Parisian Lives Read online

  Whiskey drinking was a theme among Beckett’s friends, as I discovered when I met Jack MacGowran in July. He was performing a one-man show at the Lenox Arts Center’s Music Tent in Lenox, Massachusetts. Armed with Unterecker’s introduction, my husband and I drove up to see the pastiche of Beckett’s fictional characters that MacGowran had written for himself. It was an unseasonably cold and rainy night, so windy that the metal chains securing the tent cloth to the poles clanked eerily, enhancing the sound of the shuffling, sniffling MacGowran as he brought life to the characters from Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. He wore a grungy overcoat several sizes too large, which dwarfed his small, thin frame, and his wretched boots, also too large, flapped loudly each time he took a step, adding another counterpoint to the wind and rain.

  The audience howled with laughter when MacGowran performed the sixteen sucking stones episode from Molloy. Things grew quiet as he performed some of the darker passages from Malone Dies, and by the time he got to the last lines of The Unnamable, the audience was hushed in a mix of reverence and agony over the character’s plight. When he said, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” the memorable lines from The Unnamable that ended his performance, the only sound in the tent was the occasional clang of a chain until the audience caught enough of its collective breath to surround MacGowran with tumultuous applause. It remains to this day one of my most moving theatrical experiences.

  Afterward I went to the tiny dressing room next to the tent, where MacGowran was taking off his makeup and pouring the first of his many post-performance whiskies. He was on a high, having had a full house and a receptive audience that called him back for repeated curtain calls. Gloria, his wife, popped in long enough to tell me not to rush, as he could take his time to talk at length. That was before she chided him to go easy on the whiskey. She might have been talking to the howling wind, for MacGowran was a dedicated alcoholic who made swift work of the bottle. I was enthralled watching him pour a glass whenever he paused to breathe while he gave me what amounted to a second, private performance. When I asked about when and how he first met Beckett, he launched into one story after another, until he stopped suddenly with a look of surprise on his face. “Do you know,” he said, “I’ve never talked about Sam like this before. I have much to say that I think is important, but before you, no one ever asked.”

  He told me how awkward their first meeting had been, at the Royal Court Theatre shortly before the premiere of Endgame, when he asked the British director Donald McWhinnie to introduce them. Beckett told him to come before the dress rehearsal, after which he would leave immediately for Paris, because he never attended his opening nights. MacGowran said he “was reduced to pitiful silence” and Beckett “was equally silent because he was shy. It was like this until I understood that silences were common with him, in life as well as in his art. I blurted out something about rugby and he sprang to life, saying yes, there had just been a great match. Rugby, cricket, a six-day bicycle race—suddenly we were talking nonstop, and I was aware of the intonations and idioms of Dublin speech. I asked about his Irish background, and we learned that we were born and raised three miles apart in the suburb of Foxrock. All of that, the nature of our natal rhythms, the terrain we both loved, the characters we had known—a deep friendship was formed, and this was only the first of many conversations.”

  Both men were Anglo-Irish Protestants and from families that we decided were slightly higher on the Irish social rung than upper middle class. Their fathers were both hail-fellows-well-met, the source of the fun in their lives; their mothers were the rigid disciplinarians who kept spotless houses, held elegantly formal (and boring) teas, and made sure they went to the Anglican church every Sunday, dressed in uncomfortable suits and shirts with itchy collars.

  Foxrock was also the gateway to the Wicklow Hills, which both men explored as boys. As Jack described the landscape, citing the occasional marker, monument, or unusual road sign, I found myself jumping in to say, “But that’s in…” and then naming one or another of Beckett’s novels. “Yes, yes!” Jack would agree, bouncing on his hard wooden chair as he reached over to pat my hand in agreement. I was enthralled by his imitations of the Dublin characters, the real people who were so thinly disguised in Murphy, many of whom were so upset by Beckett’s portrayal that they refused to speak to him for years after it was published. Jack told me to prepare myself for Beckett’s spot-on imitations of them when I talked to him, for Beckett was a gifted mimic.

  On and on he went, telling me what I could expect Beckett to be like, and what he told me left me with two conflicting emotions. On the one hand, I could not wait to get to Paris to talk to Beckett, but on the other hand, I was terrified that I was about to undertake a project that was way over my head and beyond my capabilities. Well before I wrote a single word, I worried about how I would incorporate the personal into what would become a public document that seemed destined to reveal much about a hitherto private life.

  We could have gone on all night, I am sure, and we were well into our second hour when Gloria returned to tell us that we really had to bring the conversation to a close. It was the first of quite a few casual conversations and formal interviews that I had with Jack during the months before my first trip to Paris and several times afterward. When he died on January 30, 1973, I lost a dear friend, one to whom I am forever grateful for his introduction to the physical realities of Samuel Beckett’s Ireland and for the way he guided me through Beckett’s transmission of his memories into his writings.

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  Through Jack Unterecker, I met one more person in New York that summer of 1971 who was a friend of Beckett, the writer John Kobler. They had met when a magazine sent Kobler to Paris to write a profile of the “reclusive Irish writer,” and they bonded over what Kobler believed was a shared love of Bushmills Irish whiskey. When Jack Unterecker told Kobler that I was on my way to Paris, he phoned to ask me to come to his apartment on West Eighty-Fifth Street, because he wanted me to carry a gift to Beckett. I had no idea what I was walking into, but I was eager to meet anyone who knew Beckett, so of course I went. I blanched when I saw the gift, two huge bottles of Bushmills Irish whiskey that Kobler expected me to put into my luggage. I resented his attitude that I was merely an errand girl but felt I had no choice but to take them, as Kobler had already sent Beckett a letter telling him to expect them.

  That was the first of my meetings with Kobler, who had a significant correspondence with Beckett as well as photos, diary entries, and notes taken for the several writing projects he had envisioned but never brought to fruition. Kobler was then writing a biography of Al Capone, so it was always an adventure to be admitted to his apartment and watch him go through elaborate cloak-and-dagger security precautions, because he was certain that other gangsters were ready to commit heinous crimes against him should he write something they did not like. I wish I had paid more attention to what I then thought was silly behavior; I might have learned something useful for my own book about Al Capone many years later.

  In the lead-up to my departure for Paris, Kobler contributed something I found important about Beckett’s character when he revealed a crucial fact about his friendships—how he compartmentalized them. Kobler lived on West Eighty-Fifth Street and Reavey lived on East Eighty-Fifth Street. Each man knew of the other, and each wanted very much to meet the other. I evinced surprise when they told me they had never met, and I offered to introduce them. Oh no, each man said at once; if Sam had wanted them to meet, he would have made the introduction on the several occasions when they had been in Paris at the same time. They could not think of getting together without (as they called it) “Sam’s blessing.”

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  And so off I went, in late fall, 1971, for my first meeting with Samuel Beckett. I felt as much anxiety about the enormity of the undertaking as anticipation over wanting to get started on it. I was loaded do
wn with my own supplies plus the two heavy bottles of Kobler’s Bushmills, and grateful to be traveling with my friend Nancy MacKnight, who generously shouldered some of my baggage. We checked into the Hôtel du Danube on November 6, and immediately after, I tried to contact Beckett, who seemed to have disappeared.

  Our scheduled November 7 meeting came and went with no word from him, and as the days passed I didn’t know whether to be angry, upset, or just plain worried. Where was he, and what cruel joke was this, to get me to Paris on the promise of meeting him to discuss a biography, only to leave me stranded? After Nancy finished her work in Paris, she left for London and I was all alone. Time was passing and I was running out of American Express traveler’s checks. If I did not hear from Beckett soon, it looked like my new career as a biographer would be over before it even started. However, I had things to do before I gave up entirely, so I got to work.

  4

  Those ten days I spent waiting for my first meeting with Beckett passed in a haze of agonizing slowness. I seem to remember never straying too far from the hotel desk, where the receptionist soon learned to ward me off by shaking her head. No, Madame Bair, no telephone messages, no blue pneu, no letter. This anxious waiting overshadows all other memories from those days, but in reality I did manage to do some important work gathering all kinds of information about Beckett when I set out to meet and interview his friends. Little did I know that his friends would also want all kinds of information, not only about me but also about Beckett.

  Carl Brandt told me to meet Mary Kling of La Nouvelle Agence, and she became the French agent who helped me with European sales after the book was written. She also became a good friend who helped me navigate the trickiness as well as the niceties of all things French. Besides giving me important introductions to many people in the French publishing world who were interested in my project, she set up my first meeting with Jérôme Lindon, Beckett’s longtime publisher at Les Éditions de Minuit. For that initial meeting I went to Lindon’s office hoping for a formal interview, during which I planned to ask easy questions that would allow me to establish a rapport that would let me ask subsequent ones with more substance. I wanted to begin with things like how Lindon had become aware of Beckett’s writings, what had happened at their first meeting—all sorts of generalities. But I never got to ask anything of the kind, because Lindon dominated the conversation with his own questions. Who was I, he wanted to know, and how did I have the temerity to expect that Beckett’s friends would tell a total unknown everything they knew about a man I had yet to meet? I had not thought to bring the letter from Beckett inviting me to Paris with me, mainly because I had not imagined that anyone would demand that I prove my bona fides.

  Lindon had been first on my list because I thought that if anyone could tell me where Beckett was and why he had so mysteriously disappeared, it would be he. But Lindon didn’t even know Beckett was away, as their friendship had devolved to the point where they seldom met socially and communicated by telephone when they had business to discuss. My inquiry gave him the opportunity to press his point that he should not talk to me; if Beckett had been so willing to meet me, why had he gone away without telling me where? I had no answer except to say that I hoped Lindon and I could meet again after he spoke to Beckett and confirmed my scholarly legitimacy. In the end he accepted my answers and agreed that we should meet again, when he would provide access to his files and photos. We parted cordially, and I left feeling that I had accomplished something important.

  Mary Kling also arranged for me to meet Denis Roche, the poet and editor then at Éditions du Seuil. Within minutes after I sat down in his office, Roche told me he could not publish my book because he was “so close to Sam” that he would be uncomfortable reading revelations about the life of his friend. I wondered why he had bothered to meet me if he felt this way, but I told him it was fine with me because I had appointments with two other publishers later in the week. I was gathering my things and preparing to leave when he began to talk, or rather to ask me questions. I could not decide whether he was trying to help me by suggesting persons to interview or he had quite another reason—that he wanted me to tell him everything I knew about his “close good friend Sam.” I thought it unusual that he would need to ask me such basic questions, but I was able to say truthfully that I couldn’t answer most of them, as I was just at the beginning of my research.

  Roche asked if I had talked yet to A. J. “Con” Leventhal, the Irishman living in Paris who was another old and close friend of “Sam’s.” I told him that Leventhal was high on my list of the friends of “Mr. Beckett.” (Throughout all the years I knew him, he was always “Mr. Beckett” and I was “Mrs. Bair” when we were together, or just “Beckett” when I spoke of him to others. I never called him “Sam,” and as I learned over the years, there were quite a few who did so without any right to claim such closeness.) Roche threw out other names I already knew of, including Man Ray and Maria Jolas, the widow of the publisher Eugene Jolas, who had known Beckett from his earliest days in Paris, when he was in James Joyce’s circle. At a name I had not yet heard before, Georges Pelorson, I looked puzzled, before Roche added that I probably knew him as the publisher Georges Belmont, who had changed his name after the war because of his shady past during the Nazi occupation. Yes, Belmont was on my list, too. We continued discussing these names and others for well over an hour, but it took me some time to realize that I was being seriously pumped for information about my knowledge of Beckett’s social circle. And when it ended, Roche asked to make a lunch date for later, saying it would be good to get together after I had talked to Beckett and all the people on my list so that he could “advise” me on what I had learned from them. He shook his head in sincere regret as he reiterated that he could not bring himself to edit the life of a friend, but he did hope I would tell him what others said about “Sam.”

  It was yet another example of Beckett’s compartmentalizing people. Indeed, he had many friends, but most of them did not know each other and would not presume to initiate an acquaintance, let alone a friendship, unless he condoned it. And I found it increasingly distressing that all these people expected me to be the conduit for information about him that they would not otherwise have. By expecting me to be a go-between, I felt, they were putting me into the unsavory position of being the teller of tales, the relater of gossip. And I wanted no part of it. As a reporter, I had never revealed or betrayed a source, and as a burgeoning biographer, I was not about to start doing so.

  Next I paid a visit to A. J. “Con” Leventhal, a critic and scholar who had moved to Paris from Dublin after he retired as lecturer in French at Trinity College. I had heard rumors that ranged from the positive (“He is an old and trusted friend who always offered support during the years of Beckett’s Irish misery, when no one would publish his writings”) to the unkind (“He is Beckett’s charity case; Beckett takes pity on his poverty and allows him to describe himself as his secretary so that he can contribute financially to his support”). I did know that Leventhal’s late wife had been Ethna MacCarthy, a striking and spirited woman on whom Beckett had had quite a crush when they were students at Trinity. However, that was all I knew, and again, it came from Dublin gossip and needed to be fact-checked.

  I met Leventhal at the comfortable apartment on the boulevard du Montparnasse he shared with his partner, Marion Leigh. It was not the apartment of someone down on his luck but, rather, a spacious and comfortable home, one that I came to know well over the years as Leventhal assumed the role of the go-between who conveyed information to me from Beckett, telling me all the things Beckett wanted me to know but did not want to say directly. It would take me months to figure out that this was the game the two of them played.

  I did not have to explain myself to Leventhal, because Beckett had alerted him that I was coming to Paris and said he should receive me if I asked to see him. Leventhal had a puckish sense of humor, and his tone was one of levity
when he said he wanted to see for himself the American woman who thought she should be admitted to “Sam’s inner sanctum.” When he told me he was eager to learn what I hoped to accomplish, my reporter’s instincts kicked in, and I became exceedingly cautious about what I said. I was not about to reveal anything without getting something in return, so I did what good reporters always do: I asked Con Leventhal straight out where Beckett had gone, and why. And he told me.

  Beckett had contracted a virus, flu, bronchitis—Con didn’t know which—but he couldn’t shake it and Suzanne, his wife, was very worried. She liked to go to a little nontourist hotel in Tunisia, where they had been when Beckett received the phone call telling him he had won the Nobel Prize. She had taken charge of travel arrangements and they had left on the spur of the moment. Suzanne thought she had canceled all her husband’s appointments; unfortunately, she forgot to cancel the one with me—if she had even been aware of it.

  It was a great relief when Con told me where and why Beckett had gone—he wasn’t playing some cruel game after all—but the truth raised a number of perplexing circumstances for me. He may have had every intention of meeting me after he returned, but when would that be? How long could I stay to wait for him? My mind started to race; I was running low on the money I had allocated for Paris, and I still needed to go to London and Dublin to fulfill the commitments I had arranged. I could not wait indefinitely.

  Then my thoughts veered from these serious matters to a ridiculous one and I blurted out, “I have two bottles of Bushmills for Beckett. May I bring them to you to keep for him?” Con laughed so loudly that Marion came in from the kitchen to ask what was so funny. Without my having to tell him, he knew whose whiskey I was carrying.