Writing biography is a
difficult, shoe-leather destroying job.
Sure, a Pulitzer might be the reward, as well as public acclaim if one
is a Robert Caro or an A. Scott Berg.
Patience is key, and most labor in years of silence while haunting
libraries and dusty archives, confronting and interviewing reticent loved ones
and associates. Once the book is
published, the focus shifts to the subject with renewed energy and the author
slips into the background again.
Audiences at book signings want to know what else did the writer find
out? They want the dirt and the gossip
along with the well-researched fact and the historical connections. Rarely are they interested in the writer’s
journey.
Deirdre Bair has paid
her dues as a first-rate biographer. She
has explored the lives of such public figures as Al Capone, Anais Nin, Saul
Steinberg, and of course, Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, the two major
figures referred to in the title of her new book. Bair has done time in academia, traveled the
path of a journalist, and, along the way, has demonstrated resilience and
fortitude as she reveals in her most recent book/memoir, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me, (Nan A. Talese, 2019).
The toll her career
has taken on Bair herself and her family is made abundantly clear in this
book. Against the backdrop of feminism
and cultural reflection, Bair takes us on a journey through her decades of work
to uncover details about the importance of Beckett and de Beauvoir across
several cultures. Both are cantankerous
characters who reflect, once again, that style is character. She reveals her struggles and roadblocks to
get to the truth of these two writers.
Beckett greets her on “that bitter cold day, November 17, 1971,” when
she began her odyssey of research, with the prophetic words: “So you are the one who is going to reveal me
for the charlatan that I am.”
Of course, Bair tells
us that a biographer must continually guard against allowing her own character
and presence to limit or obscure the sharp focus on the subject. She must also be objective and without
preconceived notions while allowing the facts and circumstances to reveal the
true history and work of the subject.
This is a book about writing biography—how to begin the research, how to
develop the revealing details, how to present the subject with both his
failings and his positive attributes, and how to craft the story with copious
revisions and sculpting to make the subject sing out from the page. Bair’s is a much more complete and detailed
analysis of biography technique than Robert Caro’s recent slim volume, Working, (Knopf, 2019) published earlier
this year. For Bair, writing biography
is an art and a science—no stone can be left unturned, no diary page or
document left unread. Letters, court
records, friends who want to hijack the process and work themselves into the
picture—all must be dealt with and kept in perspective. For a first time biographer researching
Samuel Beckett, Bair nearly falls into some deep wells of animosity, jealousy,
and the misleading accounts of craven attention seekers. She grows with the experience of Beckett’s
book and is able to write her second volume about de Beauvoir by learning
through experience.
Bair believes the
writer must avoid becoming a character in the book. There is only room for the subject on those
pages. She pulls the curtain back on the
process, start to finish. Her battles
with publishers, reluctant subjects who dodge and fail to appear when
scheduled, her shifty agent, and of course, the overwhelming machismo that uses
her sex as a reason for not taking her work seriously. She shows us how she did it, and explains in
detail the entire journey. “Biographers
are essentially storytellers,” she writes.
“So, then, tell the story, but stay the hell out of it.”
Bair keeps voluminous
boxes and folders of notes, transcripts, and clippings as well as her diary,
called DD. So her prodigious research
skills and eye for detail are abundantly displayed here based on her review of
that material. She gives us her personal
account of writing the Beckett and de Beauvoir books specifically. In her approach, she sees herself as an “artist
under oath.” In other words, no invented
or combined characters as Edmund Morris did with his biography,
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (Modern Library, 2000), still one of the
most reviled biographies ever written.
It is crucial to her
process to be as open-minded and objective as possible. She paraphrases the French writer,
Sainte-Beuve, “who believed that you never understand a writer’s work until you
understand her life.” Although there are
instances where the people surrounding Beckett and de Beauvoir want to
influence Bair’s work, she holds fast and accepts the criticism, especially
vicious from the academics, and completes her work and represents in lectures,
presentations, and speaking engagements.
With de Beauvoir, she acknowledges the “family” eccentrics surrounding
the writer and Jean-Paul Sartre.
However, she does not delve deeply into some of the sexual peccadilloes the
couple engineered. She focuses instead
on de Beauvoir’s volumes of memoir and The
Second Sex. In her discussion of
these works, Bair intercuts with the rise of feminism in America and the way
she, herself, is treated by her agent and publisher.
Beckett takes up about
a two-thirds of the book, mainly because he is her first subject and she is a
novice. Quickly she learns,
however. The last third of the book is
with Simone De Beauvoir. On these pages,
Bair is much more canny and insightful, however, this section also deals with
her forays into academia to pay the bills. The completion of de Beauvoir’s biography frees Bair from
regular teaching. No more over-enrolled multiple
courses of freshmen composition which prohibited and limited the time she could spend on
writing.
Deirdre Bair gives us
an insightful book about writing—the research, the interviews, the
manipulations by both subjects and their hangers-on. Her account makes the journey real, and
deepens the impact of her previous work by explaining the process. Life itself is a layered affair, and it is
the biographer’s job to peel all of that away—the facade and the mendacity and the truth—and show
us the real person. Bair has
successfully done that time and again in her work. This book shows us exactly how she did
it. And that makes it well worth the
read.
