Parisian Lives Read online

  She often switched topics rapidly, sometimes more quickly than I could follow. After dissecting all the books about her, she asked what she should call me. Should I be “Madame Bair,” or could she call me—and here she tried to pronounce my first name, which came out sounding something like “Dared” but with an extremely long and highly emphasized r, that French glottal roll I could never manage. I told her she must call me whatever was easiest for her, and she decided on “Darrred” (or so it sounded to me). I never asked what I should call her, for to me she was always “Madame” or “Madame de Beauvoir.”

  It was she who, from the first meeting, moved naturally to a kind of personal closeness that I had never had with Samuel Beckett. All during the years I wrote about him, I regretted the formality and sometimes resented how he would engage more personally with relative strangers who contacted him about some aspect of their work which couldn’t have been nearly as important or innately personal as mine. However, once Beauvoir began to invite “Darrred” to join her at meetings such as book publication parties and gallery openings, and to go to dinner with her and some of her friends, I always pulled back. If the event was something I thought useful to observe for the book, such as a feminist meeting to plot some sort of activity or action, I accompanied her. If, however, it was purely social, I tried to invent a prior engagement or some other excuse.

  Once the Beckett book was published, I realized that Samuel Beckett had done me a favor by keeping me at a distance. It ensured that our relationship was entirely professional and it freed me to be totally objective when I wrote about him. From the beginning I realized that I really liked Simone de Beauvoir, and I recognized that it could be a dangerous emotion. It would be far better for me to keep to a professional distance, but she made it very difficult for me to do so.

  “Ah, Darrred,” she would begin, and I would mentally cringe: Uh-oh, here it comes…And indeed it would, for she always had “a nice young friend” who wanted to come to America and needed a job, and she was perfectly sure that my university was always in need of a native French-speaker on the faculty. Of the half-dozen or so candidates she proposed, none had any sort of qualifications, but that didn’t matter to her, and she refused to accept that I had no authority to hire them and no clout to persuade anyone else to do me this favor.

  One whom she was determined to send to Philadelphia was someone who had no desire to go there, the novelist Claude Courchay. He had just won the prestigious Prix RTL for his novel Retour à Malaveil and bought a typical turn-of-the-century house on the last remaining street of them in Montparnasse. Beauvoir was extremely close to Claude, and he was her one friend to whom I became close also, as he did much to help me gain an accurate understanding of Beauvoir’s place in French culture and society.

  Of all her protégés, there was only one for whom I was successful in finding a teaching job, and in the process I also found him a wife. Serge Julienne-Caffié, who had written an eloquent and perceptive book about Beauvoir, was living in New York when Penn’s Wharton School needed a French professor for its international business program, and he agreed to teach the course. I introduced him to my colleague the anthropologist Peggy Sanday and was delighted when they married.

  * * *

  —

  The miserable January days were passing in a blur because I was too busy to notice how often it snowed and how cold it was. I was up and out of the dark and gloomy apartment early every day for interviews, and when I was not interviewing someone, I was in the Bibliothèque nationale or one of the other archives where there were documents I needed to see. I worked with Beauvoir two or three times each week, and because the questions were still dealing mostly with her childhood, girlhood, and youth, none raised any red flags and the sessions unfolded pleasantly. I told her I would be seeing her sister in early February, and I had contacted her two cousins and girlhood companions, Magdeleine Mantis de Bisschop and Jeanne de Beauvoir Dauriac, who still lived at Meyrignac and La Grillère, the family estates in southwest France where Beauvoir had spent her summers. She was delighted and said she was “content with ‘our’ progress.” I was not sure how I felt about her use of our progress.

  I was not quite so content, because aspects of my “real life” kept intruding. Carl Brandt contacted me to say there had been another round of mass firings at Little, Brown and this time Dick McDonough had been among them. Carl was still after me to sign Little, Brown’s insulting contract, but I had no idea if that would remain an option now that Dick was gone. I received some better news from Penn, where the dean had indeed done his work and his new committee had awarded my tenure that fall. It was bittersweet news for me: I was relieved to know I would have a job to return to in the fall of 1982, if only because it seemed unlikely that I was going to have a book contract to support me and my research.

  I was very grateful to be away from academic politics, and I was also relishing every day in Paris, as each one brought something new and exciting for my book. I was energized by the way things were coming together on so many different levels. For example, articles about conservative right-wing newspapers in the early years of the twentieth century explained so much about Beauvoir’s father’s attitude toward his daughters’ upbringing. Coupled with the memories of her girlhood friend GéGé Pardo, passages in Beauvoir’s memoir helped to explain some of the rebellious decisions she had made during her teen years. Things were going very well that winter, and I especially enjoyed having the luxury of time to sift through ideas, sort through information, and posit conclusions. My mantra had become “this is what I think today, no doubt subject to change tomorrow,” and most often it was.

  I made some lifelong friends on that research trip who provided the necessary socializing over lunches and dinners, where convivial conversations often led to ways of thinking or research modes I would not otherwise have learned about. Here, too, I was helped by journalists working for American and British publications and longtime residents of France, who became important sources for deep background and were often instrumental in helping me navigate bureaucracies that would otherwise have remained securely closed. Among the prominent and outspoken French feminists who became good friends, I counted the professor of American literature Marie-Claire Pasquier and the feminist publisher (and no relation) Françoise Pasquier. Mary Lou Decossaux, an American graduate student of French descent, became the research assistant I truly needed. Karen Offen, an American scholar of French women’s history who was working in archives, became an excellent sounding board for my ever-changing thoughts. It was such a pleasure to meet them for drinks and dinners after my tranquil daily routine, and I was thoroughly enjoying it—until the bombshell of a phone call.

  I had just returned from a long day of reading microfilm in an archive and was damp and disheveled after trudging through a sleet storm, eager to take off my wet shoes before any more blisters could form. I could hear the phone ringing as I unlocked the door. The call was from a professor in another department at Penn who was on sabbatical in Paris and who said he had been appointed by the university’s honorary degree committee to offer one to Simone de Beauvoir. Officiously, he told me he was “authorized” to order me to provide her contact information. Then I was to step aside, as he would take over all meetings with her to conduct this business.

  My mind was a sieve after my long day in the archive, and his arrogance left me befuddled. It was fortunate that I had only the evening and a restless night to stew, for early the next morning the concierge delivered a formal and polite letter sent by the university’s president saying that the professor would be contacting me and asking if I would be so kind as to use my influence in helping him persuade Beauvoir to accept the degree. No one had informed me that this honorary degree was on offer, and no one had included me in planning how to approach her. It seemed that although my scholarship was that of “only a biographer,” my subject was of sufficient merit to be honored, even though I�
��the creator of the project—was to be marginalized. The irony rankled. However, it was a tribute to a remarkable and deserving woman, so of course I would help the university, even though I resented the gall of, as I wrote at the time, “the big boys who just take over and push the little girl aside.”

  The day I received the president’s letter was also the day I received another blow, this one not quite so upsetting but still a disruption. Simone de Beauvoir phoned to tell me that she had decided suddenly to go away from Paris for two weeks, from February 1 to 15. She thought she might be coming down with a mild case of the flu, and Sylvie had persuaded her to go to Biarritz to take the waters at a spa she liked. I spent the next several hours fuming until I told myself no matter, never mind that we had set meetings for three days during each of those weeks; I had plenty of archival work I could attend to. But before she left, I had to talk to her about this degree.

  She moved to end the telephone conversation as abruptly as usual, but I managed to jump in to say I had something I needed to discuss with her and asked to see her that day even though we had not scheduled an appointment. She told me to come at two and not stay long because she needed a post-luncheon rest before seeing some of her feminist friends at four.

  I got right to the point when I saw her, telling her that a professor from my university wanted to be introduced to her so that he could present the offer of an honorary degree. I wanted her permission to give him her telephone number and her address, in case he wanted to write and not call. She said, dismissively, that she would give him the courtesy of a meeting the next afternoon at four. She asked if I wanted to be there, and I would have been, except that she had already arranged for me to meet Sylvie at 4:30 in her apartment on the avenue du Maine, and I preferred to keep that appointment. She said I should warn the professor that she had been offered many such honors before this one and had refused them all because they required her to be there in person: “I am an old lady now, and no longer capable of making such extravagant journeys.” I thought it ironic that she was still talking about flying to New York and then traveling up and down the East Coast by car and train. I kept the thought to myself and said I would tell him about the appointment but I would leave everything else to her.

  When the professor told her that she would be required to accept the honor in person, just as she had suspected, she declined the invitation (as he later told me) “most graciously,” saying that she could no longer travel. I could tell that he was upset by her refusal, especially after he blurted out in a rage, “How, then, could she tell me about making a trip to New York one year from now, when she will be even older?” My jaw dropped to think that she had told him this, but he explained that after she asked about his accent and he said he was a native New Yorker, she told him quite casually that she was planning a visit. That was how I learned that the trip she had been planning off and on for the past several years was back on again. But because she had changed her mind two or three times previously, I knew not to take it seriously and I said nothing to the professor.

  The end of my two months in Paris was fast approaching, and the pleasant days of setting my own schedule would soon be over. I dreaded having to return to all the intrusions upon my book. I would be going back to Cambridge and the sabbatical would last until May, but I doubted I would find the tranquility for reflection and writing that I was counting on. That night, while plotting how many interviews I could fit into the time when Beauvoir would be in Biarritz, I made a list of all the things other people expected me to do in my professional life. It was a long one, and at the end I felt close to hopeless about how I was ever going to write this book and where the money, never mind the time, would come from.

  But counting the current one, I still had three weeks in Paris, and I decided to make the most of them.

  31

  During the two weeks Beauvoir was away, I conducted interviews every day. As I met her relatives, friends, and acquaintances, I noted a clear distinction between her French friends and Beckett’s French friends. To start, hers did not like to hold meetings in the mornings, and the idea of an early-morning breakfast meeting, popular in America, was horrifying. Some of her writer friends who had spent time in the United States actually shuddered at the suggestion, reliving how they had been subjected to such meetings in New York or Los Angeles. Occasionally someone would meet me for morning coffee, but never before eleven. That suited me just fine, as it gave me time to prepare my questions for that day’s work.

  I found another difference with Beckett’s friends, who tended to speak good English because they had participated in the wider cultural world. Many had lived, worked, or studied in England or the United States, and they brought a broader perspective to France’s place—and by extension theirs—in the intellectual and cultural firmament. Despite Beauvoir’s extensive travels and her work analyzing other cultures, her circle at home in Paris was curiously restricted. Her milieu was the philosophy, politics, and literature of her native country, and the people with whom she associated most closely reflected that. Few spoke any language but their own, and if they traveled, it was mostly for holidays and vacations to places where others just like them congregated. Few saw much need to move away from Paris even for their work; professors who held positions in universities far from the city commuted to their jobs and kept their primary residence in the capital. Everyone I spoke to was highly sophisticated, but compared to the French people I had met working on the Beckett biography, this group was relatively less diverse in their outlooks and ways of thinking. This was their conscious choice, to be sure, a simple preference to concentrate their interests and endeavors on their society of origin. By spending time with them, I gained insights into French history and culture that helped me to understand why Simone de Beauvoir had made so many of the controversial decisions her non-French readers questioned.

  I thought that understanding Beauvoir’s relationships with men was a good place to start my interviews, and with Sartre and Algren both dead, Claude Lanzmann, renowned as the creator of the film Shoah, was one of the first men I contacted. He was a journalist and her junior by seventeen years when they met after he wrote an article about Sartre, and they were together as lovers from 1952 to 1959. They remained devoted friends until the end of her life.

  Unlike most of her other close friends, Lanzmann said he preferred to come to my apartment rather than meet in a restaurant or hotel lobby, and on a Saturday morning, when he would be free for the day and could talk at length. I agreed, even though I was not happy to have even my most understanding friends come into that dark and dreary place at the bottom of an air shaft. And on that freezing day when it was sleeting, the heat was so minimal that I worried I would have to greet Lanzmann in my coat and hat. When he all but burst in, though, I soon forgot about the cold. He was a large man and a formidable presence, flushed with the success of Shoah, and he quickly got down to his own agenda.

  He illustrated another difference between Beckett’s French friends and what I called in the DD Beauvoir’s “French” French friends. The Beckett interviews usually began with an exchange of pleasantries before I eased into my questions, beginning with general ones, such as when did you first meet, what was he like in the early days of your friendship—always something that would lead to pleasant memories and positive responses. Conversation would flow rather leisurely, during which time I would be on the alert for nuggets of new information so that I could casually shift toward a topic for which I wanted more detail, more depth. I was seldom able to do this with Beauvoir’s “French” French.

  With Lanzmann I tried to begin the conversation by asking about the weather—a safe topic in any country or culture, I thought—and offering coffee to warm him. He brushed off my attempt at small talk by saying he had come on the Métro and was well caffeinated, and before he even removed his coat, he launched into a discussion of the woman he had known for so many years, first as her lover and now
as a devoted and protective friend. Over the next several hours, he talked and I listened. He knew what he wanted to tell me, so I let him hold forth, because everything he said was both relevant and important. Occasionally I broke in to ask a question that related to his topic; sometimes he stopped to answer it directly, but mostly he kept on with what he was saying until he came to a natural conclusion. Only then would he answer my question. He was always this way whenever I saw him throughout the rest of Beauvoir’s life, and even after her death, when I consulted him to fact-check the manuscript. He was abrasive, seemingly irritated by my probing (and often repeated) questions. He was a difficult and opinionated man, but also extremely insightful and honest. I could argue with and dispute some of his views, but his ultimate defenses of them usually checked out, so I trusted him.

  Lanzmann’s agenda illustrated another difference between the Beckett and Beauvoir biographies. In the Beckett world, there were not that many people with whom I needed follow-up appointments. With the exception of those who were closest to him, one interview was usually enough to help me ascertain the role an individual had played in his life. In the Beauvoir world, almost every single person I spoke to, no matter how close or how peripheral, required multiple meetings. Each had a specific agenda, which perhaps in proper French intellectual terms I should call a theory or a thesis, and only when they were satisfied that they had expressed it would they allow me to proceed with my questions.

  To give some other examples, in my first meeting with Olga and Jacques-Laurent Bost, they wanted to talk only about Beauvoir’s life since Sartre’s death. But they had been her close friends throughout her entire adult life, so there was much more I needed to learn from them. I had the feeling that seeing them together was inhibiting what each wanted to tell me, and I was right. It worked out naturally to see them separately when Olga came down with the flu and Bost asked me to meet him in the bar at the Pont Royal. Sitting where he had sat with Sartre and Beauvoir for so many nights was a great tongue-loosener, as he recalled story after story, person after person. Those sessions with Bost alone, usually over many drinks in the early evenings, were immensely rewarding. Olga, perhaps because of her personal past as Sartre’s lover and the subject of one of Beauvoir’s novels, was far more guarded. I always saw her in their apartment, and after the third meeting I realized that I was upsetting her too much by asking her to relive her intimate relationship with Sartre as well as with Beauvoir. I ended my one-on-one encounters and saw her only one other time, in her husband’s company and over a hasty drink.