Parisian Lives

by Deirdre Bair

  And yet when I turned off the computer and shut the door to my office on the eve of departure, the guilt I felt over abandonment had nothing to do with my personal life but everything to do with my work. I was still struggling with the dilemmas of a woman of my generation, torn between home and profession, always feeling that attention given to one meant serious neglect of the other. As I had pushed deeper into revisions, I had begun more consciously to view my subject through my own lens. How did Beauvoir manage to avoid such doubts and conflicts throughout her life? How did she keep so single-mindedly focused on the professional? Or did she? I was still sorting this out.

  * * *

  —

  For the first (and the last) time, I dreaded having to go to Paris, the city I have always loved, which now evoked “so many feelings of desolation and loss. Just awful.”

  My anxiety was compounded by a round of terrorist attacks in Paris that led the government to require visas for all travelers. In an unseasonal and unrelenting heat wave that enveloped the entire East Coast at the end of September, Von and I had to go to New York and stand on line outside the Consulate General for three hours. When the officer asked the reason for my journey as he affixed the visa to the passport, he offered “condolences for your loss.”

  Security was tight when we flew, a commonplace now but most unusual then. When we landed at Orly Airport, “French kids in police uniforms looking scared, carrying Uzis. A loud boom all over the airport while waiting for luggage. Everyone jumps, thinking it’s a bomb, then we all laugh sheepishly. Everything so different now.”

  The apartment we rented for the month of October was on avenue Reille in our beloved Montparnasse, bright and sunny and overlooking the reservoir, which made it seem as if we were in the country looking out onto a green field. We walked through Parc Montsouris remembering how the old men had nodded their approval when le papa had come jogging along well after les enfants. We went back to the little market on the rue d’Alésia where the clerks had welcomed our family as part of the neighborhood. We walked past the bakery where Madame had kept us up-to-date on increases in the price of butter. We found everything changed: the old men were not in the park, the small market had become a supermarché, and a large apartment building was under construction where the bakery had been. It seemed that every physical thing connected to happy times was gone and now all we had were memories.

  I had a bit more archival research to do on this trip. Several films and television documentaries had been rushed to completion after Beauvoir’s death, and I needed to see them at the Centre Simone de Beauvoir, since they were unavailable elsewhere. Here I ran into bureaucratic roadblocks until I managed to convince the curators of my limited time in Paris and they let me see them all in one long day. I was not so fortunate with archives at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, where a French friend who was a historian of drama had found several interviews Beauvoir had given years before about her dramatic writings and her limited interest in theater. My friend thought I should see them, but I didn’t quite know where this information would fit in the biography and wanted to take copies home to digest later. Photocopying was not permitted, however, so I had to spend several long days sweating metaphorical bullets as I copied them in longhand with a pencil. Each night I had to ice my swollen wrist before I could think about holding a fork to eat my dinner.

  But the most important appointment was with Sylvie, who said we should meet at Beauvoir’s apartment. I knew I needed to gird myself to enter 11 bis, rue Schoelcher. The golden sofas and the jewel-like chairs were still there, as were the Giacometti lamp and the tiny sticklike figures on the shelf above where Beauvoir always sat. The plaster cast of Sartre’s hands was still on the table in the center of the room. The little tray of fountain pens and the small writing pad were still on the coffee table, but the woman who had given everything such vibrant life was gone. How was I going to cope?

  Sylvie had asked me to come in the late afternoon, when she was finished with her teaching day. Dusk was falling and she had not yet turned on the lights. At first I found her “snippy, even snotty.” This demeanor intensified after she let me turn on the tape recorder, and for almost an hour she proceeded to run down every single person in Beauvoir’s life, especially Hélène. At the end of the rant, she suggested we meet at her apartment next time, for she was removing everything from Beauvoir’s so she could sell it. She also told me she was preparing Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre for publication, “and many people will not like them.” She did not answer when I asked directly who these unhappy people would be, but having read the letters myself, I had my suspicions. Surely Sylvie would withhold the ones that were the most wounding; surely she would not publish such ugliness and cruelty against people whose only sin was to love Simone de Beauvoir. Unfortunately, I would be proven wrong when the book appeared. Sylvie printed Beauvoir’s harsh and brutal comments about her sister’s life choices as a married woman and her professional ability as a painter. Hélène was devastated when she read them, and the emotional pain she suffered lasted the rest of her life.

  Despite Sylvie’s negativity at the start of that initial meeting, it ended on very good terms. I knew we were on good footing when she took an unopened bottle of scotch from the refrigerator and said we must have a drink, “comme d’habitude,” this time unwatered, “pur, sans eau.” I think I had put her at ease by sticking to questions that were mostly about clarification of certain dates or events, all basic fact-checking, and because I had not pressed her on her plans for the damning letters. There was nothing to raise hackles or inspire controversy. She seemed surprised by the depth of my knowledge and the sophistication of some of the opinions I voiced, for more than once she made a snide remark about how unusual it was for an American to have such insights into things French. I just smiled and pretended to be grateful for the compliment.

  She told me I should give her two days to collect some documents she knew I had not seen because they had only recently been unearthed in the rue Schoelcher cellar: letters from fans, admirers, and persons who had had insignificant roles in Beauvoir’s life. Some were interesting, but most contained information I already knew. There were several notebooks I had not seen, compiled during Beauvoir’s years of teaching, which dealt with material for her classroom lectures rather than her writing or thinking. None of these documents was what I hoped to find: the Leibniz dissertation, for example, or the manuscripts of her novels. However, it was good to see all these things because they confirmed everything Beauvoir had told me during our interviews: that she was holding nothing back, and that if my book had been published before her death, there would have been no surprises or contradictions and nothing to prove wrong what I had written. I thought it ironic that her death could, in many ways, allow me to relax. And reading these documents confirmed again that no one was telling me anything new, which meant that my primary research was indeed complete.

  I saw Sylvie several more times, recording what she told me and taking copious notes. By the time we parted, I had unlimited permission to quote any document for which she held the copyright and to use whatever photos I wanted. She had agreed to honor the conditions under which I worked with Beauvoir and would put no obstacles in my path. Everything was working out so perfectly that even though there was going to be time for fun with my husband in the days ahead, all I wanted to do was go home and get back to my office, my computer, and my manuscript. And then Sylvie threw an unexpected curveball.

  When I told her that I hoped to be finished with revisions and the last of the writing by the following spring, she insisted that I had to come back in February, because she was sure that she would have found “other things” in the rue Schoelcher cellar by then. Even though Beauvoir had told me repeatedly that there were no manuscripts of any of her writings (her mother had had to use the paper to cover jam and jelly jars during the war), there was always the hope that she had missed something. Hope sprang et
ernal in me: what a coup it would be to find the manuscript of The Mandarins or She Came to Stay…Yes, I told Sylvie, I would return in February, even though I was not sure I would have either the time or the money.

  I had just spent a fortune paying the Centre Simone de Beauvoir for permission to use their copyrighted photos, and I had just written a huge check to a French graduate student who claimed to have spent hours chasing down obscure publications but had found nothing at all. And of course there was the current trip, with the extra expense of the car rental to take us south to Beauvoir’s cousins. I had visions of what was left of my fellowship money evaporating in dollar signs, as if in a cartoon bubble that floated over my head. Nevertheless, I was in Paris, and I meant to make the most of it.

  * * *

  —

  Von and I began our tourist adventures in Paris, where we had a little time for window shopping on the Right Bank. I will never forget the sight of the entire Japanese sumo wrestling team coming out of Hermès, huge men all decked out in blue-and-white kimonos, their outfits punctuated by brilliant orange shopping bags filled with luxury goodies. We still bemoan leaving the heavy Nikon at home that day and having only our memories of the sight. We spent a day rambling through the château country, another exploring Normandy, and another at Mont-Saint-Michel. Our itinerary was supposed to take us next to Goxwiller to see Hélène, but Lionel de Roulet was back in the hospital for another operation and she was exhausted by worry and long days of sitting at his bedside, so we changed it to go directly to Uzerche in southwest France to visit the two cousins, Magdeleine and Jeanne, at La Grillère and Meyrignac respectively.

  It was our second trip to Beauvoir’s two elderly cousins but the first when we were to be their houseguests. Our first stop was the village of Saint-Germain-les-Belles and the family estate of Magdeleine Mantis de Bisschop. The large manor house at La Grillère had been sold years before and was now “the property of a rich man from Nice,” but the Mantis family had kept some of the estate’s land, and when Magdeleine married she moved into a house on that property. When she was widowed, she had had a new, smaller house built for herself so that her daughter could live with her family in the larger house where she had been raised. We stayed with Magdeleine in the smaller house and visited her daughter, Agnès, her husband, Jean, and Isabelle, the only one of their three children still at home. The entire visit was pure and simple fun. At the age of eighty, Magdeleine had so much energy and enthusiasm for life that her devoted teenage granddaughter told me she was usually exhausted after a day in her company and had to go to bed early, while her grandmother stayed up to read until the local television station went off the air.

  We seemed to be eating all the time during those few days: large breakfasts and midmorning coffee with Magdeleine, bounteous lunches prepared by Agnès and Isabelle, afternoon tea with Agnès and Jean, and (thankfully) simple suppers once again with Magdeleine. In between, we walked the grounds and she described in detail all that we saw. That tower was the dovecote where Magdeleine had hidden Sartre when he showed up unannounced and uninvited. That back doorway at the château was the entrance to the house’s kitchen, from which she had spirited bread and cheese in her apron to feed Sartre. That path over there—that was how Simone had walked to the dovecote when she sneaked out of Meyrignac to spend her nights with him. I had seen it all before, on my first visit, but that had been a hasty one, and even though I had taken copious notes, much of it had not settled into my mind. Now, to take our time and see it all again, listening to the stories Magdeleine told us of Beauvoir and Sartre’s early years, I found myself transported back to those moments. I told Magdeleine that I could envision clearly the years when theirs had been pure intellectual passion, and she chortled: “Yes, and also pure lust.”

  On Sunday morning we prepared to leave for Meyrignac, the home of the other cousin who had been Beauvoir’s girlhood playmate, Jeanne de Beauvoir Dauriac. We had been told repeatedly by Hélène and Magdeleine that Madame Dauriac was like them but also very different. Each cousin had known exactly how she wanted to live her life and so, too, had Jeanne. She had wanted to marry early and have children (she had nine) and become the mistress of her family estate. She had succeeded in her desires and lived her life contentedly, in her own way and on her own terms. Jeanne was far more formal than her cousins and would always present herself as Madame Dauriac, and that, they said, was how we should address her. Jeanne’s cousins loved her dearly, but both made gentle fun of her haute bourgeois propriety as they advised us on how to behave properly at Jeanne’s Sunday lunch. As we left Magdeleine, she told us to make sure we stopped by the florist in town to buy our hostess a tasteful bouquet of flowers, and to arrive precisely at 12:30. When we phoned Hélène to update her on our travels and relay these instructions, she laughed and said we had given her the only cheer during a long worrisome day at Lionel’s bedside.

  We arrived promptly at Meyrignac, and in trepidation, but despite the formality of the occasion and the perfection of the luncheon table’s setting, it was a rollicking occasion. Madame Dauriac was charming and gracious, and some of her nine adult children (and their children) joined us for spirited conversation in two languages, as some wanted to practice their very good English. We listened enthralled to stories about Simone’s antics, so much so that we probably did not pay proper attention to Madame Dauriac’s descriptions of the excellent food, almost all of it raised or grown on the estate.

  Later she showed us the many changes to the property since Simone’s childhood. Her bedroom, for example, had been converted to a bathroom. But despite the interior changes, the exterior and some of the formal rooms remained exactly as Beauvoir described them in her memoirs. In preparation for the visit, Von had reread Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, and he turned to me with a huge smile to say that from the moment we entered the house, he could envision her there. Later we saw the kitchen (only slightly updated since young Simone’s days), where all the women gathered to gossip and cook. We were escorted to a position at the window to see the tree under which Simone would sprawl, refusing to engage in such demeaning activities as canning and preserving: “Simone preferred to keep her nose always in a book, and her father was usually there scolding while her mother glared from the kitchen window.” Everything came alive for me that weekend, and I like to think that I was able to channel that energy into the biography’s chapters that covered those years.

  On the drive back to Paris, my head was filled with ideas and the rewrites they would require. I filled several small notebooks while Von drove, and several more on the flight home. Back in my office once again, I looked at the colorful manila folders on my bookcase, smiling particularly at the green ones, which were originally intended to hold the final draft. As I read through the notes I had compiled since Beauvoir’s death, my euphoria gave way to panic. With every page I turned, it was horrifying to realize that these notes were as much about me as they were about her. They were my thoughts, my reactions, responses, emotions. How was I going to turn this mess into her biography? After all, it was her life, and how was I going to write the end of it?

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  Obviously I would need to start a different set of folders, and I went right out to buy them. The only color I had not yet used was purple, so green gave way to purple and that’s what the final version became. When I brought them back to the office, I was so paralyzed by the overwhelming thought of starting all over again that I simply sat and stared at them.

  And then my thoughts shifted to Beckett. I had managed to keep him out of mind during the Paris sojourn, knowing that I probably would not run into him on the street because he had become quite infirm. Sitting paralyzed in my office, I spent more hours than I’d like to admit reflecting on how I had written his biography and how different it had been to work with him. All our meetings had been so formal. He may have thought we were “just two friends having a conversation,” but each time we met, Mr. Beckett and M
rs. Bair were always exceedingly courteous and polite to each other. Such formality created distance, and distance allowed objectivity, so I didn’t even have to think about it as I wrote.

  I was wondering how I might impose similar objectivity on my work with Beauvoir when the phone rang late one afternoon in October 1987 and a colleague asked if I had heard the news of Beckett’s death. I did not react emotionally, as I had done to the news of Beauvoir’s. Instead, in those pre-Internet days, I thanked her, hung up, and calmly phoned a journalist friend in Paris, who told me that no, the famous writer who had just died was not Beckett; it was Jean Anouilh, in Lausanne, Switzerland. I was genuinely happy that my colleague had been mistaken, but my thoughts had zoomed originally to professional matters: a new paperback edition of the Beckett biography was in the works, and I was relieved that I would not have to rewrite the ending. I remember shaking my shoulders as if to clear my head, wondering what made me think of him so coldly.

  With hindsight, I think it was because of the formal distance between us, which I was more responsible for creating than Beckett was. I created that distance deliberately, because as a woman, I felt I had to. I was determined to act as a professional scholar completely free from any hint of inappropriate behavior, with Beckett or anyone else. This approach evolved naturally from my entire professional life to that point, starting with my first job as a journalist at Newsweek.

  At a later reporting job I learned from a caring editor not to make “smart-ass” rebuttals to insinuations that I had traded sexual favors for scoops. To this day, I keep on my desk two lines of doggerel cast in hard type by a compositor: “I don’t think it is fair/to see a mini [skirt] on Dee Bair.” I keep it there to remind me of how far women have come since I began to work with Samuel Beckett. However, the 1970s were still the bad old days, and in the end, how I presented myself really didn’t matter; the old boys’ club members still wrote whatever they wanted about professional women.