Parisian Lives Page 9

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  The next morning was a busy one for the three other Bairs, who made an early departure for Chartres. I was still lying abed around eight o’clock, as my first interview was not until lunchtime, when the bedside phone rang. The caller said in a loud and imperious voice, “This is Maria Jolas. Sam told me I am not to see you, but he did not say I was not to talk to you. So I am telephoning.” I had to ask her to repeat what she had just said, because she had awakened me from a deep sleep. When I finally processed what she was saying, total panic took hold. “Sam” had told her not to see me, but she had decided that his decree did not include the prohibition to talk to me? What sort of mischief would she be creating for me with Beckett? I did not have time to digest my thoughts, because she launched into a monologue that went on for over two hours. I had a small notebook next to the bedside phone, and I filled every page of it. I actually wrote on the wall when I ran out of paper. I sat there with legs crossed, needing the bathroom badly, but the phone cord did not stretch that far and there was no way I could interrupt her.

  She covered innumerable aspects of Beckett’s life, from the first time he met James Joyce to his relationship with Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, to how Beckett met his wife, to what he did in the war—on and on, and onward yet again. I have always described the conversation as “the Gospel According to Maria.” Her authoritative declamation of all things literary and her dogmatic insistence that only she knew the truth were irresistible; her charisma was overwhelming—and it resulted in the only factual mistake I would make in the biography. But what I had to deal with immediately after that extraordinary telephone conversation was Beckett himself, for I was scheduled to meet him in the café at Raspail at two that afternoon, and I would have to tell him all about it. What had I done? I wondered—for that was how I thought in those prefeminist days. What sin had I committed, what heinous deed had I done to let her talk, which surely would bring Beckett’s wrath down upon my head? I sort of found out that afternoon.

  9

  The “conversations” I had with Beckett between my other formal interviews took place mostly in cafés next to the Métro stops at Denfert-Rochereau and Raspail, and occasionally at the Falstaff, a restaurant and bar in Montparnasse where all the locals knew him and respected his privacy. Having done my “intellectual solitaire,” I was always prepared with more questions than we could possibly answer in the hour and a half to two hours these encounters usually lasted. However, I was seldom able to get through even those at the top of my list, because Beckett always had his own questions. He was intensely curious about what other people were telling me, and because it was his life I was exploring, I thought he had a right to know what they said and to comment on it, so I generally told him what he wanted to know—at least most of it.

  Every so often he would ask about something that I was hearing for the first time from him, something that had not come up in any of my interviews. I soon recognized that when he introduced such topics, it was because he thought they belonged in the biography. He would speak in a firm, louder-than-usual voice, all the while looking at me straight on and nodding his head vigorously. Sometimes, when I was mentally filing away his earlier comments, he seemed to think I was not paying close enough attention, so he would repeat his current comment once or twice, again with vigorous nodding. I found myself nodding back, as if to say, “Yes, I got it. Yes, yes, I’ll definitely investigate this.” I never said it out loud, but once he was sure that what he told me had sunk in, we would continue our “just two friends talking” conversation. These planted topics or pieces of information would go straight to the top of my to-do list for follow-up. And as soon as I had a basic grasp of the rules of the game we were playing, I found oblique ways to ask Beckett to tell me his version of whatever it was that he was so insistent I should investigate.

  Once or twice, after I told him what I had discovered and he seemed reluctant to give me his side of the story, I’d say, “Perhaps you’d better give me your version, just to make sure I will get it right.” There were certain subjects—his relationships with women high among them—for which this tactic proved essential. Beckett was not only smart, he was shrewd. He knew that sometimes I didn’t know much—if anything at all—about the subject in question and that I was hearing about it from him first. He was also clever about guiding me toward the knowledge he wanted me to have by implying that I was to accept his version and go no further. I, in turn, would use what he told me, but only as the starting point for further research and for writing what I eventually concluded, which became the version that ended up in my book. What I wrote was frequently much more nuanced and complex than what he told me, as I sometimes relied upon what others told me as much as or more than what Beckett did.

  What had happened between him and Lucia Joyce was one such example. I introduced the subject because at least a dozen people I interviewed insisted that it was the reason for a serious break in Beckett’s relationship with Joyce. When I asked Beckett about it, I was unsure of his reaction, whether he was upset, angry, or a combination of both. He dismissed it in several sentences, saying that Lucia may have had “a brief schoolgirl infatuation that was over in a minute,” and then he changed the subject. After sifting the testimony of so many people who had been there to observe both Lucia Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and then after reading what Beckett himself wrote in letters to friends (George Reavey and Thomas McGreevy among them), I knew this episode required much more explanation than Beckett’s casual dismissal.

  By the time I learned this, I had had enough meetings with Beckett to know that even though my questions occasionally led him to lash out in a fit of temper or pique, I sometimes felt free to prod him to answer some he did not like. On one tiring afternoon when he was less than forthcoming, I blurted something like “Well, you’d better tell me about this if you don’t want Ellmann to write about it first.” Instead of making him angry, it made him laugh, and he did something he often did when I asked about a particular person: he imitated Richard Ellmann. I never met the man, so I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Beckett’s imitation, but I think it must have been good. Every time he imitated someone I came to know personally, he was (to use one of his expressions) “spot on.” I would sit in wide-eyed wonder at the accuracy of his mimicry, often thinking that he could have acted in anything he wrote because he was so gifted at portraying someone else’s character and personality. Some of his imitations were simply funny, but there were others that I thought verged on cruelty and ridicule. To this day, I always describe him as a courtly Old World gentleman with impeccable manners who sometimes shocked me with his sharp, accurate, and devastating portrayals.

  All this came up on an afternoon when he was reluctant to talk about his admiration (if not his love) for Ethna MacCarthy, medical doctor and poet, who rejected him to marry Con Leventhal. In exasperation, I made the remark about Richard Ellmann. That was when he launched into the imitation that literally took my breath away. Ellmann’s name became a sort of code word during the next several years, when all I had to do was mention it to get Beckett to tell me grudgingly what I wanted to know.

  Sometimes, when he wanted to know who was on my list of persons to interview, I would read off names and Beckett would offer capsule biographies, imitate voices, or convey mannerisms. Later, when I met some of these people for the first time, I was struck by how accurately and perceptively he had conveyed their reality. As he ran through each imitation, his face would soften, but curiously, his eyes never met mine and he usually turned his head away. I wondered, was he embarrassed? Was he perhaps ashamed of these moments when he was so open with me? Did he wonder how much of himself he was revealing, and did he worry about how I would interpret his imitations, or if I would write about them? In all the years since then, I have never arrived at a definitive conclusion. Perhaps all these random and unfocused speculations were valid; perhaps none were. When people ask me what it was
like to be in the presence of Samuel Beckett, they usually do so with reverence, as if he were a deity. I generally respond as briefly as possible with something respectful but dismissive that will let me turn the conversation to other things. Sometimes I say it was like putting together a difficult jigsaw puzzle; other times I say it was like punching my way out of the proverbial paper bag. Until now, I have told only one or two of my most trusted confidantes how I really felt: most often, like a marionette whose strings he was pulling, because I never knew where I stood with him. In the beginning he was friendly, open, and eager to hear of my interviewing adventures. And for most of that summer of 1973, I was a dutiful reporter, in the sense that I did report back to him much of what he wanted to know about the work I was doing, in library archives (hunting down book and theater reviews) and in personal interviews (when people often gave me correspondence, photographs, and other personal souvenirs). But sometimes things changed and I saw another side of him. Whenever he felt that I was getting too close to something he was reluctant to make known, he could become clipped in his speech, cutting in his comments, and dismissive of my work.

  I thought a lot about this while in Paris that summer, because I was still in the process of learning how to become a biographer. Before I made this research trip, I had been invited by the late distinguished scholar and biographer Professor Aileen Ward to join her biography seminar at New York University. There I met other biographers who became my friends, and from them I learned a great deal about technique, method, and content as I struggled to determine what the book I was trying to write should be and to define the task I was undertaking. Mine was unusual, in that I was writing about a living person, while most of my seminar colleagues were writing about people who were long dead. I was often asked by those who worked solely in archives on letters, diaries, and other documents what it was like to conduct research with “talking heads,” a common expression for those I was interviewing. Even more, they wanted to know what it was like to interview Samuel Beckett.

  All these thoughts coalesced that summer in Paris, particularly when I remembered Con Leventhal’s story of how Beckett described me as “the woman with striped hair.” Every time I thought about it, I concluded that Beckett considered me an intellectual lightweight whom he was merely tolerating. It was upsetting, because it raised memories of my early days as a journalist, when women were mostly “girl” reporters cordoned off from the men, either doomed to be researchers (as I had been at Newsweek) or exiled to the so-called society pages to write about recipes and clothes, bridge clubs and social circles (where my newspaper editors tried to place me before they gave up and let me write news and features). To think that Beckett might be slotting me into this category was depressing. Often I had to remind myself of the two things he had told me when we were setting the ground rules for how I would operate: “My word is my bond,” he said, and he would “neither help nor hinder” my work. I clung to this, particularly after Maria Jolas’s telephone call, which I felt obliged to tell him about.

  I was still trying to sort out how to deal with her bizarre monologue, to determine what—or how much—of what she said I should tell him. Would he become so upset that he would withdraw his cooperation? Eventually I concluded that even after I told him most (but not all) of it, he would keep his word. And if he could find a way to bolster his version of events, he would do so. I hesitate to describe his efforts by using the contemporary word “spin,” but sometimes I thought he came perilously close to Brian Coffey’s contention that he was trying to shape what posterity would think of him while he was still alive to enjoy it.

  I interviewed hundreds of people in the years it took to write Beckett’s biography, and in all that time I felt most like a manipulated marionette when he told Maria Jolas not to see me. She was the only person he asked not to cooperate, and when I asked why he had forbidden her, he did another of his imitations, one that portrayed her as the epitome of a nattering, chattering old gossip.

  Maria Jolas’s phone call presented other, longer-term problems for me, rooted in the fact that much of what she told me touched on sensitive areas. One hard-and-fast rule for what I would use while writing the book came from my career as a journalist: I would need multiple sources for every single story. I knew that much of what I wrote about Beckett was new and unknown to the world at large, and that every sentence I wrote would have to be fact-checked to a fare-thee-well.

  Considering Beckett’s opinion of Ellmann’s Joyce biography and how he compartmentalized his own life, leaving even his closest friends and family members to ask me to tell them things I was astonished to learn they did not know, I became skilled in deflecting such questions so as not to risk Beckett’s displeasure. Also, as a researcher, I did not want to dispense information that amounted to mere rumor and might later be proven untrue. With this as my most basic premise, I decided that I would have to have three separate sources for any information I included in the book; three disparate individuals would have to tell me the same story, describe the same situation, reveal the same hitherto unknown fact, all independently and without any prompting from me. And for some of the most sensitive information, I wanted more than three, sometimes as many as five sources, or I would not use it.

  Yet even such a rigorous system proved not to be foolproof, and it was Maria Jolas who led me astray with the story of how Beckett met his wife, Suzanne, a topic about which I found it difficult to ask Beckett for the truth. Suzanne was high on the list of subjects Beckett was reluctant to talk about. Although he introduced her name easily into almost every conversation, and he always gave her credit for the struggles she endured to bring his work to publication, her name invariably brought on that deep red blush, a prelude to a quick flash of anger, so I took care to change the subject quickly when these occasions arose.

  I must have had more than a hundred people tell me the story of how Beckett and Suzanne met. Half said he met her on a night in the 1930s when he was gratuitously stabbed by a disturbed person as he walked down a street, and Suzanne came to his rescue while he was lying on the ground. The other half said no, he and she were already involved in a relationship well before the stabbing. Maria sided with those who said the two had met when Suzanne happened to be passing by and saw Beckett being stabbed. Because everything else Maria told me checked out, and because most of the sources I trusted the most—many more than five—agreed with her version, that is what I wrote. Unfortunately, it was not true.

  After the book was in print and I learned of my mistake, I contacted many of those who had agreed with Maria to tell me again why they believed what they did and where they had obtained their information. Originally they had said things like “Sam told me” or “I was in Paris at the time and visited him in the hospital.” Later, while I pressed them for more detail, they would say that actually, upon further reflection, they knew “someone close to Sam who was there” and who told them about it. And that someone always turned out to be Maria Jolas, who was indeed in Paris at that time but who had not been close to Beckett then and had no firsthand knowledge of his private life. I did fact-check—I just didn’t check far enough.

  One sensitive relationship that I did verify but did not include in the biography concerned the translator Barbara Bray, with whom Beckett had a long-standing affair. It was common enough knowledge, and almost everyone I spoke to in London and Paris knew about it and took it for granted. Furthermore, consensus held that it was nothing untoward; if Suzanne Beckett accepted it, they did, too. It was different in Dublin, where many people snickered as they tried to introduce salacious topics into conversations. The affair came up time and again in many of my interviews, and I struggled over what I should do when—if—I wrote about it. During my research, I made it a point to talk to everyone I could find who had known Beckett, regardless of their opinion of him because I did not want to risk being accused of selecting only the positive and ignoring any of the negative. I had had e
nough experience to know that, as reporters often said, unless you were writing a puff piece, the operative mode for any story was CYA: cover your ass. If there were unseemly aspects of Beckett’s behavior, I had at the very least to consider them, and most probably I would have to write something about them. And in the 1970s, such affairs may not have been thought of as morally reprehensible, but they were certainly something to be kept private.

  With this in mind, I telephoned Barbara Bray to ask for an interview, not about her relationship with Beckett but about how she worked alone or with him on translations. I planned to let the conversation unfold naturally and take its own direction. But she did not give me a chance to explain why I wanted to talk to her. She screamed that she knew why I was calling, and if I wrote one word about her relationship with Beckett, one of her children would commit suicide and she would tell the world that I was responsible. I tried to stammer some kind of denial, for I was too shocked to think coherently, while she continued to vilify me before slamming down the receiver. I never wrote a word about her affair with Beckett and only made a discreet reference to her as a translator.