Parisian Lives Page 16
Even though I knew that the “three p’s,” the “passionate purple prose” I was writing, would probably never see the pages of a finished book, it did serve a purpose. I sometimes needed to write ten or fifteen pages about a minor critical essay of Beckett’s to be able to understand which several sentences, a paragraph at most, really expressed what was important. I had to leave the cutting-room floor awash in discarded pages before I knew what I needed to keep.
* * *
—
It took time to create my hybrid calendar-chronology that summer, but it was well worth it. This was a busy and productive period; I wrote steadily, watching the book take form in bits and pieces as I wrote those sections for which I had significant information and multiple sources to confirm it. I was still conducting interviews as I wrote, concentrating now on people in the theater who had worked on American productions of Beckett’s plays, so that when I returned to Ireland and England, I could compare their approaches to various continental ones. I spoke to several psychologists and psychiatrists who had written about Beckett, all of whom were convinced that he had serious mental problems. I listened carefully, collected everything they gave me, and put it into a file for careful consideration. Vivian Mercier sent me his correspondence with Beckett and a chapter of the book he was then writing; I was relieved to find that nothing in it impinged upon mine.
And then Mary Manning Howe arrived to spend the summer with her daughter, the poet Susan Howe, in Guilford. There were many lunches and dinners, lots of fun and happy conversation at my house and Susan’s, and even more when another of Mary’s daughters, the writer Fanny Howe, arrived with her children. Soon it would be October and time for me to leave for Paris. As was my custom, I wrote to Beckett to give him my dates in Paris. I was stunned to receive his reply, in which he told me he “deplored the trouble you have caused with Mrs. Howe and her daughter Susan,” ending with “I prefer not to see you.”
Now what?
17
To say I was in shock when I read Beckett’s letter does not begin to describe my reaction. Trying to fathom what had provoked it brings back the memory of one particular evening, August 8, the night Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. There were all sorts of rumors, but we didn’t know what Nixon would do when I invited Molly, Susan, and Fanny to my house for dinner—only that he would be making a televised announcement. When I opened the door to let them in, I found Fanny and Susan wrestling a large television set between them. Fearful that I did not have one or that it might not work, they had brought their own. We set up theirs and mine side by side in the dining room and all of us sat in a row at the table, staring at them as if in a theater while our dinners went untouched.
In every conversation we had that summer, Molly had raised the possibility of Beckett’s parentage of Susan, trying very hard to persuade me that it was the truth and should be written as such. Fortunately, I had Beckett’s detailed calendar for the year in question and, to back it up, a great deal of corroborating evidence in his letters and postcards. He could not possibly have fathered her child, because she and he were not in Ireland at the same time. I knew I would not put rumor, innuendo, or unmitigated gossip in the biography, so I simply dismissed it and never bothered to ask Beckett about Molly’s spurious contention. I certainly never raised the subject with Susan, and every time Molly raised it in our one-on-one talks, I always told her as firmly and as politely as I could that I would not write about it in any form whatsoever. I thought that those conversations had put it to rest forever.
At our last meeting in Connecticut at the end of August, I told Molly that I would be seeing her in October, as I planned to make Dublin my first stop before going to London, where I still had many interviews and much archival research to do. I had given Beckett my itinerary, but whether I went on to Paris afterward would depend on how long my grant money lasted. If I did go, it would be for only a brief catch-up, on the off chance that something had arisen to upset him, and to calm Beckett’s anger if necessary.
Between August and the end of September, I kept on writing and was pleased with how steadily I was moving the book along. I had only bits and pieces of Beckett’s later life written, but chronologically I was well into the 1930s and about to start on his permanent move to Paris. I was stunned to receive his reply to the letter that gave him my dates, when he told me how he “deplored the trouble you have caused with Mrs. Howe and her daughter Susan…on the strength of one of [his] letters to Mr. Ussher.” He told me not to reproduce any correspondence, photos, or drawings in the book, ending with “I prefer not to see you.” I could not understand what this mess was about and why Molly Howe had created it.
Even though I remembered Brian Coffey warning me that Molly Howe was “dramatic” and would use any situation for her own purposes, I could not fathom why, as Beckett said in his letter to me, she had told him that I was going to name him as Susan’s father, or what made her ask him to denounce me, stop cooperating, and not see me ever again, especially after she kissed me goodbye and handed me a very special family treasure to cement our friendship, a piece of lace embroidered by her mother. Although it was she who had introduced me to Arland Ussher and she who had gone with me to his house to insist that he show me his letters, she had also told Beckett that I had browbeaten the poor man into submission before he agreed. She also insisted that she had had nothing to do with my discovering the story of Susan’s possible parentage and that I had learned of it only after I read the Ussher letters. I could not decide whether I was more stunned by her audacity or appalled by her lies.
Immediately after I received Beckett’s letter, I went to see Susan. She was embarrassed and upset and asked me if she should write to Beckett, even though she had no idea how she would explain her mother’s outburst. After I told her the truth of my role in this unpleasant brouhaha, she said, “That’s just Mummy being Mummy,” and we agreed not to speak of it again. I was relieved that the friendship we had formed over the summer remained intact.
And then I had to deal with Beckett, but how to go about that was entirely unclear. Luckily, something fortuitous happened that helped. Alan Schneider called to say that he had found some director’s notes pertaining to Godot and he thought they might be useful. He was planning to be in New York the next week, and we agreed to meet in Barney Rosset’s office, where we could compare notes on which theater people in London were the most important for me to interview.
Without going into the details, I told Alan and Barney that Mary Manning Howe had set off a firestorm between me and Beckett and I didn’t know what to do about it. Both men listened attentively, and as I talked, I could see them exchanging meaningful looks. Barney spoke first, asking if this was the first time I had experienced one of “Sam’s rare flashes of anger.” As I thought about it, I realized that flashes of his anger were not rare with me, for my questions usually provoked at least one per meeting.
Alan offered a solution and I did take it, but only in part. He said I should reply to Beckett’s letter at once, apologizing for any inadvertent part I might have played in “Mrs. Howe’s fantasy,” and then leave it at that—a very brief note and nothing else. “Fantasy” was what he told me to call it, and that was exactly what I wrote and what I intended to send, until stewing on the matter a bit longer made me very angry. After years of our in-person conversations and numerous letters explaining who I was seeing and what sort of questions I was asking, Beckett’s accusations in his letter struck me as outrageous. As was my custom, I unloaded all these emotions into the DD: “MMH has queered the ballgame. He is furious over all the Ussher crap and he blames me for everything. I thought about it all day and couldn’t sleep most of the night but finally composed a very dignified letter that I hope will show him I am pissed off by his arrogance.” I could not let things go without comment, because I knew his charges would fester and eventually cause me to erupt, and I didn’t want the eruption to happen when I was
with him. I went on to explain that the “fuss”—another of Alan’s words—was all Mrs. Howe’s creation.
Not satisfied with that and still seething, I could not resist concluding with an impassioned paragraph telling him that after all this time, I deeply regretted that he might still doubt the seriousness and honesty of my endeavor. I hoped he would change his mind, because I was too far along with the writing of the book, and too many people to whom I was contractually obligated were depending on me, that I had no option but to keep on with my work. I said I would be in Dublin and London, where he could reach me via my publishers, and I would go to Paris afterward only if he changed his mind and wanted to see me.
If he replied to this letter and sent it to one of the places where mail was being held for me, I never got it. But I suspect he did not reply. His flash of anger had dissipated, and by writing it, so had my righteous indignation. The next letter I received was not directly from him but from his cousin Mollie Roe, who said I should make a point to see her on my next visit to England, because she wanted to give me copies of letters and drawings she had earlier refused. When she asked Beckett about them, he told her I should have them. It seemed as though our correspondence and other kinds of contact would resume as if nothing untoward had happened.
* * *
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The Molly Howe fiasco was not my only tribulation during this period. As I worked away, I was benefiting—or so I thought—from a constant correspondence and several long and expensive transatlantic telephone conversations with Vivian Mercier in Ireland. Up to that point in my writing life, I had often discussed my work with colleagues or friends, but I never showed anything written until I had a full draft, no matter whether it was a short news article or a long profile. I broke this hard-and-fast rule with Mercier to show him parts of the biography because I was worried about accurately capturing Beckett’s Anglo-Irish heritage and social milieu and I wanted confirmation that I was not making any egregious factual blunders. “Naive American girl,” he had called me, and although I resented the word “naive,” in this instance that is exactly what I was.
I sent the better part of the manuscript to Mercier and he did help me with various “things Irish,” as I called them, but his primary response was astonishment at the material I had discovered and how it was going to change Beckett scholarship. He told me time and again that no one knew any of what I was writing and that my book would become an extremely important contribution to “the academic Beckett cottage industry.” It was as if he knew my innermost thoughts and dreams for the book’s reception, as that was exactly what I wanted it to be, a genuine contribution to scholarship. I cheerfully kept on sending chapters as I wrote them.
I had been sending chapters for the better part of a year when Mercier sent me a letter telling me that he had written his own book, and because I was a total unknown “novice” and he was an “established scholar,” he thought “it would be best” if he were to incorporate all the biographical information in my book into his own critical study. If it appeared there first, he argued, the public would be far more likely to take my book seriously. He was doing this only as “a great favor” to me. My so-called naiveté quickly took the form of action: I contacted my agent, who contacted my various publishers, whose lawyers all contacted Mercier’s publisher. His publisher then submitted a revised manuscript to me to ensure that all of my research had been removed, and Mercier’s book went to press as the critical study he had originally written.
Looking back on myself at that time, I see how I was gaining self-confidence. I had stood up to Beckett in self-defense, and it would appear that he had backed down. And I was standing up to the Reaveys time after time, refusing to be at their beck and call while focusing on my work, telling George that he could no longer dangle information but must either give it to me or not, and telling Jean that no, I had no clout with any of the theater people I had befriended and therefore I could not get them to produce her plays. Best of all, I had defanged Mercier’s blatant attempt to steal my intellectual property. Thus empowered, I was confident that my upcoming research trip to Ireland would be very different from the last one. Various interviews I had conducted in the interim all pointed to the McGreevy letters as an essential piece of the Beckett puzzle, and I was determined not to come home without them.
When I made my flight reservations, almost two months had passed since I had sent the letter defending myself to Beckett, and I thought I should probably send another note to him with my itinerary. Before I could write it, I received one from him, telling me that he was in Tangier and would be there for the entire month, resting before attending rehearsals of Happy Days in London. Then he would be in Berlin throughout December and January to rehearse Waiting for Godot. My family, my agent, and my publisher all found it hard to believe I was so relieved that I would not be seeing him on this trip, but it was true. Being in his physical presence and directly subjected to his possible volatility and usual gamesmanship surely would be a distraction, one that would disrupt my focus on the task at hand: finishing his book so that I could return to my life.
Instinctively I felt that if my reading Beckett’s correspondence with Arland Ussher had so upset him, reading those to McGreevy would almost certainly set off another of his flashes of temper, one that might prevent me from perusing those crucial letters. I knew that he had already asked several of his correspondents (who all had disobeyed his wishes) to destroy his letters, but I did not want even to hint about McGreevy’s until I had safely read them. I was afraid that if I saw Beckett in person, I might slip up and reveal that I knew they existed. So I sent him a happy, chatty little note saying oh what a shame that I would not be able to see him and wishing him well in his work and travels. Then off I went to Dublin.
18
I checked into Buswells and found a message waiting for me. Mrs. M. M. Howe would like to invite me to dinner tomorrow at her home to meet Eileen O’Casey, the widow of playwright Seán, who had much to tell me about her friendship with Mr. Beckett. If Molly Howe wanted to act as if nothing untoward had happened, then so did I. I accepted her invitation.
Then I phoned Arland Ussher to see whether I needed to offer any amends or explanations. His housekeeper answered and said I should hold for just a moment and she would get him. There was a longish wait before she returned to say, “Do you know, I believe he has just gone away for a few days.” That made for two “okaaaay” moments in half an hour, and I had a feeling I was in for an interesting week. I was not disappointed.
The bandwagon was becoming crowded, as all sorts of people wanted to climb on board. Every day for the next week my appointments began early in the morning and did not end until almost midnight. Curators at Trinity and University College were eager to show me archives that until now had been mysteriously unavailable. John Manning, Molly Howe’s brother, took me to lunch at the posh Kildare Street Club to show me an album of childhood photos that included Sam and his brother, Frank. A boozy dinner at the home of a leading Catholic academic administrator revealed a shocking contempt for Beckett’s work, while another evening of drinks with a nun and educator illustrated the Church’s reach in Ireland and clarified the Catholic antagonism toward his writing. Beckett’s cousin Hilary Heron Greene, an artist who lived on a cliff above the Irish Sea in Dalkey and who had been exceptionally close to Beckett’s mother, invited me to lunch and spent the next four hours showing me more of the many things Mae Beckett had given her, all the while laying out Mrs. Beckett’s version of how and why her son had left Ireland for France, a topic that would feature prominently in the McGreevy letters. After keeping such an exhausting pace, I concluded that it had been worthwhile, if only to know I was not leaving anything or anyone out. By Friday night, November 2, while summing it up for the DD, I just wanted to crawl into bed, sleep late, and buy a bucket of fruit the next day. I wanted a day to myself and no full English breakfast. I could not face another egg.
/> I did sleep late, but there was no slowing down. That night I had dinner at the home of the aforementioned leading Catholic academic administrator, who wanted me to meet others who represented the Catholic rebuttal to Beckett’s Anglo-Irish sensibilities. It was a most unusual evening, wherein Beckett was not really the subject: I was. Most of the conversation consisted of questions about my personal situation, most about how I had “abandoned” my husband and children to go off on my own to a foreign country and whether this was common among American “women’s libbers.” But then came the question that left me speechless: why had I left my family to write about a man like “Thomas à Beckett”? Surely this had to be sarcasm on purpose, for no one had drunk enough wine to make such a mistake. I learned that there were two worlds in modern Ireland, and one of them did not approve of Samuel Beckett.
Another busy day followed on Sunday, and by the evening I wanted nothing more than to fall into bed when I returned to the hotel. As I headed for the elevator, the desk clerk came running after me with several messages. One of the McGreevy nieces had phoned to say that she would come to the hotel the next morning at 9:30 and asked me to call her before 11 p.m. to confirm that I would be there. It was just after eleven, so I took a chance, dialed her number, and with great relief heard her voice. She rambled and equivocated at length before she got around to saying that she and her sister had been talking and they were still unsure of what to do about the letters.
It was the same story I had been hearing for the past several years, but this time there was a slight difference. They had been reading some of the letters for the first time, and based on what I had told them about my book, they thought I should have them. But then again, perhaps not. Perhaps they were too private and should instead be destroyed. For the next forty-five minutes we went over it again and again: they wanted to show me the letters, and they did want to show me all their photos, but they just didn’t know if they should. Also, if they did agree to let me read the letters, they estimated that it would take at least three or four days, if not longer, for me to get through them, and as they would not let them leave the sister’s house where they were stored, they would have to figure out the logistics of where and when I could read them, because someone would have to be there to “watch” me at all times. I bit my tongue so as not to blurt out something sarcastic to assure them that I was trustworthy. I had no interest in stealing Samuel Beckett’s letters; I only wanted to read them to ensure that what I wrote was accurate.