Parisian Lives Page 3

  I began to read them in February 1970, huddled in a cubicle in Butler Library, bundled in coat, hat, and gloves, sure that my breath was freezing on my upper lip and icicles were forming on my eyelashes. I was still reading them in that same cubicle in the sweltering heat of July when I realized how many months had passed and I was only on Sermon 11. At that rate, I envisioned myself as a stooped, white-haired old lady in a pilled sweater and coke-bottle glasses and still a graduate student. The Danforth Foundation had given me three years, maybe four, and I knew I had to find a different subject—and fast—or I would never meet my funding cutoff date. Thus I made a life-changing decision that was based not on aesthetic concerns but rather on one that was financially practical.

  I used three-by-five note cards in those precomputer days, and I took a pile of blank ones and fanned them across the desk as if they were playing cards, which in a sense they were. On each one I wrote the name of a contemporary writer whose work I admired enough to want to write about it. As a journalist, I knew how to write fast when on deadline, and if I could define a topic that required no waiting for libraries to find crumbling old books and manuscripts and no ancient languages, I could pull together one hundred or so pages in a year’s time. Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Conrad, Beckett—I forget who else, but there were just under a dozen names on the little cards. Without thinking about which name might present the best opportunity for original research, or even which I liked the most, I shuffled them into alphabetical order. There were no A’s, and Beckett came first, before Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster. Beckett it shall be, I said to myself, and that was how my life in biography began.

  Like a dutiful beginning academic (powerless and lacking authority), I decided at first to follow the rules and write a dissertation about Beckett that was based primarily on literary theory. I entered the academic world in the waning days of the New Criticism and the heyday of what has since been jumbled together under the broad title of “French critical theory.” The only valid interpretation of literature came from the work itself, not from the author’s life or the world in which he lived (“he” being the pronoun of choice, because the accepted canon then was composed almost entirely of male writers). Never mind that a work might have been produced in haste by a writer who could not pay his rent or take his sick child to a doctor, or by a political ideologue who was writing in fury about his country’s regressive government, or by a frustrated person who had to live a deeply closeted life and could only hint at sexual preference in carefully guarded references. None of this mattered then; only the text itself was relevant.

  I remember a little ditty coined during those days that I read in The New York Review of Books, one that perfectly captured the zeitgeist: “This is the story of Jacques Derrida; there ain’t no writer, there ain’t no reader either.” The “holy trinity” of Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida ruled, and there was no place in such an environment for anyone who considered them, as I did, convincing in the main but still unholy. Reading Beckett’s work made me want answers to a lot of questions, all of which were based on the life from which the work sprang rather than from any theorizing of my own or others. And as I wrote, my thoughts called me back to my days as a journalist who knew the tingle that came from identifying a good story.

  I was initially attracted to Beckett’s fiction rather than his plays, and in his novels I found many fond and loving references to actual places in the Wicklow Hills and the countryside surrounding his family’s suburban home in Foxrock. Besides recognizing real places, I wondered why others did not see the wit and humor in his descriptions of the thinly disguised Dublin characters who peopled his novels. There were times when I literally laughed out loud as I read his prose descriptions of their real-life antics. I wondered why other scholars and critics didn’t see these aspects of his writing. Were they so intimidated by the political correctness of literary theory that they had no room for real life? Or was I reading his novels with a warped sensibility, particularly as it might have reflected my own skewed sense of humor? I decided to keep an open mind while I read, one that would allow me to decipher his intentions and not impose my interpretations on them. As I listed the questions I wanted the dissertation to answer, I realized that, in short, they were all one and the same: who was the man whose imagination had managed to puzzle and perplex an international coterie of readers, leaving them to wonder about the novels they read and the plays they saw?

  I came to realize that I still revered the writer and the creative process; I embraced my status as the renegade student who had the temerity to ask how a literary work came into being, what had inspired it, and who had been the shaping intelligence behind it. “All you need is the when and where,” said the skeptical Professor Unterecker, who knew of my background in journalism and was the only one to whom I confided my “aberrant” interests. He warned me that even to think of investigating such issues in the work of Samuel Beckett would be akin to committing academic suicide. If I wrote what amounted to a biography, he said, I would never get the PhD, never mind a teaching job. At that point I was not sure I wanted one, so I forged ahead.

  Unterecker reluctantly agreed to advise the dissertation after I assured him that I was planning to demonstrate sound critical analysis of new and never-before-known information I had collected about Beckett’s writing. But I may have been a touch disingenuous when I told him I would tailor my essay to emphasize theory and stressed that it was merely the foundation for a future in-depth study that could become the all-important first book a scholar needs for tenure. In reality I had no intention of writing such a book. The answers to my questions about Beckett’s work could be found only by looking at the writer who created them, and the only way to do that was through an extended profile or—heaven forfend in the academic world of the 1970s—a biography. (I did admit that the dissertation would have some biographical underpinnings, but they would be so slight that the evaluating committee would have to agree they were there just to provide a basis for my theoretical conclusions.)

  Professional considerations aside, this was a challenging proposition. Not only had I never considered writing biography before, but with the exception of some of the classics, I had never read them. On my own as an undergraduate, I discovered and admired Suetonius, Plutarch, and Vasari, and I chuckled over Charlemagne’s two biographers, Notker and Einhard. In graduate school I read the icons, Boswell and Johnson, whom I found delightful but not particularly important as models for my own critical writing. I made the obligatory glance at Froude’s Carlyle and Lockhart’s Walter Scott, but only long enough to agree with various professors who espoused the theory that they were not important for any significant understanding of their subjects’ writings. Even as I enjoyed Lytton Strachey’s scathing Eminent Victorians, I struggled to shake off the theorists who advised students not to mistake any of these “lives” for serious scholarship. They were to be enjoyed in passing, as little more than gossip, for as one professor told me in a statement I would hear all too frequently in years to come, “It’s not scholarship; it’s only biography.”

  Meanwhile I wrote the dissertation and was about to get the degree in record time, in spring 1972. I didn’t find a teaching job right away because there were very few in the 1970s, and despite the Danforth Foundation’s entreaties that they should be given to women, those that were available usually went to men. I made desultory applications to some of the colleges in Connecticut and nearby New York, but nothing full-time materialized, and I wasn’t interested in tying myself down to teach an overload of composition courses on a part-time basis for a pittance of a salary. As my dissertation bubbled away in my mind, I realized that I had had so many fascinating experiences and encounters while writing it that I was more determined than ever to write a biography about Samuel Beckett’s life and work.

  During this period I often thought of John Unterecker shaking his head, warning about “academic suicide” and how I would “never get
a teaching job.” For five years he would be proven right, but neither of us knew it at the time, and one of us really didn’t care.

  3

  Like Scarlett O’Hara, who always put off worrying about things until the time came to do so, I planned not to worry about getting a job, because first I had Beckett’s biography to consider. When Jack Unterecker (once I had the degree we became friends on a first-name basis) asked how I planned to begin, I replied blithely that I would probably model it after a newspaper profile. Jack had an extremely droll way of speaking and an equally dry sense of humor. He raised one skeptical eyebrow and said, “Don’t you think that before you do anything, you should tell Beckett about it?” As I knew nothing about how biographies got themselves written, and as I was basing my decision on how journalism profiles came into being, it had never occurred to me that I might need “permission,” or an “agreement,” or even a “legal contract”—all expressions I heard for the first time when Jack spoke of them. Undeterred and blithely confident that I already had the necessary skill set, I said yes, of course, and wrote a letter to Beckett.

  Once I started to write it, I realized how persuasive it had to be, and I agonized over it as I discarded enough drafts to overflow a wastebasket. In the end, the one I mailed in that hot July of 1971 was fairly brief, written in haste, and taken directly to the post office before I lost my nerve. I didn’t keep a carbon, and after I sent it off, I feared that I had probably portrayed myself foolishly, like a literary Joan of Arc, clad in shining armor and clutching my reporter’s notebook as I rode in to save the day. I do remember writing to Beckett that a biography was a necessary addition to all the critical writing about him, because I read his novels very differently from most other scholars, and I found so much vitality and humor in his prose and such deadly accuracy in his depictions of people and descriptions of places. I must have come off as extremely pompous in that impassioned paragraph, which I hoped would persuade him of the importance of my argument. I concluded the letter with a brief, to-the-point description of myself: a woman who had married young, had two school-age children, and was a journalist and reporter at heart. I asked for the favor of a reply because I did not want to write such a book without his cooperation.

  The mail between New Haven and Paris was probably never again as swift as it was during that exchange. A week to the day after I mailed my letter, I received his reply. He began by telling me that his life was “dull and without interest” and “the professors know more about it than I do.” He wrote all that in a tiny, careful, and meticulous hand, on tissue-thin unlined paper, with his writing proceeding in a straight line from left to right. Then came a curious second paragraph, in a larger hand and a scrawl that began at bottom left and rose to top right in several unpunctuated lines: “Any biographical information I possess is at your disposal if you come to Paris I will see you.”

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. I kept rubbing the paper, thinking it would say something quite different if I just blinked for a moment. I looked out the window and saw my neighbor across the street, the writer-professor Ernest Lockridge, and I rushed out, waving the letter at him. He was teaching at Yale then, and while I had been studying for my dissertation oral exam, he used to sing a little ditty to the tune of the Miss America song whenever he saw me: “There she goes—think of all the crap she knows.” He had been a cheerful and encouraging voice of reason during my student years, giving me a necessary nudge not to give up whenever I was down. I showed him Beckett’s letter to make sure its content was real, and he assured me that it was. When my husband came home that night, he did the same. A practical man, he said I should call the Danforth Foundation, tell them of this extraordinary invitation, and ask for a special grant to go to Paris. The exceptional woman who ran the GFW program, Mary Brucker, listened as I blurted out my request and said so quietly that I almost didn’t hear, “Of course you must go. We’ll send you the check.”

  It was early August when I replied to Beckett to say that I could come in October or November, and he agreed that either month would be fine. My Columbia classmate Nancy MacKnight was planning to spend several days in Paris before going to London for her own research, so we arranged to travel together. At the same time, another Columbia classmate played a major role in helping me get started on the undertaking that would become the biography. Nancy Milford had just bucked the antibiography attitude at Columbia by publishing to great success her groundbreaking feminist study of Zelda Fitzgerald. We were having lunch one day when Nancy asked if I had found a teaching job. I didn’t want one, I replied, because I was going to Paris to meet Samuel Beckett and write his biography.

  Several days later, when I was sitting at my desk trying to figure out how biographies are written, never mind how to undertake the many household things I had to do to prepare my family for my absence, my phone rang. A man identified himself as Carl Brandt, Nancy Milford’s literary agent. Nancy had relayed my news, and Carl Brandt told me that if it was true, it would be an astonishing coup in the literary world; he was sure he could arrange a book contract and would like to represent me. I knew that his father had founded the highly respected literary agency Brandt & Brandt, so I was thrilled to join their list of distinguished writers and accepted at once. I could hardly believe all my good luck.

  Thus, happily situated with the Danforth Foundation guaranteeing travel money for my initial meeting with Beckett and Carl Brandt holding out the possibility of a book contract and an advance against royalties, I was truly on my way. When I tell this story today, other writers shake their heads in wonder at how easily a new career fell into my lap. They are not alone, for as I reflect back upon my amazing good fortune, I marvel at the ease of it myself.

  I was wildly excited when I told Jack Unterecker about all the amazing things that were happening, and he remained his usual calm and tranquil self as he listened. He was also practical: if I intended to pursue such madness, he said, I should go to Dublin and London as well as Paris, and he would provide me with a list of the names of his friends who were also friends of Beckett. Jack had already demonstrated how invaluable such connections could be by introducing me to two New Yorkers who were his close friends and even closer friends of Beckett, the actor Jack MacGowran and the poet George Reavey. Both had enriched my academic work as I finished the dissertation, and now that a proper biography was in the works they were eager to contribute even further. Conversations with them would grant my first insights into Beckett the man rather than Beckett the author. And the letters and other documents they could share would be invaluable.

  * * *

  —

  During Beckett’s unhappy London years in the 1930s, George Reavey was the friend who was determined to help him get his novel Murphy published and who took it upon himself to be Beckett’s agent. Their correspondence covered the years of rejections from forty-two publishers before George finally succeeded in persuading Routledge to bring out the book in 1938. During those frustrating years, as rejections mounted, Beckett wrote letters both amusing and scathing. One I particularly liked was the limerick he composed after a rejection by the American publisher Doubleday, Doran: “Oh Doubleday Doran/More oxy than moron/ you’ve a mind like a whore on/the way to Bundoran.” When I used this letter in my dissertation, it was one of the earliest indications I had of how Beckett used his withering sense of humor to respond to adversity.

  I first met George at his apartment in a tenement walk-up on East Eighty-Fifth Street where he lived with his playwright wife, Jean. It was truly the home of a hoarder, a railroad flat so cluttered that almost all the space was unusable. There were ceiling-high boxes of papers, stacks of books, paintings by his ex-wife, Irene Rice Pereira, and the works of his artist friends (and Beckett’s) Bram and Geer van Velde. There was one narrow pathway down the hallway leading from the entry to the front room, where the only uncluttered space was the sofa that became their bed at night. I could not believe my eyes the firs
t time I walked in, but almost before I could adjust to the gloom caused by all the boxes blocking the dirty windows, George said we should repair down the street to Dorrian’s Red Hand, where we could get a drink. What he meant, as I had ample opportunity to learn from that day on, was that he would drink scotch whiskey and I would pay for it. George was a falling-down drunk, an alcoholic who shrewdly dangled just enough documents to keep me coming back. But every time I became so frustrated over how much whiskey I had to buy that I threatened to have no further dealings with him, I stopped to tell myself that his contributions were priceless. The difficulty was getting him to dole them out, a nightmare that lasted throughout the seven years it took to write the book.