Deirdre Bair
Biographer of Samuel Beckett, who refused to let her use tapes or notebooks
DEIRDRE died aged Bair, 84, who was has a postgraduate student at Columbia University invited by Samuel Beckett to write his biography; she did so, and published it in 1978 to critical acclaim, but it was an uphill struggle.
She had written to the notoriously secretive playwright in early 1971 volunteering for the task, and had been surprised when he replied inviting her to meet him in Paris and assuring her that any biographical information he had was at her disposal.
They were supposed to meet on November 7, but for 10 frustrating days Deirdre Bair was left kicking her heels in a Paris hotel because he failed to show up. When they did eventually meet (Beckett explained he had gone to
Tunisia for a week to recover from a cold), his first words were the confrontational: “So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am.”
Before leaving, he made the remark that, as she later recalled, “has since come to haunt me”: “I will neither help nor hinder you. My friends and family will assist you and my enemies will find you soon enough.” She said: “I was ecstatic to think that all lights were green and all roads were open, [but] it wasn’t too long after that that I came to understand why he co-operated so blithely: he did not take me seriously.”
She learnt this a year later at a dinner in Paris when the critic AJ “Con” Leventhal told the assembled company what Beckett had told him after his first meeting with his putative biographer: “Con energetically imitated Beckett waving his hands and saying, ‘Good God, the woman has striped hair!’ It was clear that Beckett found everything about me amusing.
If he did not take me seriously as a person, he certainly felt the same about my project.”
Deirdre Bair soon found that, as well as dealing with Beckett, she had to negotiate with what she called the “Becketteers” — friends of the playwright who seemed to presume there was a price to be paid for their co-operation. Irish poet John Montague turned up with his wife at Deirdre’s home in New Haven, Connecticut, and announced that they would be staying for a month, including Christmas. The actor Patrick Magee demanded she spend the night with him; she demurred.
Beckett, too, put obstacles in her way. During their conversations he refused to allow her to make notes or use a tape recorder: “And you must not tell others that I meet with you. Ever!”
But if he wanted to break her resolve, he had chosen the wrong woman: “I began to play ‘intellectual solitaire’: writing each question I wanted to ask on a small file card and laying them out on my bed. I committed them all to memory, and in the process I would shuffle them, rearrange
and reshuffle them, sometimes rewriting them, always trying to make them more precise — or less likely to anger Beckett.
“After each interview I would rush back to the hotel to document everything I could remember. As I spoke into the recorder, I would try to capture his exact remarks with all their inflections. I carried solely to notebooks things he dedicated had said that kept coming back to me, days later.” She also found “whenever he felt I was getting too close to something he was reluctant to make known, he could become cutting in his comments, dismissive of my work and clipped in his speech.” Other “games” he played included periodically disappearing and ignoring her attempts to get in touch. Yet at the same time he would “plant” topics that had not occurred to her: “He would speak in a firm, louder-than-usual voice, all the while looking at me straight on and nodding his head vigorously. These planted topics would go straight to the top of my to-do list.” Once she grasped what she called “the rules of the game”, Deirdre Bair found “oblique ways to ask Beckett to tell me his version of whatever it was he was so insistent I should investigate. There were certain subjects — his relationships with women high among them — for which this tactic proved essential.” Yet, throughout, she felt like “a marionette whose strings he was pulling, because I never knew where I stood with him”. After the book was published, Beckett wrote to Deirdre to tell her he called it “the Bair fantasy” and claimed not to have read it. She was on June born Deirdre 21, 1935, Bartolotta in Pittsburgh, and read English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she married Lavon Bair, who was in the US Navy. After graduation, as her husband’s career took him around the world, she worked as a stringer for news magazines. They eventually settled in New Haven, where she took a job with the local paper. In the late 1960s she returned to university, taking an MA and PhD in comparative literature at the University of Columbia. Her biography of Beckett was followed by biographies of Simone de Beauvoir (1991) Anais Nin (1995), Carl Jung (2003), the cartoonist Saul Steinberg (2012) and Al Capone (2016). Last year she published Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me, a memoir charting the difficulties of tackling the biographies of the two 20th century literary greats. The breakdown of her marriage inspired a work on divorce, Calling it Quits (2007). Deirdre Bair, who died on April 17, is survived by a son and a daughter.
‘He could become cutting in his comments, dismissive of my work’