Parisian Lives Read online

  I was utterly stunned by this. I was used to keeping very careful records, everything from reporter’s notebooks to tape recordings. Often I supplemented them with thoughts and impressions in different colored inks, even cross-referencing where appropriate. I was still unsure about how to go about writing biography, but I assumed from the first that the genre required even more careful documentation than I had applied to journalism. I knew that I had to figure out new ways to operate in such constricted circumstances. We were roaming far and wide on that dismal gray afternoon as he suggested people I would probably want to see, and I had to struggle to keep all those names in my head.

  Time was passing and the bar-tabac was growing dark when suddenly the door burst open to admit a noisy gaggle of young men from the medical school across the street, and the sleepy bartender rose from his nap over a newspaper to turn on the lights and the radio at the same time. I was concentrating so hard on the details of our conversation that I didn’t realize Beckett was trying to get my attention until I felt his hand on my sleeve. I looked up and saw that one of the young men was bent over our table, staring in utter disbelief and stammering both a question and an exclamation: “You—you—you are Beckett!?”

  Beckett, ever the gentleman, handled the situation with aplomb. Turning first to me, he asked if I would permit the young man to sit down with us. What could I say but yes, even though I was irritated that Beckett wanted me to share my limited time with one of his fans. Beckett deftly turned the fellow’s questions into his own: where did he come from, what year of his studies was he in, what kind of medical practice did he envision? But the student was indeed a true fan of Beckett’s writing, and I heard him beg Beckett for his address so he could take his copies of the novels and plays around for signing. Beckett deflected the request by saying he was on his way to his publishers, where he would sign copies and have them sent to the young man’s home if he would provide his address.

  The break time was over, and with a great deal of fuss and confusion, the raucous group left the bar. The bartender turned down the radio, dimmed the lights, and returned to his newspaper while Beckett turned to me and said, “He was such a nice young man. I could not refuse him.” I think I managed a thin smile, but this would hardly be the only time I was with Beckett when someone recognized him. Beckett was too polite to ever turn away his public. Usually these encounters were brief, but I still resented having to share my limited time with him, and I believe he knew it. Although I tried never to show it, I think there were times when he deliberately prolonged these encounters just to see if my composure would break. It was only one of the several games I thought Samuel Beckett played as he tried to test my resolve to write his biography.

  It had been a long afternoon and I was mentally exhausted as darkness fell. Beckett was indeed on his way to Jérôme Lindon’s office at Les Éditions du Minuit, not only to sign books for the medical student but also for an evening rendezvous to talk about rights and permissions for an upcoming production. He told me that Lindon was his “guardian of the gates,” and he counted on the publisher to relay decisions (usually negative) for which he did not want to claim responsibility.

  Watching him sway down the rue des Saints-Pères, I was actually relieved to see him go. Back at my hotel, the first thing I did was to pull out my tape recorder and speak into it everything I remembered, all the while jotting down detailed notes to complement or explain what I was saying. After several hours of feverish work I realized that it was very late and I was terribly hungry, so I walked down to the rue Saint Benoît and into the first bistro I found. As I ate, all I could think about was the challenge that lay before me: conducting extensive interviews without being able to write anything down. How was I even going to remember what questions I wanted to ask, let alone the order in which to ask them? By the time I finished my late supper I thought I had the answer, and with slight refinements it became my modus operandi from then on.

  I called it “playing intellectual solitaire.” I wrote each question I wanted to ask on a small file card and laid them out on hotel room beds or apartment dining room tables—wherever I happened to be staying at the time. I committed them all to memory, and in the process I would shuffle them, rearrange and reshuffle them, sometimes rewrite them, always trying to make them more precise, more meaningful, and oftentimes to make them less likely to anger or offend Beckett. I never slept well on the nights before we met, as I would get up to fuss over the cards one more time. And after each interview I would rush back to the hotel or apartment, set up the notebook and tape recorder, and document everything I could remember that he had told me. As I spoke into the recorder, I would try to capture his exact remarks with all their inflections. For example, he might have called someone a “nice fellow,” saying it sarcastically and meaning the exact opposite; I would write that down, too. Days later, I was still remembering things from previous interviews and conversations, and I took to carrying small pocket notebooks that were dedicated solely to things he said that kept coming back to me. I would write them down, giving the dates he said them and the context in which they occurred. Remembering and reconstructing was an ongoing process.

  I later confided some of my difficulties about interviewing Beckett to two of his friends, the American director Alan Schneider and, on a separate occasion, Con Leventhal. Each shed some light on Beckett’s request that I keep our meetings confidential, saying that he insisted on strict secrecy because so many others had asked to write his biography and he had refused them all. There was one candidate in particular he was adamantly against: Richard Ellmann. Ellmann’s excellent biography of James Joyce, which I and many critics and scholars hail as one of the finest of our time, was originally published in 1959, when the lives of great men were written with usually oblique references to their sexual peccadilloes, and Ellman’s book had deeply distressed Beckett because of its detailed personal revelations. In the 1960s and 1970s, Samuel Johnson’s dictum that biography should include “all that is seemly to know” in a man’s life reigned, and Beckett thought Ellmann had shockingly overstepped the boundaries of taste and discretion.

  At our third and final meeting before I left Paris that November, again at 2 p.m. at the bar-tabac next to the hotel, Beckett’s face twitched with irritation because I had to refer to the paper on which I had listed all the people whom we agreed that I should interview in Dublin, London, and North America (there were several Canadians), and I needed to make sure the list was complete.

  As soon as we finished going over the list, I put the paper away, exhaustion and inexperience leaving me without anything further to discuss. However, instead of claiming he had other appointments to rush off to, as he had done at our first two meetings, Beckett suggested we have another coffee and wind up our “business,” since I was going home the following day. He wanted to know how I intended to move forward with what he called “this business of my life”—an expression that became one of his favorite euphemisms for the biography, a word he seldom used.

  I told him that the holidays were coming up and I would have to spend the next month or so taking care of my family, deliberately stressing the family obligations. Experiences from my newspaper days had taught me that this was a wise approach, and it seemed to jibe with how I thought I should present myself in my new incarnation as a scholar-writer and nascent biographer. I had usually been one of few—if any—women in the newsrooms where I worked, and I had learned early on how to create environments where I could either stop any sort of male passes before they started or else fend them off. I had had to use those tactics on my brief research trip to Dublin the week before meeting Beckett, and I wanted to make sure that if any sort of gossip about my behavior was relayed to him in Paris, he would have my version of the story for comparison. It is trite to say, I know, but like Caesar’s wife, I believed the only way he would take me seriously was if I were above and beyond reproach.

  I had alread
y been propositioned by one person in Paris who knew Beckett, and during the following years there would be others. Frenchmen were always quite direct. “Are we going to bed?” one asked. “No,” I replied. “Fine,” he said, and that was the end of it. An Englishman who became a very good friend to me and my book, the entrepreneur Tony Johnson, was also direct. A denizen of swinging sixties London, he, too, asked if we were “going to get it on.” No, I told him, as I rolled out a portrait of myself as the happily married mother of two young children who did not want to risk anything that would harm that happy Leave It to Beaver life. “Fine,” he said, before offering me the use of whichever one of his several apartments he was not in at the time, either in London’s posh Shepherd Market or Paris’s rue de Vaugirard overlooking the Jardin du Luxembourg. These advances were never threatening and usually friendly, easily dispensed with in the moment. If I thought there was a possibility of harassment or danger, I found ways to extricate myself and make it clear that such behavior would not be tolerated. In several cases, strangely enough, some gentle invitations that I politely rebuffed opened the door to genuine friendships that lasted for years.

  I presented that same portrait of myself to Beckett because I wanted him to understand clearly that I was there only to write a book. That was my work; my life was elsewhere. In retrospect, I was making a very important decision about how I would conduct my professional life, one that would prove crucial to my development as a biographer. I’ve heard stories of biographers who so identified with their subjects that they moved into their homes or affected the same styles of hair and makeup. A woman who called herself Anaïs Nin’s biographer wore Nin’s clothes and makeup after she died, and one Napoleon biographer claimed he could write only when he wore a hat purportedly belonging to the Little Corporal. I’ve also listened to biographers so determined to shoehorn a subject into a theory or thesis that they boast of manipulating materials to ensure that they and not their subject have the final say on how the life was lived. In one case two biographers tried to top each other with tales of how they created false personae, stopping just short of outright lying to coerce information out of people they were interviewing. From the first I knew that none of that was for me.

  By making a grand show of my personal circumstances, I was deliberately framing my professional life as lily white and spotlessly clean. In other words, Hands off me. All that matters is the work I am here to do. And it worked—most of the time.

  Beckett listened to me without interjection but with a slight hint of a smile on his face, and when I was finished, he made no comment. He realized what version of myself I was presenting. He said he would welcome me the following summer, when I planned to bring my family with me for a long research trip. In the meantime we would stay in touch through letters, and I would start on the several hundred interviews I wanted to conduct.

  After the rocky start of our long-postponed first meeting and the detailed conversations that set up the ground rules during the two that followed, I flew home in deep contentment, relishing the work and envisioning the adventures that I hoped lay before me. After lunch and a little bottle of TWA’s bad wine, I slept all the way to New York.

  7

  I returned to Paris for my second research trip in the spring of 1972, as I had told Beckett I would once I was a newly minted doctor of philosophy and had my dissertation in hand. I did not have a teaching job, nor did I want one. Several publishers were interested in offering book contracts, and that was where I focused my energies.

  Beckett and I met again in the tabac next to the Hôtel du Danube, with me determined to show him everything I had written and then ask for his comments, corrections, suggestions—whatever he wanted to offer for the biography. As I worked my way through the dissertation, conversation was cordial until we arrived at the final third, what I was calling “Notes Toward a Possible Biography.” He threw up his hands and said we had done enough for one day and perhaps we should save that topic for another time. In fact, he concluded, perhaps we should never discuss it at all; perhaps I should just proceed without any advice or input from him. I remember trying to lighten the mood by speaking of the role of the United States Senate when I said something like “and give no advice and no consent either.” He not only did not reply, he gave me a withering look that I interpreted as my cue to end that afternoon’s meeting.

  I saw him one other time on that trip, again in the tabac. We discussed generalities over coffee and parted amicably. I went home content that everything was proceeding smoothly, and for the rest of that year I worked in libraries in the United States and conducted interviews. The rest of 1972 was a tranquil interlude as I educated myself to write biography, and I was glad to have had it.

  * * *

  —

  There was not a happy start to 1973. Jack MacGowran died on January 30, in New York, at the age of fifty-four. The official cause of death was complications after a recent bout of the flu, but the friends in the Beckett world who loved him said the real complications were too many barbiturates and too much whiskey. I started out for his funeral in Manhattan on February 1 but could not get there because of massive car crashes and train delays caused by an ice storm. I was told he had a standing-room audience, which he would have loved.

  I had come to think of MacGowran as the friend of Beckett’s who was particularly insightful about aspects of his character and personality. We had met frequently throughout 1972, and I learned much about Beckett’s ferocious intellect as well as his outlook on worldly things in general, what MacGowran called his “deep compassion for humankind.” MacGowran told me that once Beckett and I got deeper into our “just two friends talking” conversations, I would find him retiring but with “a ruthless desire for the truth at any cost.” He said that Beckett always insisted he was “a novelist who just happened to write some plays,” and when he talked spontaneously about his work, he often said that “writing was an agony.” Nevertheless, MacGowran believed that Beckett felt he had no choice but to “show things as they are, as he sees them, to tell everything with compassion, always with humor.”

  Beckett was famous for never interpreting, analyzing, or explaining anything about his writings, particularly the plays. Although he would discuss modes of interpretation, MacGowran said, Beckett always fell back on the same final comment when questions got too close to the one he hated most: “What did you mean when you wrote X?” He brought such discussions to a quick end with “I would feel superior to my own work if I tried to explain it.”

  In many of our conversations, MacGowran told me there was one question he had always wanted to ask Beckett directly but that he had never had the courage to ask. “Sam was the only man I ever met who has total womb recall,” MacGowran said. “He could remember being in the womb and the exit thereof.” The topic rose peripherally when they discussed some of the prose texts MacGowran wanted to use in his monologues, particularly when Beckett explained how he wanted certain lines from Molloy to be delivered. I’ve never forgotten how MacGowran jumped up and acted out those lines for me, and I’ve always been grateful for our many conversations, which so deeply enriched my thinking about the man who was the writer Samuel Beckett.

  * * *

  —

  I stayed busy during the first six months of 1973 conducting interviews and preparing to spend the entire summer in Paris. I was still finding my way into the various kinds of research necessary for writing a biography. Some of what I did consisted of talking to people who figured in Beckett’s life, but always with an eye toward how he interacted with them. One example was wanting to interview Andre Gregory about his production of Endgame in New York, because Alan Schneider, Beckett’s foremost American director, was intent on stopping it. Beckett refused to grant Schneider’s request that he cancel it, and I needed to know why.

  I was always in search of historical background, and Cyril Cusack, then playing in Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycoc
k at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, proved to be a walking repository of Irish theatrical history. He also gave me a long list of persons to see in Ireland who became crucial sources.

  I spent many days consulting archives, roaming through Yale’s Sterling Library in the good old days when the stacks were open, often finding books I would not otherwise have thought to consult. A chance sighting of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack told me that “Beckett ii, the younger brother of Becket i [Frank, the team captain and Beckett’s older brother], has an awkward habit of walking across the wicket to all balls.” Kenneth Nesheim at the Beinecke Library alerted me to collections where I would not have thought to look, as did the formidable Lola Szladits at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection.

  Mostly, however, I concentrated on talking to the two persons who had played major roles in bringing Beckett’s work before the American public, the director Alan Schneider and the publisher Barney Rosset. They told me that in letters to them Beckett mentioned that he had met me in Paris, but he said nothing about my writing a biography, only that I would probably be contacting them. He did not say whether he approved or not or whether they should cooperate or not. I think both men initially agreed to see me because they were curious.

  At least Alan was, for when I went to his home in Hastings-on-Hudson for the first time, he plied me with question after question about my relationship to Beckett. I recited my usual litany, the condensed, rote version of the nice Connecticut housewife-turned-scholar/writer, with almost-teenage children, a museum administrator husband, and two English bulldogs and two Persian cats. I felt silly saying all this, but Alan was a persistent inquisitor who was familiar with women who may have begun their relationship with Beckett professionally but which they often managed to turn personal. Alan was not going to tell me anything about a man he revered and also tried to protect until he decided whether I was “legit” (his word). In the years I knew Alan, I saw how quickly he assessed character and made decisions; he certainly made a quick one about me that day.