Parisian Lives Page 14

  I had an engagement that evening, but I agreed to join them for dinner the next night. Marion had started drinking before dinner, and at the table she made snide comments that I chose to respond to as I did when difficult interview subjects were boorish: to go into what I called “cheerful and stupid” mode; to smile and deflect the conversation. She got very drunk, and as she did, her remarks became both shocking and upsetting, a rambling and convoluted monologue about how she had discussed me with Beckett after the New York trip. She told him “everything,” from a description of my home and family to what George Reavey said about me, that I was independently wealthy and lived on a private income and that everyone in New York knew that I had received a huge advance from a publisher to “spill the goods” on Samuel Beckett. Not a word of this was true.

  Her mean-spirited attack came, thankfully, at the end of the meal, which allowed me, still being cheerful and stupid, to hide my astonishment, feign exhaustion, and make a quick exit. In reality I was fuming. All the way to my room I alternated between two thoughts. The first was about Reavey: “I’ll fix that lying bastard.” The second was about Marion Leigh: “She and her ‘Sam’ have been getting their good goss in. Should I laugh it off or be worried?”

  The next morning I began my last day in Dublin. Marion phoned the room as if nothing untoward had happened, to invite me to join them for breakfast. I did, and the conversation was very general and superficially pleasant. I didn’t stay long, needing to complete some last-minute interviews before rushing to the airport for the midafternoon flight to London. On the way back to my hotel to pack up my things, I saw Leventhal and Leigh walking languidly down Molesworth Street with Désirée Moorhead, all three chatting cheerfully away. Con and Marion had not told me that Désirée was also in Dublin, and as they didn’t see me, I did not reveal myself. When I recorded it in the DD, I wrote that “the enormous secrecy and double dealing of these people never ceases to amaze me. What possible game can they be playing?” But there was little time to think about it; I had to get to the airport because my days in London were booked solid.

  I was a basket case of nerves and anxiety as I headed for the airport, where I had another encounter with the Garda Síochána, the Irish national police, that reinforced just how tense the political situation was. I was seated on the small commuter plane when I became aware of nervous whispering around me. The passengers on my side of the plane were looking anxiously out their windows at the single piece of luggage on the tarmac that had not been loaded onto the plane. Two uniformed policemen were talking to someone who looked like a baggage handler. In his hands he held an object about the size of a football that he was trying to foist off on the officers, who refused to take it. Suddenly I realized: that was my suitcase, and the object he held was the clay teapot I had bought from a local potter! I jumped out of my seat and off the plane, down the few steps to the tarmac, yelling, “Don’t hurt my teapot!” as the baggage handler was about to drop it. I snatched it from his hands just in time.

  After I unwrapped it, the policemen opened my suitcase so that I could put the teapot back inside, displaying my dirty clothing to everyone on the left side of the plane. The suitcase was stowed and I reboarded, blushing violently and avoiding all eye contact, and the plane took off. I never drink hard liquor on planes, but on this short flight to Heathrow, I gratefully accepted a whiskey and would have had another if the flight were not so short. London was going to be crazy busy, but I was so glad to get away from Ireland that I looked forward to whatever lay ahead.

  14

  My budget for this research trip allowed for one week in each of the three cities. That meant spending the several months before departure trying to confirm interviews so that I would not waste a moment. Even so, they often had to be changed, which sometimes meant longer stays in one or more place, which then threw everything out of whack. It also meant trying to find ways to conserve money, and that often included finding friends whose apartments would be available for little or no rent. I was able to keep my prior frenetic pace going in London, thanks to Tony Johnson, who let me use his apartment in Shepherd Market as my home base. There was only one problem with it: he stored his fine wines there, and the temperature had to be fifty degrees at all times. The first thing I did after a cold night and a hasty lukewarm shower was to find a hairdresser to wash and dry my hair, for I already had a bad head cold and would have risked pneumonia had I done it in the apartment.

  I had a full schedule of interviews, the first with my British agent, Mark Hamilton, who arranged meetings with British publishers who were interested in the biography. One of them was with John Calder, whom I described in the DD as “in a feisty mood. I sensed that he regrets not having this book even as he berated me for having the chutzpah to write it. He kept saying he would ‘guide me in the right direction,’ but I knew he was guiding me toward non-important topics and non-valid sources. I wondered if he was all there because he muttered and mumbled to himself as he paced around his desk. A strange meeting, from start to finish.”

  Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape was my next stop. He, in the DD, was “dynamic, hard charging, very excited about the book. I’m thrilled that he will publish it.” Tom suggested lunch, but I had to decline because I needed to rest up before a late-afternoon meeting with Beckett’s nephew, Edward. The cold I had caught in Dublin became a disorienting flu in London, and I was in such gastric distress I could not risk eating or drinking. Instead I went back to the apartment and huddled under blankets until Edward arrived.

  When he rang the bell, I was both anxious about meeting him and befuddled from all I had done in the past several weeks as I went to the building’s front door to let him in. The apartment was on the ground floor and close to the front door, and as soon as I greeted him, I realized that the apartment door had shut behind me and I had not brought the keys. Edward was shocked at my first words to him: “Oh shit! I’ve locked myself out.” We stood in the hallway for a few minutes before I had the presence of mind to go down the street to the greengrocer, who called a locksmith. Edward was clearly confused by the situation he had wandered into, but he was game to stick by me as long as he could, and he trotted along beside me. He played the flute in the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and when we had arranged the time to meet, he had told me he could give me half an hour, forty minutes at the most, before he had to leave for rehearsal. We went back to stand outside the apartment building to wait for the locksmith. I was wearing only a sweater—heavy, to be sure, but not heavy enough for a January day on a London street.

  The locksmith never came and Edward had to leave. We set a date for another meeting several days later, but on neutral territory, in a tearoom. I went back to the greengrocer, who related a great phone fuss with the locksmith, a “bloke from the neighborhood,” who said he could not come until the next day. The greengrocer went back to the apartment with me, broke the pane on the front window, raised it, crawled in, and came to the main door to let me in. It was probably the only time I was grateful to have an apartment at the front of a building on the ground floor. Once inside, we called a glass man, who said he could come the next day at 9 a.m. It was so cold and I was so sick that I had to spend the evening sitting doing nothing but trying to breathe, and the next day I spent the entire morning pacing, waiting for the glass man, who never showed up. More phone calls via the greengrocer got “this bloke’s promise” that he would certainly be there “tomorrow.” I never did see Edward again on that trip, but we did meet on a later one, when I was not so obviously flustered.

  I spent the next afternoon interviewing very old Irish people who had known Beckett in the 1930s, listening entranced as they read entries from crumbling diaries or pulling from disintegrating envelopes letters Beckett had written after he returned to Ireland. The daylight was fading and the fire was dying, but the light in the old eyes and the lilt in the shaky voices was mesmerizing. I could hardly take notes, which induced horror afterw
ard, when the interview was over and my euphoria became panic: “My damn tape recorder is dead! Crapped out! I am so glad I am going home.”

  I was frazzled when I arrived for dinner at the home of American friends who were longtime London residents. They immediately offered to let me borrow their recorder until mine could be fixed, so I was able to spend a much-needed evening relaxing and forgetting about work. The house was filled with the sounds of their preteen children joshing, chattering, and playing loud music. Good smells came from the kitchen and conversation flowed lazily. Back at the apartment, I told the DD “that was the world of my life. Beckett’s world is my work. I must remember this if I want to hold on to who I am and what I am doing while I am here.”

  Despite my trials with the still-unrepaired window and the tape recorder, Sunday, January 27, 1974, was by far the most difficult day of all on this trip. I left early in the morning to get from Mayfair to Hampstead for a nine o’clock meeting with Dr. Geoffrey Thompson. He and his late brother, Alan, were physicians and friends of Beckett’s, particularly during his Trinity years and just after. Geoffrey had been training to become a psychiatrist, and it was he who had first suggested that Beckett go into psychoanalysis and then persuaded him to do so. I had met him briefly on an earlier trip to London, when he had hinted at all that he might be willing to tell me, and now we were about to embark on a long and intense morning interview.

  I arrived promptly at nine, as Dr. Thompson had firmly instructed, only to be told that it was “too early” and I should “walk about the Heath” for at least half an hour until he was ready to receive me. It was bitter cold that morning, and not a single place was open where I could have warmed up with a cup of tea. I spent the half hour walking the streets with my gloved hands under my armpits to warm them, stamping my feet to get the blood circulating.

  When Dr. Thompson finally deigned to admit me, we spoke for three hours, even though he was exceedingly reluctant at first to talk. Instead he made me defend myself and my project: As a woman and an American at that, how could I possibly think I could write about an Irishman? How could I possibly understand his mental acuity? Here I got the distinct impression that he either planned to or was already writing a psychobiography: “Then he started to spout all the crap and rumors I had already heard countless times and discounted. Only after two hours did he finally start to talk in earnest about Bion and Jung as he kept saying ‘I’m going to write to Sam to see if I should say more. To see how much I should tell you.’ ”

  He showed me the chess set he and Beckett had played on, and he demonstrated the game from Murphy, which I (not being a player) did not understand. I made a note to ask my son (who as a teenager was about to become a chess master) to explain it so I could write about it. Dr. Thompson also kept opening and shutting the center drawer of his desk, as if he could not decide whether to show me something. He handled a pile of letters and ruffled the pages of what appeared to be a typed manuscript, but he did not read from them, nor did he let me have a proper look. Several times he repeated in a mumble that I had to strain to hear, “I’ll see if I should say more; I’ll see how much I should tell you.”

  Unwittingly—or was it on purpose? I could not decide—Dr. Thompson was confirming what I had suspected and what others, who could not provide confirmation, had told me: that Beckett had been in psychoanalysis in the mid-1930s with Dr. Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, and that Dr. Bion had taken him to hear C. G. Jung’s Tavistock Lectures. But I still needed proof before I could ask Beckett if it was true, and that proof did not come until almost the end of the year, when I was making my second research trip to Europe in 1974.

  My head was reeling when I left Hampstead. I took the tube down to Piccadilly hoping to find a restaurant where I could get a good Sunday lunch and find a store where I could buy some little things for my children. I was unsuccessful on both fronts: “No shops open, no decent restaurants. How I hate Sundays abroad and alone. So I bought all the papers and saw front-page stories that Yale’s Vineland map is a forgery. Shades of home. Tomorrow is my last day. I just hope the damn trains don’t go on strike so I don’t waste my last day.”

  I was in Waterloo Station early the next morning to go to Compton, Surrey, and the home of two Beckett cousins, Mollie Roe and her sister Sheila Roe Page, who had lived in the Foxrock home when he was a boy. Fortunately, there was not a strike, only slowdowns that seemed to take forever. It was still a rewarding day, for the house was full of gifts from Beckett. I saw the Seán O’Sullivan drawing of him as a young man, four paintings by Henri Hayden done in Roussillon while they hid from the Nazis, and a small statue of a man that Beckett told his cousins had been his inspiration for the character of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot. The cousins told me that Beckett “did not like to own possessions” and said that they were often the grateful recipients of his largesse. I read the inscriptions he had written in his first editions; I saw books signed to him by other writers; I read his letters to the cousins and was able to copy photos of him taken during his visits to their house. My book’s skeleton was growing nicely fat with such good flesh upon it.

  Once back in London, I had time before leaving for Heathrow to post a letter to Tony Johnson, to tell him that the keys were with the greengrocer and apologize again about the broken window: “I leave here with one unresolved situation: that damn window is still not fixed.” Otherwise I left with few complaints and one very large nagging fear: few people had told me anything new, and many were telling me stories I’d heard before. It was time to start writing the book. The big question now was how and where to begin.

  15

  It took a while for reentry into real life to take hold, but the weather helped. It was winter in New England, snow was thick, school was canceled, and the kids were home. I sat in my office staring at a mountain of tapes that needed transcribing and notes that needed to be typed and put into order, while the smell of cookies baking and the sounds of conflicting music (his and her differing rock favorites) blasted. There were museum openings for which I had to dig out my finery and play my usual role as the hired help’s wife, and there were dinners to cook for visiting scholar friends who were working in various Yale libraries. Suddenly it was Monday, February 25, 1974, and I noted, “I haven’t done any work since Thursday and I am in a sustained state of block and panic. Just an observation in general.”

  On the financial front, I nervously awaited news of fellowships, but the decisions were disappointingly negative. Trinity College in Hartford dangled the possibility of a job before withdrawing it because there was no funding. I went down to Westport several nights each week to give a “great books” course at a community center, and that was the only income I brought in during the winter, which made me worry about how I was going to pay for my next research trip. I knew that once I digested everything I had just collected, I would need to return to Paris to ask Beckett to confirm, correct, or even discount much that I had learned. However, the main thing I wanted to do was to write a first draft of the book so that I could have at least some idea of how it would convey the facts and events of his life. Content was primary, but how to structure it became another major concern. Just then Beckett’s circle tracked me down, and so many interruptions cropped up that sustained writing was out of the question.

  Joan Mitchell came to New York in early spring to prepare for a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show consisted of a prodigious amount of work, twenty-two new paintings done in Vétheuil between 1969 and 1973. She asked me to come to her studio on St. Mark’s Place, not because she had anything new to tell me about Beckett but just because she “liked” me and thought I “might be worth saving.” It was another “okaaaay” moment, but I genuinely liked her, so I went.

  I arrived at her studio to find her busily working the phone to set up appointments with Barney Rosset, her ex-husband and lifelong friend. She wanted the three of us to get together to talk about Beckett, whi
ch we did, and which sent me off to explore some interesting aspects of his work.

  Joan’s exhibition opening was a gala affair. She was radiant and looked beautiful in a French designer’s pantsuit in lush beige Ultrasuede (all the rage then), over which I promptly spilled a large glass of white wine when one of the well-wishers crowding her jostled my elbow. She was in such a good mood that she laughed it off, thus relieving me of my humiliation. The art world turned out to celebrate Joan, and I was able to chat with artists and museum people I knew from all the parties and openings at the Wadsworth Atheneum. It was quite the love-in, and Joan reveled in it.

  Barney Rosset was enjoying Joan’s moment as much as she was, and he took me aside to tell me he had “lots of new stuff” to show me and suggested that we meet, without Joan, in his office two days later. She would be busy doing publicity in connection with her show, and he did not want to wait, because “Sam” had told him to “show [me] correspondence and anything else” I wanted to see. That was the first sign I had received since the January research trip that all was well between Beckett and me. It was an incredible relief to learn that none of the people I had seen in London and Dublin had carried negative tales back to him, or if they did, that he chose not to believe them.

  Snow continued to fall in record amounts, but I did not let it stop me from getting in to Barney’s office, where I worked for the next several days. Mostly I concentrated on correspondence that he and Beckett had exchanged in the early years, starting around 1953. There were various typescripts of novels and plays, photographs of various productions, and occasional souvenirs (mainly postcards) sent by Beckett when he was on holidays and far away from his work.