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  He took me into his office and showed me everything from photos to production notebooks. He pulled out files of correspondence between him and Beckett and also between him and everyone involved in his productions, from actors to stagehands. That day was the start of an important working relationship as well as a friendship that lasted after the biography was published and until his tragic death in 1984, when he stepped off the curb into heavy traffic on a London street and looked the wrong way.

  Barney Rosset was not as curious about me as Alan had been. He took me at face value, as just another writer who was simply writing a book about his beloved Sam. Barney told me I would have to go to Syracuse if I wanted to see documents and correspondence, because he had given most of his archives to that university’s library. However, he was happy to tell me stories of his love and respect for Beckett, which included naming his son after his “most favorite author.” Barney also told me something that stood me in good stead during all my meetings with Beckett: that he had a quick temper, which could turn vicious in an instant. His anger would come on suddenly, and then, just as suddenly, he would bring it under control. Barney told me that it took a great deal to make Beckett erupt and I would probably never see it, but he was wrong: I had the unfortunate ability to ask questions that provoked Beckett’s temper far too often.

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  Apparently my presence in the world of Samuel Beckett had given rise to all sorts of machinations among people I did not yet know, particularly in the academic community. As I was still learning how to create a biography, one of the first things I did after returning from that first meeting in Paris in 1971 was to contact all those who had written about Beckett. By the summer of 1973, when word had gotten out that I was spending the summer in Paris, the idea of a Beckett biography was arousing all sorts of responses whenever I asked people for cooperation. Lawrence Harvey at Dartmouth College gave me photocopies of all the materials Beckett had given him in 1961, when Harvey was thinking of writing a critical biographical study. Later he gave them to the Dartmouth College Library, where they can be read by other scholars. Richard Ellmann, then at Yale, told me he would never grant me an interview because if he had anything to say about Beckett, he would write it himself. Ruby Cohn, who taught at the University of California, Davis, was disdainful, but she did have graduate students who were writing about Beckett and she expected me to share my findings with them. Hugh Kenner, at Johns Hopkins, did not answer my letter. James Knowlson, then on the faculty of the University of Reading in England and later a Beckett biographer, told me that any scholar was welcome to consult the Beckett archive he was instrumental in setting up there. He did not respond to a request for an interview. There were other so-called scholars, all of whom claimed close friendships with “Sam” and who boasted of spending booze-soaked evenings carousing around Montparnasse with him. When I checked the dates of their stories, they all unraveled, because Beckett was not even in Paris when most of these jaunts were supposed to have happened. And even if he had been there, he had all but given up drinking.

  And then there were the publishers who claimed special connections to Beckett and who thought I should grant them the right to publish the book—for free, of course—because of the honor they would bestow upon me. When I said that I was already under contract, Jeannette and Richard Seaver, publishers at Arcade Press, were the first to be offended. Beckett’s British publisher, John Calder, was the next. Richard Seaver had been one of Beckett’s earliest champions in the 1950s, when he published short stories in the literary magazine Merlin. The Seavers were great friends of Calder’s then-wife, the singer-dancer Bettina Jonic, who had never met me but who nevertheless came to New York and told the Seavers that everyone in London was boycotting my project, so they should tell everyone in New York to do the same. Curiously, her husband’s partner at Calder and Boyars, Marion Boyars, was in New York at the same time, and she took me to lunch to implore me to break my contract with Larry Freundlich at Harper’s Magazine Press and sign one with her firm. When I replied that I was content (thrilled, actually) to be where I was, she rushed back to London to tell John Calder that he needed to write a Beckett biography they could publish before mine. When I later met Calder, he laughed as he told this story, saying he didn’t think I would ever write a biography, so neither would he. By the fall of 1973, however, he (like so many others) was taking the biography seriously, because what I called “the bandwagon effect” was well under way: the train carrying those who cooperated was leaving the station, and suddenly all sorts of people wanted to jump on board.

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  It started before I went to Paris, in April, when I had personal business in San Diego. In one of life’s little ironies, my mother and Samuel Beckett shared the same birthday, April 13, and I decided to visit her and make a side trip to San Francisco to talk to Kay Boyle. Her ties to Beckett began during his earliest years in Paris, and they continued with a friendship that lasted for the rest of their lives. She was high among those who wanted to be interviewed, because she did not want to be left out of the book. She wrote to Beckett, who replied with a letter she showed me, in which he said he was “very sympathetic [to me] as a person.” For him to write that, she said, meant that he wanted her to cooperate.

  Boyle was living in a house on Frederick Street in the hippie Upper Haight. She was dressed in the flowing peasant garments and heavy native jewelry so typical of the time and place. A formidable presence, she was tall, rail-thin, of regal bearing and strong views. Her version of Beckett was so overwhelmingly and powerfully opinionated that even as I took copious notes, I knew that everything she said had to be fact-checked to the nth degree—particularly when she kept insisting that I must not write one word about her archrival, Peggy Guggenheim, the first wife of Boyle’s husband, Laurence Vail, and partner in a flaming affair with Beckett in the 1930s. Guggenheim, Boyle told me, “MUST” (her emphasis, in a strong voice then and all caps in a later letter) be left entirely out of the book. In the end, with the exception of her dislike of Guggenheim, almost everything Boyle told me turned out to be as close to the truth as any postmodern iteration of that word permits, and I considered her a reliable source.

  I saw her several times after that first meeting, and for several years after, I called on her whenever I was in San Francisco. She would invite me for tea or a glass of wine (one small glass), obviously hoping for news of Beckett. Thus I found it curious when, forty-four years later, in 2017, I met the journalist Jan Herman, who had also written about her, and he told me how, when he interviewed her in 1987, shortly after the death of her friend and his, Nelson Algren, she insisted that she had refused to give me any assistance at all. She told him she had never spoken to me and had advised everyone she knew who was also a friend of Beckett’s to do the same. I found it odd because of the letters we exchanged, especially the one she sent immediately after the biography was published in which she praised the book highly. I wish I had known about what she told Herman while she was still alive. I would have asked her what had happened to make her believe she had never met me, especially because so much of what I wrote about her role in Beckett’s life could have come only directly from her.

  I have thought about Kay Boyle ever since my conversation with Herman, because her shifting memory represented something that puzzles me and many other biographers. There is often a fairly significant contingent of people whose memories of their interactions become, as Boyle’s were with me, far, far removed from reality. Some people I talked to exaggerated their roles, often in a direction far from their actual closeness to Beckett. Those who helped sometimes wanted to distance themselves from the written life, while some who put serious obstacles in my path lost no time in claiming that I could not have written the book without their constant guidance. I thought about this particular trick of memory, of deliberately forgetting, while writing this bio-memoir and reading Julian Barnes
’s The Noise of Time. He writes of how Shostakovich could not remember whether he had gone to the Finland Station when Lenin returned to Russia. “He no longer knew which version to trust,” Barnes writes. “Had he really, truly, been at the Finland Station? Well, he lies like an eyewitness, as the saying goes.”

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  April was almost over when I returned home, and I had only May to prepare for my first long research trip to Paris, where my family would be with me. My husband, Von, was beginning his career as a museum administrator and was able to arrange his schedule to be with us. It was an exciting time, and the month flew by. The kids, Vonn Scott and Katherine Tracy (“Katney”), needed new shoes and haircuts, and there were orthodontist appointments to keep. Many activities were connected with the end of the school year and required family attendance; passports had to be put in order and plane tickets picked up, house sitters lined up for the animals. And then there was my professional life as I ran back and forth to New York, trying to cram in as many interviews and as much background work as possible. I had to figure out a schedule for everything I needed to do on this trip and, most important, to let Beckett know when I was arriving, as I was hoping he would be there to see me. I don’t remember getting much sleep that month, but somehow we all pitched in and managed to organize the details. I left first, to find an apartment, sort out what our daily life in France would require, and set up a work schedule that would somehow—magically—allow me to have fun with my family even as I tried to navigate through what was fast becoming a daily round of rather strange experiences. I was beginning to think of myself as Alice, up and down the rabbit hole, and my summer in Wonderland had not even begun.

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  I exchanged several letters with Samuel Beckett between January and May of 1973 that were mostly about my research and interviews and his work and travel. He told me he was going to London in January to work with the actress Billie Whitelaw on Not I and with actor Albert Finney on Krapp’s Last Tape. Even though he would not be in the theater to see it, his plan was to stay through Whitelaw’s opening night on January 16 and return to Paris the next day. Then he wanted to leave immediately for his country house, about forty miles northeast of Paris, in Ussy-sur-Marne, where he needed to take care of his voluminous correspondence before heading “south and sunward” to Morocco. He agreed that it would indeed be best if I waited until the summer before coming to Paris. Beckett did not tell me, but he did tell George Reavey, that he had had all his remaining teeth pulled before leaving Paris so that new dental prosthodontics would enable him to eat normally while in London. He had a sentimental fondness for his first novel, Murphy, and he also told Reavey that while walking in Kensington Gardens to the Round Pond, he had seen a man resembling his character “Mr. Kelly without his kite.”

  I wrote to Beckett that the reviews I had read of Krapp’s Last Tape gave guarded praise to the production, but the few people I knew who saw it had mixed feelings about Finney’s acting. Beckett replied that Finney was “miscast” and he was not pleased with his portrayal. When we talked about it in Paris some months later, he was vehement about his distaste for the actor. Holding his ubiquitous little brown cheroot in one hand and slapping the other down hard on the table, Beckett said, “Finney was the worst Krapp I ever had.” I tried hard to stifle a giggle and was almost choking to hold back laughter when he realized his double entendre. He gave a little shrug and colored slightly—certain topics actually made him blush. “Oh well,” he said as he laughed, too, and we moved on to other subjects.

  In one of his replies to my several letters that spring asking when I should plan to be in Paris, Beckett told me he would spend the summer going back and forth between Ussy and his apartment on the boulevard Saint-Jacques and we could meet during that period at our mutual convenience. I arrived armed with introductions to people who knew someone who knew someone who might have a place to rent. My agent, Carl Brandt, sent me to one of his clients, the writer John Gerassi, whose parents had been close friends of the young Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and who was now writing Sartre’s biography. If anyone could help me find my way around the “real Paris,” Carl thought, it would be John. I went to see him at his apartment just off the boulevard Montparnasse but got no help in finding one of my own. Instead I got an invitation to lunch that day with Sartre and Beauvoir at the Select, their neighborhood bistro.

  Gerassi told me he was inviting me only because he needed someone to keep Beauvoir occupied so that she “would not butt in” while he was talking to Sartre. He resented that she was “a nosy woman who always had to be part of the conversation,” one who did not hesitate to make her views known. “She likes to talk to American girls, particularly if they have read The Second Sex,” he said. And then he blanched in terror: “You did read it, didn’t you?” Yes, John, I thought but did not say that, like every woman of my background and education, I had read The Second Sex. And even though he seemed not to have much respect for Beauvoir or her book, I had tremendous admiration for both.

  In any other circumstance I would have crawled over hot coals to meet Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, but I had to turn down that invitation because lunch was at 1:30 and I was scheduled to meet Beckett at 2 p.m. and I didn’t dare to be one second late. That was in June 1973, and I did not meet Simone de Beauvoir until almost a decade later. I never did meet Sartre, who was already dead by then.

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  Apartment hunting was not the only thing on my mind when I arrived in Paris in early June; I was also worried about connecting with Beckett. Alan Schneider told me he had found Beckett deeply depressed when they were together on May 10 and 11. He refused to dine out at one of his favorite locales, so they ate a simple meal in Beckett’s apartment, during which he kept repeating, “What’s the sense of living when all your friends have died?” He did not specify who was dead or why he was dwelling on his own mortality. Alan said I should prepare myself to take Beckett’s mental state into consideration when I interviewed him, as his present sadness and gloom might color his recollection of past events. My career in journalism had made me aware of the nuances of memory and how they imposed themselves on accurate recall, so I made a careful note to keep in mind that Beckett might be recalling parts of his life through the lens of his present negativity rather than through an accurate picture of how he had experienced them.

  Beckett had given me his telephone number and instructions about how and when to call. He had set up a code: I was to dial at precisely 1 p.m., let the phone ring twice, hang up, and call again, and he would then answer. But when I got to my hotel at the end of May, I found a note telling me that he was in Ussy and would stay there until sometime around June 19 or 20. With my list of apartment leads yielding no immediate results, I decided on the spur of the moment to rearrange some interviews and go to Geneva to see Beckett’s cousin Maurice Sinclair and then on to Venice to see Peggy Guggenheim.

  It was desperately hot when I arrived in Paris, and I packed only the most casual summer clothing for this short trip, which meant I was not dressed appropriately for anything. During my first stop, I froze in Geneva’s constant cold rain. Maurice was the son of Beckett’s beloved aunt Cissy (Frances Beckett Sinclair) and her colorful husband, Henry Morris Sinclair, always called “the Boss,” and Beckett often sought comfort in the Sinclairs’ home in Germany during his unhappy years in the 1930s. Even though Maurice had been just a boy then, I thought that collecting his memories would be important, as it would help significantly, to use the expression I liked, “to put flesh [color] upon the skeleton [biographical facts].” I thought Maurice could be especially helpful regarding Peggy, his older sister who had died tragically young of tuberculosis. Letters and photos given to me by Beckett’s cousins in Ireland and his niece, Caroline Beckett Murphy, showed that Beckett had been in love with Peggy Sinclair. All these relatives were convinced that the elderly Krapp’s reminiscenc
es of his lost love were an expression of Beckett’s feelings about Peggy.

  Maurice relayed fully to Beckett everything he told me during that first meeting in Geneva, and he did the same after we met several times later when he came to Paris on business. I suspect this played no small part in Beckett’s attitude toward me when I finally saw him at the end of June. He was astonished at the depth of my research and had very mixed feelings about it—further confirmation that he had not taken me or my work seriously when we made our initial agreement. His attitude toward the book fluctuated repeatedly over time, but the first time I noticed the effect the project had on him was after I returned from meeting Peggy Guggenheim in Venice.

  My wardrobe left me seriously underdressed in a light T-shirt and trousers when I met Peggy Guggenheim at her glorious palazzo on the Grand Canal. I had written in advance asking for an interview, which she had granted, telling me to phone when I arrived. In the notes I made next to her phone number the first time I called, I wrote: “Voice bitchy as hell but she did say come right over.” When I entered the courtyard, she was sitting in the garden, dressed in an elegant silk caftan, gold slippers, and the most extravagant cat’s-eye sunglasses, the likes of which I had not seen since the 1950s. She waved a hand vaguely in the direction of a chair next to a small table, where she had a vile concoction already poured and waiting for me—Campari and brandy, or something equally potent. Hardly the most cooling drink for a hot afternoon, but I was thirsty, and two quick swigs made me extremely light-headed.