Parisian Lives Page 5
“Deirdre has been commissioned by Kobler to carry Bushmills. Should I take it from her?” Marion was a forceful woman of firm convictions who did not hesitate to speak her mind, and she said at once, “Absolutely not.” They knew it was an old trick of Kobler’s to find someone to transport liquor, and they also knew that Beckett could not bring himself to tell him that he had all but given up drinking because of various physical maladies. Besides, Bushmills had never been one of his favorites, so he always gave it away.
Dumping the Bushmills became one of my major priorities. I knew I could not do something so impolitic as to leave it at the Hôtel du Danube and ask Beckett to call for it at his earliest convenience. Mary Kling had already told me she would have no part in helping me get it to him, and told me not to send it through the mail. She urged me strongly not to get myself involved in delivering any more favors—for anyone. I was stumped by Leventhal’s refusal until he suggested that another of Beckett’s friends, Avigdor Arikha, was certain to accept it.
I had not known of the Romanian-born Israeli artist until Con Leventhal told me to make an appointment with him while in the next breath casting doubt on Arikha’s closeness to Beckett. He said not to ask beforehand if Arikha would take the whiskey but just to take it with me, because he knew Arikha would grasp at any opportunity to be in Beckett’s company. This was one of my earliest indications of the kinds of snide backbiting Beckett’s friends sometimes practiced as they jousted for favorable positions.
But Arikha was not so removed from Beckett’s inner circle as Leventhal thought. He and his wife, Anne, were the only other people who knew I was in Paris specifically to meet Beckett, which they could have learned only directly from him. As I found out, they also knew where he was. Anne was a serene American woman, and Beckett was very fond of her. They shared a love of music and sometimes played piano duets. Surprisingly, because Beckett was not always comfortable with children, he liked Anne’s and was relaxed when he visited and they played around him.
As for her husband, I got the impression that Avigdor thought I was calling on him as a way of paying homage or seeking his approval. I thought him self-important when he told me proudly that he called himself “Sam’s policeman.” He let me know that he was looking forward to reporting his impressions of me to Beckett the moment he returned. Coyly, he did not tell me what those impressions would be. Leventhal was right about the whiskey: when I revealed the two bottles of Bushmills, Avigdor said of course he would tell Beckett he had them, and Beckett would then put him in charge of deciding to whom they should be given, for, as he repeated once again, he was “Sam’s policeman.”
Anne helped to resolve my logistical dilemma when she told me she had just received a postcard from Beckett saying he would be staying in Tunisia for at least another week or ten days. It was November 8, and he was not expected to return to Paris until the sixteenth at the earliest. Finally I had something concrete to help me decide what to do. Although I was terribly disappointed to think that I would return home without having met Beckett, I decided to leave Paris and go to Dublin or London—still to be decided.
I sent a note just before my departure telling Beckett that I would be going on to London and Dublin and that I hoped to hear from him about the possibility of a future meeting. In the meantime I would continue to conduct interviews. I intended to incorporate some of what I had learned on this trip into the dissertation, as there was still time before its final submission in February 1972. I told him I would also try to persuade the Danforth Foundation to fund a return trip to Paris so that I could show it to him and ask him to confirm its accuracy.
* * *
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When I think back to those years now, they seem the golden age of air travel, when reservations could be made and changed without penalty, and for $325 round trip one could have a travel agent call TWA and ask for a seat from New York to Paris on Flight 800, the number tragically retired when one of the planes fell from the sky some years later. Flyers to Europe were also entitled to one stopover in each direction, but my excellent travel agent had fixed it so that this time I could stop in both London and Dublin on the way home.
London became an extremely important stop for research, because I met two of Beckett’s friends who became close friends of mine. The great Irish poet Brian Coffey had been Beckett’s friend since their university days. He and his wife, Bridget, and quite a few of their nine children went out of their way to offer gracious and generous hospitality on that initial trip and then for years after, which I tried to return when any of the children were in the United States. Years later, when I wrote about C. G. Jung, how I wished I had known that Bridget was the eldest daughter of Jung’s close confidante H. G. Baynes, but in my Beckett years I knew her only as an accomplished artist and beloved wife and mother. Brian, meanwhile, became one of my most trusted advisers. He was a loyal friend to both Beckett and me as well as a walking repository of Irish literary history and culture. If there is richness in the biography about Beckett’s Irish years, much of it came from Brian.
James Stern was the other person I contacted on this first research trip to England. He had known Beckett from his earliest years in Paris, when he and Beckett were both members of Joyce’s circle. Jimmy was a journalist and writer, and he and his wife, Tania, became close to Beckett when they were in Germany at the same time in the 1930s. Their friendship continued, and whenever Beckett was in England, he sent tickets to all his productions and dined privately with them. Their contribution to my book was as important as Brian Coffey’s.
I knew I had to interview many other people in London who had figured in Beckett’s life and work, but I had to let them wait until I was more knowledgeable about the roles they had played. An equally important reason for moving on was a matter of logistics: money was in short supply if I wanted to go to Dublin.
Looking back at some of the notes I took as I left Paris without having seen Beckett, I see that I was not in the best or most positive mood when I landed in Dublin. I worked hard and saw many different people whose memories and stories enriched the biography, but in retrospect I had more to say about the atmosphere in which I found myself than about the things I learned. Much of what people told me I eventually discovered was pure and unmitigated gossip. However, there was enough factual truth in the “good goss” that I was able to compile long lists of topics to investigate and people to interview on subsequent trips to Ireland and elsewhere.
On this brief first stay, I concentrated on those who I thought were the most important, and that meant starting with Beckett’s family members. His niece, Caroline Beckett Murphy, was the first. In typical fashion, her uncle had told her to see me or not, as he would “neither help nor hinder” me. It was the first time I heard the expression that came to define the book I wrote, for Beckett repeated it to anyone who asked his permission to talk to me. I met Mrs. Murphy at The Shottery, the house she inherited from her parents, where she grew up and was now raising her children. She was gracious and forthcoming with family history, as were Beckett’s cousins, Ann Beckett, who lived far out on windswept Howth, a part of Dublin I came to love, and her brother, John, who despite infirmities told me some fascinating tales. Hilary Heron Greene, a cousin who had been close to Beckett’s mother in her declining years, showed me the glorious copper cauldrons Mary “May” Beckett bequeathed to her. They all loved “Sam,” even though they all seemed to be looking to me to tell them how they should interpret his behavior as a boy and how to understand the man he later became.
* * *
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With my head reeling, it was time to go home. I was leaving Ireland with piles of tape-recorded interviews, several notebooks filled with ideas for future research, and a huge stack of folders crammed with family photos and documents pertaining to Beckett’s education, activities, and memberships in schoolboy organizations. I was returning content that I had made so much progress but
sad that I had fulfilled everything but the main purpose I had gone for, to meet Samuel Beckett.
On my last day in Dublin, November 15, when I was so busy packing and so short of time, I decided on an impulse to go to the American Express office to ask if by chance any letters had come for me. To this day I don’t know what made me do it. I had long since cashed my last traveler’s check and had told no one to send letters to the Dublin office. My Jungian friends would call what happened synchronicity. There was just one, said the clerk, and he handed me a small notecard-sized envelope with a Paris postmark and the thin, spiky handwriting I recognized at once. It was from Samuel Beckett.
He was so sorry he had not been able to contact me before I arrived in Paris, but “something unexpected” (he did not specify illness) had happened and he had been “called away.” He had sent a similar letter to the London American Express office, and he hoped that I would receive at least one of them. He would be so grateful if I could possibly return to Paris, where he would be happy to see me at my earliest convenience.
Naturally, I dropped everything and went.
5
After a quick phone call to my husband to sort out the logistics of wiring money to Paris and another to TWA to change flights, I was back in Paris on November 16, once again in the Hôtel du Danube and warned by the desk clerk that the boiler was malfunctioning so perhaps I should go elsewhere. I had to stay there, I told him, as I had a very important meeting the following afternoon. And so there I was, again waiting for my first meeting with Samuel Beckett. I have already described both my nervousness and the hilarity (only in retrospect) of the circumstances. Now, as I think back upon my awkwardness, I think Beckett was probably as nervous as I was, as we each tried hard to put the other at ease. Friends tell me that I often work too hard on social occasions to make others comfortable by chattering away, and that’s exactly what I did. I thought he seemed to be smiling even though he said nothing and stared.
I was all set to launch into what I hoped would become the first of many interviews about his life, but faced with his silence I couldn’t decide how to begin. After he called himself a charlatan and I replied that I was not sure I was “cut out for this biography business,” I told him that perhaps I should just write a long article, a New Yorker sort of profile based on the information I had collected in London and Dublin. Suddenly he perked up. “Who have you spoken to, and what did you learn about me?” he asked. I grasped for a starting point, reaching all the way back to Jack MacGowran and how moved I had been by his performance. Somewhere later in my unfocused monologue I told him about the Bushmills that awaited him at Arikha’s; he laughed out loud, and his entire visage was transformed. He relaxed and so did I.
He smiled when I told him about my visit to Caroline Beckett Murphy at her family home. That led to a discussion of how I had been drawn to his writing through my love of Joyce’s Ulysses and how, after an extensive study of Irish literature and history, I recognized so many of the people and places he had incorporated into his fiction. This led to my interest in exploring the relationship between his art and his life and my surprise realization that the critical study I was trained for would not suffice.
That was what had initially intrigued him in my letter, he said, elaborating with an interesting revelation that I filed away carefully for further exploration. For years Beckett had made it known that he never read anything written about his work, but in fact I found that he was well informed and had strong opinions about almost every critical discussion of it. And despite all that ink spilled—all those interpretations of him as (and here he quoted my initial letter) “the poet of alienation, isolation, and despair”—I was the only one who recognized such things as his portrayals of some famous Dublin characters and the actual places in the Wicklow Hills, County Kildare, and Leixlip.
How then did I intend to go about writing his biography? Beckett asked. I was totally unprepared to answer. Off the top of my head, I spouted ideas for how we might work together, most of them drawn from my career as a journalist. Only much later, when I made friends with other biographers who described their anguished work situations, did I realize how naive I had been in asking for the most privileged arrangement any writer could wish. I told him I would conduct formal fact-finding interviews with others as well as with him, and I would expect him to answer my questions and provide clarification, correction, or enhancement. Also I would expect to receive whatever documentation I might ask for, such as letters, photos, and manuscripts. I would want to interview his family, friends, and professional associates, and I hoped he would tell them to cooperate. And, oh yes, I concluded, it would probably be best if he did not read what I wrote about him until it was published.
Without hesitating, he agreed. I didn’t think much about his readiness to cooperate at the time. Having no idea how biographies got themselves written, I assumed that everything I asked for was the standard procedure. “My word is my bond,” he told me, and I was ecstatic to think that all lights were green and all roads were open. It wasn’t too long after that that I came to understand why he cooperated so blithely: he did not take me seriously.
I learned this one year later, when I was once again in Paris. I was shocked during a dinner at the home of the artist Stanley William Hayter and his wife, Désirée Moorhead, when Con Leventhal and Marion Leigh offered to tell the rest of us what Beckett had told them about me after our first meeting. Fueled by good wine, Con energetically quoted Beckett as waving his hands and saying, “Good God, the woman has striped hair!” He was referring to what was known in those days as a frosting and now as highlights. An overzealous hairdresser had made huge streaks of platinum blond in my normally light brown hair, which were indeed garish and which seemed to take forever to grow out. When Con told this story, I thought it was clear that Samuel Beckett found everything about me amusing. If he did not take me seriously as a person, he certainly felt the same about my project.
My astonishment slowly bloomed into anger. I sat through the rest of that dinner smiling as the others laughed at “the striped hair girl” or prodded me to tell them “whatever you and Sam talked about” in our meetings. Yes, I was smiling, but deep down I was upset and needed to digest this. I could not wait to leave the Hayters’ and take the long walk down the rue de Vaugirard to my rented apartment. Perhaps Beckett did think the best I was capable of was a puff piece, a hagiography of “Saint Sam, the good and great,” my private shorthand for the many such descriptions I was fed by people who figured in his life.
Nevertheless, he had told me that his word was his bond, and I had no reason not to believe him, because our correspondence continued when we were apart, as did our meetings when I was in Paris. I thought back to how the meetings had progressed since that first one in 1971, but especially about how relaxed we had both become as I told him about my adventures in London and Dublin. I remembered how he had told me that he could stay only briefly, and what a surprise it was to us both when he looked at his watch and realized he had spent so much time with me that he was going to be late for everything else he had planned for that afternoon and evening. Our second meeting did take place then, on the following afternoon, November 18, again at my hotel, again at two o’clock sharp. I hope I hid my smile and stopped muttering to myself as I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens one year later after that dinner at the Hayters’, probably frightening late-night strollers. I was thinking of several things Brian Coffey had told me to “always remember about Sam.” First, “he is a stickler for punctuality.” The second had particular relevance after I found out what Beckett had said about my striped hair. Brian told me that “Sam never does anything he does not want to do.” He expanded on that statement, telling me that of all the young would-be poets and writers in their university days, none so wanted “to know what posterity would think of him while he was still alive to know it as Sam.” I entered my building having decided that I would pay no attention to such
frivolous commentary. I would continue to do the work I thought needed to be done; I would write the book I thought needed to be written. I remember that I slept very well that night.
6
To return to 1971 and our second meeting, we began again at two o’clock precisely, to continue talking about the ground rules for how I would work. Once again Beckett used the expression that had caught my attention the previous day. Recapping the plan I had laid out, the perfect situation I wanted, he interrupted to state that of course he would “neither help nor hinder” my independence. Through seven years of emotional ups and downs I clung to those words—I thought it such a striking phrase that I printed it on a file card and hung it over my desk. Truth be told, he did end up helping me throughout the writing process, but the unorthodox way in which we worked created a certain amount of hindering as well, as I was about to find out.
As I headed for the tiny table, Beckett suggested that we might repair instead to the bar-tabac next to the hotel, where he had spotted a secluded empty booth. While we were getting settled, I thought I should begin what I assumed was going to be a formal interview with some easy conversation. I asked about his years at Trinity College, Dublin, where between 1923 and 1928 he had been an undergraduate and graduate student and for a brief time a lecturer. I asked him for the various places in college where he had lived and he rattled off the names of the dormitories and the room numbers. Because I have severe math anxiety and numbers throw me, I fished madly in my purse for pen and notebook to write them down before I confused or forgot them.
Suddenly he jumped up and shouted, “What are you doing?” I tried to explain, but he broke in: “No pencils! No paper! We are just having conversations. We are two friends talking. You must never write anything that we say. And don’t even think of a tape recorder.” As if this were not unsettling enough, he added a seemingly bizarre non sequitur: “And you must not tell others that I meet with you. Ever!”