When Samuel Beckett agreed to let Deirdre Bair write his biography, everyone assumed it was because he was sleeping with her. The year was 1971 and there could be no other explanation as to why the reclusive Grand Old Man of Irish and European letters should bestow a pearl of such great price on a young American with no more than a recent PhD to her name. Evil-minded gossip flew around the obstreperous ragtag of ivy league professors, Irish poets, Parisian intellectuals and New York critics who had appointed themselves gate-keepers of the Beckett universe. If anyone was going to write about the author of Waiting for Godot, Molloy and Krapp’s Last Tape, they had always imagined it would be them. Now, it transpired, this American had pillow-talked her way into the literary gig of the century while they had been busy going to international Beckett conferences, getting drunk in Dublin pubs or fretting about why “Sam” hadn’t replied to their last three letters.
Yet as Bair reveals in what she calls her “bio-memoir”, the Nobel laureate never bothered to conceal his erotic indifference to the earnest, happily married woman who had cheekily suggested that she was the best person to write his life.
No one had been more surprised when he agreed to meet her in Paris and then announced that he would do nothing to either “help or hinder” her in writing his biography. Of course, he proceeded to do both. Beckett’s rules of engagement were bafflingly opaque and shifted constantly throughout the seven years of their non-collaboration. “Mr Beckett” would meet “Mrs Bair” for interview sessions, but only when it suited him, which wasn’t often. She was not to take any notes during their meetings, which meant that she was obliged to scamper to a cafe afterwards and scribble down whatever she could remember. Despite the promise not to hinder, Beckett retreated into a cold sulk whenever his would-be biographer broached topics he did not care to discuss. Creepiest of all, behind the scenes he pumped his friends, colleagues and collaborators, whom Bair wearily dubbed “the Becketteers”, for the latest gossip on the book’s progress. No wonder the neophyte biographer felt “like a marionette whose strings he was pulling, because I never knew where I stood with him”.
You would never have guessed any of this from Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which was published in 1978 to general acclaim and went on to win a National Book Award. It was a terrific example of mid-20th-century American biography at its chilly best: rigorously researched – Bair reveals here that each fact had to have three independent sources before she allowed it over the threshold – and strenuously impersonal in the sense that the author never allows her own presence to intrude. But that didn’t mean for a moment that her personal investment in the project wasn’t huge. At a time when text-based French critical theory reigned supreme in American universities, Bair was determined to demonstrate that biographical approaches to literature were equally valid. “She’s not a scholar; she’s only a biographer,” her university colleagues were heard to sneer when coming up with reasons why she shouldn’t get tenure. But Bair burned – still burns in fact – to demonstrate that the attention she paid to Beckett’s early life brought insights that no amount of textual close reading ever could. Even now she feels the need to keep reminding us that “I was the only one who recognised” that the figures in Beckett’s plays are based on real “Dublin characters and the actual places” of his youth.
Bair, who is 84, has always stayed silent about the shadow side of her great undertaking, the one that made her name and set her on a path as a prizewinning biographer. But with all the original players in the Beckett universe safely dead, and mindful perhaps of the current trend for veteran biographers to spill the beans in late-life memoir (Claire Tomalin and James Atlas have both recently published excellent “behind the scenes” accounts of their work), Bair finally feels free, with the help of her old diaries, to tell us what really lurked behind the impenetrable wall of her po-faced prose over 40 years ago. The result is deliciously indiscreet. We cringe as she spends the best part of a decade pouring expensive drinks down old soaks in Irish bars, courts twitchy Beckett nieces who stand between her and a stash of explosive letters, and rebuffs a whole string of actors, agents and publishers who assume that, since she’s in London/Paris/New York/Dublin without her husband she must have an “open marriage”. Meanwhile, in the background there’s rising chatter about how Sam has been heard smirking that the naive American with “stripes” in her hair (subtle highlights one assumes, rather than the full Sontag) will never actually manage to get the job done. Which, it is becoming clear, is exactly the reason he agreed to her let her try in the first place.
She explains that by the time she had recovered from the misogyny of her Beckett years, she had developed not only a thick skin but a dawning feminist consciousness. Who better, then, as a subject for her next biography than Simone de Beauvoir, author of the seminal The Second Sex and, rumour had it, currently casting around for someone to write her life? Their first meeting at De Beauvoir’s Montparnasse apartment did not go well. Aged 73, she was no longer a soignée café philosophe. Instead here was a “lumpy, grumpy, frumpy and dumpy” woman in a grubby red dressing gown, whose face was inclined to go puce whenever she was angry, which was often. Worst of all, they had to communicate in Franglais, a language not known for its nuance. “Deirdre” was quite beyond De Beauvoir, who instead substituted a guttural “Darred”. Other things, though, appeared more promising. Far from forbidding notetaking, De Beauvoir made a fetish of it, insisting that Bair make both written and taped records of their conversations. All went well until it became clear that what drove De Beauvoir was not a passion for accuracy so much as the assumption that “Darred’s” job was merely to tidy up the punctuation and deliver her message, unedited, to posterity.
Still, it’s part of Bair’s new toughness that she vows she will no longer be bossed by her subjects. While she had never plucked up the courage to press Beckett on her archival discoveries of his early gay relationships, she is determined not to give up so easily with De Beauvoir. It’s not just that there had been stories about her seducing female pupils before handing them over to Sartre, it’s that the feminist thinker now appeared to be in a settled relationship with a younger woman, Sylvie le Bon. Before Bair can put the question, “We are not lesbian!” screams De Beauvoir. “Sure, we kiss on the lips, we hug, we touch each other’s breasts, but we don’t do anything ... down there! So you can’t call us lesbians!” It is at this point, Bair tells us ruefully, that her newfound courage crumbles. In Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, which appeared in 1990, four years after its subject’s death, she reverts to discreet 20th-century biographese and merely murmurs in an endnote that De Beauvoir had always enjoyed “a complex sexual identity”.
• Parisian Lives is published by Atlantic. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
