Parisian Lives Read online

  Praise of another kind came from Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner. Several years later, when I met him in New York, he told me that he had bought a copy of the book in Paris, and because it was banned in Turkey, he had taken great care to smuggle it into the country. There he passed it around to all his literary friends, who read it so closely that they shattered the binding and actually wore down some of the pages. By the time they had all finished their surreptitious reading, the pages were loose inside the cover. He told me it was the most revered study of Beckett in his country and thanked me for writing it. I was so deeply moved that I had to excuse myself and go into the women’s room to compose myself.

  * * *

  —

  But the Becketteers would not relent, and they planned a huge symposium “to rescue Beckett from Bair.” The usual suspects, as I called all those who had rushed to (in Calvin Israel’s words) “savage Bair,” made sure that I knew all about it, and also that I knew I was not invited. Beyond that tight little group, very few genuine scholars attended. I don’t think it was over for ten minutes when the phone rang for the first time with “friends” who wanted to tell me about it: “The whole damn thing revolved around ‘THE biography’ (it was the only book not written by SB that was on sale there). Seems everyone in the audience wanted to know what the ‘in crowd’ thought about it. Barney [Rosset] defended it while the rest of them sneered. I told myself I should consider the sources.”

  Yes, I should have shrugged it all off as I had done before, and I should have moved on. Instead I suppose I had a minor breakdown. I dropped everything—opportunities for publicity, offers of articles to write (and I needed the money), invitations to interesting parties, and most of all family, friends, house, and home. I went to my brother’s house in San Diego, where I paced up and down the Del Mar beach, communing with the seals and crying.

  One bleak morning, after two weeks of Jungian “creative depression,” in which I let every changing emotion I felt play itself out, I confronted a mama seal guarding her two pups and surprised myself when I shouted in an amazingly strong voice that I needed to go home and get on with my life. Mama seal gave me a snort in reply and waddled off with her babies while I kept talking, telling her that the kids would be coming home from summer camp and my family needed and wanted me at home, which my husband told me daily in our phone conversations. Even more, I needed them.

  I was suffused with shame for what I saw as having selfishly run off, and I felt that I needed to make amends. But…didn’t I also have an obligation to myself? If my head was not in the right place, could I really be useful to anyone else? Raw emotion triumphed over reason—I loved my husband and children, and quite simply, I wanted to see them. I had dedicated the book to Von, “who shared it,” and to Katney and Vonn Scott, “who grew up with it.” I should have added, “To the three I love most who were strong enough to survive it.”

  That morning, as the sun broke through the fog and haze earlier than usual and my seal friends headed back into the surf, I sat on their rock talking to myself. I told myself that I had written the best book I could and I had nothing to be ashamed of or to apologize for. I would hold my head up high and not let a bunch of spiteful mediocrities tell me otherwise. I went back to my brother’s house, changed my reservation, got on the last flight that day, and went home to face the music, sour and off-key as it mostly turned out to be.

  * I regret to say that in 2017, a friend of the writer Jan Herman asked him to “demand” of me how many times I had to sleep with Beckett to get him to cooperate. I could only sigh as I asked myself, Doesn’t anything ever change?

  25

  When classes began in September 1978, for the third year in a row I was commuting each Tuesday morning on Amtrak from New Haven to Philadelphia and then back again on Thursday evening. When I look at the DD for those first few months, I see only unfocused ramblings, mostly about all the professional responsibilities I should but could not bring myself to fulfill. I told the editors of book reviews and journals a flat-out lie, that my schedule was so full I could not accept new work. My siblings and I joked that as the oldest child of three, I was the one blessed (or cursed) with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, but in this hazy period I was so indifferent that I didn’t even care that I was blowing off one obligation after another. My contract with HBJ specified that they had the right of refusal for my next book, and my agent urged me to “strike” while I was “still hot.” I demurred, insisting that I would never write another biography.

  A year went by, and I drifted along. I could not think of anything I wanted to write, and as for biography, I insisted that I would never put myself or my family through that ever again! In fact, I found it impossible to write anything beyond a grocery list. I often taught classes without having read the texts thoroughly or preparing good lectures. I went through the motions of getting through the days at Penn, letting all the continuing sarcasm, backbiting, and general bitchiness wash right over me. I went home to Connecticut for the long weekends and relished being there, playing with the bulldogs and the Persian cats, cooking, eating, and generally doing nothing much.

  We moved to Philadelphia in September 1980, when my husband took a position at Penn’s University Museum. It was an unhappy move for me, having to give up my beloved house in Woodbridge, and my unhappiness was accompanied by back spasms that kept me confined to bed and on medical leave that semester. Doctors told me that half the paralyzing spasms were due to scoliosis but the other half were emotional and most likely exacerbated by the hostile responses to the Beckett biography.

  Meanwhile Carl Brandt phoned periodically to suggest meetings with editors to discuss subjects for another book. Conrad Aiken and Anne Sexton emerged as possibilities, but neither grabbed me strongly enough to snap me out of my funk. I thought I was truly finished with the genre of biography until one day in June 1980, when I found myself in Boston with my husband, who was participating in a museum conference. I was in desperate need of a vacation and eager to avoid schmoozing, which I thought I could achieve by spending several days alone on Cape Ann, in Rockport and Marblehead, before the conference began.

  Carl had other plans for my free time. I did not know that he had been receiving inquiries from Dick McDonough, an editor at Little, Brown & Company, who wanted to offer me a contract to write a biography about anyone at all who interested me. Carl said I would like Dick, and even if I never wrote a book for him, I would at least have a glorious lunch.

  Dick was an admirer of the Beckett book, and he turned on his considerable charm at the elegant Maison Robert, one of Boston’s finest restaurants at the time. It was a stunning June afternoon and we had a table on the terrace. Excellent food and wine coupled with witty conversation did their magic, and for the first time in ages I was relaxed and happy, laughing at jokes, trading quips, and enjoying all the publishing gossip. The afternoon drifted by in a haze of pleasure until, inevitably, Dick broached the subject of my next book. He said all the wonderfully flattering things an editor intent on wooing a reluctant writer might say about her abilities. He said he would offer me a contract to write about anyone I wanted, but his first candidate was Eudora Welty, and after her, he was convinced I could “tackle anyone Irish or even Virginia Woolf.” I thought he was joking until I realized he was deadly serious, and the afternoon became slightly tense as I told him repeatedly that I would never write another biography. Finally, and I think in exasperation, he gave up and accepted my decision. Or so I thought, until the moment that changed everything.

  “All right,” he agreed, and I remember him saying something along the lines of “But let us ponder, just for the fun of it, if you were to write one, whose life would you choose? You can pick any person in the world, living or dead, but you have to explain your selection.”

  So each of us tossed out names, most of them highly inappropriate, mostly supermarket tabloid mainstays o
f the time. After fifteen or twenty minutes of this, I stopped, saying I didn’t have a name but I did have an idea. “If I were ever to write another biography, it would have to be of a woman who made a success of every aspect of her life. She would have to have had a solid professional life, one that garnered respect and admiration, but even more, she would have to have had a happy and satisfying personal life. And since I cannot think of a single woman who had both, I guess I will never write another biography.”

  In my astonishment over what I had said, I gulped down a big slurp of the wine I had hitherto been sipping discreetly. I wondered where that remark came from, and thinking about it later in my hotel, I had no doubt it was a manifestation of the cultural moment.

  McCall’s magazine’s 1957 campaign for “togetherness” was a glorified paean to domesticity, using an image of the larger family unit to conceal a message that women should suck it up and be content as happy housewives. That message fell on a lot of deaf ears, and it gave way in 1963 to Betty Friedan’s Feminist Mystique, in which domesticated women, particularly those with good educations, were asking, “Is this all there is?” Like most of the feminist friends in my small groups, I had read Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex in college, but I did not pay much attention to it until after I read Friedan’s book. Then I read Beauvoir again, this time more carefully and with considerably more life experience. I remember being astonished by her wide-ranging examination of the lives of women, but like most of my feminist friends, I was moved more by Friedan’s American version of female dissatisfaction. Hers was the book that gave rise to the life changes made by the women I knew best.

  By the 1980s, the contemporary feminist movement was fully ramped up, and everything about women’s lives—their goals, aims, ambitions, sexual identities and preferences—was in flux. In my case, it was a struggle to stay married, raise two teenage children, get an academic career solidly under way, and oh yes, figure out how to write that all-important second book I needed to secure tenure. I told my feminist friends that the choices we were all making had made “Holding Pattern” obsolete as a possible novel title. Two others captured the moment far better: “Splitting,” and “Sticking,” because they described much better what we all seemed to be doing.

  I must have gone on at great length as I told Dick I was less interested in a specific biography than I was in an examination of the lives of contemporary women, a collection of examples of the many and varied choices contemporary women were making, quite possibly managing to construct and offer a model for how they should conduct their lives.

  That was all fine and good, he said, and of course I had a proven track record as a journalist, so there was no doubt that I could write such a book. But after Beckett, “Wouldn’t you rather examine the problem through the example of a woman who did indeed do it and have it all? Wouldn’t you rather express your concerns through the life of an exemplary woman?” Dick insisted that such a woman must exist—“We just have to identify the perfect example.” He began to toss out names of various women, from Joan of Arc to Margaret Mead and Ayn Rand, all of whom I rejected.

  To this day we joke about who said Simone de Beauvoir’s name first, but all I remember of that magic moment was the “Eureka!” burst of recognition that hit me when I heard her name. “Of course! She is probably the only modern woman who made a success of everything.” At that time, and like every other woman who had read her four volumes of autobiography, I believed that her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre was the perfection she claimed it was. Like so many other women who counted The Second Sex as an important coming-of-age book, I regarded her as both paragon and icon. It made so much sense—all those concepts that I had been thinking about, all the possibilities for the perfect life and relationship that I knew I could never use in a bio of, say, Anne Sexton. Everything fit Simone de Beauvoir so naturally that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it on my own, long before.

  * * *

  —

  I was wildly enthusiastic about the project, but my agent was not. Nor was Mary Kling, who represented me in France. When I asked why, Carl said, “Nobody is interested in an over-the-hill French feminist.” Mary said succinctly, “She is not popular in France just now.” I mustered every argument I could think of as I asked them both to begin contract negotiations, after which I would decide if it was doable. My entreaties grew heated and passionate, and they were all met with reasons why I should not “waste my time.” Reluctantly, and I think only to put an end to my phone calls, both grudgingly agreed to try to sell the idea. Carl’s bottom line was, “She is passé. Nobody cares about her anymore.” Even more shocking was Mary’s attitude: “What is she without Jean-Paul Sartre? Now that he is gone [he died on April 15, 1980], she is nothing.” I was stunned, but having come this far toward another biography, I was not yet ready to give up.

  A month passed with no further contact. At the end of June, I wrote: “No word from Brandt yet so they must still be talking. If that’s the case, I guess the project might live.” It was alive and limping along, but months passed before there was resolution, and the outcome was nothing I could possibly have envisioned.

  26

  I was on fire when I returned to Philadelphia. For almost a year we had been camping out in a rented house, because interest rates on mortgages had risen to a shocking 15 to 18 percent and we could not afford to buy anything and get settled. Every room looked like a hoarder’s paradise, filled with boxes that we hoped to unpack as soon we could move to something permanent. Despite the dreary surroundings, the energy that had eluded me for almost two years kicked in as I thought about Simone de Beauvoir. I set to work clearing my desk of everything that had piled up on it: articles for academic journals, reviews for newspapers, long-overdue correspondence, and invitations to give lectures and talks at theater openings of Beckett’s plays. All this cleaning up was accomplished in several short weeks, by the end of June 1980, and still there was no word from my agent. I had expected a quick offer of a contract but none was forthcoming.

  Summer settled over us, hot and heavy, and with it came all sorts of family crises. First Katney came down with a serious bout of mononucleosis, which left her bedridden for a month and which she then gave to her father. He was ill with so many unsettling symptoms that we spent most of July in the offices of various medical specialists, who were convinced it was not mono but a strange and perhaps life-threatening virus. When not chauffeuring the two patients to doctor appointments, I was tending to them at home, shuttling between their bedrooms and the kitchen, trying to entice them to eat. As August’s stifling humidity overwhelmed our non-air-conditioned house, I told myself that my agent’s silence was perhaps for the best, as I would not have been able to do any research anyway.

  Carl Brandt finally replied in mid-August, after his refusal to take my phone calls drove me to fire off several impassioned letters demanding to know what, if anything, was happening. He cited layoffs at Little, Brown (although Dick McDonough still had a job) and warned that now was not the time to request funding for “an over the hill French woman.” If Little, Brown did not offer a contract, he would probably not contact other publishers, as none would likely want the biography. I didn’t care, I told him. I was going to write it no matter what, and I’d find another way. And then he erupted, berating me for wanting to write it at all: “It’s going to take four to six years of your life. It might—but probably won’t—get you tenure, and if it has any success at all, it will only be ‘critical,’ meaning maybe 300 people will read it. You won’t get any European sales, not even in France. You are still paying off your first advance and you’ll go broke writing this one.” He brought up Anne Sexton’s name again, claiming that that biography would have been the bestseller and how foolish I had been not to pursue it when her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, had asked to meet me.*

  I chastise myself now for letting this man scold me and belittle my project. It took me a fe
w weeks to recover from this lambasting, but recover I did, and I wrote at the time: “I’ve decided to write the SdB bio no matter what. I’m doing this one for me. I need to write this book. I really want to do it, so I’ll just apply for grants and fellowships and get started.” It was late in the year and most deadlines had passed, but I planned to start work on two fronts at once: while I was reading or rereading everything Beauvoir had written, I would fill out an application for every grant for which I thought I might qualify. However, real life had a way of messing up my best-laid plans.

  * * *

  —

  Interest rates fell back to percentages we could afford, and we were finally able to buy a house and get settled. Simultaneously I was enduring a tenure review that required nonstop concentration for weeks, collecting or preparing all the supporting documentation that was required. On top of these distractions, I was teaching three overenrolled courses and being trotted out by the university as a prize trophy, cordially directed to perform for trustees, rich donors, and anyone else the administrators wanted to impress or recruit. And all the while the department’s powers that be chuckled as they told me how I had published “too well” to get tenure. One did tell me that Walter Kerr had called the biography the best book ever written about Beckett, chuckling gleefully that he was only telling me because Kerr misspelled both my names.

  It was not the happiest of times for me. I learned to get by on four to five hours of sleep each night because there was so much work to be done to care for the recovering invalids and move into the house that I could not do my own work until they were settled for the night. I found myself doing something I had not done since working on the Beckett book, when I so despaired of ever finishing it that I sought Jungian therapy. Once again my dreams were so unsettling that I began to keep a record of them. They were mostly what I called “can’t get it together” dreams, and the one that recurred most frequently was of me riding the New York City subway in my Columbia graduate student years. As I jumped up from my seat to exit and change trains from the express to the local at Ninety-Sixth Street, my briefcase burst open and all my papers spilled onto the floor. I could not gather them up in time before the doors closed, and the train sped on to Harlem with me trapped inside. This was when I usually woke up in the sweat of panic. As I replayed the daily stresses during the 4 a.m. galloping anxieties that usually followed the dream, I wrote, “This really can’t go on. Too much stress.” I asked myself how I was going to get out of all these messes, especially since “you created them all by yourself!” My feminist awakening had not yet taken strong enough hold for me not to think that I was to blame for everything.