Parisian Lives Read online

  I was both overwhelmed and relieved to find that my instincts were correct—that the only person with whom Beckett had been entirely truthful was Thomas McGreevy, and he had told his truths in letters that began during his early days in Paris and did not end until McGreevy’s death. When I read them, they showed a dark, deeply personal dimension to Beckett’s decision. I was stunned by the depth of his violence and vitriol, his bitterness, his anger, and above all his hatred of his mother. Samuel Beckett not only did physical damage to himself on his drunken rampages, he was so emotionally distraught that he made himself physically ill, with recurrences of the disfiguring boils and cysts he had had as an undergraduate. His behavior so upset his dutifully patient brother that Frank exhibited many of the same mental and emotional ailments and feared for his own well-being. Frank knew the mother and her two sons could not survive living together in the same house, spacious and gracious though it was, but Mae Beckett would not listen to any of his proposals for how they could live separately. Samuel Beckett described in detail to McGreevy how he became so violent during his drunken debauches that he feared he would destroy his mother or himself, whichever came first.

  * * *

  —

  As I sat there on that afternoon in the younger McGreevy niece’s study, listening to the sounds of a happy family enjoying their Sunday lunch in the dining room, I could not decide if I was shivering and shaking with cold and flu or because of every letter I read. Although I read fast and typed madly, I realized that there were dozens of letters—each one vital to my understanding of Beckett’s decisions and choices—and I had only six days to go through them all. Even more troubling, they were going to be short days, because I was allowed to read them only between eleven and three that Sunday and from ten until five o’clock on the following weekdays. Faced with a seemingly impossible task, I made the only dishonest decision of my professional life that afternoon.

  Even though the sisters examined all the boxes when I quit for the day, no doubt to make sure I was not stealing anything, I did steal some—temporarily. I managed to arrange the boxes so it would not be apparent that I slipped a handful into my purse at the end of every workday to take them back to the hotel, where I spent the night working until my eyes and typing fingers gave out. Even so, by the end of the third day, I knew that I was typing too slowly, so I began to use the tape recorder. That resulted one night in “a real mess, taped an hour without play button down, then talked over Billie Whitelaw’s interview tape until batteries died. Back to typing. Haste makes big piles of you-know-what. Frustrating.” No wonder my health was an equal mess: “Cold sores, chills, upset tum & runny nose. Everything here so wet and damp. Haven’t seen sun for a month.”

  My directive to myself was “must finish by Wednesday!” But Wednesday came and went and I was still transcribing. I used two sets of batteries in a single day and was nowhere near being finished. I just got sicker and sicker; I had not had a decent meal in days, and I certainly was not sleeping well. All the while, slipping letters out from under the McGreevy nieces’ noses was deeply upsetting: “The McGreevy nieces are the most decent human beings I have met in a very long time. They are going to feel like shit when Beckett writes to tell them not to show me these letters, and so am I.”

  * * *

  —

  I finished copying the letters eight days after I began to read them and lost no time in booking a flight home to New York. Still sick, I took the weekend off to let my family take care of me, and on Monday morning I was on the phone to Carl Brandt to tell him why I had to rewrite the central section of the book, which would make my delivery date of the manuscript even later than it already was. He listened quietly as I told him everything I had learned, both from the letters and from the interviews. He was particularly struck by the news of Beckett’s psychoanalysis and said that before I wrote a word he would have to contact my publisher, and no doubt Larry would have to consult the firm’s lawyers. The material was so explosive, Carl said, that he was not sure I could use any of it. This floored me.

  In December 1974, rules of privacy and propriety were far more strictly followed than under the contemporary “anything goes, nothing is off-limits” attitude in journalism and nonfiction. I had already imposed many restrictions on myself in terms of what I could use in the biography, but I also knew the publisher’s lawyers would need to vet the text. Many of the obstacles I had already faced and self-restrictions I had decided to follow generated strong impulses from time to time to say to hell with it and walk away, right back to the news desk or forward into the office of a professor. But this was not one of those moments. I spent the rest of the day trying to think of ways I could incorporate my findings without having to identify where they came from, even though all my other scrupulous sourcing and annotations made the task impossible.

  I was not prepared for what Carl told me when he phoned in the late afternoon and told me what the publisher’s intellectual-property lawyers had decided: I could not use any information in the letters without either verbal or written corroboration, thanks to common-law copyright. This meant that if letters were on file in a university library and available to scholars, I could paraphrase them. However, I could not quote letters in private collections, although the owner of the physical letters could agree to let me paraphrase the content. My situation was even more perilous because the writer of the letters was still alive and could deny all permissions. Also, the one subject firmly off-limits was Beckett’s medical history, which could not be quoted or paraphrased. For all things medical, particularly Beckett’s psychoanalysis, I would have to infer, insinuate, or imply. I interrupted Carl’s explanation to argue that I was not writing a book of opinion or innuendo, and to omit so much factual truth from the biography would diminish, if not destroy, my credibility as narrator. Carl said this would not happen as long as I had factual evidence that could be called upon after publication to back me up. No, I responded; everything had to be stated clearly in the book so that nothing was open for question.

  And then he raised the fear that governed my life for the next month: Beckett could get a temporary or even a permanent restraining injunction if he wanted to, because everyone would be sympathetic to someone whose medical records were being made public. If, however, I could get someone to swear that his psychoanalysis was common knowledge in London psychiatric circles, it would help my case tremendously.

  The thought of lawyers, litigation, injunctions—of a huge legal apparatus bearing down on me—rendered me helpless. I was devastated that all my important research had been for naught, that the honest and thorough book I wanted to write was never going to happen: once the lawyers were involved, who knew when or even if it would be published? I had visions of myself languishing in debtor’s prison. After a little more than a week of gloom and doom, I decided there was only one thing to do, and that was to write about Beckett’s flight from Ireland to France exactly as I wanted to write it and then send it to the publisher and wait to see what would happen. In a blaze of white-hot heat, I did so. Carl and Larry phoned as soon as they read it. Carl said they were both “absolutely wild” about it. Larry said, “Go ahead and write it as if you have permission for everything. We will deal with what happens when or if it does.”

  All this wonderful support buoyed my spirits and dissolved both negativity and depression. Newly revivified, I remembered what Samuel Beckett had said to me so many different times throughout the several years I had known him: “My word is my bond.” And I thought of his promise not to help or hinder me, which I took as his implicit permission to pursue topics in his life that might have embarrassed him or made him ashamed or unhappy. It strengthened my resolve to write the book exactly as I thought it should be written. Now it was time to hold those thoughts firmly in mind and finish.

  I used a lot of mixed metaphors back then to describe my situation, but the most coherent ones centered around dropping shoes.
Two remained to drop: Beckett’s response to the nieces about the letters, and his to me explaining whatever he decided. On December 27, 1974, one of the McGreevy nieces wrote to me. I had left the letter to Beckett with her when I left Dublin, and she found someone going to Paris to leave it in Beckett’s mailbox. She received his reply in a roundabout way: the postal strike was still on in France, so he gave his reply to the nieces to someone who was coming to the United States, who forgot to mail it to Ireland for more than a week after he arrived. It had just reached the nieces, and in it Beckett asked them not to show the letters to anyone but to destroy them. “I expected that” was my cryptic conclusion to that day’s DD entry.

  They replied to Beckett, as did I, even though I had not heard from him directly. We all explained the constraints I had been under to justify why they had let me read the letters before hearing from him. He made no direct reference when he replied to the three of us, letters we did not receive until almost two months later and which were mailed from London. He thanked the nieces for their letter, and his note to me said nothing about the letters but asked only when I planned to return to Paris; he was leaving shortly for Berlin and the Schiller Theater and wanted to alert me that he would be gone for most of the early months of 1975. I had no idea when I could make another research trip, for the usual reason: I would have to raise the money to pay for it. But I certainly was not going to tell him that. I had never told him of the financial stress writing this book had caused me, and I was not about to start now.

  Even more important, I was writing steadily, and my goal of finishing the book—not in early spring, as I had originally intended, but sometime later in 1975—was clearly in sight. At the end of January, my horoscope in the local newspaper said, “You will get money and finish an important project this month.” I could not resist thinking, I hope it knows of what it speaks.

  20

  New England winters are always harsh, but January–March 1975 was particularly bad. Too many snowstorms and too many personal interruptions, which included dealing with a misbehaving furnace, preparing one child for an exchange in France and the other for a long stay on the West Coast, and hosting an exchange student from Sweden. Still, I should have realized how well I was writing when I took my first electric typewriter to be repaired by the legendary New Haven specialist, Mr. Whitlock, and he told me it was so worn that I should abandon it and buy a new one. I did, and by the time I finished writing, I wore that one out, too.

  As I worked through the early months of 1975, an opportunity for me to let the world know that my biography was coming presented itself. Grove Press was about to publish Beckett’s Mercier and Camier in an English translation, and I contacted the critic John Leonard, then the editor of The New York Times Book Review, to suggest myself as the perfect reviewer. To the amazement of my agent and publisher—but not me—Leonard agreed. I simply assumed that no one knew more about that novel than I did, but I was still amazed when the review was published exactly as I wrote it, without cuts, corrections, or other criticisms, for during Leonard’s reign, the TBR was notorious for making writers submit seemingly interminable revisions.

  Publication of the review alerted Tom Bishop, the distinguished professor of French at New York University, that a biography was under way. He was editing a special issue of a prestigious French literary magazine, Cahiers de L’Herne, in honor of Beckett’s seventieth birthday, and he invited me to contribute an article. That led to circulation on the academic grapevine as well as elsewhere of the announcement that I was soon to publish a biography, and most often it was garbled or incorrect.

  My author’s identification in the Book Review mistakenly said the biography would be published that same year, leading Book Digest to announce a forthcoming biography by “Deidre Blair”—the first of many misspellings. If only the wave of criticism that followed could have landed at the feet of a Ms. Blair and not mine!

  The first rumble I heard came in a minor newsletter that went out to various grant-giving agencies, in which an unsigned letter suggested that I had “singlehandedly twisted Samuel Beckett’s arm to let [me] write his authorized biography.” I was horrified, and I prayed the article would never reach Beckett’s eyes.

  Then various persons who considered themselves authorities on the life and work of Samuel Beckett weighed in. One told me I was not “existential enough” to write the biography, but after reading the Times review, he changed his mind and said the book would “probably not be that bad after all.” Another told me I needed to “learn how to write” so I could “remove” myself from the book, because the Times review was “far too personal” and revealed far too much about me. And still another, a professor at a respected university, wrote a scathing letter saying that I should be “ashamed of the hubris” I had shown by writing the Times review, because it should have been his, and I’d better “watch” myself and “know [my] place” if I ever wanted an academic position. Most of these criticisms were more amusing than hurtful, but several, like the professor’s not-so-veiled threat, warned of more serious trouble headed my way.

  A cadre of Beckett specialists—the “Becketteers,” as I called them (all references to Mouseketeers are intentional), white men in secure academic positions of power and authority—formed my primary opposition. They were representative of a larger struggle in academia between the establishment and the perceived threat of women like me and my Danforth GFW colleagues, who were now competing for the same academic positions as the usual male candidates. For the Becketteers in particular, I was a brazen example, the “mere girl” who had “invaded the sacrosanct turf of the Beckett world.” One or two younger members who were brave enough to speak to me privately asked if I was completely ignorant of the pecking order, while in public they shunned me so they could “keep on the good side of the powers that be.” One of them surreptitiously motioned for me to join him as he sneaked behind a pillar in a hotel lobby at a Modern Language Association conference. “You are a pariah and I can’t be seen talking to you,” he said with a swagger, clearly feeling brave for engaging in this little clandestine conversation. His childish glee left me (unusually) speechless and unable to think up a quick riposte. When I found my voice, I said I did not understand why I was being ostracized, since my two publications about Beckett had been received positively within the academic world. “Yes,” this man said, “in the academic world. But that’s not the Beckett world.”

  Forewarned is forearmed, they say, and so for the first time in the three years since receiving my doctorate, I decided to get serious about finding a permanent academic position. I hoped to find a position at a prestigious university so that I would be less vulnerable to Becketteer attacks. My work was biographical rather than theoretical, which made me think I could escape the internecine battles common in an academic environment. I had seen many of these firsthand in graduate school because biography was still anathema in most literature departments, so I expected potential colleagues to shy away from me and leave me in peace for fear of professional contamination. I thought myself safe on any number of professional fronts simply because of the nature of my research. Theorists would not take biographical work seriously enough to think it deserved critical consideration in the first place. This was just another example of how totally wrong I was about the zero-sum game of academic politics.

  The genre of biography relies upon certain conventions, which means that it carries textual constraints. Many topics and multiple subjects pertaining to the principal subject must be identified and explored, but only to the point where they contribute to the understanding of a particular life. To some critics, this may make the work appear superficial rather than exhaustive. My aim in writing Beckett’s biography was to provide a tool that would identify aspects of his life and work for other scholars to explore with rigorous scholarship. Remember, nobody knew much about him before I began, and in my view Beckett criticism had been languishing for some time, full of repe
tition and dead ends.

  It put me in mind of the German round song in Waiting for Godot, where the dog goes in the kitchen, the cook gives him a bone, and so on, seemingly forever. I thought Beckettian criticism had been chasing its metaphorical tail and it was time for a fresh infusion. Where others saw Beckett primarily through a lens of existential angst, I found humor and pathos in equal part, much of it stemming directly from what I was learning about his family background and the Irish literary tradition. I wanted to open up new avenues of interpretation, but even more important, of appreciation. I wanted to write not only for an academic audience but also for the intelligent general reader who wanted to understand the creative vision of this writer who had given us so many brilliant novels and theatrical experiences. “In other words,” said one of my professor friends, “you want more than three hundred people to read your book.”

  Above all, I believed my authorial responsibility was to follow the dictum of the critic Desmond MacCarthy that the biographer must be “the artist under oath.” In other words, my task was to tell only the “truth” as I could establish it, but at the same time to grip the reader’s attention with a page-turner. Wasn’t this what scholarship was supposed to be? And weren’t other scholars supposed to be appreciative of my efforts? With hindsight all these years later, I was every bit the naive American girl that Vivian Mercier said I was.

  Meanwhile, in late spring 1975, I was at the stage of writing where I was in desperate need of a break, a distraction, a way to refresh and renew myself. I had been writing about Beckett since 1971, if I counted the dissertation, or 1972, if I counted just the biography. I was only up to the late 1960s in writing Beckett’s life, and at the time I noted, “Oh lord, let me finish…I’m getting anxiety attacks, migraine headaches, backaches. Just awful. Tension all the time.”