PARISIAN LIVES
SAMUEL BECKETT, SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND ME: A MEMOIR
DEIDRE BAIR
Atlantic Books, 368pp, £18.99
In 1971 a young postgraduate student named Deirdre Bair wrote to Samuel Beckett in Paris seeking permission to write his biography. His response was an undertaking not to hinder her. ‘This fascinating memoir of Bair’s years as the biographer of two monstres sacrés [the other being Simone de Beauvoir] reveals the nightmare that unfolded,’ wrote John Walsh in the Sunday Times. ‘From the start, his “friends” treated her as a presumptuous upstart... Meanwhile, Bair and Beckett perform a complex dance around the subjects he’s reluctant to discuss without actually saying so. She feels, she says, “like a marionette whose strings were being pulled”... The “Becketteers”, as she calls the network of backbiting pals, become more badly behaved.’ At the same time, this book ‘is a record of Bair’s awakening feminist conscience... When she resigns from the university where she spent so long pursuing a full professorship, and chooses an independent life as a writer, you feel like cheering.’
Throughout her encounters with both her subjects, wrote Tim Adams in the Observer, Bair ‘retained a reporter’s savvy, as well as an academic’s rigour in getting near the truth’. She ‘conjures the atmosphere of the city in which her two subjects lived – never forgetting her own excitement and trepidation, and
frustration at moving between salon and café-tabac in a sometimes comical search for their stories’. Her ‘courtship of De Beauvoir and her circle was no less complex than her battles with the Becketteers’ and her ‘account of their sessions together are a case study in rival strategies of reticence and disclosure’. The book makes voyeurs of us all, wrote Alan Riding in his review for the New York Times: ‘Can this inexperienced young American tame these two monstres sacrés? Will she be hoodwinked by two larger-than-life writers who want to influence, manipulate, control, even censor her – even as, all the while, they appear to co-operate?’