by Deirdre Bair
Those attitudes were beginning to change when I began to write about Beauvoir in the early 1980s. The larger women’s movement mirrored my own struggles as women began to reclaim their place in history and demand to take their places in all walks of professional life. Simone de Beauvoir was a role model, as she had been subjected to every outrageous sling and arrow throughout her life even as she remained dedicated to her writing career. By her last decade, feminist women all over the world used her tenacity as their example. When she espoused causes and joined protests, they lined up behind her. In effect, she was a sister in arms, and I always thought her advocacy of feminist issues was one of the reasons she welcomed me so warmly. She simply wanted someone to consider all her work, and for her, the personal hardly mattered; all she cared about was ensuring that her many contributions to contemporary culture would be recognized by generations to come.
I admit, it was probably easier for two feminist women to reach a rapport as they worked together than for an Old World gentleman to confide in a woman he hardly knew. This was a question I had had ample opportunity to explore in the programs and panel discussions I attended once I began to write about Beauvoir. The subject was usually framed as “Can a Woman Write About a Man (or Vice Versa)?” and I was usually paired with a man who had written about a woman. In almost every instance, the audience had no problem agreeing that men could certainly convey the essence of a woman’s being, but a woman writing about a man—well, that was another thing entirely. My contributions to these discussions were usually met with skepticism at best, dismissal at worst.
And the more profound and troubling question of whether a woman subject was even worthy of biography usually simmered just below the surface. During a colloquium of distinguished scholars at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, I was invited to talk with Annie Cohen-Solal about the political activity of our biographical subjects. Annie did little more than read passages or summarize what she had written in her book about Sartre, but I slaved over my lecture. My book was due to be published in several months, and so I presented much hitherto unknown information about some of Beauvoir’s political writings and opinions. It was tailored expressly for the interests of the politicians and political scientists (almost all male) in the audience. I could see many of them taking copious notes as I spoke, so I looked forward to what I thought would be a spirited Q & A. When it came, every question directed to Annie was indeed about Sartre’s politics, but every single question directed to me was about Simone de Beauvoir’s sex life. Literally, I almost cried.
Clearly the Beckett biography could not serve as a template or model for the Beauvoir biography. He was still living and working when I finished writing his, which freed me from feeling an intense need to make it a final, finished document; he was still writing, and something new was happening to him every day. I have long held the view that no biography is ever definitive and none can serve as the be-all and end-all. It can only be the book that a generation or two finds necessary, informative, and satisfying. I believe it was Margaret Atwood who rightly said that each generation needs its own biography, for how can we have the arrogance to think that we have provided all the answers when we don’t even know the questions future generations will ask?
So my ultimate obligation with Beckett’s biography had been to gather every bit of information I could find and tell the truth as I discerned it. I joked that I could not write a sentence saying “It was a nice day” until I checked weather reports for three weeks before and after that day in every newspaper published in Beckett’s immediate area. As I’ve said, for every person who volunteered a version of an encounter with Beckett, I wanted at least three others, if not five, to tell the same version independently. It was the first biography of Beckett, and therefore accuracy had to be primary. Most important, it was his life, and as I had played no role in it, there was no reason for me to appear in any part of it.
Asking that question led directly to Beauvoir: why then, had I departed so far from this point of view when I wrote about her? I found a partial answer when I was contacted by an editor who asked me for a blurb for one of his biographies, written by a woman about a woman. The author was prominent then, and as she and the editor are still working together today, I won’t name them here. The editor volunteered that I might not like his writer’s book because her writing was so different from mine. He said that I was “very careful not to place myself as an obstruction before my readers, whereas [his writer] always puts herself in the way, so that in order to understand her subject you must first let her tell you all about herself, until finally you are weighed down by her sensibility and are so inundated by her persona that you’ve almost lost sight of who she is writing about.”
The thought of my being placed in such a category scared the writing life out of me. I immediately started to purge anything that might be construed as a personal, emotional opinion and to replace it with prose so clinically detached that all the liveliness was gone. The computer screen filled with revision after revision before I found a positive rhythm, and just as I was settling into putting her life back into my book, my “other lives” intruded and I had to put it aside for the better part of the year.
I was well into my second year of fellowship in 1987, which allowed me to be away from the university and happily ensconced in my home office, when I received a call from the English Department chairman. He told me that the full professors “were embarrassed” that despite all the honors and accolades I had been receiving, I had not yet been considered for promotion to full professor. My first response was delight that my colleagues thought so well of my contributions, but, to mix metaphors, warning flags flared quickly. I had been away from the campus for almost two full years, and such absences never made academic hearts grow fonder; it only made them jealous. Even though I had a solid contract for the second book, I knew that my promotion could be fully denied or at the very least postponed until it was published, and perhaps even then until after it was reviewed. Also, preparation of a promotion dossier—compiling my writings, lectures, reviews of other books, and professional appearances; securing letters of recommendation from students; assembling a list of the many times I represented Penn at public events; and collecting testimony from people in public or nonprofit agencies throughout Philadelphia with whom I had cooperated in many different ways—all this was a very serious and time-consuming process and could take several months, at the very least.
I did not voice these concerns to the chairman during that initial phone conversation. Instead I said I realized that I could spend the time preparing this massive dossier only to have none of it taken into consideration because the all-important second book had not yet been published. He said that would never happen in my case, and in fact I would not even need to submit the entire manuscript, as no one would have the time to read it anyway, so why didn’t I just select “several hundred good pages that would give the flair and flavor of the book”? Reluctantly, I agreed to go forward, but only after he gave his word that the promotion would not be denied because I had not submitted a published second book. He assured me repeatedly that this would never happen, “given that everything else is so outstanding.”
It took almost five months to compile the dossier, and all the while I was preparing it, I drove my friends and family (according to my husband) “round the bend” with my “rampant paranoia.” I submitted it at the start of the fall term in 1987, full of apprehension about the outcome and desperate to return to my writing. The first four hundred pages of the book were fairly final, and I thought they gave its “flair and flavor.” The full professors had two months to read through the dossier, and the meeting to vote on it was scheduled for Friday, November 13, at 4:30 p.m. Less than an hour later, the chairman phoned to tell me that by a vote of seven to two (barely a quorum), they had decided it would be in my “best interests” to deny promotion until the book was published. There had not been much to discu
ss, they said, because I had submitted only a partial manuscript.
I had to ask him to repeat this before I found voice to protest that he had given his word that this would not happen. He equivocated and obfuscated, and while he did, visions of Alice’s white rabbit disappearing down the rabbit hole floated through my mind. He spouted one contradiction after another, and nothing he said made sense. I kept repeating that he had given me his word that the reason for denial would not be the submission of a partial manuscript, and now he had to deliver; if he did not reconvene the meeting and ask for another vote, he would have my resignation on his desk by the following Monday. He snickered and said he knew that that would never happen. In a rage, I wrote his exact words in the DD: “Nobody resigns tenure, especially not you.” It was all I could do to tell him goodbye—politely—before I put the phone back in its cradle—softly.
My husband came home shortly after and found me in my office working on the first draft of a letter of resignation. When I showed it to him, he said he owed me a profound apology: “Von said he thought I was being paranoid but he was very wrong: ‘They are truly insane.’ ”
What depressed me the most about this so-called review was that of the seven negative votes, four had been cast by women full professors. Sisterhood was sadly absent.
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It did not take long for news of the rejection to find its way onto the university grapevine, and my phone rang steadily all weekend. Two words were used by everyone: first they were “stunned,” and then they were “outraged.” From university trustees to members of other departments, from the distinguished external scholars who had written on my behalf to my bewildered students, no one could understand what had happened. The only person who called from the English Department was the chairman, and his increasingly contradictory messages were one of the finest examples of “cover your ass” tactics I had ever seen. All I had to do, he said, was to resubmit the following year—a brand-new dossier. In a subsequent conversation he said I should withdraw my resignation letter and resubmit the original dossier the following spring. At one point he said that if the book had still not been published, perhaps the department would want to wait until the entire text was in galleys; or perhaps not, perhaps it would be best to wait until the book was in print. Or perhaps I should wait until the reviews were in. I stood firm each time: he had given me his word and he had to keep it. He went so far as to make statements to the student newspaper: “They let him shake his jowls in righteous indignation and make me look like a hysterical crazy person. I remain silent but resolute.”
Because each department had complete autonomy, there was little the dean or the provost could do to resolve the stalemate. When the chairman was asked to explain, he told them that “the decision was to decide not to decide because it would be in [her] best interests.” People who had been in that meeting told me that “nothing he said made any sense.” My conclusion was a tired “Yea, verily.” A dear friend in another department phoned to caution me of the seriousness of my decision to resign. I listened carefully to his thoughtful arguments before telling him how I had wasted the better part of a year on this review, and how my book had been delayed for yet another time by departmental politics. I said I was aware of the financial pitfalls ahead, but I simply did not want to endure any more of these humiliations. This latest snub was one outrage too many. His conclusion also went into the DD: “In other words, you are not willing to stick your nose in one more bucket of shit so they will have no other choice but to let you into the club.”
Yes, I said, that was exactly right. I had always been a major contributor to my family’s finances and I would need to find a way to replace my salary, but I was truly lighthearted when I said this. Despite being a professor for thirteen years, I had always maintained my “freelance mentality,” and I had no qualms about resuming the improvisational writing life. In fact I looked forward to the freedom it would bring. It was going to take another year to finish writing Beauvoir’s biography and a second one for the yearlong publication process, so that would make it ten years from start to finish for my second book, 1980 to 1990. Without the academic interruptions I could have published it in six or seven at the most. I knew I was lighting out for strange new territories when I resigned, but I never looked back.
Whenever I am asked if I miss academic life, I always say that there is one thing I do regret: the pension I don’t have. But I have taught since then as a visiting professor or writer in universities in the United States and everywhere else, from Europe to Australia, and those experiences have brought nothing but pleasure and the sheer joy of experiencing so many different ways of looking at the subjects that interest me. I have taught biography courses in which clever students have delighted me with their insights into the genre, and I have helped several to publish well-regarded biographies of their own. After long periods of solitude in my office, when all I did was put my own words into print, these encounters have been wonderfully refreshing. It has been so nice to be able to leave the classroom energized and mentally enriched, and to know that the experience will not be soured by a department meeting to follow. I never did know how to play academic politics, and I realize how fortunate I have been to be free from them, and to have spent so many years doing work that I love.
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And so it was back to the biography, the writing punctuated this time by assignments I accepted happily for the needed income but also for the sheer pleasure of writing them. I established a good rhythm with the book, was pleased with the structure, and looked forward each day to resuming where I had left off the night before. My DD became filled with notes of a kind that I sheepishly referred to when talking to other biographers as “the Deirdre Bair Theory of National Biography.”
I formulated my “theory” or “thesis” after I was asked countless times what it was like to write about persons whose cultures and societies were different from my own. The Americans, I said, will footnote you to death as they overwhelm you with sources to convince you of the validity of their interpretation. They produce doorstoppers, the huge bricks that show off every bit of research they have done. The British are quite different, as they tell enthralling stories in the most elegant prose styles, but when readers look for citations and references, they are most likely to be told to trust the writer, dear reader. Oftentimes sources and citations are few and far between. The French are entirely different from both: they will create a theoretical box, and if they have to break the biographical arms and legs of the subject to fit him or her into that box, they will cheerfully do so. I was reminded of a French writer who told me he was going to write a biography, too, just as soon as he found a subject who fit his thesis.
I was factoring all these thoughts smoothly into the final Beauvoir manuscript until I came to another of those moments of insight that required a major rewrite of much of the text. I read through all the biographies of Sartre that had been published to date and came to a startling revelation about my own book. To contrast just two of them, Ronald Hayman’s with Annie Cohen-Solal’s, I noted: “His seems more thoughtful than hers. She restates much information already known while he does pretty much the same but strives to interpret it. Basically, both are acceptances of known truths and restatements of Sartre’s writings.” And then came the insight: “Interesting that neither gives that much space to SdB.”
What terrified me was the fact that in my biography of Beauvoir, Sartre appeared on almost every page, from before their first meeting to her death several years after his. How had he insinuated his way so deeply into what was supposed to be Beauvoir’s life, and why was there such a lopsided discrepancy? The British critic Peter Conrad gave me a partial answer when he reviewed a biography of Thomas de Quincy. Borrowing Joseph Conrad’s term, Peter Conrad said that de Quincy had made himself “a silent secret sharer” in any book written about him.
I asked my
self, “Is this what I did with Sartre when I wove him so deeply into the fabric of her life?” And then: “If my intention is to validate her life and work, what do I do about him!?!”
40
Nelson Algren came back to the forefront of my work while I was thinking about Sartre’s role in Beauvoir’s life, and writing about her relationship with him helped me to integrate Sartre where I thought he belonged. Her letters to Algren had been bought by Ohio State University, and at the end of 1987, I was trying to free time to go to Columbus to read them, while cognizant that I had promised Sylvie to return to Paris in February 1988 to read any further letters or manuscripts she might have found. It was quite a shock to receive a “harsh and hysterical” letter from her just after the new year, denying permission to quote from the Algren letters or from any of Beauvoir’s correspondence with Sartre that I had already seen. “Her letter was a vicious and nasty put-down, but at the same time a great relief because I don’t have to go to Paris in February. Even better, I can now interpret the Algren break accurately as the devastating romantic split it really was.” The problem of how to write about Algren was settled, but that of my “secret [and meddlesome] sharer,” Sartre, would be solved more gradually.
Sylvie could do whatever she wanted now that she was Beauvoir’s legal heir. She could obstruct my book if she chose, because I did not have a formal contract or written agreement with Beauvoir that covered rights and permissions. I was writing her biography the same way I wrote Beckett’s, on a metaphorical handshake, which in my naiveté was how I had originally thought all biographies got written. I knew better by the time I began Beauvoir’s, but I still asked for and received this informal trust. I was very lucky, because I continued to create myself as a biographer as I went along, and it was the only way I knew how to work in the genre.