Parisian Lives

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.