Parisian Lives Read online

  Pouillon and Pontalis had both read the French translation of my biography of Beckett and written critiques of it, as well as separate articles detailing their respective interpretations of his psychology. They would not talk about Beauvoir until I let them talk first about Beckett, and when they talked about her, they did so in terms of how her life and work differed from his. So many of Beauvoir’s friends had read the Beckett biography, and I think many assumed that I would write about Beauvoir through a comparison of her life and work with his. Those who held that view would not discuss Beauvoir until they had exhausted their list of differences between the two writers, from their writing styles to their personalities. Each was determined to see my second book as a continuation of what they deemed the “thesis” of my first, a thesis to which they did not hesitate to offer their “corrections.” I could only listen with a polite smile until the first opportunity to break in and get them back on track to talk about Simone de Beauvoir.

  Because I was so well aware of the animosity between Beckett and Beauvoir, I was scrupulous about never mentioning one to the other in conversations with her or in correspondence with him. I let them be the ones to bring up each other’s name or to ask questions (usually about something connected to my work with them), and I trod carefully when I answered. I found it curious that after so many years, the animosity he held against her and the indifference she showed toward his resentment had never changed.

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  I was lucky that winter because all the primary players in Simone de Beauvoir’s life were in Paris and available for interviews. At the top of the list were her sister, Hélène, and Sylvie, now her officially adopted daughter.

  I think Sylvie was leery of me before we met, and she remained cautious and distanced for the remainder of my time working with Beauvoir. Early in January, after our second meeting, Beauvoir and I were having our post-interview verre of watered-down scotch when we heard someone inserting a key into the apartment door. Beauvoir’s face brightened; she blushed, sat up straight, and leaned forward eagerly. “That will be Sylvie,” she said. “She wants to meet you.” She sprang this on me as a total surprise.

  A slim dark-haired woman of medium height looking to be in her fifties came in and crossed over immediately to Beauvoir without glancing at me. They exchanged multiple kisses in greeting and a few words about the bad weather and heavy traffic before Beauvoir turned to introduce “Darrred” to her friend Sylvie. At such first-name familiarity, I thought I saw a dark shadow cross Sylvie’s face, so I, who had risen as a sign of respect, held out my hand and called her “Madame.”

  She eyed me intently but said nothing in reply and addressed her conversation entirely to Beauvoir. I sat quietly smiling but not attempting to join in. Soon after, Sylvie included me by explaining that she had stopped in only briefly to see what Beauvoir wanted for dinner and now she was on her way to shop for it. As she was leaving, I told her I was very pleased to meet her and asked if she would be willing to grant me a separate interview. She seemed surprised and was clearly flustered until Beauvoir jumped in to say, “Of course Sylvie will see you. We will set a date tonight when we have dinner.”

  Several days later I went to Sylvie’s apartment on the avenue du Maine. Again she was guarded, wary, and, I felt certain, seeing me only under duress. Beauvoir had cautioned me to “be gentle” with Sylvie and to let her know as much as I could about the book I intended to write. I had the feeling that she wanted me to reassure Sylvie that I had no desire to replace her in Beauvoir’s affections and no intention of trying to do so, so that was what I set out to do. I spent the first part of our meeting telling her about myself, about my husband and college-age children, my career as a professor. That struck a collegial chord, as she, too, was a teacher. We commiserated about the indifferent attitudes our students had toward learning, and that provided a good segue into some of the topics I hoped to address in the biography, particularly Beauvoir’s years as a lycée teacher.

  The next several hours passed smoothly—but neither of us let down her guard. I did not want to ask any question that she might consider controversial or negative, because I felt that she did not fully trust me. In fact, throughout our subsequent meetings I always had the feeling that she simply did not like me. I did not dwell on this, nor did I try to change her attitude, because I was not looking for a new best friend or any sort of personal connection. All I wanted was a successful project, a book that would do us both proud.

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  I was reveling in the work for the new book, but the old one continued to intrude. Aside from the constant questions about Beckett from Beauvoir’s friends, I received requests from journalists who heard I was in Paris to interview me about him or to appear on radio shows to talk about him. I declined most of these offers, as the publications involved would be of little benefit to sales of the French translation, and trying to schedule appearances on these very-early-morning programs or after-midnight talk shows was impossible. I did speak on the phone with quite a few of the friends I had made in the Beckett world, but I managed to persuade most of them that I had so little time and so much to do for the new book that I could not see them. In retrospect, I think I did this because I was so fearful of contamination. This was a new and completely separate project, and I needed to make a clean break.

  As for Beckett himself, I paid him my usual courtesy of letting him know that I was in Paris and gave him the address and phone number of my apartment. He sent one of his usual replies midway through my stay, one of his calling cards inserted into a letter-sized envelope. He wrote that he was overburdened with translations of several of his new plays and planned to stay in Ussy as long as possible to complete the work. Once again he was my phantom, never in my presence but always flitting in my background. It was always unsettling to find out how much he knew about my doings, as this time he knew that I was going to Kassel at the conclusion of my time in Paris to speak at a Beckett symposium—for which he wished me luck.

  I was not looking forward to it, but I had accepted the invitation from the German university because I persuaded myself that I had to stand tall in the face of opprobrium and should therefore accept all such invitations. Just after the Beckett book was published, I read a remark made by the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who told an interviewer that “a woman has no place as an artist until she proves over and over that she won’t be eliminated.” It became one of the mantras with which I fortified myself for possible combat.

  Besides, I could put the conference in Kassel mostly out of mind because on my way I was going to stop at a tiny Alsatian commune called Goxwiller, where I would meet Hélène de Beauvoir. And that I could hardly wait to do.

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  I took an evening train to Strasbourg and spent the night in a properly heated hotel that was so hot after my freezing apartment I had to open the windows before I could sleep. The next morning at ten, Simone de Beauvoir’s sister came to take me to her home, where we were to spend the day in conversation. I recognized her the moment she entered the hotel lobby, for Hélène de Beauvoir de Roulet had the same fine bone structure, fair coloring, and exquisite complexion as her sister. The only physical difference between them was their hair; Simone’s was a rich brown while Hélène was a natural blonde.

  Hélène must have recognized me, too, as I stood at the concierge’s desk trying to get his help in changing my incorrect reservations to Kassel on the late-night train. Without a moment’s hesitation she took over, and after a single phone call she had corrected the huge mess. She verified something I had learned from talking to Simone’s closest friends, those whom she called her “family,” and also the feminist women she met with either in groups or singularly: the sisters may have looked alike, but their behavior was entirely different. Simone was completely unable to handle any sort of detail and would become bored or impatient when asked to deal with it. She who had ma
naged every aspect of Sartre’s life for years had since his death ceded everything connected with hers to Sylvie. The feminists were often in despair over her unwillingness to contribute to any sort of logistical discussion or to make a decision. Hélène was the exact opposite; to her, problems were meant for solving.

  As we drove to Goxwiller, the village on the Route des Vins where she lived in a renovated seventeenth-century farmhouse, she pointed out every site of historical interest while engaging me in a conversation in which I did most of the talking, mostly about myself. Unlike her sister, she was interested in people, particularly (as she called me) “young ones.” She, too, had read the Beckett biography, as had her husband, Lionel de Roulet, a retired diplomat, and she told me they both were eager to talk about it over lunch. But before then she would show me around her house and we would have coffee and talk about her sister.

  I was surprised when she turned down tiny village lanes to enter the courtyard to her compound, for I had imagined something on the order of a rural farm. Inside the courtyard was a sort of barn overflowing with what looked like several centuries of farm detritus. Next to it was her summer studio, an enclosed but unheated space where she painted large canvases in warm weather. The main house was a warren of rooms on different levels, evidence of a structure that had been added onto haphazardly over several centuries. It was, however, a cozy and comfortable place where life was obviously lived in contentment. Lionel had a bedroom and study at one end of the structure and Hélène had her bedroom at the other. The bedroom also served as her winter studio, where she worked on smaller projects, and in pride of place on a sturdy table next to her bed was a large flat stone that she used for the work she had recently begun to enjoy, the painstaking etching of copper plates.

  We sat there throughout the morning, talking so intensely that Lionel had to call from the other part of the house to remind us that it was getting late for lunch and he was hungry. Hélène was an excellent cook, and the lunch she served, at a beautiful table set with antique china and old family silver, was bountiful. Later, when she served afternoon tea, it was lapsang souchong presented ceremonially in porcelain cups so thin they were translucent. Everything this woman touched was graceful and beautiful, a stark contrast to life on the rue Schoelcher. We joked about how Simone was hopeless with all things domestic, and Hélène imitated her sister’s disdain with a dismissive wave of her hand and her sputtering insistence that she had more important things to do.

  We talked for long hours as the afternoon became evening, of her days as an art student in Paris and as a diplomat’s wife in Portugal and Italy. When we talked of her girlhood, I told her how her colorful memories differed in so many ways from Simone’s gloomy ones. I told Hélène how Simone described the family apartment as always dark because it got little outdoor light and her mother would not permit artificial illumination. She burst into laughter as she described the light-filled apartment on the third floor of the building that houses the famous Café de la Rotonde, with large windows that open onto balconies just above the trees that line the boulevard du Montparnasse.

  Simone remembered formal occasions during which ladies in hideous black bombazine dresses gathered around a dining table in dour disapproval of the fidgeting children, who were expected to sit in silent respect of their elders. Hélène remembered Sunday afternoons as the happy time after a huge luncheon when their grandfather would request music and someone would play the piano while others sang and the family darling, little doted-on Hélène, would dance, often to a tune from Offenbach’s La belle Hélène, which was highly popular in Paris at the time. “What did Simone do while you danced?” I asked. “Oh, she probably sulked because she wanted to be off somewhere reading a book instead.” Hélène’s laughter trilled at the memory. From their girlhood summers on the family estate, Meyrignac, to the relationship between Simone and Jean-Paul Sartre, the discrepancies between what I had heard from Simone and what Hélène was telling me mounted.

  These discrepancies created a quandary for me as a biographer, for how could I determine which sister’s memory was the more valid? How was I to present “the real truth,” and how, in my writing, was I to persuade my reader that it was the objective truth and not my reliance on one witness over another because that was how I wanted it to be and not how it actually was? I wondered why I was so willing to take Hélène for the reliably objective witness and to cast Simone in the role of the unreliable narrator who wanted to shape her personal truth into the story she wanted the world to believe. It was early days in my interviews with Simone de Beauvoir, so this question of objective narrative truth became something I kept in mind always, something I worried over and wrote and rewrote until the manuscript went to the printer and no more changes could be made.

  Here is where one of the methods I adopted to write about Beckett carried over into my writing about Beauvoir. Whenever I had multiple sources and whenever they could provide accounts of the same event, incident, situation, I factored them all into an informal compendium. Sometimes it resembled a list, other times a chart, and other times an example of my “three p’s,” the passionate purple prose where I wrote everything into a kind of narrative that I needed to see in order to pick out what seemed important, accurate, honest, objective—so many qualities were involved here—to arrive at the “real” reality. And even as I was doing all this, I was aware that I might be indulging in the biographical fallacy of giving privilege to one set of facts over another. I liked to think that I showed scrupulous objectivity when I wrote about Beckett and factored into his life story the testimonies of so many of his close relatives, but after this first meeting with Hélène and my early meetings with Simone, I had to wonder if I might be skirting perilously close to giving pride of place, if not actual preference, to one sister’s account over the other’s. Was I tending toward accepting the version that I wanted to write rather than the one that had actually happened?

  I talked about this with Hélène as she drove me to the Strasbourg train station on that cold, rainy night. She urged me to give her sister’s memories validation above all others because, as she said repeatedly, “my sister is the most honest person I know. She will never shade the truth to make anything she tells you favor her.” And then she qualified her statement: “She will tell you the truth as she knows it, or as she believes it to be. Not,” she insisted with some vehemence, “not as she wants it to be.” And as I found, in almost everything I asked Simone directly, Hélène was right.

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  The conference in Kassel added to my concern about what constituted “the real truth.” I knew all the old jokes about how history is written by the last person still living, and one event proved how that last person can perpetuate a lie that future generations should examine carefully. Knowing that Beckett had spent long periods of time in the German state of Hesse, where his Sinclair cousins lived and where the conference was being held, the conveners had searched for anyone who might have remembered Beckett or his cousins. They were especially interested in any information about Peggy, the cousin who died tragically young of tuberculosis and who many scholars believe was the inspiration for the woman in Krapp’s Last Tape.

  When Peggy died, she had a younger sibling who was eight years old and whose very good friend was a little German girl, also eight. The conveners were thrilled to find her, now an elderly woman, and they invited her to share her recollections of being in the Sinclair house during Beckett’s visits. She had often boasted throughout the town that she retained many memories of him. Her appearance was billed as a special presentation, and all the attendees were on the edges of their seats as she began to speak.

  She was a woman of modest background and little education, and as her memories of the Sinclair household unfolded, it became clear that a small child could not have observed such adult behavior as she described. When the audience pressed her with questions that only a much older observe
r could have answered, she became red-faced, flustered, and loud. And then she began to invent. She was trying to impress her audience, to give them whatever version of reality they wanted that she could create on the spot, for clearly she had little, if any, recollection of the young Samuel Beckett. It was sad to see how determined she was to please.

  Eventually one of the conveners interrupted what had become a shrill monologue, thanked her for coming, and led her off the stage. As she passed through the audience, she tried to make eye contact, but most people refused to look at her. She was clearly embarrassed and humiliated, and I felt sorry for her. However, it proved once again how a biographer had to weigh and measure every memory before committing anything to posterity. If you can’t trust the teller, you cannot trust the tale.

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