Parisian Lives Page 21
What a fiasco it was! “She looked me up and down and was more interested in my clothes than my book: My jacket was a most unusual tweed and where did I buy it? Was my scarf Hermès? And then came her voice—from on high down to little me: she wasn’t sure I was a good enough writer to pull it off but she had an assistant who was a Yale PhD and he would be delighted to ghost-write.” I was boiling with rage but said nothing, just sat there and glared down at my plate. Before I could erupt, Carl stepped in—thanked her, said we had a lot to think about, and rushed me out of there. I knew he caught my mood because he left his third martini sitting there untouched. He wanted to talk further at his office, but I said no: “Just get the manuscript back. I never want to see her again.”
To Carl’s credit, it was the first time in a very long time that I thought he behaved admirably, telling me something like “It’s you and me, kid. We are in this together. You wrote a good book and you are going to have a good publisher.” I just turned away and left him standing there. I couldn’t bear to talk to him for fear of what I might say about how he had been treating me. Obviously I was still the dutiful girl unwilling to offend the man who knew better.
I didn’t know how much longer I could continue to bear these rejections if my fortunes did not turn. Thankfully, two weeks later, on November 10, Carl called in jubilation. He had given the manuscript to Tom Stewart, a young editor at Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, who wanted very much to publish it. Carl said, “This book will make your reputation, but it’s not going to make your fortune.” He told me the offer was much less than the pittance I had received from Harper’s Magazine Press, and “we will try to persuade Harper & Row that you have suffered enough and should not have to repay it, but the situation is not hopeful.” It wasn’t, and I did have to repay Harper & Row. At that point I didn’t care. I had an enthusiastic editor, an excellent new publisher, and a likely 1977 publication. What could possibly go wrong now?
24
At 10:45 on the morning of February 28, 1977, I wrote the last words of Samuel Beckett: A Biography, the book I had begun to write on November 17, 1971. In fits of hysteria, alternately crying and laughing, I typed out the last words. What an eerie feeling it was to be finished at long last. Now came the nervous part: the waiting.
It had been sheer joy to work with Tom Stewart, and now to have everyone from editorial to secretarial to sales at my publisher giving me nothing but positive feedback was an overwhelming sensation. No expense was spared to produce a beautiful book. The art director, Harris Levine, hired the famed graphic designer Milton Glaser to paint a portrait of Beckett for the jacket, and they decided that the only place to photograph it was “on a certain wall in Henry Miller’s favorite Paris whorehouse.” And off they went to Paris! Jerry Bauer was hired to take my photo, which thrilled me because he had also photographed Beckett. I was not so happy when he told me I was a good subject but I could still stand to lose ten pounds, and I should be happy that he air-brushed out all my wrinkles. Still, it seemed that I could sit back and enjoy my first trade publishing experience: discussing the jacket, sitting for an author photo, letting the book club and review copy requests roll in; everything had been so exciting.
But there was feedback from one corner that was less sanguine: the publisher’s lawyers decided that it was time to vet the manuscript, and they said I had to get Beckett’s written permission for every single quotation from his letters and unpublished manuscripts. It threw me into a panic.
I remembered how Beckett and I had originally agreed to the project’s ground rules, and I marveled at the extraordinary circumstances under which he had freed me to write. I had come to know quite a few biographers and had made good friends with whom I got together for what we called “kvetching and bitching sessions.” I listened silently to their horror stories of restrictions and roadblocks set up by their subjects or heirs and executors who determined to impede, if not actually halt, publication, and I told all this to HBJ’s lawyers, in person and in letters, as I implored them not to make me ask Beckett to do anything that might make him withdraw his cooperation. I told them he might find my request demeaning, as if I were questioning his integrity, and that he might resent being asked to put his spoken consent into writing. At one point I blurted that “he might tell us all to go to hell, and then what do we do? Do I spend another couple of years rewriting this book and taking all the life out of it?” The lawyers were not swayed and told me to write the letter.
I thought it was the worst possible time to do such a thing, because I had just had a brief reply from Beckett to my letter telling him that I had changed publishers and was now expecting publication by the end of 1977. His reply to this news was noncommittal, along the lines of “That’s nice, good luck,” but he continued with an unusual burst of personal information. He said he was having a difficult winter. He wanted to spend January and February quietly in Ussy, but his little house had been broken into and burglarized for the third time, and now he was reluctant to go there. The thieves had taken his typewriter, chess set, and kitchen equipment, and, as they had done on the two previous occasions, ignored all his books, papers, and manuscripts, which they left scattered all over the main room. With his distinctive humor, schadenfreude certainly, he congratulated the thieves on their wisdom in choosing what was not worth taking.
He had been more forthcoming to Con Leventhal and Marion Leigh, as I learned when they came to New York again and we met for lunch. They said he had told them he felt violated and bereft, particularly over the loss of the chess set, which was one he particularly loved. And he told Alan Schneider and Barney Rosset that he was so depressed he didn’t know if he could ever participate in any activity connected with his work again, let alone try to create anything new.
Armed with all this distressing information, I set out to write a letter that would explain the situation, how it was not my idea but the lawyers’ that he should place his initials next to every single typed quotation I wanted to use. I told him I still honored his original word, but the legal situation in the United States was entirely beyond my control. I apologized for creating unnecessary work and set to typing the quotations, twenty-three single-spaced pages.
I sent it off in early February, and a week later I had his reply. It was so warm and courteous that I had to read it several times through, my eyes blurring with unshed tears. He had initialed every single quotation except one, a poem he had written when he was twelve and a student at the Portora Royal School. He said it “shows better your diligence as a researcher than my development as a writer.” I have met many honorable persons throughout my long professional life, but there was never one whose integrity equaled Samuel Beckett’s. His word was indeed his bond.
* * *
—
Suddenly it was full summer, and even though everything was proceeding smoothly toward publication, the timing for a fall launch was just too tight, so a business decision was made to move the book’s publication to spring 1978. To hype it, press releases were prepared, and I was given an enormous pile of them to take to the December meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in New York.
I was looking forward to attending the Beckett session because two British scholar-critics whose work I found useful, John Pilling and John Fletcher, were to give papers, and many American Beckett specialists were also appearing on the program. Most important, James Knowlson, a professor at Reading University in England who had engaged Beckett’s cooperation to create an important archive of manuscripts and related materials, and who, along with John Pilling, was the founder of the influential Journal of Beckett Studies (JOBS in academic shorthand), was the keynote speaker. I was eager to give him a copy of the press release and to discuss having a portion of the biography appear in JOBS. Four decades later, as I prepared to write here about what happened, the experience was still so painful and so hard to relive that I chose to do so through the DD entry I made then.
&
nbsp; “I met Dougald McMillan, Enoch Brater, Porter Abbott, Calvin Israel, David Hayman, and at least six other sycophantic finks who mostly sniggered or stared at me. [J. D.] Don O’Hara was there preening himself because he asked for and got the Times review and had an advance copy of my galleys. All the others wanted to see it but I guess he wasn’t showing it. McMillan told me he ‘knew well what a bitch’ I am and how I am ‘messing up the entire Beckett industry.’ Several others jumped in and said no, I wasn’t such a bitch after all, and the book was probably not going to be worth much so don’t waste time on me. Others were positively salivating as they told me how they were going to review it—negatively. Calvin Israel said he was writing the ‘magnum opus’ about Beckett and ‘Sam’ never told him anything personal, so with a big leer he asked what I had to do to get him to open up to me. There was a huge round of laughter when he said this, and lots of eyeball rolling and elbow punching. So naturally he repeated it several more times to even greater giggles and guffaws. Then he told the group how, when they got drunk together on his last visit to Paris, ‘Sam’ told him he regretted ever meeting me. The trouble is: I knew ‘Sam’ was not in Paris at that particular time—he was in transit from Berlin to London!”
As all this was happening, James Knowlson stood firmly planted on the far side of the room, whispering with John Calder. I could see that he was turned sideways just enough to observe everything that was taking place around me. He was obviously not going to talk to me unless I went to him—I knew that I was expected to pay homage—so I broke away from the hostile group to walk over. I greeted Calder warmly, as he had been generous with his time when I had interviewed him in London, but this time he mumbled what might have been a hello and scampered away as if fearful of contamination.
A complete hush fell upon the room when I was left alone with Knowlson. I could sense that everyone was watching us and straining to hear our conversation. When I introduced myself, he was already moving sideways to get away from me, but I put myself squarely in front of him so that he could not. He said he really could not be seen talking to me, so it was probably best for me to leave. I stood for a very long moment blocking his exodus and stared hard at him. I thought about telling him how childish he and everyone else was being, but instead, without another word, I turned and headed for the exit.
As I left the room, Professor Fred M. Robinson stood hiding in the hallway. He whispered as I passed by, “So you’re the little girl who stuck her hand in the cookie jar and ran away with all the goodies.” I just shook my head and kept on walking. All I could think of was Canto VII in Dante’s Inferno, where the sinners are submerged in the marsh of the River Styx, so filled with anger and jealousy that they bite themselves and each other in sheer rage and frustration.
Two of my Penn colleagues were with me, women professors in fields dominated by men and who had suffered similar hostility and insult. They were furious, outraged, in high dudgeon. They demanded to know what I was going to do about it and wanted me to go back into that room and confront all those men. I, however, was just the opposite—cold, detached, distanced. I can remember the sensation of feeling very far removed from what had just happened, stunned by the onslaught. And still, all these years later, I can’t explain how—or why—I just let all these insults and insinuations roll off me. Part of me supposes it was because I had such confidence in what I had written that I was sure no right-thinking person would appraise it any way other than objectively. But another reason was surely the consciousness gained from many conversations with my feminist friends, listening to all those talks and attending all the rallies led by feminist leaders. I had always trusted my instincts as a journalist and I was prepared to do so now that I was a scholar. Everything conspired to teach me to have faith in myself and my judgments, and I suppose that was why I was able to ignore the Becketteers.
* * *
—
The first copies came off the press in early May 1978. I kept one for myself and sent one to Beckett. As always, he replied quickly. After thanking me for it, he wrote, “Seems a very handsome looking book.” He claimed he never read anything written about himself, so I convinced myself that the fact he was not outraged or offended was in and of itself a success. I was relieved when he did not ask my future travel plans, as I had none to return to Paris anytime soon.
The book was published in June, but the major reviews were not timely, and, worse, they paved the way for the unrelenting hostility that followed in every subsequent review written by the Becketteers. J. D. O’Hara had made the mistake of giving a back-of-the-jacket blurb to the book, so Harvey Shapiro, the new editor of The New York Times Book Review, took the review away from him and gave it to the British critic John Sturrock. He was so late in submitting it that Shapiro had a London reporter pay a flight attendant to carry it to New York, where another reporter picked it up and delivered it. It appeared at the worst possible time, in the July 4 edition. Sturrock, whom I never met and who never saw me in person, called me “buoyant” and “enviably resilient” as he wrote of the “six hyperactive years” I had spent “in pursuit” of Beckett. Hugh Kenner weighed in with an insulting, unfocused, and silly diatribe in Saturday Review. Ruby Cohn wrote a letter praising Richard Ellmann for his attack in The New York Review of Books and, by extension, all the other Becketteers who attacked the book. Ellmann in turn attacked her, calling out all the errors she wrongfully tried to attribute to me. In his review, Ellmann wrote that I had managed a “scoop which in literary history is like that of Bernstein and Woodward in political history.” He said I found “in a shooting gallery…a big duck, or drake, named Beckett [and] took aim and brought him down,” insisting (falsely) that I “wrote a letter and another letter and another” to persuade Beckett to cooperate. His insinuation was clearly the same as Sturrock’s, one that I had been getting from any number of reporters who were interviewing me for features. It was probably voiced best by the late Mary Bull of the weekly Hamden (Connecticut) Chronicle, when she asked straight out what every reviewer and interviewer from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, also felt free to ask: “How many times did you have to sleep with Beckett to get this scoop?” It would seem that a woman could not be possessed of a brain, only a vagina.*
Even the headmaster of my daughter’s school weighed in when the biography was published, waving a copy of Ellmann’s review at her during the lunch hour and in front of all her friends, saying, “Oh boy, but your mother has really done it this time!” You can imagine how upset the sixteen-year-old girl was when she came home that night in tears. Carl Brandt, who was not high on my list of men who treated women as equals, brought my only positive relief when he said he could “not understand where all this male outrage against a woman was coming from. These people are truly crazy.”
The surprising, and often saddening, response from many quarters convinced me that my first biography would be my only biography. A professor in my department at Penn told me that I had been “overly aggressive and ambitious to write this book. Didn’t I think I had overstepped the boundaries for women?” Another member of my department wrote a review in the university’s alumni magazine—my own alumni publication, which all my classmates saw—that denounced the book: “I don’t like Beckett and I don’t think he deserves a big book like this one.” Everyone stared at me in faculty and committee meetings, but few professors spoke to me directly, unlike the student who stopped me in a hallway to ask, “Are you somebody I should know?” “NO!” I thundered and kept on walking. Most disappointing of all were the tenured women in my department, who were heard to say repeatedly, “She’s not a scholar; she’s only a biographer.” Two colleagues in another department who were appalled by how those in my department treated me took me to lunch to celebrate with a bottle of good wine. It was a lively occasion, but they were dead serious when they told me, “If you want to get ahead in academe, your motto has to be ‘publish modestly or perish.’ You cannot write a
nother Beckett.”
I had to laugh; how could I take any of this seriously? Unfortunately, I did, and it hurt. And I was truly frightened when I had to call security to remove from my university office a stalker who demanded that I write a denunciation of Beckett because “he is not a Christian and does not believe in God.” For an expensive book that sold well but not well enough to make it a bestseller, it was amazing how all sorts of people felt an obligation to offer an opinion.
“Fan mail” (an oxymoron) was heavy. A professor at American University wrote to say that he deplored my invasion of Beckett’s privacy but he had already “read it twice and probably could not stop myself from reading it again,” after which he would “prepare a list of my intransigencies.” I asked the DD, “Intransigencies? Now what the hell does that mean!?!”
There were, however, many reviewers who understood the book and why it mattered. In England, Anthony Burgess, Matthew Hodgart, and Christopher Ricks praised it—and managed to denounce Ellmann and his like at the same time. The novelist William Kennedy moved me deeply with his Washington Post review, and I even respected what Benjamin DeMott wrote in The Atlantic Monthly, when he said he liked my book but not my writing style. The distinguished scholar and Stanford professor Albert Guerard told me it was one of the most important biographies of our generation and would be the point of departure for future generations of scholars. Clifton Fadiman echoed Guerard when he wrote in the Book of the Month Club newsletter that my book was a “rescue operation, taking Beckett away from the cultists and the fadists.” Well, perhaps, but not entirely.