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  She said she would talk to John when he came back from New York and let me know. The next morning they announced cheerfully that as they could not afford to go to a hotel or rent an apartment, and as no other friend could host them as comfortably as they were situated with us, they would stay through the holidays, until their flight to Dublin on January 6. This was December 8. We were aghast, but there was no time to discuss it, as we all had to get to work or school.

  That night around nine o’clock, Von was working at his desk in our bedroom until it was midnight and time to go to the station to collect John. I was collapsed on the bed trying to grade papers when we heard a timid knocking on our door. Vonn Scott and Katney came in and announced an ultimatum. I will never forget their earnest faces as they said in unison: “Either they go or we’ll go. We’ll go to Granny’s in Pittsburgh before we’ll stay with them one day longer.” This was an astonishing declaration, for their grandmother’s love was too often hidden behind stern discipline, and their visits to her were not always the happy and relaxing occasions we all wanted.

  The next morning the four of us confronted John at the breakfast table (Evelyn was still in bed; Oonagh was wandering around the house). We told him they could stay one more day but then they had to leave, as we had to prepare for our holidays. He said nothing and Von drove him to the station as usual. That night when we returned from school and work, the Montagues were gone, leaving behind enormous messes in the guest quarters and living areas and a $400 telephone bill that included transatlantic calls to Ireland. They also helped themselves to a copy of Horizon magazine because it had one of John’s poems in it, thus destroying a complete set of the original collection. They left no note to tell us where they had gone or to thank us for the eight days we had hosted them.

  We found out the next day that they had called a friend from Brooklyn, who had come with a car to collect them. First they went to Guilford, to the home of Susan Howe and her husband, the sculptor David von Schlegell, saying they had had to leave the Bairs because Deirdre was shameless in trying to get John into her bed—and in front of her children and husband, too! David was in bed with the flu and he shouted down from the balcony of their A-frame that this was preposterous and they should leave his house at once.

  Susan warned me that this would be the talk of Dublin once the Montagues returned, but I was so exhausted from everything else on top of their disgraceful behavior that I was just happy to be rid of them. I didn’t care what they said. Before they left New York, friends telephoned to warn me that Evelyn was telling everyone “what boors we are and how awful we live and how ignorant we are and how mistreated they were.”

  My alleged attempt to seduce the poet Montague really did become the talk of Dublin, as I learned on my last research trip almost a year later. I continued to hear about it throughout the 1980s, after the biography was published and when I was invited annually to lecture and teach at the James Joyce summer school at University College, Dublin. Years later, men (for they were all men) would look at me quizzically as they asked how I could possibly have tried to seduce the poet Montague, “a nice girl like yerself, and all.” By that time my feminist hackles had been raised seriously high and I knew how to handle them. I neither defended myself nor differed with them. I just gave them my most withering look, and I’m happy to say that most were instantly fearful of my wrath and became totally deflated. It gave me pleasure to see them back down and slink away.

  We had one other hilariously awful Irish guest, the actor Patrick (Pat) Magee. Beckett adored Pat, particularly for his voice, which he said was the one he heard in his head when composing male voices for his plays. When he spoke of actors during our “conversations,” Beckett’s demeanor was neutrally controlled, but when he spoke of Pat, he was animated and his face actually took on a rosy glow.

  So there we were, the four Bairs on a calm Sunday afternoon, the newspapers spread all over the living room and the dining table still holding remnants of a lavish brunch, when the phone rang. “Pat Magee here,” said the gravelly voice at the other end. He was in New Haven to perform at the Shubert Theater, and Samuel Beckett had told him to call Deirdre Bair, who would keep him company. Pat said I should pick him up immediately and bring him to my home.

  It was Sunday, and Connecticut still had blue laws that forbade commerce on the Sabbath. We were not prepared for entertaining, and liquor and grocery stores were closed. I gave an order to the children to clean up the house and told my husband to call some friends and ask them to join us, provided they could contribute food and booze. Twelve good friends came, bringing bounty for dinner and plenty of liquor. When I returned with Pat, he glanced at the people but headed straight for the bottles. He proceeded to fill a large tumbler with scotch, grabbed the bottle by the neck, and headed for the long sofa. “Move!” he commanded the two people sitting there before claiming its entire length for himself.

  Everyone tried to engage him in polite conversation, but he either cut them cold in midsentence or said something scathing if someone approached. For the rest of the long afternoon and well into the night he sat in splendid isolation, drinking the rest of the scotch and emoting loudly in his most stentorian voice. “Amazing how time passes when you are having fun,” one of my sardonic friends said as she tried to make a quiet exit without Pat’s noticing. Even so, he bellowed that she should come back because he “needed a woman.”

  The theater was putting Pat up at a hotel, and it was quite late when I took him back there. He refused to leave the car until I agreed to spend the night, “just to keep me company.” When I convinced him that was not going to happen, he shook his head and said, “Deirdre, you have bluestockings up to your elbows.”

  “Thank you, Pat,” I replied. “That’s the nicest thing you have ever said to me.” It was exactly the impression I wanted to convey during all the years I worked on Beckett’s biography.

  The next morning at breakfast, I found my son staring at me. “What’s wrong?” I asked. With a deep sigh of resignation, he asked, “Mother, where do you find these people?”

  Where, indeed?

  23

  “January 12, 1976. My world came crashing down this afternoon when Carl Brandt called to say that Harper & Row has decided not to publish my book.” I had agreed to stay on with the parent company after the press was dissolved, and the legendary editor Simon Michael Bessie had agreed to begin editing it in October 1975, as soon as he returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair. He then claimed that other commitments kept him from it, so he farmed it out to several other editors, none of whom wanted to work on it. One said, “I don’t like Beckett enough to endure editing such a long book about him.” Another said, “He’s not an important enough writer to deserve such detailed study.” Harper & Row then hid behind the contractual euphemism publishers used in such situations, saying that I had produced “an unpublishable manuscript.” That meant I was free to shop it elsewhere, but if another publisher took it, I would have to pay back the advance Harper’s Magazine Press had given me.

  It didn’t seem right to have to repay the advance if another firm deemed “publishable” a book they called “unpublishable,” but as Carl put it, that’s just how the system worked. And I, the nicely brought up young woman who had always respected authority and did not yet possess the feminist consciousness to articulate my protest, simply said “Yes, sir” and slunk away. Carl said he would show the manuscript to other publishers one at a time, but he was noticeably curt whenever I asked why he did it this way, why he didn’t make multiple submissions, and why it was taking so long. He refused to give me feedback or tell me who was reading it or what they thought of it. I steamed and chafed but got no answers, because he seldom took my phone calls or answered my letters. I thought he was treating me like a misbehaving schoolgirl, but I did not yet know enough published women writers to ask them to share their experiences. I was too ashamed and embarrassed to ask Nancy Milford
if this was how he treated her, so I said nothing to anyone. Instead I became more and more depressed.

  The double vision after the auto accident had cleared up, but I still had the headaches. My family doctor prescribed a whole roster of different pills, from Valium to who knows what else that was in vogue at the time. At the end of 1975, I wrote: “I am in deep depression, brought on by terrible finances, dreadful jobs, a book that drags on and on and the feeling that I can’t get it all together. I sense deepening crises in my personal life. I have finally discovered that I don’t want to do it all anymore. I don’t want to be the wonder woman who cooks, bakes, decorates, manages, copes, etc. I’d like to be a good wife and mother, sure. But I want to be a scholar and a writer, too. Everything else is a dead weight dragging me down. I guess what I want is impossible: a satisfying personal AND professional life. Did any woman ever have both? I am so confused. Probably best to do nothing, to make no moves at all until I figure out what to do. I need to put myself into a holding pattern. Hey—that might make a good title for a novel: Holding Pattern!” I didn’t see it at the time, but looking back, I realize that despite my depression, by putting myself into a holding pattern I would eventually know when and where to land. It meant that I was determined to get myself out of all the messes I was in. Now I recognize this as an early feminist awakening.

  Freelance writing and part-time teaching were keeping me barely afloat, and I was so confused that when a possible lifeline drifted by just two days after the disastrous phone call with Carl, it barely registered. The English Department at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, invited me to be interviewed for an assistant professorship. To say that I was overloaded, overwhelmed, and utterly unfocused would be an understatement. And what was I going to tell Penn when they asked about the status of the biography? The interview went well and the chairman told me that the job teaching contemporary comparative literature (mostly British and French) would be mine if the dean agreed to fund it, but weeks went by without further correspondence. Nor had I heard from my agent, so I still had no job and no publisher. After another month passed, I gathered my courage and phoned him. Carl’s secretary told me that there was nothing new, because only the day before, when he was getting ready to go to Arizona for several weeks’ vacation, had he sent my manuscript out—for the very first time! I was livid, writing, “I don’t believe the s.o.b. takes me seriously. He’s got a real surprise in store for him.” Nor would this be the only time that year when Carl failed to get in touch with highly regarded editors who, I knew from friends, were interested in seeing the manuscript. He was always ready with an excuse for why so-and-so editor or such-and-such publisher was not right for me. And my son was graduating from high school soon and getting ready to start college in the fall. With most of the money we had tried to put toward his education having been spent on my research and travel, I worried ceaselessly about how we could afford it. I knew that Penn offered free tuition to the children of faculty members, but that line remained only a hoped-for possibility.

  I must have been in a terrible state, because all my friends started to ask—politely, discreetly, obliquely—if I had ever considered analysis. When I told my husband, he said that he, too, was worried about me because of my headaches, crying jags, and occasional flashes of anger. He thought analysis might be a good idea. We both asked around, and several names were suggested, all men, all quick to dig for hidden childhood trauma or to throw me another prescription (which I refused to take), if they were even decent enough to honor my appointments.

  My friend Allison Stokes knew an analyst in Wilton who was highly regarded by her and many of our other friends. “She’s a woman, and very sympathetic to women’s concerns,” Allison told me, adding, “But at the same time I have to warn you.” In a hushed tone, almost as if it were something unsavory and a secret that could only be whispered, she confided, “She’s a Jungian.” That was fine with me, because even though I did not know enough about Freud’s canon, I had rejected him in graduate school, like many of my women friends, because of the way he wrote about women. I was more sympathetic to the little I knew about C. G. Jung because of how he wrote about women, particularly his theory of anima and animus. When I met the therapist, Patricia Dunton, for the first time, I noticed the absence of the proverbial couch and joked, “Where is your sofa, and what will we do if I don’t want to lie down and talk about my childhood?” She chuckled as she invited me to sit in one of two wicker chairs facing each other and said, “You are obviously here because you have something happening right now that you want to talk about, so why don’t we just start with that?” For the first time I knew what the cliché expression of floodgates opening felt like, for as I talked, it was as if years of pent-up dirty water began to drain from behind a dam. The feeling of release and relief I got from talking was extraordinary and unforgettable. That same night I had an experience I couldn’t properly categorize until twenty years later, when I began to write about Jung—it was a “big dream.” In it, I was in my house when an emaciated female figure covered with slime and sewage was trying to break through the screen door. The trouble was, that woman was me.

  I dreamed it during the time I was becoming involved with a number of feminist groups. In Connecticut, I was part of what we called “consciousness-raising get-togethers,” small groups of women who gathered to talk about things we could not name until years later, such as why we could have credit cards only in our husbands’ names, or why it was so hard to get a job in the first place and then why the man at the next desk was paid more than we were. Most troubling of all, we wondered how we could get almost every guy we met to keep his hands to himself. And I remember the howls of outrage when I described a job interview at a local college, when the department chairman said he probably would hire a man instead of me because I had a husband to “protect me” and didn’t need the income. In New York, I attended large marches and meetings where I was a foot soldier in the audience as feminist icons energized us to go home and take political action. I was more concerned with taking personal action and, to use a popular expression of the time, with making the political personal.

  There was one curious aspect of my feminist awakening, however, that puzzles me to this day. Several of my new feminist friends were proud to call themselves “Ninnies,” devotees of Anaïs Nin. Come with us, they entreated on several occasions as they urged me to go with them to Nin’s Greenwich Village apartment, where she often invited small groups to explore her recently published Diaries. I still don’t know why, but for whatever reason, I always found an excuse not to go. I never met her in person, something I often thought about and regretted several decades later, when I wrote about her. As I pored over the several hundred thousand pages she wrote about herself or read her voluminous correspondence, I saw repeatedly how Anaïs Nin had had to filter every public event throughout the world through her own sensitivities and to put herself at its center even though she had no connection to any of it. All I found about Beckett was her written insistence that she had been the first American to recognize the genius who had written such a play as Godot and that she had done so much to enhance his reputation among Americans of influence. I thought about this almost every day when I began to write about her in the 1990s, but as 1976 was lurching steadily toward 1977, my mind was elsewhere.

  * * *

  —

  I had not seen Beckett in quite a long time, but we exchanged regular letters. When I wrote, it was to tell him of my progress; when he replied, it was usually about his recent professional activity. He may have made some remark in reply when I told him of his friends I had seen, but he never asked directly when the biography would be finished, and I certainly was not going to volunteer any information, especially now that the year was passing rapidly and I didn’t have a publisher. With the exception of my family and a few trusted friends, I had told no one, because I was so afraid of what Beckett might do if he fou
nd out.

  In October, Alan Schneider went to Berlin to watch Beckett direct Footfalls and That Time at the Schiller Theater, and on opening night he flew to London with Beckett to watch him direct a TV production. Alan told me that Beckett quizzed him at length about my book but did not ask anything personal about me. Alan said Beckett never went out of the hotel and saw no one. He said Beckett was very depressed and told him that Suzanne was sick, everyone was dying, and he himself was generally preoccupied with death. The only thing that seemed to please and excite him, according to Alan, was that he knew I expected the book to be published in 1977. I was glad we were talking on the telephone so that Alan could not see my face. I was under too much stress to take pleasure in the news that Beckett seemed pleased, because I still didn’t have a publisher. At least by that time I had the Penn appointment and my assistant-professor position on a tenure track was formally secure. However, the work environment was stressful, as my new colleagues asked me repeatedly about the status of the book. I don’t know how I managed to smile and say everything was proceeding smoothly, because none of it was true.

  And so back to Carl Brandt I went, demanding information about what was going on. He told me that the previous July he had submitted the book to a woman editor who was “everybody’s darling” and he was sure she was reading it carefully. She must be, I thought, for it was now going on November. Four months was surely enough time to know if she wanted to acquire it. At the end of October, he phoned my office at Penn to tell me she had invited us to lunch the next day at a very posh restaurant in New York. I rather resented how he instructed me to show up on time and behave presentably, but never mind: we were making progress.