Parisian Lives Read online

  By September the move was over, all the boxes were unpacked, and the invalids had recovered and resumed their usual activities. I decided to get on with my next book, contract or no contract. It was probably time to let Simone de Beauvoir know that I wanted to write her biography.

  Just as I had done with Beckett, I wrote a letter. With it, I sent a copy of the French translation of the Beckett biography, saying I thought it was important for Beauvoir to know what I had written about my last subject before she agreed to become the next one. Her reply was as swift as Beckett’s had been. She said she had already read my book and was impressed with the way “an American”—then a disdainful appellation in French literary and cultural circles—had so captured “the French writer”—for indeed the French were happy to claim Beckett as their own. Most of all, she said she welcomed me because I wanted to write “about everything and not just my feminism or Sartre.” She closed by inviting me to come to Paris as soon as possible “so that we can begin.”

  When I conveyed this news to Carl Brandt, via a message left with his secretary, he told me that a contract was being prepared. It would offer an advance that would scarcely pay for one round-trip plane ticket and a week or two in a cheap hotel. I was insulted and asked if I should take my own peanut butter and jelly to make sure that I would have something to eat. And then he revealed what I called “the kick-in-the-face clause”: at any time during the writing of the book, even before anyone had read a word, the publisher could decide not to publish it, and I would have to pay back the advance. I couldn’t believe he expected me to sign it. So I didn’t.

  Meanwhile my family and I celebrated the happy news that Simone de Beauvoir was waiting to welcome me. As children often do, mine lovingly teased me, about my French in particular. “I guess you’ll be enrolling in Berlitz any day now,” they joked. Actually, it was not all that funny, and it was something I thought about but didn’t do for lack of time. I had studied French since high school and had taken advanced literature courses all through college, and in graduate school I had easily passed the language proficiency exam. I could read novels and poetry without having to translate in my head. However, in all those years I had never really learned to speak the language properly. I could chatter away in French to everyone from waiters and desk clerks to scholars and writers, but I always had to rely on the simplest forms of nouns, verbs, and sentence structure. French people often corrected my appalling grammar, and I was grateful for it.

  With Beckett my spoken French was never a problem, because everyone in his circle, no matter their nationality or native language, had enough English and I had enough French for us to understand each other. I wasn’t worried about communicating with Beauvoir’s circle because I assumed my “franglais” would suffice, but I should have been concerned, because so few persons close to her spoke any language but their own.

  I assumed that everything I had learned about the genre of biography while writing about Beckett would simply carry over and apply to the writing of a biography of Simone de Beauvoir. That was only the first of many—no, the first of all—my assumptions about biography that I would have to discard when I returned to Paris.

  * Wisely, she chose my friend Diane Middlebrook, who wrote a splendid biography.

  27

  As 1981 began, I had ten free days between the holidays and the start of the new semester, when I would begin yet another grueling term of overenrolled courses. I needed those ten days to prepare for the onslaught to come, but it was the only time I could go to Paris. Instead of preparing syllabi, I spent the last days of the old year making increasingly frantic phone calls to hotels along the rue Jacob where I had stayed previously. None would give me a room confirmation, but all told me to come anyway, as something would surely be available. It was an inauspicious start, but I decided to do just that.

  The flight was a nightmare, delayed by bad weather and then turbulence, after which the airline lost my luggage. Bleary-eyed and frazzled, I had the taxi drop me at one end of rue Jacob, intending to work my way to the other until I found a hotel that had a free room. Fortunately, the second one I reached took me in, disheveled, dirty, and without a change of clothing. I was such a sorry sight that even though breakfast was long over, the desk clerk took pity and sent coffee and croissants to my room, “with compliments.” At least something started nicely.

  I showered and hastened over to the nearest Monoprix to buy some inexpensive clothing before I tried to telephone Beauvoir. At that point I learned that the telephone system throughout France had recently been changed, adding extra digits to every number and making the one she had given me invalid. My first thought was to call her publisher, but then I realized that Gallimard would never release her number to a stranger. I phoned Mary Kling instead and asked her to intercede, because Beauvoir knew I was arriving on January 3 and she expected me to phone on that day to set up our first meeting. That day was almost over and I had not found a way to reach her.

  Mary was sick at home with the flu and her staff had no luck in tracking down the new number. Once again, as I had with Beckett, I resorted to the little blue pneu. I sent one that gave Beauvoir the name of my hotel and my direct line, and once again I waited. By midmorning the next day I had not heard from her, so I wrote a letter in my grammatically imperfect French, ran to the Métro, and rushed over to her apartment building.

  I had no idea what I would do when I got there because the doors required a code to open, and I could not even see mailboxes in the entryway. If I did manage to get inside, I did not know where I might be able to leave a letter for her to find. Fortunately, an old man came to the building as I was standing in front of the door wondering what to do. He asked what I was doing, so I spilled out my entire sad story, clutching and waving my letter the entire time. He listened until I ran out of breath and had exhausted my limited French vocabulary, unsure if anything I had said made enough sense for him to understand me. Without a word, this old gentleman reached out and took the letter, assuring me that “Madame” would receive it. Now, he said, I was to remove myself from the entrance so that he could enter his building, making it clear that I was not to enter after him. I had little recourse but to step aside, hold the door, and bow him in.

  Two days passed, during which I wandered aimlessly around Paris in miserably cold weather. There was not much snow, but constant sleet made the streets slippery and me wet, so I popped in and out of bookstores and coffee shops, trying to kill time and keep warm. Even though Beauvoir had assured me before I made the trip that she was remaining in Paris throughout the holidays and would be at my disposal, I worried that something might have happened to change her plans. Drawing on my experience with Beckett, all sorts of scenarios went through my mind: perhaps she had become ill and had had to go somewhere warm to recuperate, or she was having second thoughts about the book. Naturally the latter was the one that played over and over in my mind.

  My anxiety increased exponentially until January 8, when I found a letter in my mailbox from Simone de Beauvoir. She apologized for having given me the old number—she didn’t realize she had done so—and asked me please to phone her new one to make an appointment. I collapsed in a heap of relief before I could compose myself long enough to dial it.

  I spoke in French and so did she. I don’t know what I expected, but hearing her voice for the first time took me by surprise. She spoke clearly, but her tone was loud and brusque, one that indicated she did not suffer foolish conversation and was in a hurry to make the appointment and get off the phone: “Six o’clock tomorrow at my apartment.” I was trying to stammer my way toward ending the call with some pleasantries when she surprised me again by continuing the conversation in an unexpected direction. She told me how happy she was to have a scholar of my reputation writing about her, one who “so understands the French character.” And then she began to lavish praise on the Beckett biography. I could not get over how closely she mu
st have read it to be bringing up so many specific points. She told me she had already asked Claude Gallimard to buy “her” book—the one for which I had not yet written a word. I was happy about all this, but it also scared me to death.

  Then she said something like “Good! Until tomorrow!” (Bon! À demain!) and hung up as abruptly as she had spoken. I sat on the edge of my bed for what must have been a very long time trying to digest what had just happened. When I reached for my date book to enter the time and place of our first appointment, I realized that it would be on January 9, her birthday. I was already a fairly nervous wreck, but here was another level of stress. Perhaps she had made a mistake giving me the rendezvous for that important day. Surely the world would be beating a path to her door, especially at the hour when her friends would be gathering to take her to cocktails and dinner. I wondered whether I should call back and ask if I had misheard the date or do nothing and just show up. If she tossed me out for my ineptitude, I could offer jet lag as an excuse for not hearing correctly and make another appointment. Needless to say, I did not sleep well that night.

  Early the next morning I created another dilemma for myself as I wondered if I should take her a gift, and if so, what kind. And how was I going to kill the hours between 6 a.m., when I woke up, and 6 p.m.? I had been introduced to quite a few French feminists who were friends of my American colleagues and who taught in French universities or worked in the publishing community, and I could have called any one of them to keep me company. But I was so nervous that I decided to keep myself to myself, doubting that I could carry on a coherent conversation. I was one of the first people in line when the Louvre opened that day, and I stayed there until late afternoon, wandering through every gallery and stopping now and then to drink coffee, for eating would have been impossible. I stared vacantly at items in the gift shop, in the end deciding that nothing was appropriate, not even a card.

  * * *

  —

  I was empty-handed when I arrived at the Denfert-Rochereau Métro station at 5 p.m. Beckett had once chastised me for being three or four minutes late to one of our earliest meetings, so every time I went to meet Beauvoir, I imitated his character in Murphy, carrying the virtue of promptness to an extreme. There was a café on the corner, but I was afraid to get too close to it for fear I would see Beckett, whom I had sometimes met there. It was a preferred haunt of his after his walks, a place to drink coffee and play chess with several local men who were always happy for a game.

  Beckett had been much on my mind during the few days while I waited for Beauvoir to phone. As soon as I received her first letter telling me she wanted me to write her biography, I wrote to tell Beckett that I had decided to do it and that I would be coming to Paris from time to time. He did not reply to that letter, or to the one I wrote once I had fixed definite dates, saying that I would be available should he wish to meet. Still reeling from the negative onslaughts of the Becketteers, I was initially relieved that I would not see him and perhaps have to defend or explain anything about my book.

  When I saw Con Leventhal and Marion Leigh later, they explained Beckett’s silence, losing no time to tell me that I had made a big mistake in “deserting Beckett, for he expected any scholar who wrote about him to remain faithful.” So now, on top of every insult others leveled at me, Beckett considered me a deserter because I was not planning to spend the rest of my professional life writing about him.

  But on that cold January day, as I stood staring at the enormous statue of the Lion of Belfort that dominated the Place Denfert-Rochereau, I realized that if one began at the statue, and with only a slight stretch of the imagination, one could say that Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir lived at opposite ends of the same street—she just up the rue Froidevaux where it met the rue Schoelcher, and he a straight shot in the opposite direction down the boulevard Saint-Jacques. Because he and I had met several times in that café on the corner, I gave it a hasty and guilty glance as I rushed past, hardly daring to look in the window for fear I might see him. I was relieved to find only empty tables near the window where he usually sat.

  Just beyond the café I saw a flower stall where the clerk was closing for the day. All she had left were several bunches of wilting yellow tulips and a large, cheerful bunch of yellow acacia blossoms. I bought them all, and thus equipped, I headed—exactly on time—for 11 bis, rue Schoelcher.

  Simone de Beauvoir buzzed me in and I walked down the long ground-floor hallway until I could turn a corner to the right and take the shorter hallway that led to her door, also on the right. Years later, when I was writing about Anaïs Nin and had befriended her brother, the composer Joaquín Nin-Culmell, we were having a casual conversation about the Nin family’s early years in Paris. “We lived on rue Schoelcher,” he began, as he described their first apartment in the city. How interesting, I said, because Simone de Beauvoir also lived on that street. Yes, he said, he and his mother lived “in 11 bis on the ground floor, down the long corridor, then the short one on the right, with our flat on the left in the rear, and Anaïs and Hugo’s to the right and in the front.” I still remember the chills that shook me as I learned that Beauvoir’s beautiful studio apartment had been Anaïs Nin’s first home in Paris.

  When the door opened, tall woman that I am, I looked straight ahead and saw only air. It felt like a cartoon moment as a beat passed before I lowered my gaze to look down and see a very tiny woman looking up at me. I remember thinking how small Sartre must have been, for in all the photos I had seen of the two of them together, she was always the taller. I thrust the flowers toward her and mumbled something about birthday greetings while she gestured dismissively and told me to come in. She walked in front of me and dumped the flowers in a sculpture of a pair of human hands on a small round table; I later learned this was a cast of Sartre’s hands. Abruptly, as if she decided that this was not an appropriate place, she excused herself to go into her kitchen and find a vase. I noticed the difficulty she had walking as she shuffled slowly back and forth.

  I also noticed how she was dressed in what looked like a shabby red bathrobe over a nightdress. How strange, I thought, that she would be dressed this way on the evening of her birthday. This robe became familiar, as she wore it for many of our conversations during the next five years. She also wore a turban, which I unkindly came to call “the ubiquitous rag,” because I never saw her without it. Her eyes were a brilliant blue, although the color was muted by the pale yellow tinge of the whites around them. Her flawless skin was marred only by a similar color and not by wrinkles, even though she turned seventy-three on that day. The yellow deepened over the years I knew her, a worrisome symptom of the cirrhosis of the liver that would contribute to her death.

  She left the flowers in the kitchen and shuffled back into the living area, where I was still standing. I was too overwhelmed on that first meeting to observe closely the furniture and decorations, except to take in the two daybeds she used for sofas, arranged perpendicularly along the walls and faced by three tiny slipper chairs with a coffee table in between. As she returned, she indicated with a sweep of her arm that I was to take the nearest slipper chair while she positioned herself on a significant dip in one of the sofas, where her body had made an impression. It was clearly the place where she spent most of her time, and it was where she always sat whenever we were together.

  I began to make stuttering conversation, starting with my thanks that she would give me time on her birthday. Her quizzical look as she replied let me know I was not making a very positive first impression. “Why not?” she said. “What is a birthday anyway but just another day?” I didn’t know what to say to that, but she didn’t pause long enough to let me answer as she asked, “Shall we get to work?”

  I had assumed that this was to be a brief getting-acquainted session and I had not brought anything with me; I had no notebook or tape recorder, and I had not prepared any questions. My only preparation had been to
practice how to tell her, in my best French, that I had to go home on the twelfth to teach during the spring semester and would not be able to begin serious interviews until at least the summer, and then only if my schedule allowed enough time for me to prepare myself with serious reading and research during the term. I stammered something about how I did not wish to impose upon what I was sure would be a festive evening, so I had not brought any work materials with me. She snorted in derision. There was to be no celebration, she told me; her friend Sylvie would be coming later with something for dinner, but until then we should probably get started.

  I fished in my bag for something to write on and could find only my date book, so I pretended it was a notebook. I got a reprieve of sorts from asking questions because she launched right in to tell me how we were going to work: “I will talk, and I will tell you what has been important in my life—all the things you need to know. You can write them down, but you must also bring a tape recorder, and I will have one, too. We can discuss what I tell you if you need me to explain it, and that will be the book you need to write. That will be the one you publish.”