Parisian Lives Page 19

  I sent birthday greetings to Beckett in early April, and he replied, ostensibly to thank me but mostly to comment on what I had told him about how my writing was progressing. In my letter, I also wrote about a staged reading I had seen, mounted by Lee Breuer and the Mabou Mines company. I only commented, but when Beckett replied, he told me that many others had sent him multiple copies of Newsweek’s review. “Sounds a crooked straight reading to me,” he concluded, reminding me once again of how well informed he was and how careful I should be with everything I said or wrote about him.

  Jean Reavey, true to form, involved me in another mini-conflagration with Beckett when she told me she had found a note from Beckett to George, dating to the early 1960s, explaining that his original intention had been to call his play Waiting for Levy, not Godot. I dismissed this claim as having no basis in fact when Jean offered no proof, but apparently she wrote to Beckett, saying that I was going to include it in the biography, which ignited another short-lived burst of his indignation.

  After I straightened out that contretemps, Beckett told me he was almost finished working with Madeleine Renaud on the French Not I, after which he would go to Morocco for a long rest. He said I should let him know when I would next be in Paris so he could be sure to see me, as it had been too long since we had talked about my “project.”

  But mostly I was just writing, yearning to cross the finish line. One day during that period, I sat for a very long lunch with Alan Schneider and his wife, Jean, while they asked questions about the book’s progress. I was nearing the end of the writing, I told them, with only the conclusion left to go. After one more revision, I expected to give it to the publisher later that summer or in early fall. As we talked, Alan and Jean plied me with questions about its content, which gave me another surprising revelation. That night at home, I wrote: “Went to see Alan Schneider. Now I really feel ready to publish. I seem to know one helluva lot more about ‘Sam’ than he does.”

  A bit further on I added, “Jean says I am going to have a best seller. I hope she is right.”

  21

  The problem of how to pay for another, final (I hoped) research trip was solved by Vivian Mercier, eager to make amends after we settled his attempted use of my research in his book. His wife, the Irish writer Eilís Dillon, told me that the Catholic Church’s International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) was hard pressed to find young Americans, especially women, and she asked me to become a member. Within weeks I was invited to attend the next meeting in London, with a stipend generous enough to pay for side trips to Ireland and France and for my husband to come with me.

  Financial needs were pressing, which was another reason I yearned to be free of the Beckett biography. I was to get the last payment of the pitifully small advance once the final manuscript was submitted and accepted, and I needed that money for the upcoming tuition payments for my children. At the same time as I was waiting for a response from Larry Freundlich to my latest draft, I was hearing ominous rumors about the status of Harper’s Magazine Press. The parent publisher of the imprint was in the process of severing ties to entities in charge of things like distribution and publicity, which signaled even more drastic separations to come. I also knew from friends whose agents had submitted their manuscripts to HMP that the house was no longer acquiring new books. Every time I asked Carl Brandt, he told me to relax and keep on writing and everything would be just fine for a book as original as mine.

  Another worry presaged more to come that very hot summer. One of my neighbors, a respected Freudian psychiatrist, held a gathering to introduce me to some of his Freudian colleagues. Among them was a former analysand of Beckett’s analyst, W. R. Bion. There were also two Jungians and a man who claimed to follow “an amalgamation of several important disciplines,” those of Freud, Jung, and Laing among them. Several of these men had read most of Beckett’s writing, and two had even written “important” (their word) papers about how his fiction revealed so much about his mental state. All of them were united in the opinion that I should “be very careful: Beckett is psychotic and dangerous and a book like yours could tip him over the edge.” This was mind-boggling, to say the least, and as I was not writing psychobiography, I did not feel I had to investigate their contention.

  But there was worse to come when Larry Freundlich got around to communicating with me at the beginning of August, two days before I was to leave for the ICEL meeting in London. He sent a ten-page letter saying that I was “making the reader work too hard” and that I should tell the reader from the outset what he (Freundlich) believed the book was about: “Beckett’s arrested development is the crux of the matter, and his mother is entirely responsible for it. You need to stress the psychotic undertones of this disturbing relationship and Beckett’s psychosis in particular.” He seemed almost gleeful when he talked about how he would market the book “to destroy Beckett because he will be revealed as so awful a person no one will buy his books.” I told him I did not believe this was true, and even if it was, I wanted my book to make readers want to buy and read his work to see for themselves. I was horrified to think that Freundlich intended to present all my years of serious scholarship as something one might read in a muckraking tabloid.

  My agent provided no support other than to tell me to relax and keep on writing and everything would be fine.

  * * *

  —

  And so Von and I went to London. I spent long days in working sessions for ICEL and nights and weekends enjoying myself. Jimmy and Tania Stern, Beckett’s friends since the 1930s, invited us to stay overnight at their home, Hatch Manor, in Tisbury, Wiltshire, a gorgeous country house with Calders in the bathroom, Picassos in our bedroom, a Djuna Barnes in the hallway, and first editions all over the place. Jimmy had difficulty walking, so we spent the afternoon sitting on Hatch’s lovely lawn to talk while enjoying the scenery, the very landscape that Constable had painted.

  Jimmy expressed concern about the state of my rapport with Beckett. I had told him of the flare-up after the Molly Howe incident, and he told me he had had what he called “several curious exchanges” with Beckett in recent letters. I described what I had written and how upset I was by the reactions of Larry Freundlich and the psychiatrists. Then he asked a question that was both odd and disturbing: if these psychiatric concerns turned out to be even partially valid, and if Beckett raised objections to the book’s publication, would I be willing to withhold it until after his death? I told him I intended to deal with that situation as honestly as I had dealt with the actual writing, and if it became necessary to delay publication, I would do it. I told Jimmy how difficult all this was becoming, and if he had to choose between friendship with Beckett and with me, I would understand why he would choose Beckett. He assured me it would never come to that. I told him we would see. He made me promise that I would contact Beckett in Paris and talk about everything I had written. I promised that I would.

  I went to see Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape because I wanted to tell him what to expect when he received the manuscript and to see if his reaction would be the same as Larry Freundlich’s. Tom had none of the same speculations about Beckett’s mental health. Instead he was intrigued by how I presented the work within the life and how I incorporated information from the several hundred interviews I had by then conducted. It was energizing to talk about content, structure, and technique in such a positive manner. I took copious notes, many of which enriched the final manuscript.

  We could not leave England without a visit to Bridget and Brian Coffey in Southampton. We talked until 3 a.m. as I told them what I had written and what had been my two publishers’ vastly different responses to it. They asked questions about topics they thought needed more explanation and detail, they volunteered stories of new memories that came to mind, and they offered suggestions about how best to deal with “prickly Sam” when I got to Paris. They were not nearly as concerned about how he would react to
the book’s content as they were about his friends (and now mine) that I had seen in England. They warned me not to go into too great detail. Bridget said, “You make ever-enlarging circles, while he compartmentalizes. He sees one person at a time and he keeps them all separate from each other. He might not approve of your American openness and might not like having you at the center of all his friendships.”

  * * *

  —

  Thus far Von’s and my travels had been centered on my work, and as we had not had a real vacation in years, we decided that it was time to do something that would have nothing to do with Samuel Beckett’s life and work and everything to do with our marriage. We went to Fornalutx, Mallorca, to stay with our friends the Spanish sculptor Juan Palà, and his American novelist wife, Dolores. They took us to visit their good friends the poet Robert Graves and his wife, Beryl, whom we helped to pick baskets of pods from St. Johnswort plants that she sold for “tonics.” One starry night, we watched the Graves grandchildren put on plays based on their grandfather’s writings as we sat in a grotto on their property, a natural stone amphitheater carved into a rocky hillside. How we laughed at the mishmash of Greek and Roman mythology, delivered in both English and the local dialect.

  We flew to Paris, and thankfully I did not have to deal with any of the concerns I had discussed with the Sterns and the Coffeys during our brief stopover. A letter from Beckett was waiting for me at my agent’s office, apologizing for not being in Paris during my time there. He said he had left Berlin in exhaustion and flown directly to Tangier for an extended stay. It came as a great relief, because I was not ready to see him until I had sorted out my differences with Larry Freundlich and was assured that he would be publishing the book I had written and would promote it in the manner I wanted. Even though Beckett insisted that he would not read it before it was published, and he frequently joked that he would most likely not read it afterward, I still feared that he might change his mind and ask to see it. I left a brief note in his mailbox telling him whom I had seen in England and how my few days in Paris would be devoted to fact-checking. To reassure him that all was well, I said the entire trip had been a rewarding one, but I left out the details. I decided that if any disagreements were to come, I would just have to worry about them when the time came.

  * * *

  —

  The European trip ended just as September was fast approaching. I had several weeks to take care of all the things my children would need before their academic year began, but I had only the Labor Day weekend to take care of my own. I was once again filling in for friends on sabbaticals, and for the fall term of 1975, I had an appointment at Central Connecticut State College, where I was to teach three sections of composition, each with thirty-five to forty students, and a fourth course on the short story, with another forty students. These were all required courses, which meant that very few (if any) students wanted to be there, particularly those in the 8 a.m. class. I had to leave my house by 6 a.m. if I wanted to arrive on time, for in those days before interstate highway connectors, New Britain was in such a remote part of the state that the joke was “you can’t get there from anywhere.”

  I scarcely had time to settle into a routine when two life-shattering events happened on two consecutive days. On September 25, I arrived at home late after a long and difficult teaching day to find a letter from Carl Brandt, mailed six days earlier from New York. I didn’t even rate a phone call for him to tell me that Harper’s Magazine Press was being disbanded, Larry Freundlich was leaving for Crown Publishers, and I had the option of going with him or having my book assimilated within Harper & Row. It was long after business hours when I read the letter, so I could not speak to him until the next day. To say the least, I spent a worried and restless night.

  The next day, Friday, September 26, was even more upsetting, because I was able to phone his office only between classes and he was not available to take my calls. After a frustrating day, I was driving home through a heavy downpour on a flooded highway when an out-of-control truck crossed a divider, slammed into my car in the left lane, and shoved it into the right lane and another car. I was trapped inside between them, rain lashing in from shattered windows on both sides. My husband was in Boston attending a museum conference, and all I could think of was my children waiting for me at home to take them to dinner, as the larder was empty and food shopping was scheduled for Saturday morning.

  State police extricated me from the car but would not let me go home. Instead an ambulance took me to the nearest hospital, in Waterbury, far from my Woodbridge home and my family doctor in New Haven. I would not let the EMTs move me to the ambulance until the police phoned my friend Allison Stokes, who went to my house, took charge of my children, and contacted my husband, who drove home through the night.

  I had hit my head hard and hurt my back, but the doctors said they could not find injuries severe enough to keep me and sent me home the next morning despite a bad headache, a back in spasm, and double vision. There was nothing they could do, they told me; I told the DD “pills are useless. Put me to sleep. I cry a lot.” Even worse than the pain was my terrible, crushing sense of guilt. Not only had I messed up all our family finances by pursuing this wretched dream of writing a book that was now in publishing limbo, now I was also ruining everything for the people I cared about most. It was a very important conference for my husband, who had to leave his paper to be read by someone else. My good friend Allison, the kindest and most nonjudgmental person I have ever known, had to rescue my children from an unkempt house and feed and shelter them because I was not there to do so. I believed that I was solely responsible for all the trouble I had caused by stepping far beyond the homebody roles women were supposed to accept contentedly. And now I was going to have to pay for it—big-time.

  22

  We half-jokingly called our house “Ireland West” because it seemed that every “Irish poet, playwright, or possible prime minister” knew they could find a comfortable bed and a good meal in Woodbridge, Connecticut. We had a constant stream of visitors, most (but not all) of whom were very welcome. They were people who had helped me in so many ways that I was happy to have the opportunity to return their personal hospitality and professional courtesy. There were many others, however, who took advantage, and the worst offender was John Montague.

  The concussion kept me from teaching throughout October and November. To save my job, colleagues at Central took my classes until the burden overwhelmed them. My friend the novelist Kit Reed helped me hold on to the position by taking over, and the department chairman did not complain because he was thrilled to have such a prestigious writer on campus. I still was not well when I returned to teaching and was looking forward to the Thanksgiving break when I received a phone call from (as my children called him sarcastically) “the poet Montague.” He was in Seattle and stopping in New York on his way home to Dublin, and asked if he—he—could stay a day or two. I told him we were far from New York and suggested that perhaps he had friends there who could put him up. He said he thought it would be nice to be in the country and preferred to stay with us. I told him not to come until after Thanksgiving, as we had family plans that could not be changed and could not include him. (Notice that I said “him.”) We ended the conversation with his agreeing to give me advance warning when his schedule was set.

  During the first week in December, after a horrendous teaching day that included multiple meetings with students whose dogs had eaten their homework (literally in one case, as a young man showed me a tattered and torn essay with toothmarks on it), I came home with over one hundred term papers to grade before the end of the week. I was not prepared for my husband to be waiting just inside the front door to greet me. The expression on his face was unlike anything I had seen throughout our long marriage. “We have company,” he muttered grimly as he took my elbow and guided me into the living room.

  There I found not only John Montague but als
o his wife, Evelyn, and their toddler daughter, Oonagh, who was busy terrifying one of our cats and shrieking and shouting while our two bulldogs terrified her in turn. My husband had found them getting out of a taxi when he drove into our driveway fifteen minutes before me.

  The immediate challenge was how to stretch four chops and baked potatoes to feed dinner to seven people, including a small child just getting used to table food. The next challenge was putting linens on the guest bed and towels in the guest bathroom while trying to figure out how and where the child was to sleep. And then there was the next day to think about, when I had to return to the campus at the crack of dawn and leave them on their own. We should have been alerted to trouble when the poet Montague told us we didn’t have to worry about him because he expected one of us to drive him to the train station in the mornings, as taxis were “too expensive.” We were also to pick him up around midnight after he spent long days in New York kibitzing (drinking) with his Irish friends. Evelyn and Oonagh would be content to spend their days in our house. I did not digest that this meant they planned to stay for some time, because I was too busy worrying about the next day. I knew there was little in the pantry they could fix for their lunch, so instead of grading papers that night, I spent time in the kitchen creating something they could eat until I got home to cook dinner.

  Because we were too polite to ask how long they planned to stay, this went on for four days, with me and my family coming home each night to a new form of chaos. Evelyn spent her mornings in bed while little Oonagh rampaged around the house. After several days, Evelyn decided to be helpful in the kitchen, and I returned one night to find that she had used a week’s worth of produce to make a huge salad doused so heavily with an inedible dressing that it had to be thrown away uneaten. It was a catastrophe on top of so many others that I asked Evelyn—blurting rudely—how long they intended to be our houseguests.