Parisian Lives Page 24
I remember clearly how I lowered my head into my hands and said out loud, “Oh dear.” I had the sinking sensation that the book was dead and done before I even got started. “What is the matter?” she demanded. “What is wrong?” I was so flustered that I could not think in French and asked her if I could reply in English. She said of course, because she read and understood the language far better than she spoke it.
“That is not how I worked with Samuel Beckett,” I told her, and then I proceeded to explain how he had given me the freedom to do my research, conduct my interviews, and to write the book that I thought needed to be written. I told her how we had agreed that he would not read it before it was published, and I even told her how he had said he would neither help nor hinder me, which his family and friends interpreted as his agreement to cooperate fully. I told her that, having worked in such extraordinary circumstances, I didn’t see how I could work any other way. I hoped that she would be generous and gracious enough to give me whatever help I asked for, but that she would also allow me the independence to construct a full and objective account of her life and work.
She sat there quietly for what seemed an eternity with her eyes cast down. Finally she met my eyes and said, “Well, if you worked that way with him, then I suppose you will have to work that way with me as well. After all, my book must be equal to the one you wrote for him.”
I was sure the enormous breath I had been holding would break her windows as I expelled it. I cannot describe the relief I felt, relief that was later confirmed by both Beckett and Beauvoir when I asked them each to confirm a story about their relationship. When he was a struggling writer, Beckett submitted the first part of a story to Sartre’s magazine, Les Temps modernes. Everyone knew it was Beauvoir who did the hard work of putting the magazine together, and also that it was she who made most of the editorial decisions. She accepted the submission and it was published to critical acclaim among the small readership of the magazine. Some weeks later Beckett submitted the second half of the story, only to have Beauvoir refuse it and tell him that the magazine could not waste any more space on such trivia when there were so many important political issues that needed to be addressed. Beckett never forgave her, and he made his resentment public. He wrote her a scathing letter, a copy of which was published after his death in his collected letters. She threw the original away and dismissed him as unworthy of further consideration.
From that day on, they cordially detested each other. I had placed myself squarely in the middle of their contretemps, but in this case it worked in my favor. I would have the same freedom to write about her that I had had while writing about him. I considered myself the most fortunate of writers as we said goodbye that day.
28
I returned to Philadelphia the day before classes began, to a schedule that had me running from one end of campus to the other. My mailbox was overflowing with notices of committees to which I had been appointed, graduate dissertations I was asked to advise, and proposals from undergraduates interested in pursuing independent studies. Requests for Beckett-related reviews or articles alone could have occupied me full-time. Because I was expecting any day to have the all-important second book contract that would be required for tenure, I also asked to be brought up a year early for consideration, which created a major stir and elicited howls of outrage over my presumption and effrontery. Or, as one of my more sympathetic senior colleagues put it while clucking in mock derision, “What chutzpah!”
To my surprise, the English Department did recommend me for tenure by a mostly positive vote, even though I was not exactly the kind of woman they wanted because I was an untraditional “scholar” and, even worse, far too public a figure. My few allies among the full professors told me that the official letter recommending me put “scholar” in quotes because my colleagues were not sure what to make of me. I should have been concerned when they also told me that two senior members of the department had put “damaging and destructive letters in my dossier.” They would not tell me who wrote them, but it was easy enough to guess their identities based on who exerted the most effort smarming and sucking up after their knives proved ineffective.
As for my being “too public,” the many accolades that were coming my way probably generated that impression, foremost among them being the National Book Award, the most significant honor of my professional life, which I received that April. Such high-profile recognition did make it seem that I was not following a traditional academic path—whatever that was supposed to be—but I had no doubt that my being a woman was also a problem for some of these established gentlemen. They resented that women were successfully climbing the barricades for admission into other boys’ clubs, but it was inspirational for me to know that I was not alone in forging an untraditional path toward tenure. A woman before me had fought and won at Penn, and there were other very public ongoing battles by women at Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, and probably many other universities I didn’t know about.
Everything seemed fine for several weeks, “fine” being my shorthand for quiet days passing without incident, when I was able to sit at my desk and work on my book. All that ended one morning when the dean of the university called as I was drinking my morning coffee. Even though the department had put forward a robust recommendation, his committee (the next step in the tenure process) had rejected it. The full professor in the English Department who had written the more damaging letter of the two in my file, a man who enjoyed a reputation in the world of literature, had gone before the dean’s committee in person to argue that “she is not a scholar; she is only a biographer.” He had enough influence with several members that they succeeded in convincing the rest to reject me. If that vote stood, it would mean that after the spring of 1982, I would not have a job. And I still did not have a book contract.
In the aftermath of this bombshell, I learned who my true friends were. Professors I did not know came from other departments to commiserate and offer advice. Some urged me to fight the decision; others (the majority) told me to start looking for another job and offered to help me find one. The dean, a quiet and dignified man and a genuine scholar, told me to keep quiet and let him work on my behalf. The current committee would be replaced by new members for the fall term and he would present my dossier to the new group. He told me to “keep to your plans, go about your business, and let your dean work for you.” So that was what I did.
* * *
—
Things were equally chaotic at home, even though both children were in college and my only daily responsibility was to my husband. From the beginning of our marriage, we had shared household and family responsibilities as equally as possible. This surprised me, growing up as I did in a household where my father never fetched a glass of water if my mother was within hailing distance. Von grew up on an Idaho farm with four siblings, and there was never “man’s work” or “woman’s work.” There was simply work to be done, and everyone pitched in and did it. So it was with us most of the time, but there were periods when one of us felt overburdened, and the years we lived in Philadelphia saw a number of them. In the winter of 1981 our weekly house cleaner retired and we were without one for several months, a period when we were so busy professionally that we had little time to find a replacement or take care of things ourselves. As dust bunnies accumulated, newspapers piled up, and laundry went undone, things grew tense.
Von’s job as a museum administrator required extensive socializing, and I, who had hitherto been willing to attend events, was now so involved with my own career that I often could not, nor could I entertain at home with casual suppers or formal dinners as I had always done before. With the success of the Beckett biography in the wider world beyond the Becketteers’ sphere of influence, I was receiving offers from other institutions to give lectures or be a guest lecturer on a longer-term basis. There were even hints from other universities that teaching positions might be available in my field, wit
h invitations to visit other campuses and let myself be looked over as a possible prospect. Ever mindful of the precarious tenure situation, I tried to accept as many as I could. Several times each month I packed up and Von had to drive me to or from various airports or train stations, which meant leaving him in charge of a large house and four pets on top of his day job and evening obligations. He felt neglected and abandoned, and rightly so. Yet while I felt tremendous guilt for not being available, I also felt a certain degree of resentment.
I was no longer the “housewife who dabbles,” as I had been dubbed by former friends in the Junior League and the PTA, even as I supported the family with a full-time job as a newspaper reporter while my husband was in graduate school. I remember a lot of tsk-tsking and head shaking when I gave up volunteerism to forge a career as a scholar-writer. Despite the broader social changes under way, it was still a man’s world. I had a full-time job that most men in my immediate circle envied, but I had very little of the professional support they enjoyed. I had 215 students in a British novel survey course and 24 in a British novel seminar, and no teaching assistant to help me with the grading. Nor did I have a work-study student, that all important gofer who would perform the many adjunct services to my teaching that I did not have time to do. I could not help but think the double standard in most households applied in the office as well: we women were being told that we could have it all, but only after we agreed to do it all.
It was not an easy time for either Von or me, and after far too many heated exchanges, we eventually agreed on the old saying that what we both needed was a good wife. And because we were not going to get one, we would have to respect each other’s commitment to our professional lives and work something out.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, my work on the Beauvoir biography was at a standstill. My plan was to have myself ready to go to Paris as soon as the semester ended, by the first of June at the very latest, and I would rent an apartment big enough to house Von, the children, and several other family members who would come for visits when they had free time. However, the semester was so frenetic that I did not have nearly enough time to prepare for the intense interviews I envisioned, both with Beauvoir and with her family and friends.
At the end of the semester, just when I was in the deepest confusion over my disorganized life, I was asked to host a panel at a Beckett conference at Ohio State University. I accepted, in the hope that this meant the unrelenting hostile attacks were finally over. (Sadly, they were not.) While there, an Australian professor at Griffith University asked if I would be interested in becoming the visiting scholar in their Institute for Modern Biography. I laughed off his query, because it seemed that the only reason I had been invited to the conference was so I could hear in person criticism that ranged from the snide to the overt. I could not wait to get home to start paying attention to Simone de Beauvoir. I had put that work on hold for far too long.
My one promising stateside interview was scheduled for May 10, when I was to go to Sag Harbor to interview Nelson Algren, one of the most important men in Simone de Beauvoir’s life. Algren and I had exchanged several phone calls to settle on a date, and in each one he had gone on at great and angry length about how eager he was to tell his side of the story about their romance. I thought that meeting him would be crucial to my work and would do much to help me organize questions about the men in her life besides Sartre. I woke up on May 9 to several phone messages telling me that Nelson Algren had been found dead after an apparent heart attack. I was stunned by the news but also angry with myself. I had put off seeing him for the previous five months because of the unrelenting pressures of academic responsibilities, and now it was too late forever.
I had been in touch with Algren’s agent, the legendary Candida Donadio, throughout the many months I had been unable to find time to meet him, and we spoke again two days after he died. She told me to give her two weeks to sort things out on her end, and she also suggested that I call Algren’s lawyers immediately so that when I phoned her later, she might have their permission to show me the “goldmine” he had left behind, especially the 350 letters he had exchanged during his love affair with Beauvoir. However, she warned that he had died without leaving a will, which meant that the lawyers had to find his nearest heirs, and they might present an insurmountable stumbling block.
Dick McDonough at Little, Brown, and Robert Ginna, Algren’s editor and friend, painted a similar, if more colorful, picture. They told me everything was probably still in the Sag Harbor house. No relatives had claimed Algren’s body, so Candida did, and took care of all the arrangements. The day before he died, Algren had given an angry interview in which he made all sorts of ugly remarks about Beauvoir, ending with how he was going to sell the letters and make a lot of money.
I wrote in the DD that “this could well be the goldmine I will never see. And to think I let all this tenure shit keep me from getting it!” I was so furious with myself for allowing academic politics to keep me from seeing Algren that I could hardly think straight, let alone write to his lawyers. It didn’t help when colleagues and friends joked that “some people will do anything to avoid having to talk to Deirdre Bair.” I have always regretted not having Algren’s personal testimony for Beauvoir’s biography, but it became a catalyzing moment: from then on, I never let anything stand in the way of seeing an important source.
I still did not have a book contract as May became June, but I did get a fellowship that would give me the academic year 1981–1982 free from teaching. The Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe College was a mixed blessing; indeed it was a significant honor, for which I have been eternally grateful, but it was also one that required residence on the Harvard campus. If Von and I found it almost impossible to coordinate our professional and personal lives while living in the same house, how were we to manage with me commuting such a distance?
And speaking of distance, another shock came with a phone call in mid-June from Australia. It came at our dinner hour, and it happened that we had both children, some of their friends, and two of my colleagues dining with us that evening, all of whom were eager to weigh in on the news. The professor I had met at the Beckett conference had been serious about the offer to visit Griffith University in Brisbane. A formal invitation was extended for me to accept a residency at the (alas, now defunct) Institute of Modern Biography from mid-July through September, which would coincide nicely with the beginning of my Bunting Fellowship in October. It was a rollicking evening as everyone around our table was insistent that I must accept. Everyone, that is, but Von and me. We were unsettled by the possibility of how much more upheaval this second separation would cause, but somehow we managed to be good hosts even as we avoided looking at each other, letting the questions about how we would manage swirl around us, unanswered.
After several days of nonstop debate, we decided that I would accept the Australian invitation instead of going to Paris to conduct research. The children’s annual college expenses were about to hit, Australia paid handsomely, and I still did not have an official book contract. Also, the family would visit me “down under,” a welcome change from the old haunts that made going to Paris almost as routine as going to New York. And I would also accept the Bunting Fellowship, but try to come home every weekend.
With everything I had to do before I went anywhere, I was actually happy to fall back into the happy-housewife mode for a brief time, even if it meant putting the Beauvoir research aside. I lined up a dependable weekly house cleaner, spent days and nights filling the freezer, and created a master calendar of all the chores that had to be done, the dates for paying bills, and the family birthdays and anniversaries that I had always acknowledged but would now have to leave to Von. Frustration over not being able to do my own necessary work bubbled on low heat in the background, but I felt that all these things were my responsibility and I had to keep them under control. I still thoug
ht that way, even though I knew it was not my job “to make the world safe for democracy,” as the analyst I had consulted during the Beckett book once told me. But somehow I could not get it out of my head that I should still be trying.
29
There was one pressing Beauvoir-related task, to tell her that because of the Australia invitation and the Bunting Fellowship, I could not go to Paris until the start of 1982, when I could dedicate the two months between Bunting semesters to being there. I composed a very careful letter outlining my reasons for accepting these honors and postponing our meetings. I included a slightly embellished version of the preparatory background research I was doing and a long list of people I had identified to interview during my time in Paris. From the beginning I recognized that Beauvoir liked schedules and plans, so I adopted the habit of keeping her informed. I saw no problem with telling her whom I wished to interview and what archives I would need to consult, but the one thing I never told her in advance was what documents or correspondence in her personal possession I would need. Working with Beckett had taught me not to risk creating a possible difficulty until I absolutely had to.
I sent this letter in June, after several weeks of worry. I had called immediately after Algren died to ask if there was anything I could do for her and had been unable to reach her by phone, a silence that persisted. I phoned several people in Paris who were normally in contact with her, but she had told no one where she was going, and none could explain why she was unavailable. Later Beauvoir told me that the press was hounding her, so she went to hide at her friend Sylvie Le Bon’s apartment.*1