Parisian Lives Page 29
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There were other times, often after the official end of an interview, when a throwaway question would result in an astonishing discovery. The time I will always remember most vividly came at the end of a long and intense session during which I had succeeded in persuading Beauvoir to lift up the Lucite curtain and let me through. We were both exhausted from the effort as we were having our ritual scotch. As we sat there, she gulping hers down and refilling her glass while I tried to sip mine as slowly as possible, I spotted the clunky silver band she wore on the middle finger of her left hand. I had seen it many times before but had never thought to ask about it, and now I was only making polite conversation until I thought I could make a graceful exit. “That’s such an interesting ring,” I said, and I told her that I had often admired it.
“Algren gave it to me. I wear it on this finger because it was supposed to be my wedding ring and I am going to be buried with it.”
I had no time to digest this stunning admission because she launched into the entire story of their relationship, of how much she had loved him and how romantically he had proposed to her on their Mexican holiday, and how she had thought seriously for the first time ever of leaving her life in France—or, more accurately, of leaving Sartre—to move to Chicago and become an American housewife. As she talked, I was in a quandary. This was vital information for her biography, but the work session, when everything was on the record, had ended, and I didn’t dare pull out my recorder or steno pad for fear that I would interrupt her reminiscing and cause her to stop talking. I certainly could not break in and ask if what she was telling me was on the record and I could use it in the biography, so I let her talk. I don’t remember any other topic that moved her so deeply and gave her such a high as telling me about Algren. I thought I saw a young woman deeply, romantically, ecstatically in love. She had never once talked about Sartre, or Lanzmann, or any of what she called her “passing fancies” (men with whom she had one-night stands or casual, fleeting affairs), with any of these emotions. Instead she talked about them with such detachment that I often envisioned her in a white lab coat, examining them as specimens under a microscope throughout the sexual act. It was only when she talked about Algren that she became girlish, flirtatious, gloriously happy, and deeply sad—all in the single telling.
She was euphoric after this session, and I, too, was emotionally moved, but even more, highly alarmed over how to write the story that she had just confided. We were off the record when she talked about this important moment in her life. Would I be breaking ethical boundaries if I used it? I decided to think about it and ask her later. I had to get it all down while it was sharp in my mind, so I hurried down her street and up to the boulevard du Montparnasse and the Dôme, where I took my favorite front-row seat before the window. I ordered my usual white wine, whipped out my notebook, and started to write down everything she had said.
At some point I paused to breathe and raised my head to look out the window. There I saw Samuel Beckett, swaying slowly as he crossed the street, probably about to look in the window and see me sitting there. Now what was I going to do? Indeed, it had been quite a day, and it wasn’t over yet.
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The evening when Beauvoir told me about Algren’s ring was the first time I had seen Samuel Beckett since finishing his biography. In order to process the sighting, I had to record it in the DD: “The most amazing thing happened today. I was sitting in the Dôme after SdB told me about Algren, trying to digest it, and I don’t know why, but I started thinking, what if SB should walk by just now? What would I do? And just then—he did!!! I almost fainted is what I did. And then I just sat there, unable to move and sure I was about to black out and cause a big scene. My heart was pounding as I watched him pause at the door and I held my breath but he didn’t come in and he didn’t see me. He walked on down the street. I was turned into stone. I couldn’t move.”
I suppose that on some deep level I knew that I was too emotionally overwrought to converse with him. Fearing that he might turn around and come back, I managed to get myself up and out of the Dôme, and as I looked in the direction he had gone to see if the coast was clear for me to leave, I saw his tall figure sway into La Coupole. I toyed briefly with the idea of following him in and pretending it was a serendipitous coincidence. But no, it would be a waste of money, as I would be too nervous to eat the expensive food, either with him or alone at a separate table.
Still revved up from Beauvoir’s revelation and then the close encounter with Beckett, I walked all the way to Saint-Sulpice before taking the Métro to my usual stop. I collapsed into my apartment but spent most of the night sleeping fitfully, waking repeatedly to hunch over a notebook and scribble something I had just remembered or some new thought that I would want to explore about why I had behaved as I did. In retrospect, hiding from Beckett seems rather silly, and I am embarrassed by it. So many years later, I still blush when I think about it.
I had no appointments until the evening of the next day, and I needed that time alone to decompress and decipher why I did not want to talk to Samuel Beckett. Was it because I was so deeply immersed in writing and thinking about Beauvoir, which was very different from how I had written about Beckett? That may have been part of it, for once I began to write about Beauvoir, I chose not to read any biographies while I was actually writing. I had developed the possibly irrational fear that I might inadvertently adopt stylistic tics or even plagiarize the work of someone else. It’s a habit I keep to this day. Perhaps the reason I did not want to talk to Beckett came out of a related concern, that a conversation with him might influence how I talked to her, which in turn would allow the book I had written about him to influence the one I was writing about her. That was a genuine possibility, but I think the most probable reason why I avoided him was my “anxiety of influence,” one based upon the general uproar the Beckett biography had caused in France, where Becketteering had become a favorite pastime of the intellectual elite.
As I tried to fill every available moment when not with Beauvoir with interviews, I depended on letters to set up as many as possible beforehand. Word of my arrival would spread among the chattering classes, which led all sorts of people to seek my time. Either they wanted me to interview them for the Beauvoir book, or, as in the case of the journalist and writer Pierre Assouline, they wanted to interview me. And not about Beauvoir, but about Beckett and the book that had been published four years earlier.
Assouline invited me to lunch, and I arrived late and out of breath because I had misheard the name of the street and had had to race across the sixth arrondissement when I realized my mistake. I had hardly sat down when he launched into “a third degree about SB. Suddenly he tells me all the American Becketteers hate me and have convinced the French to do the same. He says they hate with a violence he has never seen. And now the French believe them and spew the same hate. [Avigdor] Arikha says if Assouline even speaks to me, Arikha will never speak to him again. The same with [Jérôme] Lindon who denies ever having met me and says everything I wrote is a lie. I break in here and tell him to see Mary Kling, who introduced us, and to ask Lindon how I could have gotten access to all those files and photos if he had not permitted it. And with glee in his voice Assouline prattled on, describing more of this irrational insane gossip, all to my complete disgust.”
I should have been well prepared for this. Just that morning I had received a phone call from Mary Kling telling me that the Swiss publisher Diogenes Verlag was canceling their contract to publish Beckett in German translation because “ ‘the publisher fears the negative French reaction will influence German sales, especially all the sexual innuendo about you and him.’ Mary warned that it seemed I had powerful enemies who were out to sabotage the book.”
Assouline continued to tell me about all those who hated me while I tried to explain the Becketteers’ jealousy with an onslaught of my own: “I wrote the
book none of them dared to write and now they cannot stand their continuing powerlessness to derail its success and my career. I launch into a diatribe about the position of women in the workforce in general, and specifically in academe. He says it’s all too typically American—feminists out of control and men furious—and of course things are far more sophisticated in France. I guess we end up being friends when we leave, as he gives me one of his books, lavishly signed, and invites me to contribute an article on Beckett to Lire.”
I did write an article for the magazine he edited, and it was published along with Assouline’s interview of me. I suppose he had to cater to his base, for sure enough, he could not resist taking gratuitous swipes at the biography and at me personally. I said nothing to him but channeled my rage into the DD: “Pierre sent his article with the usual ‘homage to Saint Sam’ in it. I sent a gracious thank you despite the barb against me and my work. What no one seems to ask, perhaps because they are too stupid, too enamored of SB, or perhaps too frightened of offending him, is why this pathological veil of secrecy surrounds him, and what this says not only about his personality but about the personalities of the people who are part of his world. Why all this two-faced, behind-the-back stabbing and biting? Why not come right out in the open? I am everybody’s favorite object of hysteria because I wrote the bio and afterward refused to tiptoe around him and be one of that crowd. One should ask why these so-called mature and successful men need to create the role of whipping-girl for me. And one should ask why—of all the books written about SB—mine is the one they always mention and always quote (sure, mostly negatively), which is even more telling, I think. What is important to me is that I did a good and honest piece of work and that it will last a long time after all these Becketteers disappear into their own assholes.”
The real problem was that if Assouline, a perfect stranger before this meeting, knew all this gossip about me, Beckett had probably heard even more of it. I was so happy to be in the straightforward world of Simone de Beauvoir that I had no desire to return to his, where people walked on eggshells for fear of being ostracized by him. As I put it, “How much healthier—and fustier, and gustier—is the world of SdB. What a pleasure to be with people who are not terrified of their ‘monstre sacré.’ People who respect her and love her but don’t hesitate to stand up to her. People who tell her (and me) everything straight out, come what may.”
During the years I worked with Simone de Beauvoir, I could not avoid Beckett’s world. The invitations to write articles and attend conferences and seminars never stopped (especially from Germany, the one place where the focus was always on an honest assessment of his canon and what I had written about it). I hated how these diversions kept me from steady and sustained writing about Beauvoir, but I felt that not to accept them would be tantamount to cowardice. Like Louise Bourgeois, I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and went charging on. Simone de Beauvoir’s example was influencing me, as were my ever-expanding friendships with French feminists. Even if I wasn’t ready to see Beckett yet, I was ready to make some major changes. And the first one was firing my agent.
Carl Brandt had always treated me like the neophyte to publishing that I certainly was when he asked to represent me, but I had learned a lot in the years since I had signed the contract to write about Samuel Beckett. Every so often I would propose ideas for things I wanted to write, from magazine articles to future books, and every time he would tell me why none of them had any merit. I often met people in the publishing world at book launch parties or other receptions, and more than a few editors expressed regret that I had not accepted their invitations to write something I would have liked, had I been told about them. When I asked Carl why he had not given me the opportunity to accept or refuse, he said they were not my concern because he made the decisions for me.
What he said rankled, as I was constantly trying to raise money to pay for research and travel. I was still spending far too much time applying for grants and fellowships when one of his so-called decisions cost me a sizable advance, and that was the final straw. A British publisher had invited me to write a short book about T. S. Eliot, someone I had long wanted to write about, as part of a series suitable for a general audience. The money offered was (to poor me) a staggering sum, most of it payable up front, and best of all, I would not have to start until after I finished the Beauvoir biography. But Carl never told me about this offer, and I didn’t find out until the contract had been accepted by someone else. “What a shame you refused,” said the series editor when I met him at a party. “You were our first choice.”
I told this to two of my good friends, the writers Judith Rossner and Barbara Seaman, who were as appalled as I was. Judy, always forthright and outspoken, had the answer: “What you need is a good woman who will work for you! Fire that man! Get yourself out of that insulting [Beauvoir] contract!” And so I did. I telephoned Carl, and for a change he accepted my call. As I was telling him why I wished to leave his representation, he said “Fine” and hung up. We never spoke again.
Judy gave me the names of four women agents and told me to interview them and choose the one I liked best. Even after all I’d been through, I was unnerved by the idea of interviewing these women who held such amazingly prestigious reputations in the literary world. However, there was no need to meet the others after the first one, Elaine Markson. Our connection was immediate, and her friendship and wise counsel sustained me for the next twenty-eight years.
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Being in Paris and away from Penn had relieved me of that other thorn in my side—snide colleagues, tenure battles, etc. The phone in my apartment did ring often with calls from the university, but these were not only positive but highly intriguing. It seemed that the extraordinary woman who had recently become director of communications, Mary Perot Nichols, was envisioning a groundbreaking international feminist conference. It was to be paid for mostly by the French government, which would also pay expenses for twelve to fifteen important women scholars, writers, politicians, and artists to attend. The centerpiece would be, as I wrote, “live and in person: Simone de Beauvoir!!! Yeah, sure—in their dreams.” The project seemed so ambitious that from the beginning I had reservations. However, if it happened, it would be truly amazing. Knowing that I was working on the Beauvoir biography, Mary hoped I would be a valuable ally in securing Beauvoir’s participation.
Since Sartre’s death, Frenchwomen had sought Beauvoir as their spokesperson on many different fronts. In 1982 a women’s center was created and named in her honor: the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir. Founded by (in their words) “three militant feminists”—the film director Carole Roussopoulos, the actress Delphine Seyrig, and the director Ioana Wieder—the center was dedicated to collecting and preserving all things connected with the history of women. Beauvoir was exceedingly proud that it bore her name.
These were the years when much of her activity was devoted to supporting women. She had signed the Manifesto of the 121, joining other women who admitted to having had abortions; she agreed to participate in every program Yvette Roudy sponsored through the Ministry for the Rights of Women. When younger groups of feminist women asked her to attend their meetings, she did not hesitate. She worked closely with Roudy’s private adviser, Michelle Coquillat, whose brilliant insights into the condition of women enriched my own feminist education. Beauvoir agreed to let small groups meet in her apartment to plot strategy for protests by the MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes), and she gave them advice on how to write manifestos and proclamations. When some of their names came up in our conversations, she spoke warmly, and among those she mentioned in passing were Anne Zelensky, who represented the MLF, and Claudine Monteil. She liked it that the journalist Josyane Savigneau wrote about her and that Professor Geneviève Fraisse gave lectures based on her writings. Beauvoir thought nothing of phoning the feminist publisher Françoise Pasquier to suggest she publish someone�
��s new book. She kept in touch with her contemporary Colette Audry, who told me proudly that now that she was so old, she liked to call herself “France’s first feminist and Beauvoir’s inspiration.” And although Claire Etcherelli was seldom an active participant, Beauvoir had come to depend on the writer she had become fond of through her work on Les Temps modernes.
I never asked to be included in the small planning sessions and meetings she held in her apartment and she never invited me, but I always attended the public occasions—not with Beauvoir, as her escort, but close enough to observe her behavior. I could see that she gloried in being part of this activity and was particularly proud to be singled out so often by Yvette Roudy.
All these activities marked a dramatic change from her daily schedule when Sartre was alive. Until Arlette shut her out so completely, almost everything she did revolved around catering to his daily demands. Without him, it was as if she had reinvented herself and could spend her days as she liked. She continued to be an early riser, even though she was seldom eager to confront the day. By drinking tea and reading newspapers and correspondence, she was able to get herself going by midmorning. Usually she answered letters, made phone calls, and wrote a little if there was time. She no longer had to go to Sartre’s apartment for a one o’clock lunch, so she usually ate something at home, brought by Sylvie, unless she had a date. She tried to schedule social engagements for the early afternoon because she liked to get back to work by four or five, but she could not often work until nine or later, as she had when Sartre was alive, because her life was no longer as private as it had been. Such freedom was not without a price, as her feminist activity put her smack in the middle of the public eye. She was indeed France’s monstre sacré, their beloved and respected “sacred monster.”