Parisian Lives Page 13
That was when the phone rang for the first time all afternoon. I could hear Joan speaking in English and saying, “Yeah, yeah…okay…all right.” When she hung up, she said, “That was Sam. He wants me to put you on the train so you can get to your dinner.” And then, like a naughty child, she reached for her drink, snickered, and said, “But I’m not going to!” Another half hour passed and the phone rang again, and again it was Beckett. The same exchange ensued. Fifteen minutes after that it rang again, but this time it was the art historian Pierre Schneider, who said that “Sam” had phoned and asked him to drive to Vétheuil to take me on the forty-mile trip back to Paris. I had not yet met Schneider then, but I did have him on my list of people to see, as I knew that he and his wife were Beckett’s friends.
Joan was on the phone with Pierre for a very long time, crying and not making much sense, until finally she agreed to let me speak to him. He told me that he had spoken to her driver, who was on his way to the studio and would take me to the train. He also said he wanted to talk to me about his friendship with Beckett and asked if I could meet him on Monday. Of course I said yes, which meant I had to change my Sunday flight to Dublin so I could stay in Paris an extra day. When we ended our phone conversation, he told me he would call “Sam” and tell him it was all sorted out and I was on my way to Leventhal’s. It was not until I was safely on the train that I wondered, how did Pierre Schneider, a total stranger to me, know that I was going to Leventhal and Leigh’s? And for that matter, how did Beckett?
I arrived for my 8:30 dinner date at 10:30 p.m. Marion Leigh handed me a glass of whiskey the moment I walked in the door and said we were going to eat a roast beef dinner that was so overcooked it was cremated, “and then we will be even when it comes to roast beef dinners.” I was dropping with fatigue but still alert enough to wonder why she felt the need to remark so bitingly on the hospitality my family and I had so genuinely offered. I could hardly open my mouth to chew, let alone talk, but I didn’t need to say much, because they already knew about my day chez Joan. Marion said “Sam” had kindly phoned to let them know I was on my way and asked them not to be upset with me.
At that point it was going on midnight, and in something between nervous exhaustion, panic, and sheer frustration, I broke down in a kind of outburst, shaking and nearly sobbing. “What in the hell is going on?” I demanded once I had calmed down. “What kind of stupid silly game is Samuel Beckett playing with me?”
Con and Marion looked at each other, and then he reached across the table and put his hand over mine. It was not a game, he told me. Beckett had been felled by an outbreak of the cysts and boils that had troubled him when he was a very young man at Trinity College. He had several on his face and around his mouth that were particularly disfiguring, and he didn’t want me to see them for fear that I would write about them.
I already knew of those that had plagued him during his university years, having been told by some of his Irish classmates at Trinity, who were most eager to go into the gory details of his unhappy time there, confirmed by his cousins and his two best friends at Trinity, Drs. Alan and Geoffrey Thompson. Beckett’s niece, Caroline Beckett Murphy, offered further corroboration as she remembered hearing these family stories as a young girl. I hesitated a long time before including details about the boils and cysts when writing about Beckett’s earlier years, but because they were woven throughout his fiction, I decided I had to include such embarrassingly personal information. But I certainly didn’t mention this recurrence.
What a relief Con’s explanation was! To learn that I had not crossed some red line gave me the best night’s sleep since I had landed in Paris. Late Sunday morning, when I could finally rouse my aching head and bones from the lumpy bed, I wrote a letter to Beckett, giving him my account of the week’s research and mentioning that I was staying an extra day to meet Pierre Schneider at the Closerie des Lilas—a place I liked because it made me feel steeped in literary history. But I omitted everything personal, particularly that I was keeping that afternoon free to buy presents for my children and planned to have dinner with an old college friend who happened to be in Paris at the time.
I had been at it for well over a year by this point, and I still struggled to find the right words to describe how Beckett and I related to one another. Working relationship? Mutual undertaking? The project we were embarked upon? But one thing was clear, which was that I had to remain “all business,” as the expression goes. The last thing I wanted from Samuel Beckett was a friendship, especially a personal one. I knew that I would be revealing a great deal of his personal history to the world, history that he would surely prefer to keep private, and the notion troubled me deeply. Back in my reporting days, I had undertaken similar digs into subjects’ pasts, but in those cases I had no regrets, because the stories concerned public figures whose private deeds bore on their professional conduct and needed to be made public. Now, as a biographer, the rules seemed different, leaving me to struggle with myself. I had come so far since the research that began with my dissertation in early 1971, and here it was 1974 and ink was finally hitting paper. How could I abandon almost four years of work because I was so reluctant to reveal ugly or embarrassing personal matters? Thankfully, the immediate, pressing needs of the research took precedence over worries about content. Right now I had to finish up in Paris and get myself to Dublin and London to keep to my appointed rounds.
13
I trod warily when I landed in Dublin. I went to Ireland many times during the seven years I worked on the Beckett biography, and every time I had mixed feelings about working there. On the one hand, people were so friendly, generous, and kind to me; on the other hand, I was always dealing with unpleasant behavior from men who, if they were not actual gropers or wannabe bed partners, took delight in slyly bombarding me with sexual innuendo. To them, a woman on her own was a prime target, but one who was also a married mother was almost incomprehensible and therefore the object of all sorts of objectionable behavior. I grew used to ignoring suggestions about my being in a “free marriage” that allowed me to “abandon” my children.
But I also remember lovely dinner parties in the homes of Sean and Mary White, where Seamus and Marie Heaney became my friends, and at Paddy and Monica Henchy’s, where they and their friends took delight in watching me sputter as they introduced me to poitín, the potent Irish moonshine. I made friends among women journalists and others who were, surprisingly to me, well represented in the professions and public life. I enjoyed their company at rowdy drinks-and-dinners in their homes, where I learned a lot about how to navigate among “the ould fellers.”
This particular trip was an exhausting week of evenings at the bar at Buswells Hotel on Molesworth Street, then a grungy dump where I was staying, during which I had to buy far too many drinks far too late into the night for assorted Dublin characters, all of whom told me stories of “Sam’s escapades” during the years he had lived there. And many of them hinted at how much more they could tell me if I would just leave their hands where they put them on my knees, or, in one or two of the most egregious cases, if I might want to invite them for a private drink in my room. I spent many exhausting evenings sitting on a bar stool, trying to move out of the reach of one after another drunken Irish poet, actor, playwright, journalist, or professor.
I related these “adventures” to my women friends, and they agreed with me that most Irish men found an American woman on her own an oddity, particularly one writing about Beckett. When I interviewed some of these women for background on Irish history and culture, the topic of how Irish men treated them usually arose. They just laughed and said they had learned after the first pass how to keep things light and breezy, to reject the propositions and still keep the fellow as a friend. I learned a lot from them and followed suit.
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This trip also offered me the chance to run down a significant lead regarding Beckett’s sexual
ity. Several of my previous interviewees had stressed the importance of Beckett’s deep friendship with the Irish poet Denis Devlin. Discussing the subject with Brian Coffey, who guardedly told me of Devlin’s “importance” to Beckett, I asked if he was referring to Beckett’s sexuality. By way of response, he told me to “look to McGreevy” for a full and accurate understanding of, as he put it euphemistically, “Beckett’s life and work.” Now that I was in Dublin, I set out to learn more about the deep and lasting friendship between Beckett and the late Thomas McGreevy, one that had begun during Beckett’s Joyce years in Paris and lasted until McGreevy’s death in 1967.
McGreevy was another Dublin character, which meant he was a man with an outsized personality and one about whom everyone, regardless of class or position, had a story. He had retired as the director of the National Gallery of Ireland and was a well-known and well-loved member of both the local intelligentsia and the ordinary drinking establishment. McGreevy was also honored by the French government as a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, which in Dublin parlance became his nickname, the “Shoveler.” He was a lifelong bachelor devoted to his late sister and her two adult daughters.
Brian had told me of the voluminous correspondence Beckett had exchanged with McGreevy, all of which the Shoveler talked about fairly openly to any drinking companions who would listen. A great many people knew how McGreevy boasted of what he could reveal should he ever decide to publish the letters. Brian told me they would probably be the most important documents for a true understanding of Beckett and that I should make every possible effort to read them.
And therein lay the most important tale of my biography, what I called “the McGreevy Letters.”
By the time I was conducting research, McGreevy and his sister were both dead and the two adult nieces were the inheritors of his estate. I interviewed them first together and then separately. They were both educated and cultured women, middle-class wives and mothers who tended to good-sized families while enjoying satisfying careers. One of them was a devoted scholar of the Irish language who did much to promote it in schools and other language programs. It was she whom I saw most of the time after I began to have repeated separate interviews with each of them.
Throughout the next three years, every time I went to Dublin (which was usually twice a year, or more if I could scrounge up the research money) I would take the McGreevy nieces to very nice teas and lunches, where I would ask politely but repeatedly to see the letters. Each time they told me the same thing: they were surely inclined to cooperate and they would certainly think about it, but they could not make the decision just then. Perhaps by the time I made my next trip they would have decided. I had a nickname for them, too: “The Godot Sisters. Not today, but surely tomorrow…” The day eventually did come, but it took a while.
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When I asked Con Leventhal and Brian Coffey for the names of people who had known Beckett in his youth and the name of Mary Manning Howe came up, both would sigh deeply and roll their eyes in resignation and regret—resignation that she was indeed an important source and regret that I would be subjected to her possibly whimsical memories. The Manning family were neighbors of the Becketts and the two matriarchs had been close friends. Samuel was the brother closest to two (of three) of the Manning children, John and Mary, because they had similar interests in literature and theater. Mary became an actress-playwright in Dublin and later married the prominent Boston lawyer and Harvard professor Mark De Wolfe Howe. She and Beckett maintained a mostly epistolary friendship for the rest of her life.
Con and Brian acknowledged Mary’s propensity to exaggerate and make herself the center of a story, but they both agreed that she was definitely someone I needed to interview. Her brother, John Manning, they concurred, would be a far more reliable witness than his colorful sister. They sighed deeply again when they spoke of Arland Ussher, an ancient man of letters, but agreed that he, too, had been close to Beckett and I should at least talk to him and see for myself how useful his memories might be.
My time in Ireland was not unmarked by the political conflict roiling the country. I had gone to Northern Ireland for interviews at the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, where Beckett had been a student. I was on an early morning bus back to Dublin so that I could keep a lunch appointment with the Manning siblings and was both frantic and furious when we stopped in Cavan for no apparent reason. A policeman entered the bus and told us to remain seated. After almost an hour, exhausted and frustrated and worried that after I had gone to so much trouble to arrange the luncheon, I would not be able to keep it, I went to the bus door and behaved badly. I demanded that the two members of the Irish constabulary who were guarding it tell me what was going on. As they turned their backs on me without replying, the elderly passengers in the front seats whispered that I should sit down and be quiet. A long while later, when we were finally under way, they told me that there had been a shootout and two men were dead. They were very matter-of-fact about it, saying it was “all political” and nothing to be bothered about. When I read the Dublin papers that night, I learned there had been a bombing as well. Clearly there were many situations in Ireland when it was best to be the mousy girl hanging back rather than the brash American pushing her way forward.
That afternoon, when I met Mary (always called Molly) Manning Howe and John Manning, I was in a fairly sorry state after the episode in Cavan. Lunch proceeded smoothly, with ordinary conversation about Dublin people who knew Beckett, the state of Irish arts and letters, and the current theater scene. John left immediately after the meal, saying that he and I could meet again. Molly suggested we stay for another cup of tea, which led to all sorts of intimate details about Beckett’s sexuality.
Her version was of a rousing, rip-roaring affair she and Beckett had carried on in the mid-1930s—before and after her 1935 marriage and just before Beckett moved permanently to Paris—much to the consternation of their mothers, who knew all about it. Everyone I interviewed who knew about it referred to it as a “brief encounter” and generally thought it had probably occurred “one time and [been] initiated by her.” Molly’s descriptions of Beckett’s sexual passivity in Ireland resembled those I heard from Peggy Guggenheim and Joan Mitchell. Molly Howe went into far more detail about herself and Beckett than I wanted to hear, but of course I sat there and listened to it all. Despite my exhaustion, I came to fully alert attention when she hinted that her eldest daughter (of three) “could have been” Samuel Beckett’s.
With this nugget of new information under my belt, I moved on to speak with others, putting the topic of Beckett’s alleged parentage in abeyance for the moment. I thought it was so sensitive that I needed to discuss it with Brian Coffey and Con Leventhal first, and I thought it best not to discuss it with anyone else in Ireland. Molly Howe, meanwhile, was busy wringing her hands and fluttering about all over Dublin, telling anyone who would listen how terribly worried she was that “the American biographer” would “reveal [her] long-kept secret,” the one she either described in detail or hinted at coyly. In the end, it was she who “revealed” it to Beckett and created a brief blowup that caused me all sorts of trouble with him, but that came later.
I traipsed all over Dublin conducting my prearranged interviews, and one in particular offered a chance to gather information about Beckett’s romantic life. A grand old man of Irish letters, the essayist and translator Arland Ussher had just sold his Beckett letters, a collection that Molly Howe assured me was “second in importance only to Beckett’s with McGreevy.” We met in the Davy Byrnes pub, where I found myself sitting opposite a very old and very nervous man intent on pumping me for information about Beckett’s views on the sale. I was not about to put myself into the middle of any contretemps that might unfold, so I told Ussher I had no idea what Beckett thought, even though I did—he was furious that the letters had become public, because he had written most of them during the despera
tely drunk and unhappy years he lived in London and after he returned to his mother’s house, broke, depressed, and unsuccessful as a writer. He felt Ussher had no right to make them public, and went so far as to say he “preferred” that I not use them.
Beckett did not yet know that I had already read them when a prospective buyer asked me to evaluate whether they were worthwhile, and I thought it best not to rile him until I was actually writing the biography. I wanted to wait until I could determine what, if anything, they might contribute: if little or nothing, I would not use them; if they contained something that mattered, I would fight the good fight then. I would worry about this when the time came.
Molly Howe kept embellishing her version of what the Ussher letters contained whenever I saw her on that trip, hinting at the “scandal” they could reveal about Beckett’s “peccadilloes.” I tried to act the role of naive innocent every time, asking her to elaborate on what she meant, but she would just wave her hand dismissively and say “his unusual sexual proclivities.” I was not about to raise the specter of homosexual encounters myself for fear that she would tell everyone in Dublin that I was snooping into Beckett’s sexuality for a sensational book.
More hints at a relationship with Beckett arose when I returned to Buswells after a busy day of interviewing to find Con Leventhal and Marion Leigh sitting in the lobby having afternoon tea. They claimed to have family business in Dublin and on the spur of the moment had decided it would be good to do it while I was there. As they asked me to tell them whom I had seen and what they had told me—only as a way to help me, of course, just to see if they could verify the statements—it struck me as strange that everywhere I went, they also turned up. I drank the tea they offered and I told them what I wanted them—and Beckett—to know. Nothing more.