotch, and soon everyone was in a jolly mood. There was no opportunity to ask Con anything of substance, so the talk remained genial and superficial.
Von and I drove the four to a late train, and after we got them safely onboard and it was pulling away, we turned to each other and asked, “Now what was that all about?” We both knew the answer: Beckett was curious, and they would report their experiences back to him.
12
In so many ways 1974 was the most extraordinary year of the biography’s genesis. When I look back now, I wonder how I survived it. I needed to begin the 1974 research trip in Dublin and London because there were still so many people in each city whom I had not yet interviewed, but because of the unexpected visit by Leventhal and Leigh, I thought it wise to begin with a week in Paris in case I needed to do damage control with Beckett. I wrote early in December and received his reply several days later, one of the tiny calling cards on which he wrote a sentence or two before sending it off in an airmail envelope. All it said was to telephone upon arrival.
I landed on Saturday, January 6, and phoned as instructed, but he did not answer, so I sent a little blue pneu and started immediately to confirm my other appointments. I had budgeted for only one week and needed to hit the ground running. I phoned him again on Sunday, and again there was no answer. I was uneasy but kept busy seeing friends over the weekend, including Mary Kling, who took me to Sunday lunch and encouraged me to start writing the book so she would have something to show the several interested French publishers. I didn’t want to tell her how little writing I had done, so I said I still needed to do more research before I could show anything with confidence. That explanation was sadly true.
Madame and Général Reynauld invited me to dinner, and he volunteered to consult documents in the Vincennes archives, which were not scheduled to be open to researchers until 1975. Since I did not expect my book to be written and published for at least a year after that, we agreed that we were not breaking any laws.
I met John Gerassi at the Select because he told me he was expecting Simone de Beauvoir to be there. He said he had told her about me, and she wanted to meet because she had a lot to say about Beckett, particularly how much she disliked him. I already knew from Beckett how much he disliked her, so I was eager to get her side of the story. I waited for her until shortly before I had to leave for my next appointment, when it was clear that she was not coming. I did not meet her then, but I often thought of this near-encounter years later, when I began to write about her, wondering if knowing her beforehand would have made me hesitate, if not actually decline, to write her biography.
On Monday I called Beckett again, and again there was no answer. When I returned to the hotel after a day of interviewing, I found that I had missed a call from him, from Ussy. The message said that Monsieur Beckett had called from there but nothing else, and he had not left a number. I wasn’t alarmed, because I assumed it meant that within the next day or two he’d be back in Paris and would call again. So I kept on with my appointments, including those with a number of people who had known him during the war, when they were in the Resistance together.
Madame Marie Péron, the widow of Alfred, Beckett’s friend and Resistance colleague, gave me a deeply moving account of the tension and terror endured by the families of Resistance fighters. She also told me of the kindness and generosity Beckett showed to her and her children after her husband, who had been in a concentration camp, died in 1945. I met the Picabias during this time, in their studio full of Francis Picabia’s paintings and too many cats to count, all of them clawing their owners, climbing up the walls and onto the paintings, and hissing and screaming at each other. It was a wild but colorful setting for the Picabias’ uproarious tales of dangerous Resistance exploits, leaving me in awe of their bravery. When I talked about them later with Beckett, he could only say admiringly that “they were fearless. Amazing.”
I took a day to go to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, the tiny commune near Ussy where the elderly Josette Hayden lived. Madame Hayden was the widow of the artist Henri Hayden, and both of them had lived in Roussillon when Beckett was hiding there. Like her husband, she had spent many boring days learning English to pass the time. She had things to show me, she said, but first we had to drink some “Aig”—Haig & Haig, her favorite scotch whiskey (it was 11 a.m.). After that she had to treat me to lunch. She had the driver who met me at the train station take us to the restaurant where she habitually took her noonday meal. There I had to meet the chef, who had once worked in “Quins” (Queens, New York). Josette (as she asked me to call her) ordered wine and said we must start with the excellent soup. I didn’t need the wine, but a big bowl of hot soup on a cold day was just what I was after. She would order for me, she said, because she knew the menu and it was particularly good on Thursdays. The next course was a huge filet of fish in a cream sauce with potatoes and several vegetables, and it was certainly delicious. We both ate heartily and drank several glasses of wine to wash it down. I thought we were finished and only waiting for coffee when along came the next course, an enormous slice of roast lamb with more potatoes and vegetables. That tiny little woman tucked right in and expected me to do the same. Somehow I ate most of it, and also the crème caramel that followed. How I managed to function for the rest of the afternoon when we returned to her home and she poured more “Aig” still remains a mysterious blur. I was grateful for the tape recorder when she shared her Roussillon memories and materials, because my notes that day were not the most legible.
Madame Hayden’s driver took me back to the train along with a carful of his fellow workers, who were going to begin their shift working on the railroad. They all told him he was a terrible braggart. I didn’t look like a very important person, they said; I just looked like an ordinary American girl who might have had too much to drink.
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Every now and again I did meet someone whose views on Beckett departed from the hagiographic “Saint Sam, the good and great”—usually another Irish writer. Such was the case with Aidan Higgins, whom I met at Bill Hayter’s workshop. Higgins promoted what he called the “official” verdict of the Irish literati, but I could not decide if his snideness accurately reflected what other Irish writers thought about their countryman’s writings or if he was simply jealous.
A negative view still surprised me, especially when it came from someone like Jenny Bradley, the famed literary
agent, who spoke of Beckett with open hostility. She told me that she despised him because he had been “Joyce’s sycophant” and advised me to “look deeply into his deadly serious desire for fame and fortune.” She said I would be especially wise to dig for the truth about his “affair” with Lucia Joyce. No one before Mrs. Bradley had spoken so severely of Beckett, and because of who she was, I had to take what she said seriously. Her reputation for honesty and perceptiveness preceded her, and her judgments were trusted implicitly by the Paris literary community.
By the time I met Mrs. Bradley, I had already interviewed enough people—around sixty, and increasing every day—to realize that I had taken on the formidable task of writing the life of an incredibly complex man and there would have to be much serious discerning, sifting, and interpreting of both information and opinion before I could write a single word. The monumentality of the undertaking kept me up nights. There were times when I would wake up with what I called “the 4 a.m. galloping anxieties,” wondering if I could find a face-saving way not to write the book.
The week was flying by, and suddenly it was Friday and I still had not seen Beckett, nor had I had further communication from him. Yet he managed to be an unseen presence hovering over me everywhere I went, and in so doing he made me terribly uneasy. Madame Péron told me he had phoned just before I arrived to make sure she would be there to receive me; the Picabias said the same as they thanked me for bringing him—or at least his voice—back into their lives after so many years. Désirée Moorhead dropped into Hayter’s studio when I was talking to Aidan Higgins, and she also said that “Sam” had called to ask if she and her husband were going to see me on this trip. When she told Beckett that I was seeing Higgins that very day, he asked her to be sure to let him know how it went. It was maddening: if he was so intent on monitoring my progress, why wasn’t he in town to see me?
One of my 4 a.m. galloping-anxiety sessions came early Saturday morning, probably because I was so worried about sleeping through the early alarm that would let me get to Gare Montparnasse in time for the first train to Mantes-la-Jolie and from there to the artist Joan Mitchell’s house in Vétheuil.
I arrived shortly before 10 a.m. and looked around the station for Joan. Instead I was approached by a local fellow who asked if I was “Joan’s American.” He said he worked for her and that I should get into his car and he would take me to her. I opened my car window on that very cold day because the man reeked of booze and cigarettes. He was either baiting me or laughing at Joan on the short drive from the train station, not to her house but to a local bar. I could not tell which, because he spoke swiftly with an accent I could not decipher, and his vocabulary consisted almost entirely of outdated slang I could not understand.
Joan was at a table just inside the bar, a full glass of Pernod next to several empty ones. She asked what I would drink, and as it was 10 a.m. and I had not had breakfast, I said I would like coffee. She sneered at me as she made some crack about Americans who obviously could not hold their liquor. I had been warned that she could be sharp and nasty, particularly when she was drinking, so I knew I had to tread carefully. Joan was the American publisher Barney Rosset’s first wife, and she had known Beckett almost as long as Barney had. She kept a small studio in Paris on the rue Frémicourt, but mostly she lived in the Vétheuil house she liked to insist was formerly owned by the artist Claude Monet. She shared it with the French-Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, or at least she had previously lived there with him. By noon, after numerous glasses of the potent yellow liquor had gotten her rather sloppy and her voice slurred, I learned that most of Riopelle’s things were still there although he was living elsewhere with another woman.
By one o’clock Joan was still drinking and I was starving. I had nursed two or three cups of coffee and moved on at her insistence to the most harmless drink I could think of, a wine spritzer that I pretended to sip. A stress headache had been building over the last several frenetic days, and hunger was not easing it. Other patrons, mostly workingmen, came and went throughout the morning, and they all knew her. “Joan!” they would shout, followed up with comments I could not understand but assumed were ribald jokes and salacious teasing, because the only word I recognized in her reply was foutre, as she told them what they could do to themselves. The atmosphere was both menacing and testy. I really wanted to get out of there, and fortunately, at just about that time, the man who had brought me from the station returned. He picked up Joan by her elbow and said it was time to go home, as her cook (his wife) had prepared lunch and we had to eat it.
And oh, did I eat! It was one of the best home-cooked meals I have had in all my years of going to France. Consommé, lamb chops, potatoes, vegetables, salad, cheese, and molten chocolate cake with a bitter orange-chocolate sauce. I ate more than my share while Joan didn’t touch her plate; she just continued with Pernod and cigarettes, leading me to wonder how she stayed alive. She spent the meal staring at me across the table and telling me repeatedly either that I was “all fucked up and needed a shrink” or that she liked me so much and we were going to be good friends.
After lunch we went to her studio, where she showed me several of her huge and extraordinary canvases, all done in vibrant shades of orange and red with an occasional smash of turquoise or blue. Those paintings astonished me, as I wondered how someone so slight and frail could expend so much energy on such hard physical work. While she talked, she studied what she had already done and occasionally picked up a brush to make frantic stabs and jabs at one of the works in progress. She told me story after story about Beckett, all in cold, clear prose and with absolute clarity. She was one of those drunks who could appear to be stone-cold sober, totally lucid, and mentally well organized. But she staggered at times, and I was afraid that the full glass of red wine or the point of the burning cigarette she held most of the time might end up ruining one of those glorious canvases.
Considering how my visit was unfolding, it should not have surprised me that some of Joan’s stories couldn’t make it into the biography for lack of corroborating sources. One of the more salacious involved a Bastille Day afternoon in Paris when she ran into Beckett as she was returning to her studio. They decided to go for a drink, and after a great many drinks, Joan said, “Oh what the hell, Sam, why don’t we just go fuck?” He said, “Yes, why not,” so they found a nearby fleabag hotel. “Did you?” I asked Joan, nodding my head to indicate that I meant the f-word while not saying it. “Fuck, you mean? Fuck?” she replied. “What the hell is wrong with you, woman? Why don’t you just say what you mean!” I had no response, and let the question pass.
“Hell no,” she said eventually. “We spent all night on our hands and knees on the goddamn floor looking for some of his false teeth that fell out.” When I finally stifled my giggles and thought I could trust myself to reply, I asked if they had ever fucked, deliberately saying with heavy emphasis the word that I still don’t like to say, even though I otherwise can and do curse with the best. “Nah, not really,” she said. “I don’t think he was ever much into that”—offering up yet another opinion to factor into Beckett’s sexuality when I wrote about it.
I yearned to use this story in the biography but did not, because she was the only source and I was too embarrassed at the time to ask Beckett. It turned out to be true, however, as I was able to confirm from Beckett himself in 1983, almost five years after I had published his biography and when I was working with Simone de Beauvoir. Our paths just happened to cross as I was on my way to see her and he was walking down the boulevard Raspail toward his home. By this time our encounters were easy and cordial, and during the course of a meandering conversation, I thought I had nothing to lose, so I asked him if what Joan had told me had actually happened. He said quite simply yes, and we moved on to other topics.
But on that late winter afternoon it was becoming quite dark, literally and personally, as I asked repeatedly if Joan would call the man to dr
ive me back to the station and she declined to answer. I had a dinner date that night with Leventhal and Leigh, and if I left her then, I could arrive back in Paris only slightly late for the 8:30 engagement. By that time Joan was in a very bad way, and she did not want me to go. She had a deep fear of being alone at night, and she decided not only that I was going to stay with her but that she was going to see to it that I caught up with her and drank myself into the same oblivion she was fast approaching.
I thought I was saved when another visitor arrived quite unexpectedly from Paris. He was the husband of a woman who had known Beckett since childhood, a woman whom I had interviewed that very week. I soon realized that he had come to spend the night with Joan and to join her in drinking, which was as good an excuse as any to renew my demand for a ride to the station. Her visitor said there was no need, for he had just that moment changed his plans and would happily drive me back to Paris, where we could then spend the night together in my apartment. Alas, I said, what a pity that I could not accept his kind invitation, as I already had a dinner date. He accepted the refusal and, as he had already been drinking heavily, retired shortly thereafter to one of Joan’s bedrooms to sleep alone. But I was still stuck without a ride to the station.